by Miklós Vámos
Only a month later the sky turned completely dark and there was a hurricane such that even the oldest locals could not recall its like. There was no rain, but flashes of lightning sizzled to and fro. Even trees with massive trunks were uprooted and seemingly solid roofs went crashing onto the road. The papers reported seven seriously injured. In Budapest a whirlwind resembling an American tornado caused the deaths of several people, ripping the belfries off three churches, and also caused some structural damage to the Chain Bridge.
“Is appen soon, sumsinna bigue,” said Signor Supercilio.
The Monarchy severed diplomatic relations with Serbia. In Pécs there was no end of patriotic marching up and down the city streets. A military band played the rousing Rákóczi March and other popular recruitment songs, enthusiastic gentlemen of a certain age raised their walking canes gunlike to their shoulders and marched to and fro as the ladies and children waved lanterns and pennants.
“Where will all this end?” asked Ilona of her husband several times a day.
“Storm in a Serbian teacup,” he would reply.
At first Nándor Csillag sang at weddings and family celebrations. His fame spread far and wide. Soon he was being invited to perform at musical soirées, together with professional singers. The posters proclaimed: Nándor Csillag, the golden-throated boy wonder from Pécs. When he performed he was chaperoned by his father or Aunt Tonchi.
The front pages of the newspapers were plastered with military reports when the postman brought a rust-brown envelope. It was from Milan. Signor Supercilio translated it for them: “You are asked performance, for charity, in Milano.”
It turned out that the concert was to raise money for Italian workers stranded in Germany: these unfortunates had already lost their jobs and were anxious to return home. Nándor Csillag’s mother was opposed to the trip. “Have you quite lost your senses? There’s a war on!”
Convinced that Italy would remain neutral, Sándor Csillag took his son to Milan. From the evening papers in Italy he managed to deduce that the following day Caruso would also be performing for charity in Rome, so they took the train to see him perform. Many years later, that evening was to be recalled by Nándor Csillag in The Book of Fathers.
On October 19, 1914, I had the good fortune to be among the select few to hear Caruso on the stage of the Teatro Costanzi. The audience gave an ecstatic welcome to all the performers. But nothing could compare with the whistling and torrential clapping that greeted the performance of Enrico Caruso. When Caruso sang the aria he made his own, “Ridi, Pagliaccio!,” his compatriots stood up to shout their endless Bravos and the display of joy seemed as though it would never end. The conductor, Maestro Toscanini, spent at least fifteen minutes tapping the rostrum, asking to be allowed to continue the program and unwilling to permit an encore. The theater manager hurried over to him and with much wringing of hands prevailed upon him to make an exception just this once. Caruso was then able to reprise the song, to the enormous satisfaction of all. This was for me the most important experience of my life. It is only since then that I have had some conception of how to perform in public.
There was no stage or role in the course of his career that was not blighted by the oppressive presence of the great Caruso. His efforts hardly amounted to more than a striving to shake off the harrowing burden of the Italian tenor, and he was unable to resist imitating even the least remarkable aspects of his technique. Ede Karsay, his manager in Budapest, was blunt: “Please to abandon this behavior at once. Genius cannot be imitated; by trying to do so you merely make yourself look ridiculous. Better a mediocre Csillag than a first-class imitator of Caruso.”
It was easier said than done. A mind as receptive as his, having heard Caruso’s painful tale as Canio, could free itself of the experience only the way a viper’s poison can be removed from the flesh: with the blade of a sharp knife. Nándor Csillag was always having to put an imaginary blade to himself if he wanted to be able to perform on stage at all. To his eternal misfortune the roles he was most often asked to perform were those of Canio and Turiddu, in which Caruso was simply unsurpassable.
