Messages From a Lost World: Europe on the Brink

by Stefan Zweig

  As a result of this constant mixing the people and everything else in Vienna were far more easy-going, even-tempered, pleasant, and this conciliatory character, which was a secret of the Viennese soul, could equally be found in Austrian literature. In Grillparzer, our greatest dramatist, there is the same creative strength as in Schiller, but thankfully without the melodrama. The Viennese is too self-aware to be melodramatic. With Adalbert Stifter the reflective character of Goethe is in some way transmuted into the Austrian, into something softer, more tender, more appealing and picturesque. And Hofmannsthal, part Tyrolean, part Viennese, part Jew, part Italian, shows us in a symbolic way what new values, what finesse and what happy surprises can result from such a melange; in both his poetry and prose is found the highest musicality that the German language has ever attained, a truly harmonious grafting of the German genius with the Latin, which could only occur in Austria, this country located between two cultures. But that has always been Vienna’s secret: to welcome, to adopt, to forge links of spiritual conciliation and transform dissonances into harmony.

  It is for this reason and not by pure chance that Vienna became the classic city of music. Like Florence, where painting scaled the highest peaks in the joy and glory of gathering to its walls, in the space of a century, all the great creators, Giotto and Cimabue, Donatello and Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo, so Vienna gathered to its bosom in the space of a century all the leading names of classical music. Metastasio, the king of opera, settles opposite the Hofburg, Haydn lives in the same house, Gluck gives lessons to the children of Maria Theresa and to Haydn comes Mozart, to Mozart Beethoven and close by are Salieri and Schubert and after them Brahms and Bruckner, Johann Strauss and Lanner, Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler. Not a moment’s pause in 150 years, not a decade, not a year where in Vienna an immortal work is not born. Never did the god of music bless a city so much as Vienna in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Some might raise an objection: of all these masters, none save for Schubert was a genuine Viennese. I do not intend to contest this. Certainly Gluck came from Bohemia, Haydn from Hungary, Caldara and Salieri from Italy, Beethoven from the Rhineland, Mozart from Salzburg, Brahms from Hamburg, Bruckner from High Austria, Hugo Wolf from Styria. But why did they all arrive from the four points of the compass to Vienna alone, why did they choose this city in which to practise their art? Because presumably they could earn more money there? On the contrary. Neither Mozart nor Schubert were exactly sitting on a fortune and Haydn earned more in London in a year than he did over the six decades he spent in Austria. The real reason why the musicians settled in Vienna and remained there was the simple fact that they sensed the cultural climate required for the development of their art was more favourable here than anywhere else. In the same way a plant requires a sympathetic soil in order to flourish, so art needs to develop within a receptive sphere, in a widening circle of connoisseurship, and like the plant it needs sun and light, the stimulating warmth of a great empathy. The highest levels of art are always attained where it is the passion of the whole people. If the sculptors and painters of sixteenth-century Italy gathered in Florence, it was not only because there they encountered the Medicis, who offered them money and commissions, but because the entire people placed its pride in the presence of these artists, because every new canvas was an event more significant than any in politics or commerce, and this fact led artists into a constant striving to surpass one another.

  The great musicians could hardly find a better city in which to carry out their work than Vienna, for it had the ideal public, because a fanaticism for music had penetrated all levels of society. A love for music inhabited the imperial palace: Emperor Leopold composed himself; Maria Theresa keenly followed the musical education of her children; Mozart and Gluck played in her house; the Emperor Joseph knew every note of the operas he had performed in his theatre. They even neglected politics in favour of music. Their orchestra, their theatre was their true pride, and in the sprawling domain of state administration they never looked as closely at questions as at those that asked: which opera should I have performed, which conductor, which singers should I employ? This was their greatest concern.

  In this passion for music, the high aristocracy wants to outdo the imperial house. The names of Esterházy, Lobkowicz, Waldstein, Razumovsky and Kinsky, all immortalized in the biographies of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, have their own orchestras or at least a quartet. All these proud aristocrats, whose houses were never opened to the bourgeoisie, accept the musician’s authority. They do not consider him an employee; he is not simply a guest but a guest of honour, and they submit to his vagaries and pretensions. Dozens of times Beethoven has his imperial pupil the Archduke Rudolf wait for his music lesson and the latter never once complains. When Beethoven wants to withdraw his Fidelio before the performance, a princess and countess fall to their knees begging him to relent; one can scarcely imagine today what this gesture by people of noble stock represented, prostrating themselves before the son of a drunken provincial pastor. When the Princess Lobkowicz annoys Beethoven, he comes to the door of her palace and bawls before her lackeys, “Lobkowicz you ass!” But the Princess simply tolerates it and does not bear him a grudge. When Beethoven wants to leave Vienna, the aristocrats offer him an annuity sum, enormous for the period, with no other obligation than that he stay on in Vienna and freely devote himself to his art. Though they might have been mediocre in other disciplines, they all know what great music is and how precious and worthy of admiration such a monumental genius. They encourage musicians not through snobbism, but because they dwell within music and place it on a rung far higher than their own.

