A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  The bourgeois were troubled at home now. There were also international frictions, bruised national egos, and pent-up new talents famished for release. To cope with it all the city had built the theatrics of the Ringstrasse and cultivated the dramaturgy of pure gesture.

  Would that be enough of a defense? Enough to cope with the unease seeping even through the affluent Inner City districts? Or to contain the slums sleazing through the town’s south and west? Or to face the sleek new might of other empires? Would Vienna be able to assume the modern greatness that was demanded and that the fall season was to bring?

  “Fräulein Operator in Vienna?” Fräulein Operator in Baden said. “The party whom I have the honor to serve at this end of the wire, University Professor Dr. Dr. Alois Zechner,* would like to convey to you and to your party a hand kiss for the courtesy of awaiting the completion of this connection. Fräulein Operator, if it is still convenient for His Excellency the Privy Councillor Baron von Wieck to entertain the connection, Herr Professor Dr. Dr. Zechner would be only too deeply pleased…”

  The rococo kept rolling over the telephone during the warm months of 1888. Not everybody shared the Crown Prince’s impatience over it. Why hurry? This new season ahead, this newfangled autumn wasn’t here yet. In fact, right now fall seemed further off than ever. The rain stopped, the sun shone, and July flowed so radiantly into August that one might think that August would, with the same ease, flow back into July. One floated through a summer of reprieve.

  It was during this reprieve that Dr. Freud added a day to his Alpine weekends with his family at Maria-Schutz. He picked mushrooms, climbed past fragrant dwarf larches to the Schneeberg peak, enjoyed the view of the Vienna Woods, and for once let the Grub Street deadlines for that medical dictionary go hang.

  During this summer of reprieve Hugo Wolf took a leave of absence from the passion play with Melanie Köchert. Melanie 66 read his furlough notice in the personal-advertisements column of the Neue Freie Presse: With heartfelt wishes a letter is sent to you today, sweet friend. By the time the message was published, Wolf had already left with the Wagner Society charter train for the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth.

  Anton Bruckner boarded the same train, and for him the departure from Vienna was a still more distinct summertide relief. He could get away from the persecutions of Eduard Hanslick, Chief Critic and Grand Inquisitor of Music in the magisterial Neue Freie Presse. He could escape from his housekeeper-harpie Frau Kachelmayer (who caught up with him at the Western Railway terminal, irate because he had forgotten his snuffbox). He could arrive in Bayreuth and kneel and cry to his heart’s content at the grave of the “High One,” as he called Wagner; he could have his gray fringe cut by Herr Schnappauf, the late High One’s barber; and he could indulge in another of his frequent young-girl crushes, this one on Henrietta Samet, the daughter of Herr Samet who owned the café where the High One had once sipped mocha. And then he could take the train back to Austria, to his native village of St. Florian. Here he could sit down at the organ of the local monastery and close his eyes and touch the keys that sang under his fingers as they would sing under no one else’s. This bumpkin Bruckner was, among other things, the world’s greatest organist. But he could compose here too, in this summer of reprieve. He settled in the abbey’s music room to revise the Third Symphony. In the beer garden of his youth he could sit at a weathered table with old friends who tried to understand his bewilderment at his own beleaguered eminence. The village tailor could fit him another suit with the too-wide, too-short trousers at which city children would hoot in the fall. But it wasn’t fall yet. It was the summer of reprieve.

  It was a moment of reprieve even for Viennese away from Vienna.

  In England Theodor Herzl drew fitful enjoyment from his role as the Neue Freie Presse’s new ace travel writer. His constant chatty letters and cards to his parents (vacationing in Bruckner’s Upper Austria) speak of bits of fun between the deadlines: He savored the elegance of the famous Goodwood races and basked on the shores of the Isle of Wight. “I am beginning to be satisfied with this trip,” he wrote on August 3, “and even with myself…My dear, good parents, so far I’ve written ten feuilletons on this trip, and may raise the total to fifteen by my return…”

  It had turned into a summer of reprieve for young Dr. Schnitzler. He had sailed with the Channel ferry from Britain to meet his parents in Belgium. On the beach of Ostend (much favored by Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie) he simulated being just the son of Europe’s leading laryngologist, the illustrious Dr. Johann Schnitzler. Schnitzler Jr. became all princeling, fop, flirt and flaneur; tried to give up his literary hungers, intrigued with a married coquette on the boardwalk, and wrote long letters to Vienna to the mistress he cheated on—that is to Jeanette Heger, the model for the Sweet Girl who would not only invest his best plays, but enter the German language as the essence of milkmaid vulnerability, as the plucked rose of summer ripeness.

