Indeed, residing here paid some very flossy fringe benefits. The Freuds’ first child, Mathilde, was also the first baby in the building. Two days after the birth an adjutant in plumed hat called from His Majesty’s Palace. He presented the gift of a vase from the Imperial Porcelain Works together with a signed letter from the sovereign himself. It conveyed the All Highest’s pleasure that new life in the form of Mathilde Freud had arisen on the spot where death had claimed so many.
Unfortunately the Emperor’s congratulations did not reduce the rent by one penny. And in the great fall of 1888, the pennies came in such trickles to Dr. Freud. He knew that the weather would soon turn raw. Four large and noble rooms would have to be heated. He still couldn’t afford to furnish them fully and their bareness made them look cold already. The prices of coal and kindling wood as well as sugar were going up. Every kreuzer counted. He didn’t have to pawn his gold watch again (as he had, soon after his honeymoon two years earlier) but life was awfully tight and getting yet tighter.
The doctor kept the habit he’d begun right after his engagement to Martha: he turned his income over to her for deposit in a cash box. Freud “borrowed” from the funds in the box, giving his wife a detailed written account of his expenses to curb what he considered his extravagance, especially his “scandalous” outlays for cigars. They cost him only about ten cents a day, but there was so damnably little in the funds box.
The smallest expenditure had to be weighed. He had long wanted to give Martha a gold snake bracelet, a status symbol distinguishing the wives of University-affiliated physicians from those of lesser doctors. In 1888 she still had to make do with a merely silver one—a minor but real humiliation. He owned all of two good neckties and was fortunate in his tailor, a family acquaintance indulgent about tardy installment payments.
Since the arrival of the baby, much more money seemed to be leaving the household than entering it. Freud’s waiting room attracted fewer patients than ever. The method of hypnotic suggestion he now liked to try on nerve cases produced interesting results but dour reactions from referring physicians, fewer and fewer new referrals and hence a diminishing income. The few gulden he’d received for his dictionary articles were gone and he received no new assignments. He did make something extra with medical translations from the French and with private lectures on neural pathology, occasionally held in English for visiting American students.
The only original work he squeezed in was on his paper about hysteria. But as it went on it focused less on anatomy and more on emotion. In other words, it trespassed beyond prevalent dogma. Psychiatric theory was still firmly based on malfunctions of the physical brain. A challenge to those axioms would only endanger Freud’s already precarious career. Certainly it would do nothing to advance him. His ornate address, too, turned out to be of small help. He hustled from one chore to another. Had he held on to the white gloves and silk hat which went with his job at Professor Leidesdorf’s, he would have been much more in tune with Vienna’s splendid season in the fall of 1888.
Johann Pfeiffer, street clown and King of the Birds, did better in his particular field. He was still performing on the Schottenring, a block and a half from Freud’s doorstep. Professionally he was more facile and more flexible than the doctor. He and his parrots in their turretlike cage had changed their repertoire. Now they did scenes about the encounter of great kings—the like of which Vienna was to see soon. But there was always a court jester’s line thrown in to amuse the strollers on the Ringstrasse who were waiting for greatness to happen and who laughed and threw coins into the upended lid of the mask box whose gilt letters said: LIFE IS SERIOUS BUT ART IS GAY.
The mounting excitement in town also affected Gustav Mahler. Toward the end of September he received a sudden, electrifying summons. It was a telegram from Baron von Bernizcky, master of Franz Joseph’s Court operas and Court theaters in both halves of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Would Mahler meet the Baron’s representative in Vienna, at his earliest convenience?
Actually von Bernizcky had been flirting for a while with the idea of appointing Mahler opera director in Budapest—risky as that idea was because of the man’s odd intensities, his already notorious quarrelsomeness. But Budapest, sister capital of the Empire, suffered an understandable case of sibling rivalry that fall. A great shining season was being prepared in Vienna; Budapest needed to be given some spark of its own. The Royal Opera House there, fading away placidly for years, could use a new glow, a new powerful director, no matter how complicated his personality.
