But that was just funny old Bruckner’s view. Practically everyone else that mattered made obeisances to Brahms without reservations. Johannes Brahms was the only serious resident artist whom Vienna admired wholeheartedly in his own lifetime.
Why just Brahms? Perhaps because he produced beauty without creating anything really new and therefore frightening. Furthermore this German brought off something incomprehensible to the Viennese: he could actually cope with his own gifts. He was a genius, to be sure, but geniuses often made only a pale impression on the town. Brahms was a middle-class genius—that was the astounding, the mesmerizing difference about him. He was such a blunt, factual, coolly functioning genius. When invited to the Riviera, as he was that fall, he declined “because of the awful elegance of it all.” Unlike Johann Strauss, who once tried to become a baron by having himself adopted by a baroness, it never even occurred to Brahms to covet a title.
He operated as the dry bourgeois administrator of his gifts. He was sufficient unto himself. And this simply thrilled Vienna’s most dynamic yet uncertain class, all those burghers with hopelessly feudal souls. Inside their newly-escutcheoned Ringstrasse palazzi they proclaimed liberalism, progress and post-Baroque modernism. They liked to protest their vitality—even their superiority—vis-à-vis the hauteur of the nobles; and then gave themselves away by protesting too much in a lead article of their own foremost newspaper.
“The present generation of the upper aristocracy still wants to dominate the middle class,” the Neue Freie Presse wrote in December.
But they want to dominate the middle class without becoming acquainted with it. To them “the people” consist of a speeding fiacre and the laundresses they tease. In contrast to London where (even before our time) the Iron Duke bowed before Peel who was a weaver’s son, the aristocracy here is sterile and sequestered. Forty years ago Mrs. Trollope spent a winter in Vienna and was quite astonished by the castelike separations of the various social levels. She had never met more graceful ladies than those in bankers’ houses, yet these were not admitted to aristocratic circles…Nowadays the bourgeoisie regards the social isolation of the nobility with complete equanimity. Yes, there are some Sons of the Factory who are ashamed of chimneys, who desire the Castle: who do not know that true nobility springs from work and who forget that only contempt awaits them if they try to uproot themselves. These young people would like to imitate the nonchalance of a count, the gambling and frivolity of a cavalier. They try to deny their origins. They are indolent in all questions of bourgeois freedom. We are not. The bourgeoisie must contend with the aristocrats, but it is sure of victory.
Very firm; very cocky; quite hollow. A few weeks before the Neue Freie Presse published such defiance, Duke Maximilian, the Empress’s father, had died in Bavaria. To most Viennese he was just a remote name. Yet the very same Neue Freie Presse, along with the Tagblatt and other voices of the middle class, soon brought word of a change in the fashion note. Court was in mourning. The new leitmotif was black, with variations and mitigations—sable furs, pearl-toned sleeves, skirts and bodices in dark chinchilla shadings.
Only families of the loftiest quarterings, namely those admitted to Court, were expected to show public sorrow. But the Wives of the Factory read their Neue Freie Presse and off they went, shopping for blueblood grief at their furriers and dressmakers. They bought it, and had it fitted, and pulled it this way and that, and twisted it into an anxious burghers’ elegance that spoke the opposite of pride in origin.
It was a queasy business, this need to fortwurstel upward.
Only few were immune to it. On November 1, a missive with an imposing seal had arrived by liveried messenger at Gustav Klimt’s ramshackle studio on the Sandwirthgasse. It came from His Excellency, the Minister of Culture: “His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty has deigned, in accordance with his All Highest decision on October 28, and in affable consideration of your outstanding artistic services in connection with the new Court Theater…to most graciously confer upon you the Golden Service Cross with Crown…”
At the age of twenty-six Gustav Klimt was rewarded for muraling the new theater’s ceiling in splendid stereotype. And now he had the chance for other high favors, this time in connection with the old Court Theater. The City of Vienna had commissioned him and his partner Franz Matsch to do heroic portraits of the old house—Klimt’s picture facing the audience from the stage, Matsch’s the other way. Each view was to show some hundred-odd of the most prominent habitués of the house, and it was left to the artists to define prominence by painting it into the picture.
