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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  The premiere conducted by Monteux on May 28, 1913, created almost a riot in the theatre. The abandonment of understood harmony, melody and structure seemed musical anarchy. People felt they were hearing a blasphemous attempt to destroy music as an art and responded with howls and catcalls and derisive laughter. Counter-demonstrators bellowed defiance. One young man became so excited he began to beat rhythmically with his fists on the head of an American in the audience whose own emotion was so great that “I did not feel the blows for some time.” A beautifully gowned lady in a box stood up and slapped the face of a man hissing in an adjoining box. Saint-Saëns indignantly rose and left the hall; Ravel shouted, “Genius!” The dancers could not hear the music above the uproar and Nijinsky, who had choreographed the ballet, stood in the wings pounding out the rhythm with his fists and shouting in despair, “Ras, Dwa, Tri!” Monteux threw desperate glances to Diaghilev who signed to him to keep on playing and shouted to the audience to let the piece be heard. “Listen first, hiss afterwards!” screamed Gabriel Astruc, the French manager, in a rage. When it was over the audience streamed out to continue their battle in the cafés and the critics to carry it to the press, but as the music had hardly been heard, opinion was largely emotion. Not until a year later when the music was played again in Paris as a concert in April, 1914, was it recognized for what it was. With the performance of the Sacre, filling out a decade of innovation in the arts, all the major tendencies of the next half-century had been stated.

  That summer Strauss completed Joseph. Meeting with Diaghilev and Bakst in Venice, Hofmannsthal planned a production that was to be “the most lavish and beautiful imaginable.” It was to be set not in Egypt but in the Venice of Tintoretto and Veronese because as Count Kessler explained, “Too scrupulous an accuracy can but impede the freedom of imagination.”

  Already busy with several new works, Strauss was news. When in July he finished Ein Deutsches Motette for chorus and orchestra it was considered worth a cable dispatch to the New York Times. For the opening of a new concert hall in Vienna in November he composed a Festival Prelude scored for a bigger orchestra than ever: one hundred and fifty musicians including eight horns, eight drums, six extra trumpets and an organ. It was suitable to a year of national chest-thumping in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon at Leipzig and the simultaneous twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kaiser’s reign.

  For the Centenary a book called Germany in Arms was published with an introduction by the Crown Prince, who wrote: “It is the holy duty of Germany above all other peoples to maintain an army and a fleet ever at the highest point of readiness. Only then, supported by our own good sword, can we preserve the place in the sun which is our due but which is not willingly granted to us.” Although the “gigantic conflagration” of nations, once started, would not be easily extinguished, this should not deter the German hand from the sword, “for the sword will remain the decisive factor till the end of the world.”

  More factually Karl Helfferich, director of the Deutsche Bank, published a survey of Germany’s Economic Progress and National Wealth, 1888–1913 which supplied overwhelming figures of the “impetuous and triumphant upward movement” of the last twenty-five years. Helfferich showed that the population had increased by more than a third, that Germany’s excess of births over deaths was greater than any other country’s except Russia, that economic opportunity and demand for labour had expanded faster than the population, that productivity of German workers and percentage of population gainfully employed had increased, that upward was the word for statistics on production, transportation, consumption, capital aggregation, investments, savings-bank deposits and every other factor of economic life. Helfferich’s pages groaned under such phrases as “enormous development,” “vast progress,” “prodigious expansion,” “gigantic increase.”

  That year an Englishman traveling in Alsace-Lorraine asked a waiter in Metz what nationality he considered himself. “Muss-Preussen” (Obligatory Prussian) the man replied, and for the rest of the journey the Englishman was heard by his traveling companion to mutter at intervals, “Muss-Preussen—we’re all going to be Muss-Preussen before long.”

