“Things are bad with me,” he wrote a friend in July 1888. “I see no chance of finding an engagement elsewhere and I must confess in all honesty that this worries me terribly. I now need a very absorbing activity if I am not to perish!”
He did not perish. He saved himself by making out of perishing a poem. In the first July week of 1888 Mahler sat down in his childhood room at his father’s house in Iglau and worked out great sound-metaphors of perdition, the first movement of his Second Symphony. He would call it Totenfeier or Death Celebration. And to this same friend he would confess: “It is the hero of my First Symphony I carry to the grave here. Immediately arise the great questions: Why hast thou lived?…Why hast thou suffered?…Is it all nothing but a huge, terrible joke?”
* * *
* Vacationing in the same spot exactly seven Julys later, Sigmund Freud would happen on the key insight to his Interpretation of Dreams. Today a plaque marks that event.
Chapter 3
On Saturday, July 7, 1888, the Crown Prince returned from Mayerling. He arrived at the Vienna Southern Railway terminal sometime in the late afternoon, observed by a detective and met by Bratfisch who drove him whistling through the rain. At the gates of the Hofburg—the Imperial Palace—Bratfisch jumped from the coachman’s seat, too late. Too late the guard stepped from his yellow-and-black striped sentinel box. Rudolf had already opened the fiacre door himself, slipped through the gate, hurried up marble steps and down parquet corridors, past spurred boots clicking and hands saluting, to his apartments facing the inner Palace courtyard. He carried a small valise. At journey’s end he put it down on his study desk, next to a paperweight—a polished, snow-white human skull.
Why dost thou live? The question had been flung publicly at Rudolf the day after he was born. Three hundred yards away from the death’s head on his desk stood the old Court Theater, not yet superseded by the new Court Theater where Klimt was still painting. The old theater had celebrated Rudolf’s birth with a gala performance of allegorical scenes: Among mighty ruins, Clio, the Muse of History, had sat onstage and with a gold stylus had incised on a golden slab the heir’s birth date: August 21, 1858. “Here I inscribe the year and the date,” she had said to an audience of the Empire’s foremost dignitaries. “But the rest of the tablet I leave empty. There must be room for his deeds—and I divine greatness—which I shall record here yet!”
Why hast thou lived? Why hast thou suffered?
Of course it wasn’t just Rudolf’s bafflement. It was the soulbray of the times, of the new ego. Man believed himself emancipated from the limits of custom and station—therefore he was also estranged from their shelter. Man had become An Individual, born for his unique great purpose, for which he must quest and under whose pressure he must justify his life through every moment until death.
How could men meet this superb demand? Some, like Mahler, managed to give it eloquent voice. Others, like Freud and Herzl, would see much of it fulfilled while they still walked the earth. Most labored in vain and chafed out their days in inadequacy. But at least they could chafe in private. Not Rudolf.
Rudolf was wriggling in his first diapers as History pronounced him a titan before the world. Twenty-seven years of expectancy later, on New Year’s Day of 1886, he wrote his friend Moritz Szeps: “To make a few speeches which aren’t so bad, to write a few fairly good articles and books, to have a modern education—those are things which are still a long way from a great success in the course of world history. Who knows what the new year will bring? Perhaps one will have to show what one is worth.”
The year 1886 had brought him no “great success.” Nor had 1887. Yet to a degree he’d shown what he was worth. His slim, quick presence could make a personal gesture out of an official hand-wave. He entranced crowds and leaders alike. Queen Victoria’s crustiness dissolved at the sight of him. At her Golden Jubilee in 1887 she particularly asked for his attendance. No sooner had he arrived than she awarded him the Order of the Garter and not just with routine courtesy either, but with such caressing tenderness, “tickling me as she did so, that I could hardly keep myself from laughing.” In fond violation of protocol she asked him to escort her to her state dinner. Leading her on his arm, he preceded all attendant kings.
