The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

  After we had worked out the basic structure he gave me a few more small directions. He would leave me absolute freedom, he said, because he was never inspired by a libretto made to measure in advance, in the manner of Verdi’s operas, only by a genuine work of literature. But he would be glad if I could provide places for a few complex musical forms that would enable the musical colouring to develop in a certain way. “I’m not thinking of long melodies such as you can find in Mozart. I manage short themes best. But I can vary and paraphrase such themes, get everything possible out of them. In fact I think I do that better than anyone else today.” Again, I was amazed by the frank way he spoke, because it is true that Strauss’s melodies hardly ever go beyond a few bars, but the way those few bars are worked up into a fugal structure—think of the Rosenkavalier waltz—gives them fully rounded perfection.

  Not just at this first meeting but at all our others I was astonished, over and over again, by the objectivity and certainty that the old master brought to the relation between himself and his works. Once I was alone with him at a private rehearsal of Die ägyptische Helena in the Salzburg Festival Theatre. There was no one else in the auditorium, and we sat in the dark. He was listening. Suddenly I noticed him drumming his fingers slightly but impatiently on the arm of his seat. Then he whispered to me, “Poor! Oh, very poor. I obviously couldn’t think of anything better!” And after a minute or so he added, “If only I could cut that! Oh God, oh God, it means nothing and it goes on too long, much too long.” But after another few minutes: “Ah, there—now, you see, that’s good!” He assessed his own work in as matter-of-fact a way as if he were hearing the music for the first time, and it had been written by some other composer entirely unknown to him. That extraordinary awareness of his own capabilities never left him. He always knew exactly who he was and what he could do. He did not seem very interested in how much or how little other composers meant by comparison to him, or in what he meant to them. It was the work of composition itself that he liked.

  With Strauss, that work is a remarkable process. There is nothing daemonic about it, none of the artist’s fine, careless rapture, or the depression and desperation we know from accounts of the lives of Beethoven and Wagner. Strauss works coolly and objectively, he composes—like Johann Sebastian Bach and all those other sublime musical craftsmen—calmly and with regularity. He sits down at his desk at nine in the morning, and goes on composing exactly where he left off the day before, regularly writing the first sketch in pencil, the piano score in ink, and going on without a break until twelve or one o’clock. He plays Skat11 in the afternoon, transfers two or three pages of his composition to the full score, and then may have to go to the theatre to conduct in the evening. He is never nervous in any way, and his artist’s intellect is bright and clear by day and night alike. When a servant knocks on his door to bring him the tailcoat he wears for conducting he leaves his work, drives to the theatre, and conducts music with the same sure touch and air of calm as when he was playing cards in the afternoon, and inspiration returns to him at exactly the right place next morning. For, to borrow a term from Goethe, Strauss is “in command” of his ideas. To him art means ability, even all-embracing ability. As he has said, amusingly, “Anyone who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a restaurant menu to music.” Difficulties do not deter him; his creative intellect sees them as a game. I like to remember how his little blue eyes twinkled as he told me triumphantly, when the musicians reached a certain passage: “I gave the singer quite a problem to solve there! Let her puzzle away at it until she works out the answer!” In such rare moments of amusement, you feel that something daemonic does in fact lie buried in the mind of this remarkable man, although you may have doubted it at first because of the meticulous, methodical, reliable craftsmanship of his working method and the apparent absence of any nervous strain. In the same way his face initially looks rather ordinary—plump, childlike cheeks, rather commonplace fleshy features, and his forehead is not domed but recedes slightly. However, one glance at his clear, blue, beaming eyes, and you instantly feel some kind of special magical force behind the everyday bourgeois façade. I think they are the most watchful eyes I ever saw in any musician—if not daemonic then far-seeing, the eyes of a man who knows his art inside out.

  Back in Salzburg after this invigorating meeting with Strauss, I set to work at once. Wondering what he would make of my verses, I dispatched the first act to him only two weeks later. By return of post, he sent me a postcard with a quotation from Die Meistersinger on it: The opening was good. The second act brought me an even warmer comment in the shape of the opening bars of his own song: How glad I am I found you, my dear child!12 This pleasure, even delight of his made the rest of my work a true delight as well. Richard Strauss did not change a single line of the entire libretto, and only once asked me to add thee or four lines so that he could bring in another voice. A very friendly relationship developed between us; he came to our house and I visited him in Garmisch, where little by little he played me the entire opera from the sketch of the score, his long, thin fingers moving over the piano keys. Without any written contract, we agreed to take it for granted that when this opera was finished we would start on another one at once. He had already approved of its general outline in advance.