  Fear of the same ancient sin of pride that had prompted Kipling to write “Recessional” in the year of Britain’s Jubilee now afflicted an occasional thoughtful German. Walther Rathenau, introspective and literary heir of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft, published a long poem called “Festal Song” in Die Zukunft whose tone was a protest against the organized enthusiasm worked up for the Centenary. He too saw an apocalyptic vision and headed his poem with a text from Ezekiel, “Also thou son of man, thus saith the Lord God unto the land of Israel, ‘An end, the end is come upon the four corners of the land. Now is the end come upon thee; it watcheth for thee; behold it is come.’ ” Rathenau quoted no more but readers who turned to Ezekiel would have found the judgment upon Tyre: “With thy wisdom and thy understanding thou hast gotten thee riches and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasure and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy riches and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches and thou hast said I am a God.… Therefore I will bring strangers upon thee, the terrible of nations and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom … and bring thee down into the pit and thou shalt die the deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.”

  Voices like that of Rathenau, who did not have quite the courage to sign his own important name but used a pseudonym, were not heard. Such was German national sentiment that when Hauptmann’s Festspiel in honor of the Centenary was produced by Max Reinhardt it was attacked by the Nationalists and closed on demand of the Crown Prince because it stressed liberation rather than the sword which had accomplished it. The mood culminated at Zabern, a small Alsatian town where ill-feeling between the German garrison and the natives provoked German officers to assault and arrest civilians. Becoming a cause célèbre the incident increased foreign hostility to Germany. When Colonel Reuter, the commanding officer of Zabern, was court-martialed and acquitted, the power of the Army over the rights of the citizen became a major political issue in Germany. If Army officers were put beyond the law, said a member of the Center party in the Reichstag, “then finis Germaniae.” He was cheered by the majority, but Colonel Reuter received the Order of the Red Eagle, Third Class, and a congratulatory telegram from the Crown Prince saying, “Keep it up!”

  The combination of Richard Strauss and Russian Ballet, awaited as a major event, was scheduled for May, 1914, with the composer conducting. Attempting to sum up his career so far, Lawrence Gilman in January found the same baffling duality in Strauss which had so often troubled historians of his country. His best work, Gilman wrote, as in the opening of Zarathustra, the finale of Don Quixote, the love passage in Heldenleben, the recognition of Orestes and Electra, was music of “terrifying cosmic sublimity” and Elektra, his masterpiece, would someday be recognized as “among the supreme things of music.” Yet he could achieve “a degree of bad taste that passes credibility, be commonplace with a blatancy that sets teeth on edge” and irritate by his “staggeringly complacent habit” of writing music without point or coherence, reason or logic. He always stirred the waters, coming up now with something precious, now with mud, but the activity was indisputable. Gilman, who had not yet heard the Sacre, concluded that Strauss was “unequalled in music as an awakener,… the most dynamic, the most reckless, the most preposterous of all composers,… the most commanding music maker since Wagner.”

  Strauss arrived in Paris for rehearsals in April. Nijinsky, for whom the part had been created, was not to play it, having been banished from the company by Diaghilev in a jealous fury because of his marriage. A new young dancer from the Imperial Ballet, Léonide Massine, slim, barely seventeen, with great brown eyes, replaced him. Ida Rubinstein was the Queen and the Spanish painter José Maria Sert supplemented the designs of Bakst. In a Palladian hall with fountains, pillars of gold, marble floors, and ewers of crystal
piled with fruit, Potiphar’s wife in scarlet brocade was surrounded by slaves in pink and gold and a bodyguard of gigantic mulattoes in black plumes holding golden whips. Animal life was present in a brace of Russian wolfhounds. A variety of exotic dancers endeavor to relieve the Queen’s “almost passionate weariness of life” in vain, until a shepherd boy, Joseph, is carried in asleep wrapped in yellow silk and who, on waking, dances his search for the divine, instantly arousing the Queen from passionate weariness to passionate desire. Her most strenuous efforts at seduction are repulsed, she denounces Joseph, guards prepare his torture and death and he is saved by an Archangel who carries him off to the sound of heavenly music while Potiphar’s wife strangles herself with her rope of pearls.

