A Nervous Splendor
Page 15
A bailiff.
In the name of the Municipality of Vienna this gentleman put a tax lien of three thousand gulden on box-office receipts.
Gasps all around. The bailiff quoted a municipal ordinance subjecting a foreign theatrical company to a levy based minimally on a six-months run, whereas Madame Bernhardt’s manager had only paid a tax for the actual two weeks of the engagement.
More gasps. A flurry among the journalists present, dismay among the illuminati. Madame Bernhardt’s general manager protested that the Theater an der Wien received forty percent of the profits and therefore should pay forty percent of the tax, which they had so far refused to do. The theater manager only cleared his throat. Madame Bernhardt’s husband, a hitherto rather inconspicuous supporting actor, sighed and said it would all be straightened out by lawyers. Madame Bernhardt’s secretary kept saying it was getting late, the private train was waiting to take the company to its next engagement in Prague.
And Madame Bernhardt herself gathered up her magnificent skirt. She cradled the biggest bouquet of roses in her elbow and smiled her singular smile: it had all been most memorable. She was taking with her the most interesting memories of Vienna.
Next morning the Viennese gobbled it all up over their coffee. For a change, they grinned instead of griped about the tax people. And for the first time they loved the great Sarah truly, without reservation, the kind of love we lavish only on superiors in trouble.
Chapter 16
Madame Bernhardt’s misadventure encouraged Vienna. Madame’s great reputation had fallen a little short. So had Vienna’s so far this season. Yet Bernhardt continued to shine. Perhaps so would Vienna. And another nice parallel: Both the lady and the city had gone a nuance past their prime. But that nuance could be delicious and did not preclude marvelous moments ahead. In fact, the winter still promised highlights in the city: the benison of Christmas, New Year’s Eve excitement, and then the Viennese carnival with its unique swirl of myriad balls. Nobody could say vale to carne—nobody could bid farewell to the flesh—with more dash and glamour than Vienna before Lent. The season would bring dazzle yet.
Politically there was another hopeful indication. By November it became clear that Prime Minister Taaffe had scored a great coup. At least for the time being he had defused that imbroglio between Germans and Slovenes which had started in the small Styrian town of Celje but quickly spread beyond. The Prime Minister had found—or rather prestidigitated—a solution. He had pacified the Slovenes by decreeing that their children were indeed entitled to Slovene instruction in Celje’s schools. He placated the Germans by postponing, indefinitely, execution of the decree.
His ambidexterity produced a prospect of peace in Parliament. Confounded were forecasts that warring nationalisms would be the end of Habsburg’s empire. Perhaps the end would never happen. His Excellency, the Prime Minister, had once more pulled out of his sleeve a miracle sustaining that “perhaps.” Count Taaffe excelled in endless improvisation. He would not be indentured to any finality, nor even to a principle. Indeed he did not ever burden himself with even half a principle; but possessed instead ten thousand expedients, like the cigar box which he offered with irresistible joviality to any opponent he wanted to turn into an accomplice.
Count Taaffe made good use of his ancestry. A descendant of Irish peers who had settled in Austria after the Thirty Years’ War, His Excellency was Cork County handsome, with a dark, softly curling mustache. He parlayed blarney, Gemütlichkeit and elegance into a political infallibility which kept him at the right hand of the throne longer than any other Prime Minister during Franz Joseph’s long reign. Armed with adroit ideas, unencumbered by ideals, he cheated the inevitable, crisis in, crisis out, for fourteen years. Clericals liked him for his industrious churchgoing. Anti-clericals were disarmed by his statements against the Vatican concordat. His federalist leanings appeased Czechs and Poles, while German liberals liked his asides that personally and emotionally he was really one of them. Anti-Semites sometimes detected a sympathizer in him when he spoke out against “foreign capitalists.” But Jews did not worry: Wasn’t His Excellency’s chief counselor named Blumenstock?
