by John Suchet
Although the reasons for which I did not remember my dear brother Eduard in my will to my knowledge no longer apply, I will not make any alteration to take account of this. I hope that my brother’s situation will improve.
So what accounted for Eduard’s sudden reversal of fortune? Almost thirty-five years earlier, on 8 January 1863, Eduard had married Maria Magdalena Klenkhart, the youngest daughter of a coffee house owner who had been a friend of Johann Strauss the elder.
The couple had two sons, interestingly named Johann and Josef (one suspects Anna’s controlling hand in this). We owe a debt of gratitude to Johann for carrying the Strauss musical tradition into the next century. But the two sons, in connivance with their mother, would later spend every penny of their father’s hard-earned fortune, leaving him destitute.
As for Eduard himself, he would one day take revenge on his two brothers, after their deaths, in a devastating way, the consequences of which we are still suffering today.
57 The irony of this was that Strauss himself had Jewish blood, as we shall see later.
The year is 1888 and Franz Josef has been Emperor of Austria for forty years. He is fifty-eight years of age, and already to his people he is ‘the old emperor’. He has a kindly, avuncular face, a half-smile always present, eyes slightly closed, causing friendly wrinkles to emanate from their corners. He is universally respected, even if ‘loved’ is a touch too strong a word for a man who rules through divine providence.
Those who had predicted he would soon relinquish the throne after being placed there in fraught circumstances in 1848 had been long since proved mistaken. In fact he had won the affection and admiration of his people on that day in February 1853 when he had survived an assassination attempt. Where had he been at the time, and what had he been doing? Was he fulfilling some official function, surrounded by advisers and soldiers? No, he had been strolling with one of his officers, a good friend, on the Bastei, mingling easily with other Viennese following the same pursuit.
The high, sturdy collar of his military uniform had saved his life. What no one could have known at the time is that what, if the assassination attempt had succeeded, would have been a brief five-year reign, forgotten to history, was to become a reign lasting sixty-eight years, almost the longest to this day in European history.
But as the Viennese prepared to put on a show for Franz Josef’s fortieth jubilee celebrations, neither for them nor their emperor had it been four decades of trouble-free existence.
In the first place the fairytale marriage of the young emperor to the young and beautiful Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria, known as Sisi, had turned out to be anything but. From the day she arrived by boat in Vienna, Sisi had hated the formality and protocol of the imperial court. She did not get on with her domineering mother-in-law, and longed for the freedom of her childhood home, Possenhofen Castle, on the shore of Lake Starnberg in Bavaria.
Sisi was not one to bow to convention, however lofty. She had a mind of her own. She shocked her mother-in-law by having a gym installed in her apartment in the Hofburg Palace; she frequently indulged her passion for horses and riding; she insisted on preserving and exhibiting her beauty by combing her lustrous hair into which she set jewels, and having her ladies-in-waiting tie her into almost impossibly small-waisted dresses.58 It was behaviour that bordered on the eccentric; certainly not to be expected of an empress.
She adhered to a strict diet. Meat disgusted her, so that a meal might consist of the juice of half-raw beef squeezed into thin soup, or a diet of just milk and eggs. She ate small amounts and very quickly, as if trying to avoid any long-term effect on her weight. If the smallness of her waist was in any way threatened, she would fast completely for several days. Today we would not hesitate to say she suffered from an eating disorder.
There is no question that her mental health was fragile, both genetically – there was inbreeding to the extent that her mother-in-law was also her aunt – and as an independent retaliation against a world she wished every minute of the day and night she had never joined.59
After her first child, Sophie, died at the age of just two, she refused to eat for days. As with Sophie, a second daughter was immediately taken away from her. Her mother-in-law refused to allow her to breastfeed or to have anything to do with the baby’s care. Such treatment worsened her already erratic behaviour, leading to bouts of depression that consumed her for weeks.