  In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, the piano score of our opera Die schweigsame Frau—The Silent Woman—was as good as finished, and Strauss had completed the orchestration of most of the first act. A few weeks later came the decree strictly banning from the German stage works by non-Aryans, and even those in which a Jew had been involved in any way at all. This sweeping prohibition extended to the dead, and Mendelssohn’s statue was removed from its place outside the Leipzig Gewandhaus, an outrage bitterly resented by all music-lovers. It looked to me as if the ban sealed the fate of our opera, and I assumed that Richard Strauss would naturally give up any idea of further collaboration with me and begin again with a new librettist. Instead he wrote me letter after letter, asking what on earth I was thinking of—on the contrary, he said, now that he was busy orchestrating Die schweigsame Frau he would like me to start preparing the libretto for his next opera. He had no intention of letting anyone forbid him to collaborate with me, and I must acknowledge freely that in the course of the entire affair he maintained his loyal friendship with me as long as possible. At the same time, I have to admit, he did take certain precautions that I found less attractive—he moved closer to the men who wielded power, he was often seen in the company of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, and he let himself be appointed President of the Reich Chamber of Music at a time when even Furtwängler13 was still declining to support the National Socialists.

  To have Strauss openly on their side was enormously important to the National Socialists at this moment. Infuriatingly, not only the best writers but also the outstanding musicians of the time had rejected their ideas outright, and the few who did agree with them, or went over to them, were not widely known. To win the support of the most famous musician in Germany at such a delicate moment would be extremely profitable, in a purely decorative sense, to Goebbels and Hitler. Hitler, who during his vagrant years in Vienna, as Strauss told me, had somehow scraped up the money to go to Graz for the premiere of Salome, paid ostentatious tribute to him. The only music performed at evening parties at Berchtesgaden, apart from Wagner’s, consisted of Strauss lieder. Strauss himself had ulterior motives for siding with the National Socialists. He always freely and coolly admitted that, with the egotism of an artist, he was indifferent at heart to any political regime. He had served the Kaiser as his Kapellmeister, and had made instrumental arrangements of military marches for him. Then he had gone to Vienna to be Court Kapellmeister to the Austrian Emperor, but subsequently was persona gratissima in both the Austrian and the German Republics. Obliging the National Socialists was also of vital importance to him, because he had put himself morally in the wrong by Nazi standards—his son’s wife was Jewish, and he feared that
his grandchildren, whom he loved dearly, would be excluded from school; the librettos of his earlier operas had been by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was not a ‘pure Aryan’; and his publisher was a Jew. So it seemed to him particularly advisable to gain support, and he went about it with great persistence. He conducted anywhere the new masters of Germany asked him to, and set an anthem to music for the Olympic Games in Berlin. At the same time he was writing me extraordinarily candid letters, and he mentioned that commission with little enthusiasm. With the sacro egoismo of the artist, his only real concern was to safeguard his work, and most of all to see the new opera, which was especially close to his heart, go into production.

  Naturally making concessions of this kind to the National Socialists was bound to be very awkward for me. It could easily give the impression that I was secretly on the same side, or just agreeing that a single exception to the disgraceful boycott of Jewish artists might be made in my own special case. My friends kept pressing me to protest publicly in Nazi Germany. But for one thing I hate emotional public gestures on principle, and for another I was not inclined to put difficulties in the way of a genius of the stature of Richard Strauss. After all, Strauss was the greatest living musician and was seventy years old; he had spent three years writing this work, and all that time he had shown friendship for me, had behaved perfectly correctly, and had even shown courage. So I thought the right thing for me to do was keep quiet and let things run their course. I also knew that complete passivity was my best way of making life more difficult for the present custodians of German culture. The Reich Chamber of Literature and the Ministry of Propaganda were just looking for a good pretext, one that would hold water, for imposing a ban on their greatest composer in this affair. How convenient it would have been if Die schweigsame Frau had contained a risqué situation, like the scene in Der Rosenkavalier when a young man comes out of a married woman’s bedroom! Then they could have claimed that they must protect German morality. But to their disappointment, there was no immorality in my libretto. Then they searched any number of Gestapo files and read my earlier books. But again, they could find no evidence that I had ever said a disparaging word about Germany—or indeed about any other nation on earth—or had been politically active. Whatever they did, whatever they tried, the decision was still going to be theirs alone. Were they going to deny the old master, whom incidentally they themselves had appointed to carry the banner of National Socialist music, the right to have his new opera performed, and do it before the eyes of the whole world, or was the name of Stefan Zweig, on whose mention as his librettist Richard Strauss expressly insisted, to contaminate German theatrical programmes as it had so often done before? What a shameful day that would be! I quietly relished their anxieties and their painful dilemma. I guessed that if I simply did nothing, or rather refrained from helping or hindering the affair in any way, this musical comedy was bound to degenerate into party-political caterwauling.