  The Crown Prince himself found reprieve in the summer. He left for Hungary and Poland to inspect garrisons and to observe war games. True, he suffered from the dog days’ heat; in 1888 he seemed especially frail. On the other hand he loved nothing better than to be with troops on maneuvers. He particularly enjoyed a regiment—and he made sure to pick the right one—whose officers were not vapid aristocrats but of the intelligent middle class. The colonels and majors with whom he sat around the mess table might be awed at first, but he quickly charmed away the gap in rank. Talking freely about politics and culture, he felt (and he didn’t feel that often) that he was among his own. What relief from the hollow pomp imprisoning him in Vienna! To his wife Stephanie he wrote of marching through stifling dust. But to Moritz Szeps he reiterated a thought he’d expressed before: that the Army was “the single central thread which in this chaos still stands for the Empire.” With him moved a young, pleasant-looking woman named Mitzi Caspar, registered as “household assistant” in his retinue. When not with the Crown Prince, she lived quietly with her mother in the suburbs. Princess Louise, Rudolf’s sister-in-law, once caught a glimpse of her. She was, in Louise’s words, “a sweet girl.”

  Meanwhile the milkmaid among Court Theater actresses enhanced the midsummer reprieve of the Monarchy’s First Drudge. Katharina Schratt took the train to Ischl in the Salzburg Alps where the Emperor had just arrived. Now Franz Joseph could hike past cowherds in the company of his Sweet Girl.

  At the same time the Johann Strauss ménage made its customary midsummer move. The Emperor’s annual stay at Ischl attracted to that resort many of the Monarchy’s fashionables. It was therefore incumbent on a Johann Strauss to leave the manor at Schönau and open the villa at Ischl and, with it, the round of resort sociabilities—the corso in the Kur Park, the promenades to and from the Café Walther, the candlelight dinners and soirees. Which is another way of saying that Strauss temporarily suspended work on the opera Ritter Pazman, and was thus freed for a while from his life’s hardest chore.

  As for Gustav Klimt, he wasn’t only reprieved that summer from his endless daubing, but released. He and his two co-muralists climbed down for good from the scaffold on the Court Theater ceiling. They were done with their frescoes. But since their scaffold remained standing for the use of various craftsmen, they still had no way of judging their own paintings. They hadn’t seen them yet in their totality with an unimpeded look from below. And Klimt was happy to be spared the view. Indeed he ran as far away from it as possible into the mountains of Salzburg and Tyrol and Bavaria.

  The only artist left in the Court Theater neighborhood that August was a certain Johann Pfeiffer, “King of the Birds,” as he billed himself. The sidewalks he played for were now largely deserted but he played on through the August emptiness. He played “previews” from classics the new Court Theater would present after its great opening. His fellow actors were parrots he kept in a huge baroquely domed cage. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” his leading lady’s beak would squawk, and he would respond using the bells of passing horse
tramways to punctuate his speeches. He would bow whenever a coin fell into the upended plumed hat that was his collection box; he would pick up a new mask for a new role, from a box on which in golden letters a sentence was imprinted. The sentence expressed the spirit of his city, especially during the summer of reprieve: LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS GAY—VIENNESE SPECIALITIES.

  * * *

  * (sic) In Austria, to this day, in addressing an academician, each of his doctorates is separately mentioned.

  Chapter 5

  During the hot months of 1888, while Vienna was waiting for its autumn greatness, a coach rolled into the leafy driveway of a villa in the Vienna Woods. It belonged to Count Walter H., as the newspapers would refer to him later. A gentleman stepped out, excellently cravated, and handed a footman his calling card. It said, Philip H. Elkins, Esquire, New Jersey, USA.

