A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  Vienna’s suicide rate, already Europe’s highest, rose further as autumn progressed. Not everybody who contributed to it had the inventiveness of the two rope artists. Some just jumped into the Danube and let their bodies wash ashore without known motive or identification. Yet the city took care to decorate these deaths properly. The corpses received burial in a special resting place, the Friedhof der Namenlosen, the Cemetery of the Nameless. And now All Souls’ Day was celebrated on November 2; citizens from hovels and palaces made pilgrimages to the Nameless Ones and leaned bouquets against unmarked crosses.

  In fact, all the many cemeteries in Catholic Vienna came alive on November 2 with commemorations and supplications for the dead. The city still had not connected with the great future this fall, but death was an eternally great occasion and Vienna knew how to abandon itself to its ceremonials. Even on the day before All Souls’, on All Saints’ Day, endless throngs traveled to their family graves carrying wreaths and nosegays, wax candles, colored lanterns and holy images.

  Often they were accompanied by a special breed of ancient women hired for the purpose. When the mourners departed, these others kept vigil throughout the night. Cemeteries stirred and murmured with multitudes of such crones, all hooded in black, their wrinkles twitching in the flicker of the candles they kept lit by each grave. By the thousands they mumbled liturgies from their prayer books and munched bacon from their baskets of food; mumbling and munching they stooped over the tombs until dawn made pale the candle flames, and the mourners themselves returned by daylight to implore the Holy Ghost for their dear ones in purgatory.

  Most newspapers in town—the Neue Freie Presse first and foremost—ran critiques of the floral displays on celebrity tombs like those of Beethoven and Schubert. Reviewers of graves trained on their subject as much detail and discrimination as their colleagues did on opera premieres. The town was given over to the dramaturgy of death.

  This preoccupation affected Vienna’s more sensitive spirits. All Souls’ Day—or at least its gloom—touched Arthur Schnitzler during what was for him an at least spasmodically buoyant fall. The new Court Theater opening had excited the young man, as it had the rest of Vienna. He had not, like his powerful father, been invited to the premiere, but his father’s influence had gained him access to a dress rehearsal. And with his father’s money he rented a small apartment of his own in his parents’ building. In his diary the sexual graph is encouraging.

  October 6th. Saturday. Jean. (3)

  And not long afterward:

  October 19th. Friday. My new apartment. Jean. (2)

  At the end of October the diary computed three hundred and fifty-five copulations with Jeanette so far.

  The creative juices were flowing too. He polished “Wedding Morning” and completed another draft of “Episode,” two of the seven short scenes making up the Anatol cycle that would bring him his first renown. In this play he displayed a ruthless grasp on the hypocrisies of civilized sex. Here he began to turn a new light on that subject as well as on other crevices in the human psyche—a light so revealing that years later Freud was moved to write him: “You know through intuition, or rather through self-observation, everything that I have discovered by laborious work on other people.”

  Schnitzler’s self-observation was the key. It did far more than quantify sex into numbers. It was an instrument tuned to every half tone of his psyche. In our fall of 1888 his diary not only reflected his upswings but caught all beats in a despondency which kept recurring toward All Souls’ Day.

  Hypochondria, melancholia, make me more gloomy every day. My so-called artistic ability can’t break through. Often I’m near desperation. Medicine is still alien to me. Nowhere am I taken seriously as a physician. For the other thing [literature] I don’t have the necessary calm, clarity and, real talent. My youth is over, I’m a mature man, but I’ve come to nothing. Nobody believes in me. The time of being a talented young man is finished and now I must really perform…I can’t take hold…I can’t concentrate even for an hour over any medical book. And now again this scribbling. I’ve again looked at my old things. Nothing that’s really good. Nothing with which I can really stand out. The divine spark was just a lie. But I’m posing again, I really like myself in this wonderful agony as I’m describing it here, and through its description excuse myself—miserable, miserable again…

  Theodor Herzl wrote similarly somber lines, not in his diary but in the Neue Freie Presse. Their blackness was well-timed: they were published just a few days before All Souls’ Day. In a story Herzl described the experience of a man who had suffered a very deep cut on his arm. As the doctors worked on the wound he saw, for one moment, his own bone. There was terror as well as a certain harrowing beauty in that glimpse. It showed what he was to be before eternity. The man—a dandy, a world traveler, a sybarite—became obsessed with his own skeleton which he came to call “The Beautiful Rosalinda.” And that, in fact, was the title of Herzl’s piece.