Two rather unknown young men had suddenly become the arbiters of fame. Power had been handed to them on a palette. It was a tremendous chance.
Matsch seized it and studded the old Court Theater boxes with Esterházys, Metternichs and others capable of advancing him. It was his first step toward eminence as Vienna’s society painter.
For Klimt it was a step in the opposite direction. He neglected the chance assiduously—though even so it was hard to evade. Some choices were musts: The painting had to include Brahms, La Schratt, Prime Minister Taaffe and the new Court Theater’s architect Hasenauer. Others Klimt may have put in because he liked their liberal politics, like Moritz Szeps and Eduard Bacher, publisher of the Neue Freie Presse. He painted in his brother Ernst Klimt and his sisters as well as a number of invented faces. But he ignored many offers to sit for him which came in letters engraved with crests. He ignored invitations to tea in the Ringstrasse salons of financial barons. At first he didn’t even include Karl Lueger who was among the best-known Court Theater goers as well as a parliamentary star of great anti-Semitic brilliance. When the city fathers discovered the omission, Klimt had to rectify it. (After all, it was pointed out to him, Lueger’s anti-Jewish figure would barely balance the Jewish ones already in the picture.) But the portrait he added belatedly is a bit less flattering than most others made of “handsome Karl.”
For the most part Klimt didn’t care very deeply. The picture was just more academic piecework done to support his parents, his brothers and sisters. He was still waiting for authentic inspiration to take control of his brush. Meanwhile he lifted barbells and used the warmer days to take long hikes near Mödling in the Vienna Woods. Thanks to the mild weather, the trees retained their foliage longer than usual. Red and gold, ocher and amber leaped to the eye. How beautifully the leaves aged on ten thousand twigs! No politics could produce such glory in a forest. Only so natural and simple a thing as death.
* * *
* See Chapter 7
Chapter 17
A difficult duty, of the Crown Prince is to keep silent, when the lowest subject of the state is free to talk. It is his duty to remain in the shadow even when he feels the necessity to step candidly and powerfully into the light of public opinion. This difficult duty had been a severe burden to the Crown Prince because so often he was convinced that what happened…was not beneficial to the fatherland.
On December 1, all Vienna could read these lines on the front page of the Wiener Tagblatt. Censorship had let them through for a simple reason. They referred to a foreign controversy. The words quoted were from a lawyer beyond the border, defending the publisher of the diaries of the German Crown Prince Friedrich; the Friedrich who had died in March after barely three months on the throne. Wilhelm, the new Kaiser, disliked his predecessor’s liberalism and had interdicted publication of the diaries. His act had become an international cause célèbre. Moritz Szeps’s Wiener Tagblatt was merely reporting on a hot issue abroad—good journalistic practice. It was a liberal paper and quite naturally quoted an argument stressing the historical importance of the diaries of a liberal prince. That was all.
Yet many readers sensed that wasn’t all, at all. Moritz Szeps was too good a friend of the Austrian Crown Prince. Citing dead Friedrich’s defender meant writing, between the lines, an eloquent essay on behalf of Rudolf.
Szeps still saw the Crown Prince regularly. He knew that Rudolf’s
life did not get easier as the year wore on to its end. When Rudolf traveled with Franz Joseph to his grandfather’s funeral in Munich, his cough returned—an old complaint. But there was a complaint yet older and worse, which afflicted him whenever he had to accompany the monarch to a pomp of state. He felt he was being moved about like an overdressed archaic puppet. The Emperor pulled strings taut for the pettiest motions. “His Majesty has ordered,” Rudolf wrote his First Court Chamberlain, Count Bombelles, “that neither you nor I should attend the Bavarian regimental anniversary [because of mourning], but that a courteous regret note should be sent now, and that later, on the anniversary day itself, a congratulatory cable should be dispatched.”
On his return to Vienna, Rudolf had to playact his way through the usual ceremonial chores. Sometimes, rarely, he disconcerted courtiers with a flash of his real face, as he had with Countess Festetics on All Souls’ Day. Mostly he concealed himself and his resentment beneath his official graciousness. He had to go on miming a role he loathed, and the court calendar scheduled him for many performances that fall.
