Silvana (opera)

Silvana
Opera by Carl Maria von Weber
Playbill of the premiere
Librettist	Franz Carl Hiemer
Language	German
Premiere	16 September 1810 (1810-09-16) Nationaltheater Frankfurt

Silvana (J. 87) is an opera by Carl Maria von Weber, first performed at the Nationaltheater Frankfurt on 16 September 1810. The libretto, by Franz Carl Hiemer [de], is a reworking of an earlier, unsuccessful opera by Weber, Das Waldmädchen. Weber also reused music from the same piece in Silvana. It has been characterized as a somewhat unstable combination of emerging individualism with conventional techniques;^[1][2] however, the premiere was moderately successful, and the Berlin premiere was met with an enthusiastic reception.^[3] It is the earliest Weber opera to have survived in its complete form; older operatic works are either fragmentary or entirely lost.

Weber used a melody from a discarded aria for the opera to compose the popular Seven Variations on a Theme from Silvana for clarinet and piano. He used the same melody for the theme-and-variations first movement of his Sonata No. 5 in A major (from the Six sonates progressives for piano and violin obbligato, J 99-104).