Carl Maria von Weber was a great opera composer with a minimal ability to find the right libretto writers. Yet its music is exuberantly inventive, full of colour and beauty, and – as with Weber’s other two grand operas – deserves to be heard. View image in fullscreen ‘Wonderful dramatic music, saddled with a terrible libretto’: Clive Bayley in Glyndebourne’s 2002 staging of Weber’s Euryanthe. (Not for nothing does Grove’s dictionary of music describe Planché’s libretto as “a picaresque farrago of nonsense”.) I have known and loved Oberon all my life – I played it as a bassoonist in a university orchestra decades ago.