  The Nazi Party hummed and hawed over its decision as long as it possibly could. But early in 1934 it finally had to decide whether it was going to break its own law or oppose the greatest musician of the time. The day of decision could not be put off any longer. The score, the piano score, the libretto had all been printed long ago. In the Dresden Court Theatre, costumes had been ordered, the cast list decided, and the singers had even begun learning their parts. And still the various authorities, Goering and Goebbels, the Reich Chamber of Literature and the Cultural Council, the Ministry of Education and Streicher’s associates could not agree. Idiotic as all this may seem, the production of Die schweigsame Frau finally became a hotly debated affair of state. None of those authorities would venture to take full responsibility for giving the go-ahead to the straight Yes or No that would resolve the dilemma. So there was nothing for it but to leave the matter to the personal decision of the master of Germany and the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler. My books had now had the honour of being read at length by National Socialists, and it was Fouché in particular that they had studied and discussed because its subject was a man without political scruples. But I really had never expected that, after Goebbels and Goering had read it, Adolf Hitler himself would have to go to the trouble of studying the three acts of my verse libretto ex officio. He evidently did not find the decision easy. As I found out later, from accounts reaching me by devious ways, there was then another endless series of conferences. Finally Richard Strauss was called before these almighty powers, and Hitler in person told him that in this exceptional case he would allow the performance of his opera, although it was an offence against all the laws of the new German Reich. It was a decision that he probably made as unwillingly—and dishonestly—as when he decided to sign his treaty with Stalin and Molotov.

  It was a dark day for Nazi Germany when an opera was produced, once again, with the unmentionable name of Stefan Zweig displayed on all the programmes. I was not at the first night myself, of course, knowing that the auditorium would be bristling with brown uniforms. Even Hitler himself was expected to attend a later performance. The opera was a great success, and I must mention that, much to the credit of the music critics, nine out of ten of them seized with enthusiasm on this chance to show their private opposition to the racist Nazi stance by praising my libretto in the kindest of terms. All the German opera houses—Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich—immediately announced that they would be including productions of the work in their next season.

  Then, after the second performance, a lightning bolt suddenly descended from the blue. Everything was cancelled, the opera was banned in Dresden and the whole of Germany overnight. Even more astonishing, the papers said that Richard Strauss had resigned as President of the Reich Chamber of Music. Everyone knew that something extraordinary must have happened. But it was some time before I discovered the whole truth. Strauss had written me another letter urging me to start on the libretto of his next opera soon, and expressing his personal opinions rather too freely. His letter had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo. It was placed before Strauss, who consequently had to resign from his position, and the opera was banned. Since then it has been staged in German only in neutral Switzerland and in Prague, later in Italian at La Scala, Milan, by special agreement with Mussolini, who had not yet fallen in line with the racist standpoint. But the German people have never again been allowed to hear a note of this sometimes enchanting opera of their greatest musician’s old age.

  While this affair was going on, attended by a considerable amount of uproar, I was living abroad. I could tell that the unrest in Austria was going to make it impossible for me to work in peace. My house in Salzburg was close enough to the border for me to see, with the naked eye, the mountain where Adolf Hitler’s own Berchtesgaden house stood. Having Hitler as a neighbour was an unedifying and extremely disturbing situation. My proximity to the border with the German Reich, however, meant that I could assess the threat to Austria better than my friends in Vienna. The Viennese who frequented the cafés, even the men in the Ministries, thought of National Socialism as something that was going on ‘over there’, and couldn’t have anything to do with Austria. The well-organised Social Democratic party was in power here, after all, with almost half the population backing it. Even the Clerical party, with strong Catholic support, went along with it in passionate opposition to Hitler’s “German Christians”, who were now openly persecuting the Christian religion and calling their Führer literally “greater than Christ himself” in public. Surely France, Britain and the League of Nations were our friends and would look after us? Hadn’t Mussolini expressly undertaken to protect Austria, going so far as to guarantee the country’s independence? Even the Jews were not anxious, and behaved as if Jewish doctors, lawyers, scholars and actors were being deprived of their civil liberties in China, instead of just three hours’ journey away in the same German-speaking part of the world. They took their ease at home and drove around in their cars. And the comforting phrase, “This can’t last long” was on all lips. But I remembered a c
onversation with my former publisher in Leningrad during my brief visit to Russia. He told me how he had once been a rich man; he told me about the beautiful pictures he had owned, and I had asked why, in that case, he didn’t do as so many others had done and emigrate as soon as the Revolution broke out. “Oh, well,” he said, “who’d have thought at the time that a republic consisting of workers’ councils and the army would last more than two weeks?” Here we had the same delusion, arising from the same propensity for self-deception.