When he had set out on his singing career, Nándor Csillag tended to give himself airs and let it be known that he would be a bigger star in the firmament than Caruso. They smiled at his punning on his surname. But he was serious. He would have liked at least to have been known as the Hungarian Caruso. With his extravagant coiffure and dress, too, he copied his model. In time he gave up the wearing of jackets, cloaks, pelisses, and headgear reminiscent of stage costumes, but even then in the opinion of his father he tended to the bohemian rather than to the middle-class in his attire. He adored expensive Parisian perfumes, the wilder shores of fashion, and even more the latest triumphs of technology. He acquired novelties of the hugely expensive type partly in the interests of promoting his health (waves of hypochondria would sweep over him in a rhythm now gentle, now more serious), and partly because of his temperament (constructing objects with his hands always had a soothing effect on him).
His orders to the importer Gyula László for an American ball-bearing-operated power drill, suitable for drilling to a depth of five millimeters in marble, stone, iron, or wood, were more quickly delivered than those of any Pécs craftsman. He similarly secured the wonder hammer, which united eighteen different tools in one, from adjustable S-wrench to saw, reamer to metal rule, all these nickel-plated, with a miniature anvil and vise, from the toolmakers V.M. Weiss berger, by appointment, K. u. K. suppliers of tools.
He was certainly the only inhabitant of Pécs to order from Vienna a heatable bath with artificial waves. This piece of equipment, serving both one’s physical and mental welfare, was crescent-shaped when seen from the side, but head-on it was like a giant cradle. Filled to its capacity of forty liters of water, one could take a wonderful bath in it, waves being produced if one managed to use one’s own weight to rock the construction to and fro. Nándor Csillag also purchased a steam generator sauna. The manufacturer Károly Becker guaranteed that his bath would resist spillage even in the case of the most powerful generation of waves. In this product Nándor Csillag was not disappointed. He ran a bath so often in the con traption-every other day-that his manservant called him Water Vole behind his back. He was, however, disappointed by the flat-foot corset, which was uniquely manufactured by Székely and Partner, orthopedic shoemakers of Budapest, at 9 Museum Boulevard. The genuine Zagorian Mountains chest cordial lived up to the claims made for it: a glassful of this herbal decoction consumed every morning certainly prevented him from acquiring any kind of cough or wheeze.
Naturally he purchased a number of gramophones, in this sphere insisting on the products of Schwartz & Manotone as manufacturers. The record players of Schwartz & Manotone, as the firm’s slogan proclaimed, Speak, laugh and sing, out in every tongue they ring. In their record catalogue were the recordings of artists of the first order, which Nándor Csillag bought, virtually without exception. He dreamed of his voice being recorded at some point, like the arias of Caruso, but this never became a reality.
Several other things he had hoped for stubbornly and persistently also failed to materialize. Despite every effort he failed to secure contracts from either Covent Garden or La Scala, Milan. It was in these two opera houses that his unsurpassable ideal had heaped success upon success. By the time this would have been timely for Nándor Csillag, Enrico Caruso was arousing feverish excitement among opera-lovers overseas, chiefly in the diamond horseshoe seats in the Metropolitan Opera House. Nándor Csillag envied him from the bottom of the purest of hearts not just for the hundreds of thousands of dollars but the ten-or fourteenfold encores, lasting more than fifteen minutes, in which the New York Italians excelled, climbing onto the gallery for the Bravos! and stamping the floor. Nándor Csillag scored the greatest success of his career at the Vienna Opera, where he twice had to reprise the Glove Aria from Rigoletto, but for him the audience never rose to its feet. This was something he could never forgive them; som
etimes he would call them ticket-buying riff-raff.
His most secret desire, to sing on the same stage as the maestro, seemed quite unattainable. Nándor Csillag appeared in many places in Europe in second-rank companies and theaters, which secured him a comfortable way of life and a decent reputation, but neither happiness nor peace of mind. Only at the small workbench he had constructed in his shed did he find, while he worked there, himself at peace, or perhaps at ceasefire.
Rare were the moments when the suspicion dawned that his gifts and his skills were perhaps not after all of the same order as those of the great Caruso, and between such flashes of insight long years would intervene, during which he attributed the imperfect arc traced by his career to ill-intentioned impresarios, illiterate audiences, corrupt managers, crass reviewers, and scheming rivals. Sometimes he put it down to downright misfortune. From his pale face the unusually round, light brown eyes blazed out; around his lips a constant, tense dissatisfaction had etched curlicues of bitterness.