  Admitted to the Count’s presence, Mister Elkins introduced himself as the chief European representative of Thomas A. Edison Enterprises of New Jersey. He admired the Count’s salon and said he had heard much praise of the Count’s extraordinary baritone. The Count, who was the principal performer in the amateur musicals given in his house, smiled. To what did he owe the pleasure of Mister Elkins’s visit?

  Mister Elkins replied that Mister Thomas Edison was planning a phonographic gallery of famous great voices of the nineteenth century. At Mister Edison’s request he had therefore brought along an Edison machine in the hope that the Count might be kind enough to let the machine record the art coming from the Count’s throat.

  The Count was most cooperative. With the help of two of his footmen, a heavy American-looking machine, bristling with tubes and wires, was dragged out of the coach, over precious carpets, into the music room. Here the Count sang feelingly his favorite aria, “Se vuol ballare,” from The Marriage of Figaro, while Mister Elkins kept adjusting levers to accommodate the remarkable volume of the Count’s voice.

  At the end Mister Elkins applauded most appreciatively and packed up his machine. However, the Count requested that his aria be played back before its shipment to America. Alas, Mister Elkins could not comply. This recording machine was so delicate that it required a very special playback apparatus which he, Mister Elkins himself, had perfected from Mister Edison’s blueprint. Unfortunately the only such apparatus existing so far was with Mister Edison in New Jersey, though Mister Elkins had plans to produce some in Europe as well.

  Here the Count, most eager to hear his “Se vuol ballare,” had a thought: Why not build a playback apparatus in Vienna? Mister Elkins seemed struck by the idea, but warned the Count that it would cost five hundred florins and take at least three weeks. Whereupon Count H. gave him two hundred and fifty florins to get the work started, plus a fifty-florin licensing fee to Mister Edison.

  Mister Elkins then carefully guided the footmen as they heaved the wires and tubes out of the house and into the coach, climbed into the coach himself, waved his hat, and was never heard of again.

  Count H. was by no means the only one to succumb to the New World’s siren song that summer. Throughout the Monarchy not only the rich but the poor, the young and the old, all dreamed America. America fascinated because it had leaped with such ease to modern greatness, the kind of greatness Vienna would essay in the fall. Rudolf himself was not immune to the dazzle. In a recent memorandum on the European scene he had stated that the best solution for the Hohenzollern Empire would be to change it into a republic “and then not a centralized republic like France but a federal republic like the United States.” On another occasion Rudolf saw the Habsburg realm ideally as “the miniature form of Victor Hugo’s dream of a United States of Europe.”

  To the Viennese, America’s greatness lay not only in its political structure but in its glamour, its adventures, its riches. The America fever mounted during the Danubian summer of 1888. Little boys kept running away to the Wild West even after they discovered that it didn’t lie just beyond the last tramway stop. Old men discussed the Last Chance Gold Rush in California. During the hot-months doldrums, when not much happened domestically, it was America-time in the newspapers.

  In a front-page story datelined New York, the Wiener Tagblatt reported that possession of a mere million dollars was no longer enough to make one a true millionaire in the United States; over there being rich started with two million. And the Salonblatt, organ of the socially ambitious, described the ineffable wealth of American summer resorts: One single Saratoga Springs night surpassed the jewelry and silks of a whole season in Karlsbad.

  No wonder that His Majesty’s Minister of Education threatened to prosecute printers whose pamphlets seduced laborers into emigrating to the U.S.A. Brochures showed the Statue of Liberty glittering in solid gold and skyscrapers edged with diamonds. But threats or not, the temptation of America continued.

  And yet and yet. There was another side to this, with a reverse dynamic. Vienna, for its part, exerted a magnetism on the Anglo-Saxon West, though it was a pull of a quainter kind. To many a Britisher it was the roofs by the Danube which formed the golden never-never city. This view almost seduced a correspondent of the London Times. His paper had dispatched him in view of the excitement scheduled in the Austrian capital for the fall. He was to probe the ambiance of the city beforehand. He did, and found Grillparzer’s dictum confirmed: Here indeed glistened the Cathay of Europe.