On September 24 Mahler checked into the Hotel Höller in Vienna. On the twenty-fifth he met von Bernizcky’s envoy there. No doubt he stirred his coffee with his cigarette. It was a habit apt to emerge during intense conversations. The very next day Gustav Mahler left for Hungary. At the incredible age of twenty-eight he was the Director of the Budapest Royal Opera. His unfinished Second Symphony in which he demanded of the heavens why he struggled, why he strove and suffered—it would have to wait until after he had started his great embroilment with the Magyars.
Gustav Klimt had his own confrontation just then: the moment of truth about his frescoes on the new Court Theater’s ceiling. One day at the end of September he walked into the building with his two fellow muralists, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch. The theater was still closed to the public but, alas, open to participating artists. The staircase scaffolds had been removed.
Klimt hesitated to look up. On the ceiling his work of the past two years would now be visible as a whole for the first time. For the first time the view from below and the light from the windows were unobstructed.
He looked up. He hated it. Here was the saga of the theater, from Greek myth to Shakespeare’s Globe, daubed in all the historicist grandiloquence of the 1880s. Here was the only self-portrait he would ever paint—himself as a member of The Globe Theater audience. It didn’t help either.
“Dreck!…Schweinsdreck!” Klimt said—“Pig shit!” (Matsch would remember his precise words many years later.) And at that very moment guards announced the entrance of the Emperor.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Klimt hissed. Too late. His Majesty, retinued by his First Lord Chamberlain, by von Bernizcky and the architect Hasenauer, had arrived. Franz Joseph, too, wanted to see the ceiling murals. But first a problem had to be overcome. His Majesty’s stiff gold collar prevented him from looking up in comfort.
Klimt muttered something about it being better if the Big Chief didn’t see a thing. In the meantime, though, an attendant had rushed up with a mirror. With its aid the Emperor could inspect the ceiling without straining his neck.
He inspected thoroughly, for minutes. He stared at the paintings stretching above the great staircase—the five done by Gustav Klimt, the two by his brother Ernst, the three by Franz Matsch. The artists stood by waiting, petrified. At last the Emperor turned to the architect Hasenauer. He said something softly.
“Wonderful!” Hasenauer called out to the Klimt group. “You people are just wonderful! I am to convey the All Highest appreciation!”
To bows and scrapes and whispered obeisances the sovereign departed. “Did we go bats while working on this thing?” Klimt said in Viennese dialect to his partners. “Or is it them that got a screw loose?”
Gustav Klimt’s engagement at the new Court Theater ended in official praise and private fury. Theodor Herzl’s had not even begun, to his great impatience. The theater would make its debut in a few weeks. High time to honor a vow spoken years earlier. With Arthur Schnitzler he had sauntered on the Ringstrasse, past the new Court Theater when its walls were still going up. “When that opens,” Herzl had said, “I am going to have a play in it!”
Now the opening loomed close. Herzl’s featured by-line in the Neue Freie Press left his other, loftier ambition unfulfilled and palpitating. His accepted one-acter The Refugee was still unscheduled. He inquired. He remonstrated. He was told once more that the delays in the opening of the new Court Theater had delaye
d everything, especially the production of one-act plays, of which there was an oversupply. Herzl’s might not be done at all in the foreseeable future.
He couldn’t wait. He had to burst forth with something sooner than that. Therefore he had begun to collaborate on a full-length comedy with an already successful playwright and essayist, Hugo Wittmann. Wittmann, however, didn’t want it known that he was working in partnership. His condition: their play, if produced, must remain anonymous. Herzl’s worst foe was anonymity, yet he agreed. The project would help him toward greatness. He couldn’t wait.
For his friend Arthur Schnitzler—also not one of your contented loiterers—autumn appeared to end the summer’s drought. During his travels abroad in the hot season Schnitzler had to endure what was, for him, relative continence. Now things changed for the better. Reunion with his Sweet Girl Jeanette in Vienna relieved him of even intermittent chastity, as proved by the first item in his diary after his return to native grounds.