  Although the libretto was widely ridiculed and the music was considered second-rate Strauss, the production was so sumptuous and lascivious that everyone enjoyed it and the evening ended happily in a gala supper at Larue’s given by the composer for his friends who had come from Germany, Austria and Italy for the premiere. After feasting on early strawberries and exquisite wines, each guest was presented by the waiter with his share of the bill.

  The company went to London at the end of May for a two-month season of “extraordinary success.” Chaliapin was declared “supreme” as Ivan the Terrible, Rimsky’s last opera, Coq d’Or, and Stravinsky’s new one, The Nightingale, were acclaimed and the “ultra-modern” Joseph to be given on June 23 with the composer again conducting, aroused eager expectations. At rehearsals with Karsavina, who had replaced Ida Rubinstein, Strauss demonstrated how he wanted her to perform her dance of seduction. Starting from the far corner of her dressing room and singing the music “he would run, trampling heavily across the room, to the sofa representing the couch of Joseph.”

  On the night of the performance Drury Lane was crowded to the last seat by a bejewelled and brilliant audience “keyed up to concert pitch for a memorable event.” To a young man among them, jostled by bare shoulders and gay laughter, everyone seemed to know one another as if at “an enormous but exclusive party.” In the presence of the Prime Minister and Mrs. Asquith, the Russian company and the renowned composer, it seemed “an occasion of almost international importance.” As applause filled the house the young man, leaning forward from his seat in the dress circle, could see the tall “world-weary” German composer take up his stand before the orchestra, “pink and imperturbable.”

  If the music won no new laurels, Strauss’s visit was personally satisfying. He conducted the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in a program of his own and Mozart’s music, which was considered one of the finest concerts of the season. On June 24 wearing the “most beautiful of all the Doctors’ robes,” the crimson silk and cream-colored brocade of a Doctor of Music, he received an honorary degree from Oxford.

  A month later on July 25 the Russian Ballet closed its season with a joint performance of Strauss’s Joseph and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka. At the same hour that evening in Belgrade the Serbian reply to an Austrian ultimatum was rejected by the Austrian Ambassador, who announced the severance of relations and left for home.

  *There’s only one King’s City,

  Vienna’s its name;

  There’s only one Robber’s Nest,

  Berlin is the name.

  7

  Transfer of Power

  ENGLAND : 1902–11

  7

  Transfer of Power

  LORD SALISBURY, who had died in 1903, was not on hand to see the workings of democracy in the first major election of the new century, but he would not have been surprised. A new segment of society was rising, not yet to take the patricians’ place, but by its pressure and through its surrogates to push them aside. The age of the people was under way.

  It revealed itself in the cry “Pigtail!” which echoed through the constituencies in the General Election of 1906 with virulence equal to its irrelevance. No issue proved more exploitable than “Chinese Slavery” and the Liberals played it up as designedly as the Tories had used patriotic slogans in the Khaki Election of 1900. The slaves in question were indentured Chinese labour imported with the consent of the Unionist government to mine gold in South Africa. Billboards flamed with pictures of Chinese in chains, Chinese being kicked, Chinese being flogged. Sandwich men dressed as Chinese slaves paraded the streets. Cartoons showed the ghosts of British soldiers killed in the Boer War pointing to the fenced compounds where the Chinese were lodged and asking, “Did we die for this?” Working-class audiences were told the Tories would introduce Chinese labour into England if they won and pictures of a pigtailed coolie in a straw hat were labeled “Tory British Workingman.” Thrown on a lantern screen at political meetings, the pictures, reported Graham Wallas, a Liberal sympathizer, aroused “an instantaneous howl of indignation against Mr. Balfour.” The audience could not have told whether it howled from humanitarian indignation or fear of the competition of cheap labour. Underlying both these sentiments Wallas thought he detected a fear of the alien symbolized by the alien pigtail. The hideous yellow faces aroused “an immediate hatred of the Mongoloid racial type and this hatred was transferred to the Conservative party.” In the howl of the audience he heard the force of the irrational in public affairs.

