Carl Maria von Weber - Family Lore about Carl Maria von Weber

Started by Dan Cornett on Wednesday, January 8, 2020
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1/8/2020 at 5:19 AM

"Since I was a little girl, so for over 60 years, I've been hearing from my father that my great-great-great grand father was Carl Maria von Weber. I knew then that it was on my father's mother side but I was not very much interested in the subject. Until recently when I retired. I started digging in various family documents and I found a note that my father had written in the 70's while visiting his mother's sister Gabriela (his mother, Józefa, died in 1939 when he was still a boy).

Aunt Gabriela told my father the following story which she knew from her mother:

When young Carl Maria von Weber was staying in the court of a German Duke he fell in love with the Duke's daughter and his love was reciprocated. The result was a baby-girl who received a name Anna. She was given to the Webers family and was brought up by Carl's much older brother. The Duke supplied his granddaughter at her baptizing with some jewels and when she was a teenager she gave away some of them to her friends for which she was beaten. As her father died early she was married off at the age of 16. Her first husband died after 1,5 years of marriage and she was married once more to a Frenchman. I know only that his name was Tien, probably Francois, and that they had two sons. About twenty years later her second husband died and she married a Polish nobleman called Wincenty Olifierowicz. They had only one child, a daughter, Maria. Weber's daughter Anna died in 1878 and her pretty daughter Maria Olifierowicz married a nobleman (from eastern Poland which is Belarus now) Aleksander Witold Myślicki. They had 4 sons and 5 daughters and my grandmother, Józefa, was one of them.

I have portraits of all Myślicki siblings and their parents, Aleksander and Maria, and know where they are buried. I have created my genealogical tree including that branch of the family but I have no documents proving the story I have told you above. My father, Jerzy, died last year at the age of almost 98 but his memory was already void. From the information found in the internet it seems that the Duke would be Eugen von Wuerttenberg and Anna's mother would be his only daughter Luise Sophie Dorothea. Since September 1806 Carl Maria Weber spent half a year in Carlsruhe (now Pokój in south-western Poland) in the Duke's residence there enjoying the hospitality of the Duke's wife and the daughter. I do not know if there are any memoirs of C.M. Weber where such information about his love affair and then a daughter could be sensed.

In April 2018 I was in Dresden with my husband and we visited C.M. Weber's museum there. I talked to its Head, Mrs Dorothea Renz but she hadn't heard about Weber's daughter though she believed that his love affair with a princess would be very probable. Maybe this was the main reason why he was sent away from the Duke Eugen's residence in February 1807?

I would be most grateful for helping me to resolve that mystery.

Best regards from Warsaw, Poland, Ewa Bellert-Michalik"

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