James Robinson Planche, who concocted the dreamlike, romantic semi-drama which forms the libretto of Oberon, was an antiquary of some distinction, a successful playwright, and an important innovator in the London theater. He was the first man in the history of the English stage to costume a historical play in something like the clothes the characters might actually have worn. (The play was Shakespeare's King John, the producer Charles Kemble.) He also developed a form of theatrical entertainment, part music, part dancing, part acting, all romantic, which is now known as "the pantomime," a peculiarly British institution to which English mamas in huge numbers still take their children in still larger numbers every Christmas.
 

Oberon is very much like a pantomime: most of its characters sing, but others don't; there is opportunity for spectacle and ballet; there is magic; there is a joyful ending. Yet its nature is not so different from that of Der Freischutz as to have caused Weber any feeling of oddness when he received the book. Kemble, who had been much impressed by that opera, traveled to Germany to persuade Weber to compose an opera especially for Covent Garden, and the subject of Oberon was one of the two he suggested, the other being Faust Weber chose Oberon, and Kemble chose Planche to write the book.
 

Both librettist and composer were highly conscientious men. When Рlanche had written it in English (he was an Englishman, despite his name), he translated it into French especially for Weber and sent it to him. But Weber had, in the meantime, gone to the trouble of learning English, and wrote his collaborator the following charming acknowledgment: "I thank you obligingly for your goodness of having translated the verses in French; but it was not so necessary, because I am, though yet a weak, however, a diligent student of the English language."
 

It was this very conscientiousness of Weber's which puts a sad ending to our story. Not yet forty, he was a very sick man when he undertook Kemble's commission. Nevertheless, he wrote the music in six weeks, went to London to supervise every one of the fifteen rehearsals, conducted a round dozen performances of it as well as several concerts, and then quietly died. He knew perfectly well that he stood little chance of surviving, but he forced himself to the effort. The $5355 he earned from his three months in London were a godsend to his impoverished wife and children.
 

The spectacular nature of the opera and the severe demands it makes on the leading soprano and tenor have given pause to many an imaginative impresario who has thought of reviving it, and many revivals of the past have severely modified the work in one way or another. Even then they have failed as often as not. But in the mid 1950's the Paris Орerа mounted it as a spectacle so grand that the wonderful score was, apparently, the smallest attraction for the huge crowds that went to see it. Maybe there really is no way to rescue the music from the rest of the show, excepting to play the overture and to sing the one great soprano aria at concerts. That is practically all that most of us ever hear of it.