Her husband, by contrast, was a simple soldier – his own description – with all a soldier’s instincts for discipline, obedience, an acceptance of duty and obligation. He was ill-equipped mentally to deal with a highly strung woman whose beauty was legendary throughout Europe, who made her own decisions about how and where to spend her time, and with whom.
Franz Josef indulged his wife in every way that he was capable of. When she developed a passion for Greece, he had a palace built for her on the island of Corfu. She rarely visited it.60 When she announced that she was travelling to Britain and Ireland to go riding to hounds, he allowed it – refusing to listen to rumours that she was having an affair with the dashing Scottish horseman, Bay Middleton.
The Viennese, who had really wanted to love their empress, had long since realised that was an impossible wish. If anything, Elisabeth’s eccentricities, which made life so difficult for her husband, increased the people’s affection, even sympathy, for their emperor.
The empress was aware she was failing her husband in certain areas, and as if to confirm her unpredictable behaviour, somewhere around the mid-1880s she allowed her husband to take a mistress. A mistress chosen by the empress herself.
One evening in 1883 Franz Josef found himself in one of his least favourite places, the Burgtheater, that imposing building on the Ringstrasse where plays and opera were performed. The emperor was not a great theatregoer, in fact the arts in general were an area that rather passed him by. But on this occasion an actress by the name of Katharina Schratt had been engaged by the Imperial Hofburgtheater, and given the title ‘Imperial and Royal Actress of the Burgtheater’ (Kaiserliche und Königliche Burg Schauspielerin). It was customary when this happened for the actress (or actor) to thank the emperor personally for the honour.
And so Franz Josef, resplendent in military uniform, found himself talking to a tongue-tied young woman of thirty, twenty-three years younger than him. The oft-told story has the emperor imploring the young actress to sit, but she repeatedly refused. When finally he asked her why, she replied that she had been ordered to remain standing in his presence, at the risk of being expelled for lack of decorum.
Franz Josef is said to have laughed out loud so heartily that others waiting for an audience, as well as footmen and imperial staff, stood in astonishment. Never had anyone heard the normally stiff and reserved emperor let himself go quite like this.
In the months that followed, to general surprise, which gave way to mild amusement, Franz Josef developed an unexpected love of the theatre, attending more often than he had done for years.
Among those whose attention this behaviour had not escaped was the empress herself, and in Katharina Schratt she saw at least a partial solution to her marital problems. She could see quite clearly that her husband had become infatuated with the young actress.
In a remarkable act of, shall we say, ‘understanding’, the empress decided that Katharina would make the ideal mistress for her husband. She had no aristocratic connections, therefore there could be no risk of political influence being sought. It was by no means unheard of for a ruler to take a mistress, and as long as the young woman could be persuaded to exercise at least a modicum of discretion, there would be benefit all round.
Empress Elisabeth’s instinct told her Katharina was the right woman for the purpose, and in May 1886 she acted on that instinct. She decided to commission a leading artist to paint a portrait of Katharina. More than that, she invited her husband to come with her to the artist’s studio to watch the painting in progress.
It appears Katharina was not let in on the emp
ress’s plan. Imagine the young actress, finding herself sitting for a society artist for a reason she was not aware of, suddenly finding herself in the company of the emperor and empress!
Franz Josef, clearly encouraged by his wife, lost no time in putting her plan into action. Two days after the visit to the artist’s studio, the emperor sent Katharina an emerald ring to thank her ‘for having gone to the trouble of posing for [the artist]’. In an extraordinarily affectionate note, he expressed his gratitude to her for sacrificing her time, and signed it ‘your devoted admirer’.
Thus began a relationship that was to last until the end of the emperor’s life thirty-four years later, and provide him over the years with succour and comfort through a series of tragic circumstances that he himself said no man should have to bear.61 Given that, perhaps my earlier use of the word ‘understanding’ to describe the empress’s action should be replaced by ‘prescience’.
