The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Born in the same year as Strauss, Wedekind was a writer of satanic talent who had been an actor, journalist, circus publicity agent, singer of grisly ballads for Überbrettl and while on the staff of Simplicissimus served a term in prison for lèse majesté. “I have the imagination of disaster—and see life as ferocious and sinister” exactly described him, though it was Henry James who said it of himself. Frühlings Erwachen, if taken as a plea for sex education, at least had a social message and a quality of pity, but thereafter Wedekind saw nothing but the ferocious and sinister. In the same years in which Freud was carefully arriving at his discovery of the subconscious, Wedekind saw an awful vision of it and stripped off every covering to show it as purely malignant. From 1895 on, his plays plunged into a debauch of the vicious and perverse which seemed to have no argument but that humanity was vile. Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) and its sequel, Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box), take place in a world of pimps, crooks, harlots, blackmailers, murderers and hangmen surrounding the heroine, Lulu, who represents sensuality incarnate both heterosexual and lesbian. Her adventures proceed through brothels and dives, seduction, abortion, sadism, necrophilia and nymphomania in what a contemporary critic called “a torrent of sex foaming over jagged rocks of insanity and crime.” It was sex, not creative in its primal function, but destructive, producing not life but death. Lulu’s first husband dies of a stroke, her second, bedeviled by her perfidy, cuts his own throat, her third on discovering her infidelity committed with his son is killed by her. After prison, degradation and prostitution, she ends, logically, slashed to death by a Jack the Ripper in a final lethal explosion of that erotic power which Shaw, a very different playwright, was celebrating at the same time as the Life Force.

  The all-pervasive influence of Nietzsche was at work. Shaw’s Man and Superman distilled from it a philosophic idea, but the Germans took Nietzsche literally. His rejection of conventional morality, which he meant as a steppingstone to a higher ground, they embraced as a command to roam the gutter. Sudermann quoted Nietzsche’s words, “Only in the savage forest of vice can new domains of knowledge be conquered.” As the domain of art if not knowledge, the same forest had lured the French decadents and the aesthetes of England in the movement that was abruptly terminated by Wilde’s trial. In Germany the movement, carrying over into the new century, was pushed to new limits by Wedekind with a kind of frustrated ferocity. It was a form of rebellion against the overwhelming material success of the country, a sense of something wrong beneath the twelve-course dinners, the pomp of military parades, the boasts of “blood and iron.” Wedekind and his kind were Schwarzseher, seers of black, of the black in man. They were a trend feeble in comparison with the dominant mood of self-confident power and pugnacity, yet who felt intimations of disaster, of a city ripe for burning, of Neroism in the air.

  Strauss’s antennae picked up whatever was in the air and he fixed unerringly on Salome—as the subject of an opera, not a tone poem. Using more instruments than ever, he composed a score of tremendous difficulty and exaggerated dissonance with the orchestra at times divided against itself, playing in two violently antagonistic keys as if to express the horror of the subject by horrifying the ear. Instruments were twisted to new demands, cellos made to reach the realm of violins, trombones to cavort like flutes, kettledrums given figures of unprecedented complexity. The musical fabric was dazzling. Strauss could write for the voice with no less virtuosity than for orchestra and the singers’ parts seemed to grow more eloquent as the drama deepened in depravity. Salome’s final song to the severed head thrilled listeners with a sinister beauty that did justice to Wilde’s words:

  “Ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me, Iokanaan! If thou hadst seen me thou hadst loved me. I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body and neither the floods nor the great waters can quench my passion.… Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.”