He had to inspect the model for City Hall Park together with a host of newspaper reporters. He had to smile the Crown Princely smile though he hated the very idea of the park. Its execution would cost over a million gulden. It would dress up still more an already overembellished Ringstrasse neighborhood. The rich would promenade around its monumental fountain, their poodles would mince across those million-gulden lawns, whereas the poor would go on crowding into the dilapidated public clinic for which his friend Dr. Billroth could not even get an appropriation of a hundred thousand.
But he had to keep on smiling. He had to smile while sitting for a portrait commissioned by the City Council. One hundred and sixty copies of it would go as Christmas gifts to one hundred and sixty schools throughout the municipality. He was wonderfully popular. But most Viennese did not recognize him as a modern leader who wanted to raise the proletarian to bourgeois; who wanted to encourage the middle class so that its fruits—science, efficiency, progresss—might cure the Empire’s languid rot. Too many Austrians saw him with an entirely unenlightened adulation as a high gallant, the hero of a living fairytale.
A fairytale? A bitter paradox. Rudolf Habsburg, who wished to pull the Viennese out of their baroque trance, was yoked to a plumed image that would draw them more deeply into it.
His image constantly undermined his politics. But it wasn’t only the Viennese who bedeviled him with the wrong kind of fame. The Hungarians also misunderstood, or worse, misused him. In an official memorandum two years earlier Rudolf had attacked the oppression of non-Hungarians within Hungary’s borders: Magyar bureaucrats, administering their autonomous part of the Empire, handled Slovaks “almost as if they were animals.” Other Slavic minorities were treated—again in the words of Rudolf’s memorandum—with “contempt and brute measures which in the end must prove futile.”
No, Rudolf had few illusions about Hungary. Its gentry, which ran the government, practiced gross chauvinism. Above them were the magnates, who lived exquisitely on the peasantry’s back. They were a blend of high polish and tough reaction. In the sixteenth century they had put the leader of a peasant revolt on a red-hot iron throne; had placed a red-hot crown on his head and pressed into his hands a red-hot scepter. Then they had forced his retinue to eat his sizzling flesh. In the 1880s their regime had grown less savage and more dashing. No other system built on inequity managed quite so dapper a veneer.
At his writing desk Rudolf saw clearly through the bluebloods of the puszta. But on the hunting trail or over a bottle of tokay they knew how to beguile him. They knew how to play on the fact that he was the heir of the dual monarch; that he had a thorough Hungarian education; that he corresponded with his mother in Hungarian and that he himself possessed a downright Hungarian charm; and, last but not least, that among the dull aristocracies of the polyglot Empire, they, the Hungarian bloods, were a keen exception. The Telekis and the Károlyis stood out as Rudolf’s few stimulating friends. Politically he disapproved of them. Emotionally they disarmed him. He was stymied.
The Czechs stymied him in a different way, and they constituted the realm’s most critical nationality issue. “The conflict between slavery and anti-slavery parties in the U.S.A.,” reported the American Consul from Prague in 1886, “was not waged with more acrimony and determination than the political strife now in progress between the German and the Czech subjects of the Empire.”
Rudolf felt an instinctive sympathy for the Czechs. His happiest years had been his early twenties in Prague, commanding a Czech regiment. Shortly afterward he’d written a study that characterized any policy which denied Slav rights as “a great danger to the ship of state.”
But in Bohemia, Rudolf faced a problem whose emergence he had himself foreseen. The struggle for Czech rights became increasingly split into two wings—young and old. The Old Czechs were led by great landed names like the Princes Schwarzenberg and by high clerics, and naturally Rudolf couldn’t stomach them. “These feudal and nationless gentlemen,” Rudolf once said in a letter, “just exploit the Slavic people for their own ends. The Slavs are liberal. The day will come when they will disown these gentlemen thoroughly.”
