A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  His brother Eduard, the handsome, exuberant fiddler-conductor—him they loved. He, Johann, had become a kind of ikon, something like an extraterritorial deity. Literally extraterritorial. Four years ago, in 1884, he had been made Honored Citizen of Vienna. Now in 1888 he was no longer even a legal resident in his native city. He was no longer even an Austrian citizen.

  Few people knew that. It was a heavy thing for him to accept. It had come about because an Austrian subject of the Catholic faith could not divorce or remarry. That is, no ordinary subject could. And he, apparently, was ordinary. When he’d wanted to wed his Adele in 1887, the powers-that-be had not arranged annulment of his previous marriage through the Vatican, an accommodation finessed often for lesser luminaries. Not for Johann Strauss.

  No, Johann Strauss had had to apply for citizenship in the German Duchy of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha. He’d had to change his religion from Catholic to Protestant. He’d had to rent an apartment in the distant principality to establish residence. Only after that could he put a ring on the finger of his beloved, and return to the Blue Danube without fear of clerical or secular reprisal.

  During his “phase” he would brood about that. Everything taxed his nerves, even the limited Court Mourning caused by the death of the Emperor’s father-in-law; it was like a prolongation of All Souls’ Day. And the weather, which had turned unexpectedly balmy in November, grated on him. The lack of rain was an exasperation. He needed the dark, the wild, the wet, in order to work. He decided to get away again for a few days, to his country seat in Schönau, to enjoy the rougher sub-Alpine climate. But would it be safe in the country at this time? It was deserted out there in late November. He had come to distrust people. On the other hand he feared their absence.

  “I’ve read about the dog exhibit that will open soon,” he wrote in a note to his friend Priester. “Please buy a big and very alert dog. Beauty is much less important than alertness and size. Our villa in Schönau is so hidden that cutthroats could easily be attracted there. If you find a beast that can do more than just bark, and really go for the jugular, take that one…”

  He did not want to lie in an overornamented honor grave, come next All Souls’ Day.

  It was on All Souls’ Day of that year that Countess Festetics, a lady-in-waiting, met Rudolf in a rococo corridor of the Imperial Palace. He nodded at her curtsy and placed a finger on her arm.

  “Off to the cemetery, Countess?”

  “Yes, Your Imperial Highness. To pray for my dead.”

  “When I’m gone, will you pray for me?”

  “Your Imperial Highness!”

  “Will you include me among your dead?”

  “Your Imperial Highness is smiling. It is a joke.”

  “A smile doesn’t always mean a joke.”

  “Your Imperial Highness—I am much older than you. I pray God, I shall never have a chance to—to do what you ask.”

  “But if I should be gone, will you pray for me on All Souls’ Day?”

  “I hope never to see such an All Souls’ Day—”

  “If you do, will you pray for me?”

  “Yes—yes, of course, Your Imperial Highness.”

  “Thank you.”

  For many years the Countess remembered this conversation verbatim. It was a strange scene for the unchurchly Crown Prince.

  All Souls’ Day on November 2 was appropriately marked by Hugo Wolf. In the final October days of 1888 he composed the melancholy song “He Who on Solitude Is Bent.” Based on the Goethe poem, its final phrase read, “Oh come at last relief: lone in the grave at peace. Then I shall find release.” On November 4, Wolf set to music Goethe’s no less sepulchral “Anacreon’s Grave.”

  At the same time autumn brought an intensification of his very private life which was lively but hardly gay. The circumvention of sexual reality, which so piqued Sigmund Freud, was practiced in November as an increasingly difficult art form not only by the Crown Prince and Baroness Vetsera, but by Hugo Wolf and Melanie Köchert as well.

