Aloysia Antonia Weber (abt. 1760 - 1839)

Born about 1760 in Zell im Wiesental Germany

Ancestors

Died 8 Jun 1839 at about age 79 in Salzburg Austria

Biography

Born in Zell im Wiesental, Aloysia Weber was one of the four daughters of the musical Weber family. Her three sisters were soprano Josepha Weber (1758–1819), who premiered the role of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute; Constanze Weber the wife of Mozart; and Sophie Weber. Her first cousin was the composer Carl Maria von Weber.

Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Mannheim and Aloysia grew up there; she moved to Munich in 1778, where she made her operatic debut. Her salary at the Court Theater was 1000 florins per year; her father made 600.[1] The following year, she was engaged to sing in the National Singspiel in Vienna, a project of the Emperor Joseph II; the family moved together to Vienna in September, where the father worked briefly as a ticket-taker, but he died suddenly only a month after their arrival.

Weber continued in a fairly successful singing career in Vienna over the next two decades.

On 31 October 1780, she married Joseph Lange, an actor at the Court Theater who was also an amateur painter (he later produced a well-known portrait of Mozart).[2] It was Lange's second marriage after his first wife had died in 1779. Since Weber was the main support of her family at the time, Lange agreed to pay her mother an advance of 900 florins and the sum of 700 florins per year on a continuing basis.[3]

She moved to the Burgtheater in 1782, singing Italian opera. This position lasted only eight months, as she soon became "persona non grata owing to disagreements over salary and role distribution as well as missed performances."[2] She continued to sing, however, at the Kärntnertortheater as well as in occasional roles at the Burgtheater. In 1795, she went on concert tour with her widowed sister Constanze. As of that year, she ceased to live with her husband Lange.[4]

She spent her old age in Salzburg, in order to be near her surviving sisters Constanze and Sophie, who had moved there.

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloysia_Weber