  At first the Times man found nothing but marvels behind the Chinese Wall. Even the off-season everyday Vienna of the summer dog days was gorgeous. Its women were piquant, combining the tasteful with the provocative. Its military music exhilarated. Its uniforms were dashing, its fiacres original, its pastry irresistible, its coffee superb, its environs, the Vienna Woods, without peer, its manners charming, and the most common details of life sweetened by effortless grace. But life here was also so encrusted with strange quirks and traditions and such peculiar philosophies that foreigners found it difficult to settle down permanently. Thus Vienna was not likely to become an international center like London or Paris. The Viennese themselves, though they would not live anywhere else, knew something was missing. They were not happy with the city they loved. The London Times man concluded that only if these aspects were changed, would the town deserve to be called a great metropolis.

  There was the problem again, weighing on the Crown Prince and his liberal allies, the problem to be engaged this fall. Before that, however, Franz Joseph’s birthday loomed. Its celebration would be a rehearsal for the crescendoes to follow.

  On August 18, His Majesty would be fifty-eight years old, after no less than four decades on the throne. And this year the Empire tried to mark the date with reverberations that would be heard across the borders.

  Every class prepared to join the party, including people from the bleakest walks of life. If the Times correspondent had bothered to investigate Ottakring, the largest proletarian district, west of the Ring, he would have been amazed both by the poverty and the loyalty prevailing there that August. Most workers bent over lathe and loom eleven hours a day. By the time they reached home they had little time or energy for anything but sleep—and they slept in houses of which more than half lacked plumbing of any kind except the pump in the courtyard.

  Yet on all the peeling doors of all the dank corridors there were glued naive votive posters of the Emperor. Children had made them in school for the Imperial anniversary. And when their parents left for work early in the morning, the men pinned on their lapels, the women on their babushkas, the two-kreuzer discs on which the Emperor’s profile has been printed together with the number 58.

  The Ottakringers were set to rejoice in their monarch even though their life in his capital did not exactly warrant celebration. Most of the thirty thousand apartments in their district consisted of two narrow rooms which often must accommodate more than one family. More than ten thousand of the residents here could afford to rent no more than the use of a bed; they had to share the night table with another tenant. In balmy August the nights meant cramped r
est in Ottakring; the days, smoky toil; but the prospect of the Emperor’s birthday—a festival.

  “Hatred for the rich,” Rudolf had once written in his notebook, “becomes as demoralizing for the poor as the struggle for their own survival.”

  A thought true of the Western world in general; but not necessarily of Vienna in 1888. Not yet. The Crown Prince writing in that notebook was more of a Jacobin than many slum dwellers in ugliest Ottakring. It so happened that in 1888 the Austrian Social Democratic Party, a tremendous force in later years, was being organized. But who was its founder? Dr. Viktor Adler, living comfortably in his father’s apartment house close to the Ringstrasse.* Few of the workers on whose behalf Adler was framing a program saw themselves as the masses unified by the need to revolt. Though large factories had begun to spring up, many of the city’s laborers were still separated into small sweatshops. Often they were also divided linguistically—Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and others come to the city only in recent years.

  And Vienna itself, its Imperial presence, narcotized the poor past their troubles. The very tenements in which they slept were embossed with flourishes outside. Each window had its corniced dignity—never mind the dank bedding that hung out of it each morning for fresh air. The plaster goddess supporting a fake balcony ignored the laundry drooping from her stucco limb; she only looked at the monarch’s birthday banner that already glittered from the flagstaff.

  Here was poverty spiced with panache, with the capital’s royal flavor.

  Even hard work was different in Vienna, especially in the fine, not overly hot August of 1888. Street harpists would materialize here and there, all ancient men of a storybook calling. On a good summer morning an old troll caped in loden might shuffle into the mossy yard around which most workshops were built, and lean his cane against the wall and sit down by the well rim and prop his harp on it, and twine his gnarled fingers through the strings to sing Das Lied vom Augustin and I bin so gmütlich heut, and by the time he got through Der Weaner geht net unter (You can’t get the Viennese down), to end—in view of the great birthday ahead—with Gott erhalte unsern Kaiser…why, by then the boss had tossed a fifty-kreuzer piece into the hat and told his workers to forget about work for a minute and gather round and join in the hymm. And perhaps he even took time out to explain to the Czech apprentice just arrived from Brno what the words meant and why Vienna was so wonderful and unique. Afterwards the quarter of an hour thus lost had to be recouped by working deeper into the evening. Still, if the harpist lengthened the work day, he also leavened it.