Written in 1881, this was another of his eagle-eyed forecasts. Seven years later, political sentiment in Bohemia turned away from the Old Czechs toward the Young. The Young ones were middle-class firebrands of liberal persuasion, just exactly Rudolf’s sort. Yet for reasons of foreign policy he could not be their protector nor they his supporters. The Young Czechs looked to an alliance with St. Petersburg, the world’s most retrograde absolutism. But to Bohemian militants the Tsarist ideology mattered little. “The enemies of our enemies are our friends,” one of their spokesmen had declared long ago, and dear Russia was Habsburg’s antagonist on the international chessboard. The Russian press often served as mouthpiece for Young Czech diatribes. Rudolf feared that this faction, once given free rein in Prague, might create a Muscovite outpost within the Empire. In addition, many Young Czechs nursed a personal hatred against the Habsburg dynasty, and Rudolf—his progressive intentions notwithstanding—could not help being the Crown Prince. Among Czechs, therefore, the Old ones were abhorrent and the Young ones impossible. Rudolf had a constituency in neither.
In all the tangled ethnic politics of the Empire, Rudolf did possess one impassioned follower: King Milan of Serbia. Milan adored Rudolf’s light royal touch and wrote him lines that often seem less from king to prince than from fan to star. Rudolf, however, despised Milan as a weakling; as an all-too-obvious Austrian vassal disliked by his own people. To be friends with Milan was to attract bitterness from the South Slavs. There was no firm support looming from that direction either.
Politics had become futility, a dead end, a quagmire. Rudolf’s hopes for nourishment receded from his public to his private life. By the end of 1888 he saw in the gilded labyrinth around him only one figure worth clinging to: Mary Vetsera.
By December his meetings with her became more intense, but also more difficult to arrange. Countess Larisch, who had engineered them till now, was summoned to her husband’s estate in Bohemia. The pair must find some other go-between. And found it in, of all people, Richard Wagner.
On December 11, the Court Opera began the Ring Cycle with Das Rheingold. Dowager Baroness Vetsera prepared to man the family box in full and triple finery. The fashion championship must be defended to the cries of the Valkyries. But suddenly Mary, the champion, did not want to go. She had a pretext: not liking Wagner. She had voiced her aversion before. Could she please be excused from the odious Ring? When that didn’t work with her mother, she made sure to develop a bad headache, or washed her hair so late it couldn’t dry in time for the performance.
One trick or the other always took. The evenings were clear. As soon as her mother and sister had driven off to the opera, she slipped out of the house. With her wet hair she ran to the corner where Salesianergasse met Marokkanergasse. Bratfisch was w
aiting in a spot beyond the range of lanterns. The fiacre would pick up Rudolf a few blocks farther and drive out to Schönbrunn Castle. Here the two walked the enormous park together in darkness, in silence, in continence. It was cold. The weather had turned raw. They whispered. Their breath came in clouds that merged and vanished. That was all. By 10 P.M. she was home again.
He still did not move toward consummation. Climax meant end. He was not ready for that. He shied away now from anything climactic. He was not ready to submit to the Empire’s pervasive, graceful drift toward doom; yet he was not ready either to move against it. For he knew that any decisive act by him would trigger convulsion. He was not ready to act on overtures made to him during his hunts in Hungary—they spoke of crowning him king in Budapest, usurping half his father’s realm. Was that the way to ride his liberalism to royal power? Through a conspiracy with Magyar nobles? Should he make revelers and shooting companions his partners in statesmanship?
No, he wanted to wait a while longer. He hoped for a more modern way out. Or at least for some partial, provisional resolution which might release him from futility, smooth his nerves, ease his sleep. Something might happen.
And something did. It began to snow.
On December 8, whiteness came down on Vienna. Life changed. The countryside fluttered into the city. Even the dirty cobbles of the Ottakringerstrasse became as clean and natural as the slopes of the Kahlenberg. During the day, Rudolf drove through the transmutation. The streets had taken on a playfulness, and play is hope.
Edifice and statuary joined a general relaxation. White dollops sat on marble helmets; they turned heroes into toys. The Ringstrasse looked like a tumbling ground of giant children in ermine rags who were so happy that, for a while at least, they needn’t act like monuments; under the butterfly whirl of white flakes, greatness ceased to be an obligation. At fiacre stands cabbies in muskrat coats built snowmen to keep the ex-statues company. Many of these snowmen were coal-buttoned, broomstick-sabered cartoons of the fiacres’ enemy—the police. And the police laughed and swung their arms against the cold, and walked on.
A Nervous Splendor Page 16