  His pensive brilliance here contrasted with his main project that fall: the play he was co-carpentering with his colleague Hugo Wittmann of the Neue Freie Presse. It was called Wilddiebe, which could be freely translated as Love Poachers. Tailored for the Court Theater, it toyed coyly with flirtation, deception, jealousy. Its characters had neither skeleton nor flesh nor blood nor true lust. The idea of the comedy was not to squeeze a maximum of innuendo from the plot, but to make a pseudoerotic situation yield a wealth of elegant epigrams and gestures.

  The same was true of Herzl’s real-life romance. He’d fallen into a facsimile of love with a girl who seemed precisely the right drawing-room heroine for the hero he hoped he would one day become. At twenty-eight he had reached the best of his extraordinary good looks: tall, with eyes as mesmerically dark as his imperious beard, fiercely handsome, absolutely elegant, deucedly clever, devastatingly articulate. He was also deeply, if secretly, skeptical of his talent and much struck by his life’s puzzlements and by his death’s certainty. Last but not least he was quite unsure about his Jewishness.

  His bride-to-be, Julie Naschauer, was Jewish too, but blonde and blue-eyed like most heroines in his plays. She came from a family much richer, still more assimilated, more haute-bourgeoise than the Herzls. In her own restricted group, her fashionability almost matched Mary Vetsera’s higher up. In Julie, Theodor worshipped the first woman in Vienna to paint her fingernails.

  A number of people considered the Naschauer girl willful, vapid and neurasthenic. And Herzl was much too intelligent not to suspect, now and then, that marriage between two inveterate narcissists must mean catastrophe. No matter. The courtship was such good show. In his letters to his parents he called Julie “the little one.” In his diary she is “the little princess for whose sake I shall slay dragons…She is sweet, sweet, sweet.”

  She was hardly sweet and he hardly honest with himself. But they looked wonderful together, promenading on the Ringstrasse’s smartest stretch between the Court Opera and the Schwarzenberg Platz. The skeleton “Rosalindas” inside the couple participated in the walk, waiting. Waiting, especially on All Souls’ Day.

  Herzl preferred to frequent only the chic part of the Ring. But one of his contemporaries had a habit of rounding the entire four-kilometer circle of the boulevard each afternoon. He walked very fast with long athletic strides rather surprising in a short man; on brisk fall days like these he came close to the tempo of a run. On All Souls’ Day a flower woman would try to stop him here or there, holding out a fifty-kreuzer bouquet, thinking that he was hurrying to some cemetery before it closed.

  He would brush her aside. He paced impetuously; stopped of a sudden before a bookstore window near the University part of the Ring; glared; stormed on. He hoped to have stomped away his daily bad temper by the time he reached his apartment on the Maria Theresienstrasse. All kinds of cares awaited him there, mostly financial. But what worried Sigmund Freud the most was his own irritability with his beloved Martha. Again and again, by letter and face to face, he h
ad apologized, he had tried to explain: “Since I am violent and passionate with all sorts of devils pent up that cannot emerge, they rumble about me inside or else are released against you, you dear one. Had I only some daring activity where I could venture and win, I should be gentle at home, but I am forced to exercise moderation and [professional] self-control, and I even enjoy a reputation for doing so.”