  When Berlin and Vienna refused performance, like London, on the ground of sacrilege, Strauss’s great admirer, Ernst von Schuch, conductor of the Dresden Royal Opera, presented it there on December 9, 1905. The production, in a single act lasting an hour and forty minutes without interruption, spared the audience’s sensibilities nothing. Iokanaan’s head, made up in realistic pallor of death with appropriate gore, was held in full view; Salome’s seven veils were ritually discarded one by one while Herod leered. Death under the soldiers’ shields supplied a punishing catharsis. The audience responded with unbounded enthusiasm extending to thirty-eight curtain calls for cast and composer. In subsequent performances in other German cities Salome went on to huge success and, for Strauss, large financial reward not adversely affected by bans and censorship troubles. In Vienna owing to the objections of the Archbishop the ban held, but in Berlin over the strenuous objections of the Kaiserin a compromise was reached of the kind applied by the Church to the Song of Solomon. Performance was allowed on condition that the star of Bethlehem should appear in the sky as Salome died, presumably indicating the posthumous triumph of the Baptist over unnatural passion.

  Kaiser Wilhelm nevertheless remained unhappy. Despite an affinity for coarse physical jokes practiced upon his courtiers to their intense embarrassment, his moral views were more Victorian than Edwardian and he was married to a model of German bourgeois respectability. The Kaiserin Augusta, known as Dona, was a plain, amiable woman who provided her husband with six sons and a daughter, had no interests outside her family and wore large feathered hats on every occasion, even when yachting. They were her husband’s choice since his annual birthday present to her was invariably twelve hats selected by himself which she was obliged to wear. Her one mark on history was her insistence on a double bed in which she so often kept her husband awake with family discussions which made him irritable next day, that Chancellor Billow suggested separate bedrooms for the good of the State. But against her conviction that a good German husband and wife should sleep together, his proposal was in vain. Already offended by Strauss’s earlier opera Feuersnot, whose theme, bawdily expressed, was the necessity of a maiden yielding her virginity to restore fire to a village, the Kaiserin had caused its cancellation, at which the Intendant of the Royal Opera had resigned in protest. The Kaiser himself had removed the imperial coat of arms from the Deutsches Theater when it performed Hauptmann’s Die Weber to a cheering Socialist demonstration in the mid-nineties. A decade had passed since then and to suppress on moral grounds an opera by Germany’s leading composer would now have subjected the Kaiser to the sharp-tongued wit of Kladderadatsch and other irreverent journals. Accepting the compromise the Kaiser said, “I am sorry Strauss composed this Salome. It will do him a great deal of harm,” upon which Strauss said that it had enabled him to build his new villa at Garmisch.

  Outside Germany where taste was more prudish, Salome became “the storm center of the musical world.” In New York a tense audience at the Metropolitan Opera on January 22, 1907, awaited the rise of the curtain with “foreboding,” soon amply fulfilled. The music, when critics could tear their attention from portrayal of “a psychopathic condition literally unspeakable in its horror and abnormality,” was acknowledged marvelous but perverted to means that “sicken the mind and wreck the nerves.” The opera’s theme, not humanly representative as the material of music should be, was considered variously “monstrous,” “pestilential,” “intolerable and abhorrent,” “mephitic, poisonous, sinister and obsessing in the extreme.” Its “erotic pathology” was unfit for “conversation between self-respecting men,” and the Dance alone “ought to make it impossible for an Occidental woman to look at it.” Rising in “righteous fury” the press agreed that popularity in Germany settled nothing for America and the Metropolitan bowing to the storm withdrew the production.

  London did not even attempt it until three years later. A license was at first refused but this was overcome with the help of Mrs. Asquith, who invited Beecham, conductor at Covent Garden, for a visit in the country to enlist the help of the P
rime Minister. By playing for him the march from Tannhäuser on the piano, the only piece of music Mr. Asquith knew, and assuring him that to like it was not a sign of philistinism, and by explaining that Strauss was “the most famous and in common opinion the greatest of living composers,” Beecham won his support. In consultation with the Lord Chamberlain, changes in the text were worked out transforming all Salome’s expressions of physical desire into pleas for spiritual guidance and, as extra precaution against sacrilege, requiring her final song to be sung to an empty platter.

