A Nervous Splendor
Page 17
At the Eislaufverein, the new Skaters’ Palace rose up with many cross-timbered turrets like a Russian grand duke’s villa. The sports crowd pirouetted before it in muffs and top hats. And as if that weren’t gaiety enough, Christmas had broken out in the streets. A whole pinewoods of Christmas trees had sprung up overnight on the cobbles of Judenplatz square. On another square, Am Hof, the Christkindlmarkt (Little Christ Child’s Market) was a Lilliputian mirage. A townlet of little huts stood here, inhabited by thousands of dolls, marionettes, jumping jacks, tin soldiers, and small grave personages made of gingerbread and candy. They lived among gilded nuts, snowballs, sparrows and children’s laughter.
Soon boots and horses’ hooves stamped away the snow. But a happy scurry continued on sidewalks and in roadways. Everyone noted that now Vienna pulsed like a genuine metropolis at last. The rush of Christmas shopping had begun.
Rudolf saw all that, but the Imperial treadmill must be trod. He must inspect a cadet school in Bratislava, attend a regimental winter drill in the Carpathians, escort Balkan royalty through the Tyrol, stalk bears with a Rumanian prince in Hungary. But he could always hurry back to Vienna’s Christmas. At the Christkindlmarkt he bought, as always, a basketful of gifts for his retainers’ children as well as for his own little daughter Elisabeth. Nights he walked with Mary Vetsera through Schönbrunn Park in whose immense gardens snow patches still perched like owls, immaculately white.
Religion was flummery to him. Yet these weeks were full of the enigma of redemption. Perhaps the city would not hopelessly squander its possibilities. Perhaps his position was not altogether feckless. He might be able to do something real after all.
So he roused himself once more to action. For the Foreign Minister he wrote a report on his recent experience with King Milan. He argued that Milan’s servility vis-à-vis Austria was a potential hazard; it might provoke a drastic Serbian reaction against the Empire. This memo repeated similar earlier warnings, but it was even more forceful, more cogently reasoned, more prophetic of the catastrophe to come in 1914…and was even more smoothly ignored.
He kept on. He did not relax his guard against Kaiser Wilhelm. At the end of November the attacks against Rudolf had flared up again in Prussian newspapers. But he was ready. He’d sent Moritz Szeps a deposition on a whore who had stolen Wilhelm’s monogrammed cufflinks during “a hunting entertainment” in Styria. He was now prepared to instruct Szeps to make this information public, if Wilhelm did not leash his press.
He would go that far. He could be that hard. But in the last weeks of the year he also had preserved the strength to be tender, and not just with Mary Vetsera. He remembered his tutor of long ago, old General Latour, who had been one of his youth’s better spirits. “Because of all these emperors, kings and princes I had so little time,” he wrote Latour. “But we should at least hunt together. You ought to get some exercise in the fresh air.”
Childhood stirred in him. He felt new love for the woman who had once been his mother. Empress Elisabeth had become still more remote in 1888, having spent much of the year in her exotic hermitage in Corfu. She was still beautiful, and stranger than ever. She had missed her own father’s funeral, since the news had reached her too late at the faraway island. Now she arrived in Vienna in December, with an anchor tattooed on her shoulder. It shocked the Emperor. But to Rudolf this made her more like him—a fellow mutant. She, too, disliked Court etiquette. Her sensibility, too, rebelled against exalted emptiness.
In the winter of 1888 he remembered the springs of long ago when they had strolled through the gardens of Laxenburg Castle, hand in hand, mother and child, playing word games in Hungarian. Her birthday fell on Christmas day, and suddenly he wanted to give her something very special. She adulated Heine. Therefore he procured a book of Heine letters edited by Hugo Wittmann, Herzl’s play collaborator. Not content with that, Rudolf had asked his friend Moritz Szeps to track down, through French friends, a packet of eleven rare original letters Heine had written to a relative in Paris. “Do you have the Heine material?” was a refrain in Rudolf’s notes to Szeps that December.