  It is with equal success and passion that in the same epoch musicians mix with the Viennese bourgeoisie. In virtually every house they hold a chamber concert once a week. Every cultivated man plays an instrument; every girl from a good home can sing from an open book and be part of a choir or orchestra. When the bourgeois of Vienna opens his daily paper, it’s not to read what is happening in the world of politics, but what is playing at the opera or theatre, who were the singers, the conductor, the players. A new work is an event: the engagement of a new conductor or opera singer provokes endless debate, and backstage gossip spreads through the city. For the theatre, and particularly the Burgtheater, signifies much more for the Viennese than a mere theatre: it is a microcosm playing within a macrocosm, a sublimely concentrated Vienna in the interior of the other, a society within a society. The imperial court theatre shows people how one behaves in society, how conversation is held in a salon, how one dresses, how one speaks, how one comports oneself, how one holds a teacup, how one enters and then takes one’s leave. It’s a kind of Cortegiano, a morality mirror of good conduct, for at the Burgtheater as at the Comédie-Française not a word is out of place, as in the same way at the Opera not a wrong note is struck: for to do so would be tantamount to national shame. They attend the Opera, the Burgtheater, in the Italian style, as if a salon. They greet each other, they know the faces, they are quite at home. All classes rub shoulders with each other: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the new youth. They are the great community, and all, everything that happens there, belongs to the city. When it was decided that the old building of the Burgtheater should be demolished, the place where The Marriage of Figaro was first performed, it was like a day of mourning in Vienna. From six in the morning enthusiasts queued at the doors and remained standing there until evening, for thirteen hours, without food or drink, just so they could attend the last performance. They tore splinters of wood from the stage, which they piously conserved, as they once had the splinters of the Holy Cross.

  Exaggeration, you will say, an absurd exaggeration! And that’s what we too think sometimes about this delirious enthusiasm of the Viennese for music and theatre. Yes, I know it is sometimes absurd. For example, when the Viennese plucked hairs from the manes of the horses harnessed to Fanny Elssler’s coach; and I know too we have paid dearly for this fanati
cism. For while the Viennese were caught up in their unbridled passion for theatre and music, the Germans were overtaking them in the domain of technology, efficiency and the more practical things of existence. But let us not forget: such overvaluing also creates values. Only where true enthusiasm for art exists does the artist feel comfortable, when so much is demanded of art. I believe there is no other city where the musician, the singer, the actor, the conductor, the director are placed under more scrutiny and constrained by a greater tension. There is not only the critique of opening night, but also an unrelenting and entrenched public critique. In Vienna, no mistake is tolerated at any concert; every performance, whether it be the twentieth or hundredth, is subjected to the same degree of lucid and penetrating critique on the part of every spectator or listener. We are accustomed to the highest levels of quality and are not willing to give an inch. This knowledge was forged in us from an early age. When I attended high school, I was one among two dozen of my classmates who never missed a performance at the Burgtheater or the Opera; being the true Viennese we were, we cared nothing for politics or political economics and we would have been ashamed to know anything about sport. Even today I can’t make out the difference between cricket and golf and the football reports in the papers might as well be written in Chinese. But at the age of fourteen or fifteen I could discern any slip or cursoriness in a production; and we knew exactly by which means this or that conductor raised the tempo. We were for or against such and such an artist; we either worshipped them or reviled them, we two dozen of our class. Imagine then these two dozen high school students multiplied by fifty schools, plus a university, a bourgeoisie, a whole city, and you may comprehend the level of tension that such an interest in all theatrical and musical works must engender, how much this untiring, relentless scrutiny must have stimulated the overall level of these musical and theatrical works. Every musician, every artist knew that no drop in standards would be tolerated in Vienna, that he had to strive to the maximum if he were to maintain his standing. This scrutiny carried into the lower stratum of the people. The regimental orchestras competed between themselves, and our army possessed—I always remember the debut of Lehár—far better conductors than generals. The little female orchestras in the Prater, the pianists in the cabaret, where they drank new wine, were all placed under this merciless scrutiny, for the quality of the orchestra was for the ordinary Viennese as important as that of the wine; the musician had to play well, otherwise he was lost, he was dismissed.

  Yes, it was strange, everywhere in Vienna, in public life and morals, in the city administration, there was a good deal of nonchalance, indifference, mellowness, a sort of “sloppiness”, we used to say. But in the sphere of art no negligence was excused, no sluggishness was tolerated. It is possible that in this exaggerated passion for music, theatre, culture, Vienna, the Hapsburgs and Austria as a whole had forfeited political success. But it is this we can thank for our musical empire.