  In Salome Strauss had found his lode but where was there another Wilde? One appeared, and with a subject which promised to outdo Salome. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a young poet and prodigy of Vienna, was already famous at twenty-six when he first met Strauss, ten years his senior, in 1900. The grandson of an Italian lady and a converted Jew ennobled as a baron, he embodied Vienna’s cosmopolitan strains. When at sixteen and still a student in the gymnasium, he read his first verse play to Arthur Schnitzler, the listener felt he had “encountered a born genius for the first time in my life.” Two years later, in 1892, under the pseudonym “Loris,” he enraptured Jung Wien, the literary avant-garde of Vienna, with two verse plays, Gestern (Yesterday) and Der Tod des Tizian (Titian’s Death), whose worldly knowledge and sophisticated weariness led Hermann Bahr, leader of the young literati, to suppose the author must be a titled diplomat of fifty. He was incredulous to find him a boy of eighteen, “a strange youth … fired by the slightest stimulus, but only with his intellect, for his heart remained cold.” Self-indulgent, already a man of the world, “yet terribly sad in his precocious worldliness,” Hofmannsthal was a combination of Edwardian Werther and Viennese Dorian Gray. Like Wilde an artist in language, he played on German as on a harp and in 1893, his next drama, Tod und der Tor (Death and the Fool), confirmed in him a poet who could raise his native language to the harmony of Italian. When words are used for their own sake the result may be musical but the thought murky. In 1905 Hofmannsthal concluded an essay on Wilde, in perfect if unconscious emulation of his subject, “He who knows the power of the dance of life fears not death. For he knows that love kills.” To his contemporaries he seemed “absolute poetic perfection come into being.” As an acolyte, for a time, of the circle which genuflected to Stefan George in Munich, von Hofmannsthal was absorbed in problems of symbol and paradoxes of “the truth of masks.” As a Viennese he did not escape the pessimism that infused the capital of the oldest empire in Europe.

  In Vienna, the Kaiserstadt, seat of the Congress that had pasted Europe together after Napoleon, the time was twilight. As the center of a centuries-old mixture of races and peoples and the unwilling allegiances of restless nationalities, the capital of Austria-Hungary had too many problems of political life too difficult to cope with—and so turned its attention to other matters: to culture and connoisseurship, dalliance if not love, refinement of manner above everything and seriousness in nothing but music. The tempo was easygoing, the temper flippant, the mood hedonism and a nonchalant fatalism. It was the land of the Lotus-Eaters, the “Capua of the Mind.” Its Emperor was seventy-five in 1905 and had been holding together his difficult domains through a reign of fifty-seven years. Its sad wandering Empress was dead by an Anarchist’s knife. Its court had retreated to the aristocratic purity of sixteen quarterings for every member. It was a place where something was visibly coming to an end; everyone knew it and no one spoke of it.

  Vienna looked down on Berlin as parvenu and crude and expressed its feeling in a popular song:

  Es gibt nur eine Kaiserstadt

  Es gibt nur ein Wien,

  Es gibt nur ein Räubernest

  Und das heisst Berlin.*

  In the city of Beethoven, music and opera were king and the man in the street discussed the rival merits of the bands who played in the Prater. Art and the artist were esteemed. In politics, in government, in morals, Vienna was “affably tolerant of all that was slovenly,… in artistic matters there was no pardon; here the honor of the city was at stake.” That honor was maintained by the bourgeoisie and the cultivated Jews, who were the new patrons of art. Franz Joseph had never read a book and nursed an antipathy to music. The nobility not only kept its distance from artistic and intellectual life but feared and contemned it. They had, however, the most accomplished social manners in Europe, and when Theodore Roosevelt was asked what type of person he had found most sympathetic on his European travels, he replied, “the Austrian gentleman.”