On Christmas Eve the Imperial Family gathered in the damask-hung reception room of the Empress’s apartment. On a table before the blue-fir Christmas tree lay Rudolf’s Heine offerings for his mother’s birthday. Rudolf had also put on the table exquisitely wrapped, signed copies of his Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture as Christmas gifts for his parents and his sister. His wife Stephanie, ever the bumptious dilettante, surprised Their Majesties with a gift of her drawings of the Adriatic coast. And Their Majesties in turn surprised their granddaughter, Rudolf’s and Stephanie’s little Elisabeth. They gave the child a delicious set of miniature garden furniture crafted in Corfu.
There were embraces and kisses as in millions of other households that remembered Bethlehem together. Archduke Franz Salvator of Tuscany attended the intimate gathering because his engagement to Valerie, the Crown Prince’s sister, was about to be announced. Rudolf considered him too closely related, too much the vacuous fait néant princeling. But he said nothing. He kissed his sister and hugged his future brother-in-law. When he put his arms around his mother, there broke out of him a sudden sob.
It startled the whole family. But this was, after all, a moving milestone in Valerie’s life, and by the time the group sat down in the Empress’s dining salon, Rudolf had resolved his features into their customary charm. The moon rose above the great roofs of the Ringstrasse, “Silent Night” came choiring softly from the Burgplatz, and, finally, the huge bell in the cathedral tower of St. Stephen’s began to toll for Mass.
Chapter 18
Hugo Wolf had intended to go home to Styria for the holidays. A delay in the publication of his Mörike Lieder detained him. So he spent Christmas with the Köcherts in Vienna. Under the mistletoe he could kiss Melanie for one single licit moment. Then their mouths parted, carols sounded, and the secret resumed.
At Gustav Klimt’s studio on the Sandwirthgassse, dozens of prettily ribboned food baskets had been delivered, with compliments of the season. He had just about as many Santa Clauses as there were ambitious rich hoping to be included in his painting of old Court Theater celebrities. He kept only the baskets containing fruit, which he ate with passion. The others he gave to his brother Ernst or to Franz Matsch, partners in art with whom he shared the studio. The cards attached to the gifts he tore up without looking, shredding all chance of future favors.
Brahms’s Christmas was bluntly careerist. Unlike Hugo Wolf, he had made sure that the Zigeuner Lieder, his song cycle, was published promptly on time, promptly praised by Hanslick in the Neue Freie Presse (“For years now we have received a holiday gift from Herr Brahms’s talent, and it pleases me to say that this year, too, his songs make excellent Christmas presents…”), and therefore sold promptly and briskly in the gift-shopping trade. The Sunday before Christmas he collected wild applause at Joseph Joachim’s performance (with cellist Robert Hausmann) of his Double Concerto. Christmas Eve he dined with the Hanslicks. Christmas day the master took his lunch at Zum Rothen Igel, accepted gifts and good wishes from admirers, napped punctually at the Café Heinrichshof at 1:30 P.M. and spent the afternoon supervising Frau Truxa’s packing. He was about to depart for the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen where the Duke sponsored a music festival built efficiently around the genius of Johannes Brahms. The Brahms annual cycle completed itself on clockwork schedule.
At Burgring 1, the seignorial apartment house Brahms glimpsed daily on his way to the Heinrichshof, Arthur Schnitzler experienced Christmas in his own way. “December 23, Sunday,” his tight-lipped diary notes. “Trimming the Christmas tree…December 24, Monday. Christmas at home. Jean. (2). Kfh. Poker.” Which meant that not only the famous, though unbaptized, Professor Schnitzler in his sumptuous residence celebrated the birth of Christ, but so did his unbaptized, unknown son in the smaller flat under the same roof. And that, after Schnitzler Junior had committed the act of love twice with Jeanette, our young m
an went to the coffeehouse to play poker, and then used his journal to sum up the day in a few cryptic words to despise himself by.
Across the Danube Canal, at Stefaniestrasse 1, Jakob and Jeanette Herzl celebrated the season with their son Theodor. He shared the spacious apartment with them; here they were the first to see Theodor’s feuilletons or the newest draft of his play that must make the Court Theater. On December 24 all three were decorating what Theodor would later call “our Chanukah tree.”