August 25th, Saturday, Baden, near Vienna. Evening with Jean. (5).
In his diary the digit between parentheses always kept count of precisely the number of sex acts performed on each occasion. Hence (5) measures the multiplicity of welcome he received on the twenty-fifth. After that it’s
August 26th. Sunday. Afternoon. Jean. (2)
August 27th. Monday. Prater. Jean. (4)
…and so on until the thirty-first. Here the diary in its iron arithmetical conscientiousness added up all previous parentheses; it recorded that Arthur and Jeanette had, on completion of the eleventh month of their relationship, tumbled to a climax exactly three hundred and twenty-six times.
That wasn’t all, either. The fall promised to fulfill still another of young Schnitzler’s desires—literature. One day he was conducting a laryngological examination, mirror strapped to his forehead; he was acting as one of his father’s numerous assistants at the Polyclinic. Professor Schnitzler entered the room; in his hand he held his son’s deliverance. It was a letter from An der schönen blauen Donau, the literary supplement of Die Presse. It informed Herr A. Schnitzler that his story had been accepted.
This was Arthur Schnitzler’s first such triumph. Yet weeks passed and “My Friend Ypsilon,” as the story was called, did not appear. Great names and high events began to ripple through Vienna. Schnitzler read of them, but not a word of his story. Indeed he began to read more and more about and by his father while still searching for a word of his own.
Schnitzler Senior, full University Professor, Chairman of the Department of Laryngology, head of the Polyclinic, Editor-in-Chief of important medical publications, physician extraordinary to the city’s theatrical lights—Schnitzler Senior rode the crest of the news. He was always either at the bedside of celebrities or at their balls, apparently indispensable at both. When Vienna’s first actress, Charlotte Wolter, came down with a fever—an indisposition threatening the debut of the new Court Theater in which she was to shine—the Wiener Tagblatt became impatient. “Frau Wolter is silent but Schnitzler speaks,” it wrote in October. “We respect the prose of the excellent professor. He has a wonderful baritone, yet we confess that we might prefer a single word from the lovely actress to all those beautifully phrased bulletins of the famous doctor that are being published everywhere on her condition.”
La Wolter recovered, with much credit to her healer. Schnitzler Senior’s bulletins on other patients kept brightening the public prints along with his social scintillations. Meanwhile drought had once more befallen his son. Schnitzler Junior chafed against being a lackey in Papa’s clinic, searched vainly for his story in An der schönen blauen Donau, reduced his lust to parenthetical numbers in his diary. The pomp and ceremony which had begun to trumpet through Vienna that fall were not for him.
They were not for Anton Bruckner either. But he was sixty-four. His exclusion from greatness seemed much more final than young Schnitzler’s. True, he had some encouraging news on his return to Vienna in September. His mail brought him two issues of the Parisian magazine, Guide Musicale, which were both wholly devoted to him: “Un symphoniste d’avenir, Antoine Bruckner.”
But that was from the friendly distance of Paris. The same mail contained a blow from enemies closer by. He found his Romantic Symphony rejected by a Mainz conductor without even the courtesy of an explanation. In Vienna the Philharmonic halls remained inhospitable. From the heights of the Neue Freie Presse the sovereign critic Eduard Hanslick decreed that Bruckner was still unworthy of performance. The old man walked the streets in his country togs, lonely and dazed, like a stranger. Even the chaos of his bedroom in the Hessgasse was no longer familiar.