He several times toyed with the idea of settling abroad, especially when he had seasons in Amsterdam and Branstadt. Most seriously in the latter, as this was where he met his future wife. Ilse was the daughter of a priest who was fanatical about opera. Across the river that ran through the little town, south of the two stone bridges, there was also a mercantile bridge 980 Viennese paces in length. After a performance it was across this bridge that Nándor Csillag would stroll towards his lodgings in the moonlit night, in the company of some of the singers and members of the orchestra. They were often joined by some of the audience, their faces red from the cold. Sometimes the entire company would land up at the brasserie, which was open until midnight, for a stein of beer. Nándor Csillag never drank, but attracted attention with his elaborate toasts. The tall, straw-blonde Ilse attracted attention because she was able to down a single Maas at one go. When Nándor Csillag expressed his astonishment, she replied: “We Germans like a good beer. Try it!”
“Thank you, but no, I’d rather not. It harms the vocal cords.”
“It’s medicinal! If anything harms anything, it’s that watery Brause you are supping.”
Ilse told him her life story that evening. The Creator had called her mother unto Him all too early and her father had married again; she and her stepmother were constantly at loggerheads, both of them hoping that the girl would at last get married. Ilse let her corn-blue gaze rest on Nándor Csillag, as if waiting for an answer.
The answer came three weeks later: the Hungarian singer came to pay his respects to the parents and ask for the daughter’s fair hand, with a bouquet of burgundy-red roses the size of a millstone. Ilse’s father strove not to show how pleased he was, in case it encouraged exaggerated ideas about the dowry; but in fact he had begun to fear she might be left on the shelf. The wedding feast was the biggest ever seen in those parts, and was long remembered in the girl’s village; even the dogs had their share of the roast venison with cranberries.
The Csillag side of the family were not in the least happy with Ilse, regarding her openness as vulgar and her frequent laughter as the neighing of a horse. They were certain Nándor Csillag would set up home on German territory, but after the expiry of his contract he turned up with his wife in Pécs. They set up home on the ground floor of the house in Apácza Street, but they soon moved to their own place: Nándor Csillag bought a run-down and disused grain barn. To general astonishment Ilse was using words of Hungarian within a fortnight, and forming sentences by the second month, and within twelve months only the characteristic articulation of her r’s revealed her German origins. She also showed great skills in the organization of soirées and receptions; their cherrywood-paneled salon became a regular meeting place for the town’s intellectual elite.
Nándor Csillag was, in his active days, little able to enjoy his house and home, living the bird-of-passage life of artists. He would have liked Ilse to become his permanent accompanist, a kind of maid-of-all-work ready to wait on him hand and foot. But Ilse hated traveling. This became a recurrent source of trouble. She accused him of wanting to haul her around with him out of sheer jealousy; but she was not prepared to pass her time being bored in a selection of hotel rooms in various parts of Europe. So Nándor Csillag joined an international company that was to spend three months touring South America with two Puccini operas. “You are not coming with me even if it’s Argentina?” he asked angrily.
“I can’t,” Ilse said smiling coyly.
“Why not?”
“Because of the state I find myself in.”
Thus did Nándor Csillag learn that he was to become a father. He had little time to rejoice, as he had two distinct roles to learn in Italian.
Balázs Csillag came into this world after a labor that stretched away like strudel pastry, bearing out the truth of the old saying: all beginnings are difficult. Not for the first time did I realize that I had serious responsibilities to my family. I can no longer allow myself to be devoted only to the holy altar of art; I have to consider my decisions in the light of finances also. Following my father’s advice, I split my income into three parts. One third I placed in the Post Office Savings Bank, for our everyday needs. One third I deposited in the Swiss Bank that he recommends. Out of the remaining third I shall maintain and expand our property.