Nobody could worry effectively in Count Taaffe’s presence. With a bit of lighthearted manipulation here, a touch of jovial chicanery there, he not only reconciled irreconcilables but spun out of them a parliamentary majority: Catholic politicians, Slav nationalists, aristocrats, and even a smattering of Liberals. His fine-tuned ambiguities, his opaque showmanship enabled the Emperor to remain sober, straight and immaculate. Bravo, Count Taaffe! He rode the steeplechase, jumped the moats, leaped barriers while blowing smoke rings and lifting his derby to the ladies.
Vienna loved him for that. It loved him particularly that fall because he made an old Viennese slang word officially immortal. “Our government’s policy,” he said in a speech before Parliament, “can be best defined as ‘fortwursteln.’”
Henceforward fortwursteln stood legitimized not only as a statesman’s philosophy but as the eternal Austrian way of life. The genus loci so saturates the word that fortwursteln cannot be transported intact into other languages. Maybe its English sense could be rendered best (but still inadequately) by a mixture of three phrases: Keep improvising…keep slogging on…keep clowning…
Fortwursteln constituted not merely Taaffe’s Five Year Plan, the long-range program of his administration. It also described the weather by the Danube in November 1888. Like a sleight-of-hand trick, spring warmed the streets on the brink of winter. After the bitter cold of October—there had even been some premature snow—the mercury climbed to an unbelievable nineteen degrees Celsius. A summer sun beamed in a sirocco-blue sky. In the Vienna Woods the bare branches of some chestnut trees revealed a bizarre swelling of buds.
Suddenly Vienna was not just incomparable (it had always remained that); but, in addition, it was now also bearable. The Vienna-loving Viennese could tolerate their city again. For the first time in many months the price of meat went down instead of up. Sugar held at least steady. A new rent-control law passed, spreading some overdue cheer among the poor.
The posh side of town, too, showed signs of buoyancy. The nice strolling weather populated the Ringstrasse. Unseasonably many passers-by (and coins) came Johann Pfeiffer’s way as he, the King of the Birds, performed with his parrots near the new Court Theater. Other landmarks prospered as well. Eduard Sacher, the hotelier and restaurateur, announced that “in appreciation of the excellent execution of His Imperial Highness’s orders,” Rudolf had appointed him patissier to the Crown Prince. Demel’s, torte-baker to the Emperor, opened its new quarters on the Kohlmarkt. At the stock market, prices were sweetening—a bit too much, in fact, for insiders.
Item: The shares of a certain metal company shot up madly at the news that controlling interest had been purchased by Karl Wittgenstein, * not only sire of the prodigious family, but head of the Empire’s leading industrial enterprise, the giant Prag-Eisen consortium. Karl, of course, would survive in the history books as the father of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would be born the next spring and grow up to turn modern philosophy upside down with his linguistic skepticism. But in November 1888 Karl’s fame was his own, and his business leverage awesome. Any enterprise blazoning the name Wittgenstein attracted investors all over the Monarchy. So much so that this month he had to cool down the plungers, even though it cost him a nice fast piece of profit-taking.
“Two weeks ago,” said his Letter to the Editor in the Neue Freie Presse, “I and some friends bought a majority interest in the Egydy Iron and Steel Company. This was done not so much to score a bigger profit but mainly because it seemed advantageous to become owner of said company, in view of the other companies my friends and I already hold. Since then there has been a great rise in the price of Egydy securities which, in my opinion, is unjustified…I don’t want to confirm, indirectly, through my silence, any unreasonable hopes and expectations that have recently arisen in connection with said company.”
One of them was Professor Anton Bruckner. Whenever he could, he took advantage of the warmth so uncommon in November. He missed the hay-scented fields of his Upper Austria but at least he could stroll the meadows by the Danube. Nearby, in the Prater, the Trade Fair (sponsored by Rudolf) still continued; and, being Bruckner, he was asked again to play the organ of the big Rotunde building. Here he underwent a sweet autumnal affliction.
A lovely young girl giggled for his autograph, bounced with rosy-cheeked, braid-tossing admiration, promised to chat with him again at a bench outside the Rotunde on the following day. The next day he sat there alone on the bench. For her he had bought a brand-new blue handkerchief to brighten the breast pocket of his loden suit. She never came. The handkerchief brightened him in vain. It lit up the humiliation.