But he never escaped the hand of his own sovereign. He was an extraordinarily graceful stylist, but at Buckingham Palace as at all official functions, he had to give his toast in the clumsy tropes concocted for him by his father’s Foreign Minister. Rudolf’s personality was displayed abroad as an advertisement of Austrian charm. But his opinions? His ideas? If His Imperial Highness insisted on indulging himself in such, His Imperial Highness must not indulge himself in public.
For a man who lived intensely through his thoughts and words this was a throttling restriction. He could not violate it head-on. But he could evade it indirectly. For some years now he had been speaking in a roundabout but effective fashion to some fifty thousand Viennese newspaper readers unaware that it was their Crown Prince who was addressing them with such subtle polemics, in such accomplished language.
The path from writer to reader was labyrinthine. On the day of Rudolf’s return from Mayerling to the city, Saturday, July 7, 1888, he sent his manuscript on its usual route. He rang for his old servant Nehammer and pulled from his valise the pages written at Mayerling. Nehammer then left the Palace. It was the end of his day’s work, but he did not go home to his little apartment in the Lerchenfelderstrasse. He did not head for his true destination either. Twice he changed horse-tramways to throw any hounds off the scent, but he could never be sure he wasn’t followed. Apparently old Nehammer never worried either. For a quarter of a century, since the Crown Prince had been a tot, he had helped his master into coats and out of scrapes. Service was service, even if it meant zigzagging through Vienna.
Finally arrived at a mansion at Liechtensteinstrasse 51, old Nehammer announced himself as the masseur for Fräulein Szeps. He was admitted into Fräulein Szeps’s bedroom where not only Bertha Szeps was waiting, but also her father Moritz, editor and publisher of the Wiener Tagblatt, one of Vienna’s leading liberal papers. To him the old man gave his master’s manuscript. Herr Szeps immediately copied it in his own hand, gave it to a messenger standing by who then sped the copy to the paper’s editorial offices at Universitätsstrasse 4. Szeps returned the original to Nehammer along with some late information from Tagblatt correspondents, foreign and domestic, much of which the censor would not allow in print.
“I belong to the people least informed by official sources,” Rudolf had once complained. Well, through Nehammer, who came to work the next day with dispatches inside his jacket, he was well informed unofficially. And that same day, July 8, 1888, the Wiener Tagblatt featured an unsigned lead article, presumably by Szeps. But only Szeps knew that the Crown Prince had written it. The article discussed Kaiser Wilhelm’s current voyage to Russia on his yacht Hohenzollern. It paid tribute to the might and honor and youth of the Prussian Empire as personified by the new German monarch. But it also could not conceal the fact that there sailed on that ship “not only the pride of Prussia but also a question.” Why, for the first stop on his Imperial travels, had Wilhelm chosen the retrograde Tsar’s realm, which seemed unwilling to compromise on its anti-Austrian policies?
It was as fine a diatribe against Rudolf’s enemy as could slip through the meshes of censorship.
Why hast thou lived? Why hast thou suffered?…To what purpose?
In July 1888, more than ever, Rudolf wanted to budge the Monarchy from its friendship with Wilhelm, that bumptious reactionary. He wanted to move toward an alliance with a forward-minded republic like France. More important still, he wanted to encourage everything that might modernize and liberalize Austria. On July 10 he appeared at the Vienna Trade Exhibit, opened rather perfunctorily by his father the Emperor a few days before. The Crown Prince allowed himself to be photographed with all the new developments advertised there, the trends in interior decorating, the new methods in c
arpentry, the latest building techniques and newfangled sports gear like bicycles and metal skates.
For a while the Crown Prince’s personal interest drew more attention to the show. Then attendance dropped again—way below that of similar exhibits in other lands. Rudolf was the city’s Prince Charming; and it kept stalemating him charmingly. He exhorted his Viennese to progress. They loved the lecturer all the more for the peculiarity of his lecture. They adored his arm, the comeliness of its angle, the fashionability of its sleeve, but adroitly ignored the future to which it kept pointing.