  In internal affairs the strongest political sentiment was anti-Semitism, which was outspoken but more routine than heated. Karl Luger, the handsome blond-bearded Mayor of Vienna and head of the Christian Socialist party, was the leading anti-Semite, though more officially than personally. “I myself decide who is a Jew,” he used to say. Known as der schöne Karl, he was the most popular man in the city and his funeral in 1910 was a major event. Despite their handicap the Jews, who represented 10 per cent of Vienna’s population, were fertilizers of its culture. They played a prominent part in press, theatre, music, literature, finance, medicine and the law. They supplied the conductor of the Vienna Court Opera and the country’s leading composer in Gustav Mahler as well as Vienna’s truest mirror in Arthur Schnitzler.

  A doctor like Chekhov, Schnitzler was marked by the same melancholy underlying a tone of irony and mockery. Except in his tragedy of Professor Bernhardi, the Jewish doctor who was assimilated but never enough, Schnitzler’s heroes were philanderers, seekers for meaning in love and art and life, but always, as became Vienna, a little listlessly. They were charming, good-natured, clever and sophisticated; voices of the wit, inconstancy, politeness and unscrupulousness of the Viennese soul—and of its lassitude. The hero of Der Weg ins Freie (The Road to the Open), six months after returning from a “melancholy and rather boring” tour of Sicily with his mistress before a final parting, reminds himself that since then he has done no real work, not even written down “the plaintive adagio which he had heard in the waves breaking on the beach on a windy morning in Palermo.” He is obsessed by a feeling of the “dreamlike and purposeless character of existence.” Discussing a heated debate in the Landtag he replies to a question, “Heated? Well, yes, what we call heated in Austria. People were outwardly offensive and inwardly indifferent.”

  Hofmannsthal after his first meeting with Strauss sent him a verse play for a ballet which he had written on discovering “Dionysian beauty” in the wordless gesture of the dance. Not so dedicated to pure art as not to value an association with Strauss, he hoped the Master would set his libretto to music. Strauss, however, was at the moment too busy with Feuersnot and other projects. Pursuing the Dionysian trail, Hofmannsthal began to make notes on Greek themes, on the relation of the supernatural to the bestial, on “phallic exuberance” and the “pathology and criminal psychology” of the tragedies then enjoying revival on the stage. Here he found, not the marble purity of the conventional classical Greece known to the Nineteenth Century, but Nietzsche’s vision of a demonic Greece in whose sins and hates and forbidden bloodstained passions was the birth of tragedy, the earliest statement of man’s compulsive drive toward ruin. The central tragedy, which Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides all had dramatized, was the chain of guilt in the house of Atreus from the sacrifice of Iphigenia to the murder of Agamemnon to the revenge of Electra and Orestes in their ultimate act of matricide. Hofmannsthal followed, but his Elektra turned out to be closer to Poe than Euripides, a nightmare of Gothic horror rather than a drama of man’s fate.

  His stage directions describe a palace courtyard at sunset where “patches of red light glimmering through the fig tree fall like bloodstains on the ground and walls.” His characters surpass Salome in extravagant utterances of torment and desire, in ghastly longing for the double slaying of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, in recollections of Agamemnon’s gaping wounds, in sexual images of hatred appearing as a bridegroom, “hollow-eyed, breathing a viperous breath,” whom Electra takes into her bed that it might t
each her “all that is done between man and wife.” Crazed with mutual hate, mother and daughter circle each other like mad dogs. Electra is a maniacal fury, feeding the vulture of revenge on her body, groveling in the dust of Agamemnon’s grave at sundown, the hour when she “howls for her father” and sniffs among the dogs for the buried corpse. Clytemnestra is almost putrescent, with “a sallow bloated face” and heavy eyelids which she can only keep open by a “terrible effort.” Dressed in purple, covered in jewels and talismans, she leans on an ivory cane, her train carried by “a yellow figure with the face of an Egyptian and the posture of a serpent.” Sick with terror, evil dreams and an old lust, she is obsessed by the need to spill blood and drives herds of animals to the sacrifice in the hope that if the right blood flows she will be relieved of the nameless horror of her nightmares. It is no word, no pain that chokes her; it is nothing, yet so terrifying that her soul “hungers to hang itself and every nerve cries for death.”