That was only one of his troubles. His teaching at the Conservatory and his organ duties at the Palace Chapel didn’t leave enough time for composing in the fall. The pressure made him yet more disorganized; and that, in turn, doubled the impatience of his housekeeper, Frau Kachelmayer. Once his left stocking simply vanished. Frau Kachelmayer finally found it in the piano. She was furious. He was baffled. But he was baffled by so many things. Some people told him that he was a great artist. So many others turned their backs. After the disillusionment with the braid-bouncing minx, he went against the city’s mood: he sensed darkness ahead, and frustration. Toward the end of 1888 life seemed to grow worse instead of better, at least for him. He couldn’t get his Romantic Symphony performed or even published without a subsidy.
“Herr Gutmann [a publisher] wants it,” Bruckner wrote a friend, “and says I should ask the Court for 1,000 gulden for Herr Gutmann, which I cannot possibly do. I would prefer that he would just take it without paying me; after all, I have never ever gotten anything, whereas Brahms has gotten so much…”
There was the torment. The contrast between that other one in Vienna, Brahms, and himself. He, Bruckner, remained neglected by many important critics. Neglected or worse. Often jeers rained down on him over “his windy mysticism, his pseudo-Wagnerian noisings.” Brahms himself had brutalized him; Brahms had publicly said that “in dealing with Bruckner one deals not with a body of compositions but a series of frauds.”
The great Johannes Brahms, of course, received nothing but overheated tribute. To a Brahms concert, Hanslick and all other high arbiters came as to a divine service.
In the Neue Freie Presse, as well as elsewhere, they published their adorations. They swooned before their deity’s “classic limpidity”; they went on about Brahms’s “great sense of line and sequence” and his “mastery of form.” To Bruckner these words were a fancy way of covering up a plain old lack of invention.
But talent was the only thing Brahms lacked. Otherwise the man had everything. Brahms had all the decorations he wanted, whereas Bruckner scrounged for them in vain. Brahms had declined an honorary doctorate from Cambridge. Bruckner’s application there had gone unheard. Brahms was published and performed everywhere. Of Bruckner’s seven symphonies so far, four still went begging. At great occasions in the Musikvereinssaal, Brahms sat enthroned in the director’s box. Bruckner had to buy his ticket for standing room in the gallery.
Bruckner was permitted to teach at the Conservatory and to sound the pipes in the Palace Chapel. Brahms permitted the world to adulate him. And the world, thrilled, made Brahms an honored member of the Musikverein as well as Honorary President of the Tonkünstlerverband (the composers’ and musicians’ association). They all treated him as the composer laureate. Bruckner might console himself with the thought of the pince-nez he shared with Beethoven. Brahms bestrode the scene as Beethoven reborn. It was a chilling inequity, no matter how warm the autumn sun. Bruckner was no anti-Semite, he had Jewish friends, yet sometimes in the past he had thought of applying for redress to his Upper Austrian parliamentary representative, Georg von Schönerer.
Schönerer, though, sat in jail. Of Bruckner’s partisans, Mahler struggled in Budapest, and Hugo Wolf was too immersed in his Goethe Lieder and in his clandestine love life to offer anything more than sympathy. The injustice continued. It expressed itself even in the private lives of the two adversary composers. Both Bruckner and Brahms were old bachelors who drank lager beer and liked smoked pork with sauerkraut. But at Hessgasse 7, Bruckner was, at best, tempestuously served by Frau Kachelmayer. It was lucky she didn’t spank him. He was her unending vexation and she didn’t mind saying so, loudly. She couldn’t bear the chaos in his bedroom. She was tired of the snuff-stained inkblotted litter in the other chambers. Every two weeks she had to threaten to quit if the Herr Professor didn’t stop throwing stacks of note sheets on top of his slippers.
At Karlsgasse 4, by contrast, Johannes Brahms’s life moved in a dream of neatness. He controlled—and enchanted—his Frau Truxa with dainty hints. If a glove needed mending, Frau Truxa would find it lying on top in a drawer left “accidentally” open. If a pair of boots could use polishing, they would be placed a shade away from the wall, toward the middle of the room. Yes, Johannes Brahms was a giant and a dear. Even his terseness impressed and ingratiated. Friends treasured his aphoristic postcards. Bruckner, on the other hand, spent much more postage on long letters which began “Most Honored, Most Kind and Geniuslike Protector!” but which brought no remedy. The injustice continued.