At Maria Theresienstrasse 8 the Freuds never indulged either in Christian rites or their own Jewish ones. The holidays meant simply a lighter schedule at the Pediatric Institute and still fewer patients in the doctor’s private practice. There was a bit more time for his weekly tarok game with pediatrician colleagues in their local coffeehouse; more time for his daily stomp around the Ringstrasse. Above all, he could devote extra hours to his paper in progress on hysteria, exploring his heresies on the subject. The holidays, in brief, gave him more leisure with which to jeopardize his so-called career.
Opposite the Freuds, on the top floor of Hessgasse 7, all was dark, all quiet at the Bruckner flat. Frau Kachelmayer needn’t fret over her frowsy Herr Professor. He had left town for a while, to overcome his old-bachelor loneliness during Christmas. The Abbot of Kremsmünster in Styria had invited him. Around the monastery, snow hung on the rolling woods. Inside, the monks sat in awe as Bruckner played the organ at midnight Mass, improvising far beyond the printed note into great godly dreams of sound. Afterward they prayed and gave him a little roast pork and more pilsner and much love.
Even in the insane asylum on the Brünlfeld there was, if not peace, good will among inmates. They presented their annual show starring Alois Bank, a well-known comedian who considered himself cured without ever expressing the desire to leave. At the Christmas revue he sailed through a routine of ten-year-old gags (the last he had done “outside”), but fell into a sudden stutter at the end. His audience took it to be intentional, and the evening ended with shrill gusts of hilarity.
In Vienna’s working-class districts Christmas was the art of make-do. For an Ottakring family it wasn’t uncommon to buy a fifty-kreuzer branch lopped from a big upper-class tree in the Inner City. This “tree,” propped against the wall, fit the narrowness of the tenement and the scantiness of the presents. Father might get a nice cravat from the secondhand store; mother, a darning kit; little Anna, a pair of coarse warm socks rolled around a candy ball. All these bounties lay under the “tree,” swathed in red tissue paper which, wrinkled but still serviceable, was kept carefully from one year to the next, as the stores charged extra for gift wrapping.
But even in Ottakring the night was very special. It was the one night in the year when the Bettgeher—the subtenant who rented only a bed, nothing else—joined the family for dinner; it featured not horsemeat but genuine beef that night. This one night of the year the oven serving the apartment did not go hungry. Christmas Eve of 1888 was crisp rather than cold, and coal so awfully expensive. Yet the father made sure that the oven was fully stoked before he retired; so that flames remained high throughout the Savior’s night and nobody needed to wake chilled into Christmas Day.
The weather, not harsh for December, relented even more after Christmas. New Year’s Eve came upon Vienna in an unseasonably warm fog. On the far side of this mild nervous haze hulked 1889. Chimneysweeps received more generous tips than usual, because the very sight of their sooty faces brought luck in the twelve months ahead. Johann Pfeiffer, King of the Birds, performing on the Schottenring, had an act ready for the occasion. For ten kreuzer, a parrot would fly to a shelf of envelopes inside the cage, pick one, and deliver to King Pfeiffer his client’s horoscope for 1889. At New Year’s Eve parties all over town, the climax was the lead-casting: After the midnight bells pealed, after the good-luck punch had been drunk, you would toss melted bits of lead into cold water—and your piece would freeze into a delphic shape hinting your destiny in the new year.
The new year. In the Imperial capital the past was a magnificence, familiar and cozy. But the future? Even the near future?…Where was the promised, the necessary greatness? The Viennese were never on comfortable terms with the forward-turned face of time. A quaver crept even into the magisterial accents of the Neue Freie Presse as it assessed the local temper on the first day of 1889: “There is a general air of discontent…a breath of melancholy brushes through our society. The rich do not enjoy their surfeit. The poor can bear their misery less than ever. At our St. Stephen’s Cathedral there is a strange and ancient tablet with the inscription, ‘Here I lie, Simon Paur, ambushed and killed in treachery and in envy.’ The story of his death is not known. Nobody can tell who the unfortunate Simon Paur was; but his grave may become the emblem of our city. The envy that acted as his assassin has grown into the dominant passion fermenting the populace and jeopardizing the peace of our citizens.”