  “Moderation and self-control.” He was wrong. Just as he was wrong in a self-appraisal somewhat later that “I am not a genius…not even very talented.” The facts were that he stomped without moderation along the Ringstrasse and that he could not control those essentials in his behavior that prevented fashionable success in his field or for that matter in any other field in Vienna. He never could summon the surface charm which Professor Schnitzler could produce so easily and which even his son Arthur could manage when he tried. He did not possess Herzl’s electric suavity or Mahler’s instinctive flamboyance, nor Bruckner’s childlike appeal. He was no heartbreaker like Rudolf and anything but a fascinating cherub like Hugo Wolf. The stage instinct of the Viennese, the flair that commanded attention by seducing it, escaped Freud entirely. He could not even affect a popular consultation-room manner. That was another reason why his waiting room, despite its modish address, was so often empty. Other nerve doctors circled charmingly around their patients’ problems. He strode and stomped toward the center of things, governed by intuition rather than tact.

  He also found it hard to be diplomatic with colleagues in the echelon above. The article on hysteria into which he poured what energy he could spare from money-grubbing chores—the danger in that article was becoming apparent; the longer he worked at it, the less respect it showed to psychiatric postulates sacred in Vienna. But then it would no doubt be ignored like all his other endeavors. Neither his life nor his thoughts attracted much interest. He was just a family-minded sobersides, stubborn and industrious, often full of a cold, apt, inconvenient wit, too often heedless of established truths, but otherwise unspectacular to himself and to others.

  Except when he was storming around the Ringstrasse. Strollers parted before the speed of his orbit. Heads turned toward this waistcoated academic-looking strider. He stopped abruptly before yet another medical bookstore. And shook his head. And stormed on once more. He shouldn’t look at other people’s publications. They only stoked his temper.

  These works were by people he admired—books by Jean Martin Charcot, monographs by Rudolf Chrobak and Josef Breuer. Charcot, of course, had initiated his research into hypnosis. Chrobak, Vienna’s leading gynecologist, had generously shared cases with psychiatric overtones. And Breuer had not only made him partner to his studies and discoveries in hypnotic suggestion. Breuer had also loaned Freud huge sums. They had totaled no less than twenty-three hundred gulden before the young man’s engagement and were far from paid off on All Souls’ Day of 1888. But Breuer, like the other two, exacerbated Freud’s bafflement.

  He could not understand it.

  Why did all three of these admirable minds stop short before a subject to which their own keenness had led them? Years earlier Breuer had explained the aberrations of a woman patient with, “Such cases are always secrets of the marriage bed,” and shrugged off Freud’s further questions. Charcot, discussing the bizarre symptoms of a young bride, had said, “In this sort of situation it’s always a question of the genitals—always, always, always…” And much more recently Chrobak had said to him that the ideal prescription for a certain patient—a severely disturbed wife with a feeble husband—would be: “Rx: One dose of normal penis, to be applied repeatedly.”

  But none of the three great doctors had in any way pursued this insight conceptually or clinically; their inertness before their own diagnoses baffled Freud more and more in 1888. The theme remained untouched in any of these men’s publications he saw in any bookstore window.

  Here was an invisible resistance. It reminded the young doctor of the barrier that kept him from solvency, from success, from pushing his own ideas into crystallized conclusion. He was storming past the new Court Theater, which had no bookstores, mercifully, but whose fustian portals vexed him. Did everything have to be histrionics in Vienna? All this overblown manneredness concealing sex! All this embroidery of death with petals and ikons! He brushed past more vendors of All Souls’ Day flowers. Once more he would not come home tranquil to his Martha.

  Johann Strauss fled Vienna on All Souls’ Day. He had never liked funerals or things funereal. Now he was sixty-three and the dislike had become phobia. He made wide detours around cemeteries, boycotted death. His inspiration, in turn, boycotted him. He could not get on with the project that would place his name in the first rank of serious art: with his opera Ritter Pazman. All these unpleasantnesses he now evaded by leaving his composing chores in Vienna for some conducting enagagements in Prague. Here he gave a series of benefit concerts early in November.

  Prague, like any other city in the West, lived under the Waltz God’s spell. The lectern awaiting him was wreathed with his votaries’ laurels and roses. Applause began long before his appearance. Finally he materialized in a swallowtail coat, slim and gallant and discreetly corseted. Slim and gallant, hand pressed against his heart, he accepted gales of homage. He bowed and smiled under his dyed mustache, smiled and bowed until the clapping melted into devout silence.