I am resolute in resisting the urging of my fellow musician Bertalan Szalma, who claims that shares in a mill, which might be purchased with the assistance of his uncle, would yield profits three times the size of the investment. In size, maybe, but at a much greater risk. Whereas for a paterfamilias the primary consideration must be security. If only people did not forget this, many of the world’s problems would be solved and instead of tensions that seethe towards an explosion, a reassuring order would prevail.
One afternoon his father visited them. He asked his son whether he often wrote in The Book of Fathers.
“Quite often,” said Nándor Csillag.
“You make me curious. Can I take a look?”
“By all means.”
When his father had read the above, he immediately wanted to know how he might contact Bertalan Szalma.
“I am told he has a contract at the Opera House in Monte Carlo,” said Nándor Csillag.
“And his uncle?”
“Him I don’t know. What would you be wanting with him, Father?”
“I’d buy shares in mills.”
This made Nándor Csillag ponder. He discussed the matter with Ilse, but his wife preferred not to take a view on this matter. “Do what you think is best, Nándor dear.”
By the time, after lengthy deliberations, he had decided to commit himself, those particular mill shares had long been sold. He did not have long to regret his failure, as a series of shady deals resulted in the mill company going bankrupt-the shares were soon not worth the paper they were printed on. Nándor Csillag blessed his own good sense and swore again never to take action without lengthy and substantial deliberation.
His father could not stop wringing his hands. “What a fool I am! What a miserable fellow! Why did you not bind my hands? Lock me up? What a meshuggah I am, ay, ay, ay!”
Nándor Csillag had a sudden thought: “Father, why did you not try to find out about the future? We are supposed to be able to do that, to some degree. Or aren’t we?”
Sándor Csillag wiped the sweat from his receding brow. “I’m out of practice… You think I haven’t tried, time and again, for the lottery? Ach, we are in decline, we are getting old…”
Nándor Csillag nodded. As far as he was concerned, of the first-born’s capacities only a fraction remained to him. He didn’t even practice the skill much, having little interest in the past and even less in the future. Yet, he thought: I should perhaps pay more heed, in both directions.
He devoted his siesta to leafing through the pages of The Book of Fathers, slowly, line by line, to garner the significance of every possible connection. Perhaps this was a suitable way of strengthening his powers of vision.
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br /> For the first time in his life he found his singing ambitions ebbing away. He was no longer unhappy if a tempting contract failed to materialize. He spent his free evenings tinkering in the shed. Increasingly prominent among his interests, alongside wood-carving, was the restoration of old clocks. He had two gramophones on his shelves, so he could play his records alternately, the period of silence between changes of record being thus reduced to the minimum. The sounds of Melba, Caruso, and Galli-Curci soared in the light of the shimmering lamps, wondrously outdoing the ticking and striking of the clocks.
As if in the society of the time-measuring instruments he was more likely to sink into Time, it was on one such peaceful evening that he was vouchsafed a glimpse of the fate that awaited him. He was drowning, with many others, in semidarkness. He could make neither head nor tail of it. He wondered if he should share the vision with his father. But Sándor Csillag had just gone to Balatonfüred, for major treatment on his weak heart.
Though in the years ’26 and ’27 I found peace of mind, I was much afflicted with troubles. It began with my Father’s illness and continued with irregularities with my larynx. I had to cancel several performances, more than ever before in my career. However, our financial situation – thanks to my prudence and savings – did not become critical. Though I lost a great deal on the exchange rate when the pengö was brought in, I still managed to purchase a summer cottage on Lake Balaton, at Szemes. I plan to spend there the winter of my days. I have already started to set up a workshop in the outhouse.
My second son was christened Endre, and was born, by comparison with the first, with amazing straightforwardness, hale and hearty. It seems my Ilse has now got the hang of the business. Maybe we shall not stop until we reach six, the family record, held by my ancestor Richard Stern. The blessing of a child is perhaps the greatest joy a man can experience, so I have nothing to complain of. Perhaps only my “daymare” visions of misfortune make me restless, but I have determined not to let them exercise me too much.