“Dear, good mother!” Hugo Wolf wrote on December 30. “Best wishes for the New Year. If my success gives you joy, please think as I do of the incredible miracle of the past year. It was the most fertile and therefore the happiest year of my life. In this year I composed no less than ninety-two songs and ballads, and not one is a failure. I think I may be satisfied with the year 1888. What will 1889 bring? In that year the opera whose execution I will start in a few days will be finished…* If my success can color your life in a friendlier hue, then you should see everything in the rosiest glitter. My young fame is now powerfully ascendant and perhaps I will soon play the leading role in the musical world. True, it may take reviewers long to understand my thoughts because my art is too new. But I have already gained an unprejudiced public…I have every right to call 1889 a year that augurs luck.”
“Most Highborn and Most Noble Herr Baron Wohlzogen!” Bruckner wrote to one of his protectors in Bayreuth. “From the bottom of my soul I call out to my high sponsor on this special first day of the New Year: Hail! Hail! Hail!…The Brahms cult here is becoming something altogether incredible! Hans Richter [the conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic] is uppermost in this respect. He claims the new direction [taken by Bruckner’s music] has no justification in the concert world and he does not dare—because of Hanslick—to put anything of mine on the program…But I have been working since June on the Third Symphony (the “Wagner” symphony) which I have thoroughly improved…Oh, if the High Immortal One [i.e., Wagner] could see it! What indescribable happiness for me!”
Arthur Schnitzler wrote only to his diary at year’s end. But his entry, though short, also bore a climactic note: “December 31. New Year’s Eve. Jean. (2).” Since the diary’s last previous total with Jeanette had been (398), the additional (2) signified that at the start of 1889 he and the Sweet Girl had had exactly (400) ecstasies together.
His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty produced what was for him a voluptuous letter. It was an outburst caused by the conjunction of Christmas and the measles. The disease had struck Frau Schratt’s little son Toni, quarantining the mother along with the child. For weeks now, the Emperor would be cut off from his solace. At this point, after nearly three years of their relationship, Franz Joseph dropped the conventional “gnädige Frau” (gracious lady) with which he had hitherto begun all his letters.
“Meine liebe theuerste Freundin!” he wrote on December 27—
My dear, most precious friend! You will allow me to use this address at a moment when the awful news came at me like a thunderbolt, and when, at the thought of the long separation ahead of us, I feel so vividly how much I hold you dear. Forgive me for this perhaps unseemly emotional eruption, but I am very sad not to see you for so long and it is my only consolation to confide in you at least by letter. But of course these are all egotistic thoughts, it is above all anxiety about you and your sick Toni which grips me…
And a few days later, New Year’s Eve, in the same tremulous vein:
My most precious friend!…May all your wishes be fulfilled and may you receive only joy from your To
ni. If I may speak of myself, then let me say that I wish, hope and beg of you that you will keep your friendship for me in the year 1889, that you will keep on being as infinitely good to me as you have in the past and that you will continue being lenient with me when I am contrary, but, above all, that you will have a little love for me…Perhaps you will think tomorrow a little about me and pray a brief prayer for me…It really is often quite hard to be a Megaliotis…
“Megaliotis,” the Greek term for “majesty,” was the Empress’s nickname for him. Among the many unmajestic letters Franz Joseph wrote to his precious friend, this was among the most throbbingly humble.
During the same week, in fact on the very date of his father’s earlier letter, December 27, Rudolf wrote a year-end letter of his own to his very different confidant, Moritz Szeps.
Dear Szeps…In international politics there is a temporary quiet. The dangers threatening us from Serbia are postponed for the moment, but this uncanny stillness gives me the impression of calm before the storm. It can’t go on like that; that is my consolation…My wife and I are off to Abbazia [a fashionable resort on the Adriatic Coast] today and on my return I hope to see you.
Compared with the effusions of others, this strikes a composed or at least braced and certainly perspicacious note. Yet Szeps, who knew his friend well, did not read it that way. The New Year greeting he sent back sounds like an indirect answer to an indirect cry for help. Szeps’s words seem meant for someone who is both lofty and lost, so urgent is the undertone of consolation whispering beneath the louder rhetoric of obeisance.