  The Köcherts had moved back from their country seat to their townhouse in Vienna’s core. Wolf, restless, commuted between the empty summer places of friends and the equally empty suburban apartment the Köcherts had put at his disposal. Frau Melanie Köchert remained an exquisite woman of high repute, managing an elaborate household for her husband and children. Wolf was very Austrian like Rudolf. When he chose to, he could be a master of the outward form. Arriving at the Köcherts’ house, he bowed to the Court jeweler; he kissed Frau Köchert’s hand; observed all urbanities and courtesies due to the wife of the man who kept him financially afloat and who, in turn, was kept solicitously innocent of the truth. None of Melanie’s three children, always about, entertained any suspicions. None of the friends Wolf and the Köcherts had in common ever noticed a single nuance exceeding the socially permissible. Frau Köchert, attractive and accomplished as a hostess despite her retiring nature, was thirty-five and showed nothing but the most ladylike kindness to the composer who was so young—only twenty-seven—so poor, so diminutive, he looked like a child who had glued on a blond mustache.

  But they kept touching in secret ways. Throughout the fall their code-name messages throbbed in the classified columns of the Neue Freie Presse.

  R: Received your letters—full of desire for a reunion soon. I give a thousand thanks. Take care. Wholly yours…

  R. still meant Rinnbach, the hamlet close to the Köchert villa in the Salzburg Alps. At the Rinnbach post office in the summer, and now at the Vienna office of Wolf’s music publisher in fall and winter, they left each other notes arranging assignations. They stole hours from their official lives and intertwined furiously in little inns in the Vienna Woods. Outside those rooms, outside the closed window shutters on which hearts had been carved, the leaves turned color as gently as the leaves in the Palace gardens outside the room where Rudolf was meeting Mary.

  The letters Melanie wrote her lover that fall breathe the vehemence and the difficulty of the torrent that must run underground. Her lines seem to buckle under the stress: “Save me! Save me!…You don’t know what I’ve suffered…I have only one wish more—once more again to possess you wholly, then to die…” One of her letters described how she waited for him on a bridge over a brook. But something kept him from the rendezvous. His small figure never appeared. She returned home and suddenly found herself opening all the windows wide in the hope he would fly in.

  If all this furtive incandescence burned Melanie’s senses, it goaded Hugo Wolf back into his music. The summer interlude at Bayreuth had been a brief sabbatical. But now Melanie had reentered and quickened his life. From each meeting with her he rushed to the verse of Mörike and Goethe, turning their poems into Lieder with an élan, a confidence and an impatience he would never quite reach again in later years. He scribbled on note paper indoors and outdoors, on restaurant tables, tree stumps, in mail coaches and train compartments.

  “I am working day and night,” he wrote his friend Friedrich Eckstein just before All Souls’ Day, “…I no longer know what rest is…All the songs are truly shatteringly composed. Often the tears rolled down my cheeks as I wrote. They surpass in depth and conceptions all the other settings of Mörike…Have you taken steps in the matter of separate printings of the poems? Do have them copied so that the matter can be finished. But hurry! hurry! hurry!”

  Chapter 15

  Hugo Wolf’s art throve on the dissembling he had to do for propriety’s sake. In Vienna, however, propriety was not bleak compulsion but velvet stagecraft. Propriety acted less to inhibit sex than to stimulate erotic games. Since the middle class felt here sooner than elsewhere that it would never arrive at an organically satisfying style of its own, it also held on here, longer than elsewhere, to the old protocols borrowed from nobility: the pageantries of death and the courtly plays of love. Electric bulbs had begun to flash by the Danube, but when men and women coveted one another in Vienna they moved like candlelit actors and actresses, distilling carnality into v
intage charades. The classified-advertisements page in any newspaper showed that day by day:

  To the blonde exquisite lady sitting in the Café Griensteidl with a male escort yesterday: she had the kindness to hand a copy of the magazine Kikeriki in a most sympathetic manner to a gentleman at a neighboring table, and would do said gentleman an even more incalculable kindness by indicating to Box 672, this newspaper, when and at what café he would be allowed to hand a Kikeriki to her.

  The gentleman who stumbled by mistake into the funeral feast at the Hannes Saal yesterday and who read such wonderful forgiveness in the eves of the lovely lady in the feathered black hat with the veil on the side…said gentleman would be plunged into mourning as well, if the lady would not grant him the chance to make restitution for his blunder at a meeting he prays might be arranged through Box 871, this newspaper.