  His hand, gloved in white glacé, picked up the filigreed baton. (The violin bow of his youth was now far beneath him.) The many bracelets on his wrist dangled and shone. The baton swung, the orchestra surged, the universe swirled into three-quarter time.

  When it was over, he bowed to endless ovations, hand pressed against his heart. He picked a flower from the many on the lectern, kissed it, put it into his buttonhole, bowed again, and walked out only to be called back for yet more bows. If his gratitude was studied, it was also real. Such enthusiasm defied aging, death and All Souls’ Day. What he craved to be forever—what he had to prove anxiously anew—had come true once more: he was still the world’s immortal young darling.

  After Prague he did not return directly to Vienna. He and his Adele went to nearby Franzensbad for the cure that preserves youth. The season there had already run its course, but the best hotel remained open for the maestro and offered its best suite. The spa orchestra stayed on to play just for him. He smiled and clapped, enacted his public charm. In truth he hated the music, was appalled at the prices, feared that the extravagance would be ruinous. By day he bravely took the turbid baths and sipped the acrid waters. By night he worked grimly on his opera. He could not get on with it. Not so well nor so fast as he liked. Soon he wanted to leave again. But leaving meant going to the train depot and, like young Freud, he feared trains. (The moment motion started, all shades had to be pulled in his compartment; passing through tunnels, he lay on the floor, face down.) Furthermore, boarding the train meant going home, and home was Vienna. And Vienna?…He, whose name was already what it would be forever—a synonym for Vienna—was ambivalent about the city. A dour letter he wrote from Franzensbad wound up suddenly, without transition or explanation: “Austria will get her lumps.”

  He did go home after a week. He must. Rehearsals were about to begin for his Emperor Waltz, which would premiere in Vienna’s Musikvereinssaal on December 2, the fortieth anniversary of the Emperor’s reign. Despite the waltz’s title, the Emperor’s First Lord Chamberlain had already indicated that His Majesty would not be present. It was a bitter tradition. Franz Joseph had never yet attended a Johann Strauss premiere. Why? A long time ago, in 1848 when Strauss had been very young and foolish, and as unpolitical as he was now, he had played the republican “Marseillaise,” at some inn; for which crime he’d had to undergo police interrogation. Was that the problem? Did His Apostolic Majesty nurse so long a grudge? Whatever the reason, the Emperor had declined the invitation to the waltz named for him. Strauss nearly took up the suggestion of his Berlin publisher Simrock—to dedicate the Emperor Waltz to Kaiser Wilhelm.

 
; In the end Strauss refrained. The waltz remained undedicated, which was eloquent enough in Franz Joseph’s jubilee year. Strauss went to work again on Ritter Pazman. The opera was very, very hard going. Good ideas turned treacherous. He discovered that a symphonic czardas he’d composed during the summer was an unconscious plagiarism of someone else’s tune.

  Once more it was all a bit too much for his nerves. He went into a “phase.” The Waltz Palais on the Igelgasse became a tomb. For days he spoke with no one, not even with Adele. He never lifted his glance from the tips of his polished patent-leather boots, just paced from his study to the stable in the yard, and back to the cage of his parrot Jacquot who whistled piercingly the opening bars of “The Blue Danube.” It did not amuse him. The drawing instructor who coached him in the art of caricature was told to stay away; so was the private billiard teacher retained for Adele. The billiard table remained hooded in canvas. The tarok cards in the “Coffeehouse Room” remained untouched. His cronies knew better than to come. He couldn’t have stood their chatter. But he also hated the silence and the emptiness.

  During his “phase” he felt not the elevation of great fame, but its isolation. The awe generated by his name walled him in. He loved so much to be loved. The worship he received from the Viennese—there was not…well, there was not necessarily much fondness in it. They were so proud of him; the question was whether that pride contained warmth. He went out to buy his special blend of pipe tobacco; only that errand would make him leave the house during a “phase.” To the tobacconist he would say, not without tartness: “Send it to Igelgasse 4. My name is Strauss, Johann. I am the brother of Edi.”