“Dear Sir,” he wrote one of his far-away supporters, W. L. van Meurs in the Netherlands. “It is a mystery what you can do (for me)…as it is a mystery what Hanslick, Bülow and Joachim do against me…Till 1876 Hanslick was my greatest supporter and friend, and then became my greatest enemy because I accepted the Lectureship for Music at the University. Brahms is full of jealousy…therefore nobody dares to perform anything of mine…”
He felt abandoned in his Hessgasse flat, at the onset of the fall in Vienna. His sometime ally, Gustav Mahler, was away, struggling to reorganize the Budapest Opera. Hugo Wolf, another occasional friend, was engrossed in his surreptitious love affair and in his own work. Bruckner abided in isolation, just like Freud across the street. But he was more than thirty years older than these others, a rumpled, vulnerable village creature in the big city, bullied by his housekeeper for misplacing a slipper.
Still he kept working. A new draft of the Third Symphony was almost finished. In his low mood he feared more than ever Hanslick’s anti-Wagnerian wrath and removed most of the direct Wagner quotes from the score. Saturday evening and Sunday morning he played the organ in the chapel of the Imperial Palace—not even Hanslick could take that away from him. He enjoyed his pilsner, his roast pork and cabbage at the restaurant Zur Kugel. At home, snuff from his silver box was a solace, even if Frau Kachelmayer growled about brown stains everywhere. He also had the memory of Fräulein Martha Rauscher, “a very nice, lovely girl” he’d met during the summer in Upper Austria; she’d sent him a duplicate of the photograph he’d lost on the journey back to Vienna. And the organizers of the Industrial Fair in the Prater asked him to display his virtuosity on an organ there.
It was the only public occasion to which he was invited. The great things happening that autumn passed him by. And yet Bruckner had a sort of season of his own: On the first day of fall this wrinkled mystic from the Upper Austrian meadows received a state visit in the dimension special to him.
On September 22, at noon, he began to get himself ready to meet his visitor. He put on his best black suit with its trousers too short and too wide, his Sunday St. Florian jacket, and his top hat which Frau Kachelmayer refused to brush because, she said, it was no use, the Herr Professor had let it get wet again the night before.
So he brushed it himself at great length. At three P.M. he boarded the horse tramway out to Währing, to the district cemetery there. A number of officials from musical organizations had already gathered at a graveside together with some doctors and anthropologists. Bruckner took his place in the front row.
At 3:45 sharp the cemetery workers started digging. Within minutes the vehicle of the visitor rose into view: A crane lifted the heavy sarcophagus from the tomb, and transported it to the chapel where only Bruckner and a few officials and scientists were admitted. In the chapel the coffin lid was opened. Anton Bruckner stood face to face with Franz Schubert, now sixty years dead.
As in his earlier confrontation with Beethoven, Bruckner started forward, but was restrained. First others had their turn. The Mayor’s representative delivered an address praising the bones that had produced such beautiful melodies. Today, he intoned, these exalted remains had been exhumed not only to give them a more dignified resting place in the Central Cemetery but also to afford scientists a chance to examine the physical evidence of genius.
Eve
rything proceeded with characteristic Viennese ritual. On a small table covered by black velvet, Schubert’s skull was placed, as ceremoniously as though it were a priest’s monstrance. A Dr. Langl photographed it four times, especially the profile on the right side, which was much better preserved. A secretary in top hat took down minutes of the event. It was noted that Schubert’s head was a deep yellow; that his teeth were still in excellent condition (much better than Beethoven’s as observed in the similar procedure in June) and that only one molar was missing; that the face was strongly developed in proportion to the skull top; and that some clothes and hair were still present.
Now came the anthropologists. Their calipers ascertained curvature and depth of the brain cavity. Whereupon another commemorative appreciation was pronounced by the Mayor’s representative. At half past five the officials wanted to replace the remains in the coffin, when Bruckner pressed forward, greatly excited, and insisted on touching the head “of the master.” With both hands he grasped the forehead. He clutched it until the Mayor’s representative had to dislodge his hold gently. But he was permitted to put the skull into the coffin. Thus Bruckner became the last man to touch Schubert. Finally he went home again in the horse tramway while Schubert wended his way toward the Central Cemetery in a black coach. It was hard to say who was more fulfilled.
A Nervous Splendor Page 9