It was into this Napoleonic situation that Weber was thrown in his most impressionable years. On a little vacation trip from Prague he went to Berlin and saw the return of Frederick William and the victorious Prussians from Paris after the battle of Leipzig. The national frenzy took hold of him and, at his next moment of leisure, he composed settings to some of Körner’s war songs, including the famous _Du Schwert an meiner Linken_, which made him better known and loved throughout Germany than all his previous works. To this day these songs are sung by the German singing societies, and nothing in all the literature of music is more truly German. To celebrate Waterloo he composed a cantata, _Kampf und Sieg_, which in the next two years was performed in a number of the capitals and secured to Weber his nationalist reputation. It was well that he was thus brilliantly and openly known at the time; he needed this reputation five years later when his work took on a changed significance. Carl Maria Freiherr von Weber was born at Eutin, Oldenburg, in 1786, of Austrian parentage, into what we should call the ‘decayed gentility.’ His father was from time to time ‘retired army officer,’ director of a theatre band, and itinerant theatre manager. His mother, who died when he was seven, was an opera singer. The boy, under his stepbrother’s proddings, became something of a musician, and, when left to his own resources, a prodigy. His travellings were incessant, his studies a patchwork.[79] Nevertheless he had success on his infantile concert tours, and showed marked talent in his early compositions. At the age of thirteen he wrote an opera, _Das Waldmädchen_, which was performed in many theatres of Germany, and even in Russia. From the age of sixteen to eighteen he was kapellmeister at the theatre in Breslau. After some two years of uncertainty and rather fast life he became private secretary to the Duke Ludwig of Württemberg. His life became faster. He became involved in debts. Worse, he became involved in intrigue. The king was suspicious. Weber was arrested and thrown into prison. He was cleared of the charges against him, but was banished from the kingdom. Realizing that the way of the transgressor is hard, Weber now devoted himself to serious living and the making of music. Then followed three undirected years, filled with literature and reading, as well as music. In 1812, during a stay in Berlin, he amused himself by teaching a war-song of his to the Brandenburg Brigade stationed in the barracks. No doubt his life in the court of Stuttgart had shown him the insincerity of aristocratic pretensions and had turned his thoughts already to the finer things about him--that popular liberal feeling which just now took the form of military enthusiasm. In the following year he accepted the post of kapellmeister of the German theatre at Prague, with the difficult problem of reorganizing the opera, but with full authority to do it at his best. From this time on