  The lady in company of what must be presumed to be her father, whose dog had the inspiration to break loose on the Kärntnerstrasse yesterday afternoon, is hereby begged a great favor by the retriever of the dog: he has presumed to procure a small gift for the pet in gratitude for causing the encounter and would like to present it in the presence of its gracious mistress at whatever place or time she might have the goodness to stipulate to Box 254, this newspaper.

  November, which saw all these smaller byplays in Vienna, also brought to town the grand empress of thespian passion. This was the world’s most famous star, Sarah Bernhardt. She could not only lose her heart and her virtue to surpassing effect. She could also—she opened the week of All Souls’ Day—perish more beautifully before the footlights than anyone else. Her engagement at the Theater an der Wien evoked greater curiosity than the Kaiser’s guest appearance at the Imperial Palace. Certainly La Bernhardt, now in her mid-forties, had more interesting fans than did Wilhelm.

  During her summer run in London she had flabbergasted Theodor Herzl, who was passing through as the Neue Freie Presse’s blasé man in England. As such he had maintained an iron sophistication; he described how incomparably she died “once a day and twice on Saturday,” and only then allowed himself to be amazed by “this slim red-haired phenomenon.” In Paris some years earlier he’d been able to admire her more frankly. Freud, studying under Charcot there at about the same time, lost his usual coolness to theatrics: “How that Sarah plays! After the first words of her vibrantly lovely voice I felt I had known her for years. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me. I believe at once everything she says…every inch of that little figure lives and bewitches. Then her flattering and imploring and embracing…it is incredible what postures she can assume and how every limb and joint acts with her…” In Paris in 1885 Freud had been a poor bachelor physician, barely able to afford a ticket to the Porte St. Martin theater. In Vienna in 1888 he was a poor married doctor and such dear luxuries must be ruled out altogether.

  Franz Joseph, away on an official hunt in Hungary, also found himself unable to see the one and only Bernhardt. Very much to his regret. “If you go to see Sarah Bernhardt,” he wrote Frau Schratt, “please give me your impressions…you’ll do me a favor if you write me theater gossip. Perhaps it’s not very nice of me to ask for that but, alas, it’s true.”

  It was on the level of gossip that the Vienna press pounced on Bernhardt. To a degree she herself provoked such a reception. Hadn’t this French nonpareil once mused aloud that no, she wasn’t quite sure who was the father of her child, Victor Hugo, or General Boulanger, or Prime Minister Gambetta?

  Notoriety is naturally more famous than fame. But initially Vienna received Sarah Bernhardt as a curio without equal—and as nothing else. This bitchiness was inevitable. Vienna and Madame Bernhardt met not the way a fresh new audience meets a star, but the way one knowing prima donna meets another. Both Bernhardt and the city were practitioners of the same superb tricks. But Bernhardt played at the center of the world’s attention whereas Vienna suspected herself of being on the passé fringe. Bernhardt enjoyed a very contemporary prominence. And Vienna?…

  Vienna gave her colleague a not particularly merciful onceover. Bernhardt’s press notices consisted of ironic glosses: on her fabled slenderness (it had become “rather, uh, rounded” as one critic put it); on her temper (the Wiener Tagblatt reported how enchantingly she had smiled at the applause ending the first act of Camille—only to scream like a fishwife, as soon as the curtain was down, about the lousy lighting and the absence of rugs in her rotten dressing room); on the haute couture of her death scenes.

  Of course, dying was her specialty. She had been known to die standing. No one doubted that if she chose, she could die at great length, dancing. No stage personality commanded such a masterful repertoire of death agonies or a more ravishing gamut of ensembles in which to suffer them. The orange-and-black lace bodice of her Camille’s last heavings stimulated more descriptive prose in newspapers than did the heavings themselves.

  Further lengthy commentary concerned the clothes worn by the audience on opening night. Rudolf appeared in the Imperial Box in his sky-blue Hussar’s uniform. The Vetseras sat in a proscenium box, with Baroness Mary unmistakable in her sable cape. Between these two poles passed many private glances. Around them sat an array of notables equal to the recent Court Theater opening. Habsburgs, Rothschilds, Frau Schratt, Princess Metternich, Professor Schnitzler, etc., etc.; a mighty panorama of fashion.