  New men were appealing to a new electorate; were called forth, as was the yellow press, by the existence of a new electorate. People were more literate and to that extent more reachable and more gullible. The ha’penny Daily Mail had a circulation of over half a million, more than ten times that of The Times. Motorcars enabled candidates to reach a wider audience and the growth of cities made audiences larger. The force of the irrational was not necessarily wrong; it could just as well be right for the wrong reasons. It was not necessarily confined to what Matthew Arnold called the Populace, but the effect was greater because there were more of them.

  When Arthur Balfour smoothly succeeded Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister after the end of the Boer War in 1902, the waves of change were already lapping at his feet. Business was good but competition from abroad was cutting into British supremacy in foreign commerce, moving into her markets, taking the lead in new industries. At home upper-class life was still delightful, but unemployment, hunger and want, all the ills, injustices and inequities collectively known as the Social Problem, were pressing against the ramparts of privilege in a tide of discontent impossible to ignore or repress. The demands of a new age were requiring from government more action, more imagination, more positive intention and measures than formerly. The Liberals, who now looked forward to their chance after ten years out of office, believed they could supply the need.

  They were not a coherent group and never had been. Their dominant philosophy, as of liberalism anywhere, favored change and reform, but it was cut into by a thousand fissures of ideas and social background. In person the Liberals ranged from Whig aristocrats like Lord Rosebery to country gentlemen like Sir Edward Grey to men of business wealth like Campbell-Bannerman to landless intellectuals like Asquith and Morley to a unique and alien upstart from the Celtic fringe like Lloyd George. Some were Little Englanders who regarded Empire, in the words of John Bright, as “a gigantic system for providing outdoor relief for the aristocracy”; some were as fervent imperialists as the Tories. Some were Church of England, some Nonconformist, some Home Rulers, some unalterably opposed to Home Rule. Some were ardent Radicals dedicated to redistribution of wealth and political power, some were magnates of industry absorbed in making fortunes. Those who were Liberals from conviction rather than from family tradition or political expedient felt that between themselves and the Tories existed “a gulf as wide as any in previous time”; the gulf, as Herbert Samuel put it, between “the quietist and the reformer.” Filled with the zeal of the reformer, Samuel believed that the principles of Liberalism “are nothing else than the application to public affairs of the religious spirit itself.” Some Liberals were sincere, some were opportunists, some were demagogues, some like Lloyd George all three at once. They were the outs, eager for offic
e, ready to answer the demands of a new time.

  Their opponents were split among themselves, harassed by a series of domestic quarrels which had reopened since the Boer War with a peculiar vehemence. All the hatred and jealousy of Nonconformity for the Establishment blew up into a national tempest over the Education Act of 1902. Sponsored and largely drafted by Balfour himself, the Act added secondary to primary education as an obligation of the state with the object of making it available to all and of bringing all schools up to a uniform standard. Like the Compulsory Education Act of 1870 it had an economic motive: the recognition that unless the nation undertook to raise the level of schooling, it would continue to fall behind in the competition for markets. In effecting progress, the Act was perhaps the most important of the decade but its method was partisan. By favoring and, in fact, giving financial support to the schools of the Established Church—that is, the Church of England—while the Board Schools under local control were abolished, the Act infuriated the Nonconformists, who were traditionally Liberals. It supplied a cause to reunite the Imperialist and Radical wings of the Liberal party which had divided over the Boer War and Home Rule. Debate in the Commons took on the animus peculiar to the war of High Church against Low Church, Methodist clergymen wrote outraged letters to the papers, the Act was called “the greatest betrayal since the Crucifixion,” protest meetings assembled in villages and leagues were formed pledged to non-payment of school taxes with all the fervor of Roundheads refusing ship money to King Charles. Lloyd George, already the champion of Welsh Disestablishment, encouraged the leagues with histrionic oratory. In throwing themselves into a revival of religious battle, people seemed to be on the hunt for excitement, as if the Boer War had created a taste for it while supplying its physical experience to less than two per cent of the population.