  In a city which exists so profoundly in music, with nerves so attuned, with such a subtle sense of rhythm and cadence, dance must, as a gregarious distraction, transform itself into art. The Viennese danced with passion; they were dance-mad and that went for the balls of the royal court and the Opera right down to those performed in the pubs of the suburbs and by rural farm-workers. But they were not content with dancing voluntarily. To dance well was a social obligation, and when they said of an otherwise unremarkable person that he was an excellent dancer, that signified a certain social standing. He was thereby promoted to a sphere of culture, because they had made of dance an art. On the other hand, because dance was considered an art, they raised it to a higher level, and the so-called light music, dance music, became a complete music in itself. The public danced a great deal and did not always want to hear the same old waltzes. The musicians were compelled perpetually to offer up new ones and outdo each other. That’s why alongside the greats, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, there evolved a second line of musicians, from Schubert, Lanner, Johann Strauss father and son to Franz Lehár and other greater and lesser masters of the Viennese operetta—an art which wanted to make life lighter, more animated, more colourful, more wanton, an ideal music for the light hearts of the Viennese.

  But I realize I run the danger of lending an impression of our Viennese which too easily corresponds with the soft and sentimental tones of the operetta. A frivolous, theatre-mad city which knows only how to dance, sing, eat, love, where no one has any cares or knows what work is. As in any legend, there is more than a germ of truth in this. Certainly we lived well in Vienna, we led an easy life, we strove to pass off with a quip all that was unpleasant or oppressive. We revelled in celebrations and amusements. When the military bands passed by, people stopped whatever they were doing and raced into the streets. When the flower parade took place in the Prater 300,000 people turned out, and even a burial was an excuse for a pageant and celebration. A wind of lightness blew down from the Danube and the Germans looked on us with a kind of mistrust, like children who did not take life seriously enough. For them Vienna was the Falstaff of cities, wanton, wisecracking, jocular, and for Schiller we were Phaeacians, the people for whom it is always Sunday, over whose stoves the spit never stops turning. They all thought that life in Vienna was too frivolous, too casual. They reproached us for our spirit of “jouissance” and for two centuries blamed us because we liked the good things in life so much.

  I won’t deny this spirit of “jouissance” among the Viennese and I will even defend it. I believe the good things in life exist so one might profit from them and it is the supreme right of every man to live freely, without anxieties, without longing. I believe that an excess of ambition in the soul of a man, as with a people, destroys precious values and that the old adage of Vienna, “live and let live”, is not only humane, but far wiser than all the severe maxims and categorical imperatives. It is on this fact that the Austrians, who have never been imperialists, will never see eye to eye with the Germans, even with the best among them. For the German people the concept of “jouissance” is always linked to effort, activity, success, to victory. To be fully himself, each must outstrip his neighbour and if possible oppress him. Even Goethe, whose greatness and sagacity we so admire, raises this dogma in a poem which ever since early childhood I have felt was anti-natural. He says of men:

  You must reign and conquer,

  or be subservient and lose, suffer or triumph,

  be the anvil or the hammer.

  Well, I hope you will not accuse me of impertinence if I offer an alternative to “You must reign and conquer”. I believe that a man or a people should neither reign nor conquer. Above all one must be free and leave others to their freedom; as we have learnt in Vienna, one should live and let live and not be ashamed of taking pleasure in existence. “Jouissance”, it seems to me, is a right and almost a duty of man, as long as it does not wear him down or weaken him. And I have always noted that it is those who, for as long as they were able, freely and frankly took pleasure in life who in the hour of despair or danger showed themselves more robust, in the same way as men and peoples who fight each other not through love of militarism but only when they are forced to do so, prove themselves the most able combatants.

  Vienna showed this at the time of its hardest struggle. It showed that it could work and it must work when it mattered and those who had been dismissed as frivolous showed that, when the need arose, they could be impressively earnest and resolved. No city in 1919 had been so brutally struck as Vienna. Imagine, an empire of fifty-four million people suddenly reduced to four million. It is no longer the Emperor’s city; the Emperor has been chased out and with him the lustre of festiveness. The arteries leading to the provinces from where the capital drew its resources have been severed; the railways lack coaches, the locomotives coal; the shops are empty, there’s no bread, no fruit, no meat, no vegetables and the currency is depreciating hour by hour. Everywhere they prophesy the end for Vienna. Grass grows in the streets, ten
s, hundreds of thousands of people are forced to leave in order not to die of hunger; they seriously consider selling off the art treasures to pay for bread, and to demolish whole swathes of ruined houses.

  But this old city harboured a strength no one had suspected. In fact she had always shown this strength for life, this strength for work. But, unlike the Germans, we did not loudly brag about it; better still, our mask of frivolity had deceived even ourselves of this work which had patiently been accomplished within the arts and the manual crafts. In the same way that foreigners viewed France as the country of profligacy and luxury—failing to see beyond the jewellers’ shops on the rue de la Paix and the nightclubs of Montmartre, never having laid eyes on Belleville, never having seen the workers, the bourgeoisie, the provincials in their steady and determined labour—so too they were mistaken about Vienna. Now it was challenged, all was accomplished and no time was wasted. We did not squander our moral strength denying defeat as in Germany, where they declared, “We were not beaten, we were betrayed!” We said honestly, “The war is over, let us get back to work. Let us reconstruct Vienna and Austria!”