The first of these was an event so utterly traumatic and unexpected that it threatened the very fabric of the Habsburg monarchy. In the immediate chaos that followed, there were those who expected the dynasty itself, more than six hundred years old and destined to last for ever, to fall.
The seeds had been sown many years earlier by an event of unmatched happiness in the imperial capital.
After four and a quarter years of marriage, which had produced two daughters, one of whom had not survived, the empress set not just the city of Vienna, but the entire Habsburg empire, alight with joy by producing a son.
A 101-gun salute heralded the arrival on 21 August 1858 of an heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria. The emperor’s joy was complete. A son and heir, and a wife with her popularity restored, which would surely restore her own happiness.
It was a vain hope. The emperor’s mother once again took control. If a daughter was not to be entrusted to its mother, how much less so was the son and heir to the throne. As the infant grew, Elisabeth was allowed to have no say over his upbringing or education.
Within two short years Elisabeth’s health collapsed. She was only twenty-two years of age, but was suffering from such extreme physical exhaustion that tuberculosis was feared. Without a thought for court protocol, Elisabeth deserted the court, left her husband and children, and fled from Vienna.
She stayed away for six months, and within days of her return her health once more deteriorated. Elisabeth’s health remained unstable in the years that followed. When she was away from Vienna, her health improved. As soon as she returned, she became ill again.
In August 1862, having been away from husband and children for two whole years, she returned to Vienna shortly before Franz Josef’s birthday, but on the journey suffered from a violent migraine and vomited four times.
Without doubt we would say today that her illnesses were psychosomatic, but her physical reactions were certainly genuine. She hated Vienna, life at court, so much that she simply could not avoid falling ill.
This had one advantage. All the medical advice said that she was too fragile to risk another pregnancy. That at least released her from what her mother-in-law, and quite possibly poor Franz Josef, saw as her primary duty.
She herself was under no illusion over her priorities. A close confidante quoted her as saying, ‘Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come they drive away beauty, which is the best gift of the gods.’
It is hardly surprising that the child on whom the future of the Habsburg dynasty depended was to grow up rather troubled. Taken from his mother at birth, then seeing so little of her that she was in effect a stranger, and taught the rigours and discipline of court life from as soon as he could stand.
If the infant rarely saw his mother, his relationship with his father was cold and formal. Franz Josef hardly knew how to bestow love on his son, other than in strict accordance with protocol. On the day the child was born his father had awarded him the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the following day appointed him Honorary Colonel-in-Chief of the 19th Regiment. Later he would promote him to Inspector General of the Infantry. One wonders if little Rudolf was ever cuddled by either mother or father.
Added to all this was the disturbing fact that his genetic provenance was, to say the least, fragile. His parents were first cousins, and both families were related several times over, with instances of mental illness on both sides.
It was as if Rudolf was destined for tragedy from the day he was born.
Thirty years later the heir to the throne was a disillusioned, even dangerous, young man. Where his father saw order and permanence, the son was certain that everything had to change. ‘A tremendous change has to come,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘a social restructuring.’
The words were seditious. His thoughts were seditious. He mixed with the poor and anarchists. His behaviour verged on treason. He made no secret of his activities and allegiances; discretion was unknown to him. At the age of twenty he had written a twelve-page letter assessing the effects of military manoeuvres in Bosnia on the Slav people. Three months later he filled fourteen pages analysing the current political situation, with overt support for the growing movement for social democracy. It was not what you said in an empire where rule was by divine right, particularly when you yourself were heir to it.
Franz Josef simply did not know how to handle his rebellious son, and Empress Elisabeth was barely there to exercise any maternal influence. In fact she was in London, staying at Claridge’s Hotel, when a telegram informed her of her son’s engagement to a Belgian princess. It appears she had no idea of the proposed match until the telegram arrived.