How long it had been pointing by 1888! How often had he encouraged technical exhibitions in Vienna, had sponsored, funded and inaugurated! Five years earlier he had opened the International Electric Fair in Vienna with the phrase: “Let an ocean of light and progress pour forth from these streets…” This happened to be one of the rare speeches he’d been able to write himself without some Lord High monocle peering over his shoulder. His “ocean of light” had become a byword. People also remembered—not knowing that the Crown Prince was here the source as well—a particularly striking unsigned article in the Wiener Tagblatt called “A Thousand and One Days.” It coincided with the start of the Electrical Fair and combined a paean to the liberating potential of modern science with an assault on the dead hand of the aristocracy:
“Here is the difference,” Rudolf had written, “between the old fantastic fairytale and its realization in the nineteenth century. The magic light streaming from the enchanted castle could once be seen by only one individual whom a fairy princess rewarded with her favors. But what one man creates out of the soil of facts today does not belong to him alone, it becomes the property of all people. It belongs to the use, advantage and enjoyment of all mankind. The fairytale is an aristocratic dream. Its realization through research and invention is democratic reality…”
Thus spake the Crown Prince, nameless but eloquent in the Tagblatt of 1883. Yet “democratic reality” still brightened very little of Vienna in 1888. Oceans of light already poured forth from other capitals, but within Vienna’s Chinese Wall one still relied on gas lanterns. True, even in this respect a change had been promised for this year. The great season ahead was to be illuminated by bulbs shining not only in the new Court Theater but in Parliament and in a number of other Ringstrasse buildings. So far, however, the electric current expressed itself most emphatically through electrotherapy dispensed at insane asylums and at the Prater Amusement Park.
At the Prater it had become fashionable for young bucks to buy themselves jolts at “electrocution extravaganzas.” There was supposed to be a safe limit on the voltage, but the extravaganza managers had discovered that safety wasn’t good box office. That summer many young men, literally overcome by modernity, had to be carried off in ambulances.
If his subjects’ electrical frivolities frustrated the Crown Prince, so did their attitude toward the telephone. Rudolf admired the telephone’s use abroad, not least its facilitation of stock-market business between widely separated cities. Particularly in America this let more and more of the common people participate in transactions heretofore limited to millionaires.
In Rudolf’s own country, though, the telephone could not seem to become a democratic utility. Austrians treated it like a rococo bauble. This summer long-distance service began between Vienna and the suburb of Baden near Mayerling. Calls were limited to ten minutes, of which at least six were taken up by delicious arabesques of protocol.
“Fräulein Operator in Baden?” said Fräulein Operator in Vienna. “Might I have the honor to wish you a good morning? It is my privilege to establish a connection on behalf of His Excellency, the Privy Councillor Alfons Baron von Wieck, who presents his compliments. His Excellency would be grateful for the pleasure of conversing with…”
In Austria people just couldn’t seem to take efficient advantage of progress. It baffled Rudolf. Perhaps he would have been less baffled if his fervor for the future had allowed for some interest in the past. A speeding driver, he bent forward too keenly ever to look back. Yet only such a look would have revealed why his Viennese subjects lacked every instinct for the up-to-date; why they could not assimilate the middle-class utopia of technology or the entire middle-class enterprise of modernity—why, for that matter, they couldn’t quite manage being middle-class at all. The fact was that their class structure had failed to crystallize a viable middle. It was a failure integral to the town’s character and to its history.
Chapter 4
What vexed the last Rudolf Habsburg had really started over half a millennium earlier with the first. The perverseness of the Viennese genius was, among other things, a consequence of an act of the original dynast. When Rudolf I founded the Habsburg Empire in 1273, he made a choice that was literally eccentric, i.e., off-center. He picked Vienna as his capital though it lay on the precarious eastern rim of his possessions.
