Composer, conductor, administrator, impresario, creative writer, acid critic, sometime painter, aspiring philosopher, classical symphonist, opera romantic, profound nationalist … blessed with the melodic flowering of a Mozart, the technical facility of a Mendelssohn … a man, conscious of his genius, ‘always honest and selfless in his dealings with his fellow men and with the art he loved’ (Autobiographical Sketch, Dresden, 14 March 1818) … put on a pedestal by all the post-Beethovenites, the inspiration of Mahler and Debussy, of Hindemith and Stravinsky: Carl Maria von Weber was, by universal consent, a great pianist in an age of great virtuosi. Beethoven apart, his piano music was in advance of almost anything else in late Napoleonic / early Biedermeier Europe. Unschooled, dependent on the tradition of neither Clementi nor Hummel, the pianistic forces of the day, his style inquiringly imaginative, he explored the resources of his instrument across its entire available compass. He took advantage of his gift for pearling runs and athletic leaps, thirds and sixths, octaves and glissandi. He exploited to the full his enormous long-fingered hand stretch of around a twelfth (notwithstanding the smaller-than-modern octave span of the Viennese Brodmann he preferred to play). ‘Having the advantage of a very large hand’, his student and biographer Sir Julius Benedict remembered in 1881, ‘and being able to play tenths with the same facility as octaves, Weber produced the most startling effects of sonority and possessed the power, like [Anton] Rubinstein, to elicit an almost vocal quality of tone where delicacy or deep expression were required.’