With a profound belief that there could be no such thing as a happy marriage, proved by the disaster of her own, she is said to have turned white when she read it, and muttered, ‘Please God it does not become a calamity.’ She cannot have imagined just how far her prayer would go unanswered.
The emperor had taken matters into his own hands. His son and heir needed to settle down, have a family, start behaving like a normal young man in society, he decided. The chosen bride was Princess Stéphanie of Belgium. It was a perfect match, her mother being a Habsburg princess, thus uniting the two houses.
Perfect on paper, that was all. Stéphanie was a mere fifteen years of age, and the marriage, planned for the summer of 1880, had to be postponed for almost a year because it was found she had not yet begun to menstruate.
Archduke Rudolf, now twenty-two years of age, was not in the slightest bit attracted to his bride. After just a few weeks of married life, Stéphanie wrote that when she arrived from Belgium there were ‘no plants, no flowers to celebrate my arrival, no carpets, no dressing table [in their rooms in Laxenburg Palace outside Vienna], no bathroom, nothing but a wash handstand on a three-legged framework’.
Of much more import, as it turned out, were her words that she and her husband had ‘little to say to each other; we were virtual strangers’.
Around five years into the marriage Rudolf’s health deteriorated sharply. He suffered from persistent bronchitis, coupled with rheumatic pains. He had constant headaches. He started taking morphine, and soon became dependent on it. He was drinking too much alcohol as well.
And so we reach the year 1888, the year the emperor and his people were preparing to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his accession to the throne. The actual date was 2 December.
In April that year Archduke Rudolf appeared to take total leave of his senses. Under a pen-name that fooled no one, he published a 15,000-word ‘Open Letter to His Majesty Emperor Franz Josef I’ on the subject of ‘Austria-Hungary and its Alliances’. This was a son, heir to the throne, in open revolt against his father the emperor, just as preparations were being made for the anniversary celebrations.
But Franz Josef could not have known just how seriously unbalanced his son had now become. There was a sultry young dancer by the name of Mizzi Caspar, who had made herself well known, and available, to Rudolf and his officer friends. In the summer of this year he met
her secretly and proposed that she should accompany him to the officers’ memorial, which stood in the hills south of Mödling, close to Vienna.
She assumed it was for some kind of tryst. It was, he told her, but it was more than that. The monument bore an engraving ‘To Emperor and Fatherland’. In front of it, he said, they would shoot themselves and die together. This concerned young woman laughed it off, telling him not to be so stupid and to come to his senses.
Then Rudolf met Mary Vetsera, the ambitious seventeen-year- old daughter of an ambitious mother. Ambitious for what? To enter the very highest aristocratic circles, and their prey was the heir to the throne. With her mother’s overt encouragement, Mary set out first to become mistress to the archduke, then, who knows, maybe even succeed in displacing Princess Stéphanie.
But that was not the way it turned out. Mary succeeded in her first aim, but she became infatuated with Rudolf to such an extent that when he made the same suggestion to her that Mizzi had rejected, she saw it as her path to posthumous fame, even possible immortality.
There was one difference. Rudolf decided that their act of defiance against everything his father and the empire stood for would take place not in front of a memorial on the edge of a wood, but in the hunting lodge he had bought the year before in a village a little way to the south-west of Vienna, by the name of Mayerling.
While Rudolf hatched his devastating plan, Vienna celebrated. In fact the city had never celebrated like it. For the unveiling of a huge monument to the memory of the mother of the nation, Empress Maria Theresa, her arm outstretched as if to gather her people, the Prince of Wales was in Vienna, the King of Greece, the new Kaiser of Germany, all on show along with no fewer than sixty-six archdukes and archduchesses, there to pay respects, even homage, to the Habsburg emperor and his beautiful empress.
Only those standing close to Empress Elisabeth saw the look of alarm on her face as she turned to her son. Rudolf was pale, deep shadows beneath his eyes. They heard her ask, ‘Are you ill?’ ‘No, only tired and exhausted,’ he replied.