Geography is destiny. Henceforward Vienna had to be both throne room and fortress. There was a good reason why the Imperial Palace was called Hofburg, “Court Fortress.” More than once the battering ram of the Turk drove at Vienna’s ramparts. Through a long historic stretch the town was, simultaneously, traumatized by war and exalted by intimacy with the crown. As a result it never went through normal urban development by way of a gradual unfettering of the middle class. The sword of the knight and the flourish of the courtier marked its streets, not the common sense of the tradesman. There was little physical or psychological room inside these ramparts for bourgeois growth. Sometimes the guilds managed to assert civic independence, but in the end the Imperial overseers always carried the day. In other, comparable, Western capitals burgherdom thrived along with practicality, efficiency, industry. Not in Vienna.
The principal manufacture of the city was the grandeur of its monarchs. In this outpost Habsburg maintained an immense, brocaded court through which the sovereign (usually drably and inexorably) manipulated the feudal levers controlling his diverse dominions—often by setting one against the other. An old joke went: “The King of Croatia declared war on the King of Hungary, and Austria’s Emperor, who was both, remained benevolently neutral.”
Other large states generated a bureaucracy that could keep pace with technics and with the times. Habsburg still preferred to govern by legend; by the loyalty of its princely vassals; and, as the years passed, by an intricate, picturesquely costumed backwardness. That is, “by a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of officials, and a skulking army of informers.”
A more substantial business society did, after all, develop in the capital, often in the form of craftsmen displaced by factories from industrially advanced provinces like Bohemia. But these artisans tailored and carpentered and wove and troweled mainly for the monumental Imperial household. They acted as free-lance domestics to the Imperial family, to equerries and ladies-in-waiting, to the cupbearers, lord marshals, seneschals and chamberlains who made up the resident aristocracy; to the lord high ministers, the noble judges and titled generals, with their palaces, their subsidiary establishments and their attendant retinues. The total Court amounted to a multitude, escutcheoned, exalted and rarefied, of over forty thousand.
The Court absorbed the products and the services of the middle class. The Court also consumed the middle-class soul. Even when that class attained some political power, it never turned fully bourgeois. Hypnotized by the Court, Vienna’s burghers became like the city’s fountains, squares and churches—irretrievably baroque. Not only in the salon but in the counting house, manner overtook substance. Theater overtook reality.
As the nobles, shut out from their political roles by the Crown, retreated into their estates, the moneyed commoners appropriated their airs, their avocations and their amorality with a grace unmatched by townsmen elsewhere. “I kiss your hand, dear fellow,” one aristocrat would say to another in eighteenth-century Vienna for the loan of a horse with which to chase the fox. “I lay myself at milady’s feet,” he would say if he wanted to give th
e countess his regards. He did not care to chat about annoyances like the Jacobins or death or poverty. But he would discuss, with finesse and feeling, the music of a dead pauper like Mozart.
“I kiss your hand,” a nineteenth-century butcher would say to the owner of a slaughterhouse in thanks for the extension of another month’s credit on that wagonload of hogs. “I lay myself at the gracious lady’s feet,” he would say to convey greetings to the slaughterhouse owner’s wife. He would drop such words naturally and easily. Furthermore he was as lithe as an aristocrat in the evasion of Heavy Topics. The rising price of sugar? The expensiveness of bread? The confiscation of a too-liberal newspaper? Of such things one acted elegantly unmindful. One let play a spirited wit and an informed eloquence on arguments considered truly important: What was superior—Mendelssohn’s classic chords, or the romantic nocturnes of Chopin?
Yes, Rudolf had an urgent purpose in making Vienna more seriously modern. London, Paris, New York—they all bristled with engineers and pragmatists. On the sidewalks by the Danube sauntered nothing but cavaliers, courtiers, epicures, estheticians, attitudinizers.
That had been all right for a few hundred years. But now truly new times were coming down on the city. Industrialization was tearing up the villagelike outer districts. Textile plants had opened, and the smoke of piano factories and paper mills smudged backyard gardens. Soon workers might discover that they were the proletariat. As for the capitalists, they often faced deprivation of a peculiar internal kind. It showed most in their sons. Many scions, unable to find meaning in their fathers’ factories or mansions, sought it vainly in coffeehouse broodings or by the betting window at the races.
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