  But how was La Bernhardt in person?

  The day after her first night a reporter from the Wiener Tagblatt visited the Divine One at the Hotel Imperial. She resided here in the very suite just occupied by King Milan of Serbia. This, of course, gratified all preconceptions; as did the fabulously brocaded robe Madame was wearing; as did the lunch on which she nibbled—oysters, truffled paté, fruit omelet, Bordeaux of select vintage.

  Madame began the conversation amiably enough, with the regret that she would have insufficient time to really see and absorb the Ringstrasse and the rest of the beautiful new Vienna, though she intended to devote three full days of the twelve of her engagement here to inspecting the Court Theater, which she understood to be the finest such house ever built.

  So far so good. But soon the interview veered into a peculiar direction. Madame Bernhardt mentioned that after each performance she liked to read a very difficult book in order to fall asleep more easily. But just the night before she had read, by accident, a book which would not let her sleep at all because it was so vicious. It was called La France Juive (Jewish France) and it had infuriated her because of the perversions and fabrications of the author who was obviously a paid henchman of the lowest reaction.

  Now, the author of La France Juive happened to be the same Eduard Adolphe Drumont who in a tract just published had attacked Rudolf for his Jewish friends. The very week of Bernhardt’s opening, Rudolf had reacted to the tract in his bitter letter to Szeps. Szeps would have sympathized with the star’s feelings about Drumont, but his own Tagblatt reporter was puzzled to find such political preoccupations in an actress. He became a bit impatient.

  “We came here to chat with the lady about her profession and perhaps her gowns,” he wrote,

  and suddenly found ourselves in a discussion of social themes. She, the incarnation of chic, elegance and perhaps frivolity, talked like an intellectual socialist. That was too much for us, and we attempted to get back to her own territory which admittedly includes many provinces. This most prominent actress of our time is also a sculptress of some critical as well as commercial repute. She writes, too. Her one-acter, L’aveu, is supposed to be a gripping play. She says she will play drama only for another three years. Then she will have sufficient means to do nothing but sculpting and writing and, one supposes, preaching…

  That was the tone, silky-nasty. Vienna placed the star on a pedestal made of high ambivalence. Madame Bernhardt was “unique,” to be sure, but in a slightly inexcusable way. After Camile she’d chosen as her next vehicle Sardou’s La Tosca, drawing reviews that couldn’t be more wildly mixed. “A terrible play,”
one reviewer wrote typically, “a dramatic crime. The actress, by forcing us to become interested in it through her virtuosity, compounds the crime.”

  Never mind. Bernhardt acted her way past scribblers’ gibes and clear across the language barrier. Performing in French for a German-speaking audience, she sold out the house night after night. Night after night fans mobbed her on her way from the stage door to the Hotel Imperial. A widower, whose advertisement for a wife was answered by a supposed letter from her, went crazy when he discovered it was a hoax. And Josefine Gallmeyer, Vienna’s foremost impersonator, who’d studied Bernhardt’s performance in order to mimic it, was confirmed in her verdict: “Her art is too great for parody. She is a genius. We can all clean her boots.”

  In the end Vienna seemed to surrender to Sarah Bernhardt even though she had the gall to conduct a “serious” private life. After all, the lady did spend one hundred thousand francs on costumes, and anyone investing so much on disguises warranted forgiveness from the city.

  Bernhardt crowned her local engagement with Frou-Frou, closing November 13 on what seemed at first to be a triumphant note. True, Rudolf was not present because, according to the Court calendar, the Crown Prince was hunting at Orth on the Danube. Baroness Vetsera did not come for reasons unstated. But these excepted, every great light in Vienna assembled in the Theater an der Wien, including an unusually large complement of archdukes, Katharina Schratt, the inevitable Professor Schnitzler, and most ambassadors of the diplomatic corps. The curtain dropped to a typhoon of applause. Within minutes Madame Bernhardt’s dressing room, already vernal with bouquets and laurel wreaths, coruscated with highnesses and excellencies. Presently these were joined by another interesting presence.