Bruckner was a pathetic joke to many Viennese in 1888. Brahms was their marvel. They admired his very quirks. Brahms was the only notable in town to rise almost as early as Franz Joseph. He left bed at 5 A.M. After that he marched through his day’s program with a self-assurance as solid and axiomatic as the Emperor’s.
First he made his own special coffee, with beans sent him by an admirer in Marseilles. Next he took his early-morning walk and then settled down to work. In the fall of ’88 his desk work followed a seasonal routine. All his actual composing was done during the hot months. From September to December he redrafted, modified, prepared for publication the music born during his Swiss summers. This autumn the Zigeuner Lieder had to be corrected and the Third Sonata for Violin and Piano in D-minor must be seen through the printer.
He worked till noon. Then he allowed Frau Truxa, who had arrived meanwhile, to help him into his overcoat. Fingers intertwined authoritatively behind his back, he started to walk north, toward the Inner City. He crossed the Ringstrasse with his massive figure, his powerful profile, his dynast’s beard, his stunning gray mane. Children followed him as he moved down the Kärntnerstrasse. There was always candy in the great man’s pocket. It didn’t matter that he talked with a harsh North German accent in a surprisingly thin high voice. He was so kind, handing out sweets. He knew how to lace distinction with affability.
When he reached his inn, Zum Rothen Igel in the Wildpretmarkt, he passed by the main dining room frequented by higher government officials. A Stube farther back was his favorite; coachmen cut into their goulash here, and here a corner table was famous for being the Brahms lunching place.
He ordered his roast pork, kraut and pilsner, received friends and admirers. Then he walked back to the Ringstrasse, toward another table reserved for him at the Café Heinrichshof, opposite the Opera. There he reclined in a chair by the window and often would doze off after his mocha. Passers-by would pause to admire the Brahms monument which sat there behind the glass pane with closed eyes. It was a thrill to watch the statue come alive and tip the waiter.
His afternoons were spent at home, on musical politics played with wonderfully deft fingers. That November a delicate and rather strategic kindness occupied him. He helped arrange a celebration of Joseph Joachim’s fiftieth year in music and donated one hundred gulden toward a Joachim bust. This was important because the violin virtuoso was one of Brahms’ principal interpreters and a Brahms champion of international caliber. Yet in 1888 an estrangement had dev
eloped because the violinist thought the composer had taken his wife’s side in a matrimonial dispute. By his contribution Brahms now turned the anniversary into a fine occasion for fence-mending. It was the sort of thing he liked to do after lunch: meting out, to enemies or allies, just deserts or sweet rewards.
Charity was another skill exercised during Brahms’s afternoons. Huge royalty sums flowed toward him from all directions. Since his habits were frugal and his investments shrewd, he could afford to be truly generous, particularly to truly important people. In the fall of 1888 he sent fifteen thousand gulden, a princely sum, a munificence, to Clara Schumann, his aged and by now arthritic friend. Not long afterward she arranged a recital against which he protested, but not too vehemently or effectively, because Clara insisted on making it all-Brahms.
It was all in a day’s work. At night his touch was no less sure when he dined with Eduard Hanslick, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Music. Brahms’ life was one steady craftsmanlike masterpiece; Bruckner’s, an inspired shambles.
In the course of the fall the two would pass one another, face to face, in the building of the Musikverein. Bruckner might be on his way to one of his Conservatory classes, Brahms coming from a session of the high council of the organization. Along the corridors people would slow down to watch. They’d see Brahms nod with clipped courtesy. Bruckner would bow elaborately: “Most obedient servant, Herr President!”
A fraught encounter, a loaded greeting. By “Herr President” Bruckner let drop the implication that he recognized Brahms as president of the Composers’ Association; that it was the bureaucratic title which warranted his salute, not necessarily the talent.