A Nervous Splendor

by Frederic Morton

  Your Imperial Highness!

  “Uncanny is the calm”—to quote from Your Imperial Highness’s last letter—“the stillness before the storm.” The past year will figure in history as The Undertakers’ Year [an allusion to the death of two German Emperors, Wilhelm I and Friedrich III]. It was no more than that. But under certain circumstances that may be enough. For if all that is withered, rotten and old is removed in order to make room for the fresh and the young, then this removal is an act of renewal and rejuvenation which is necessary for the world. The undertakers of 1888 have, however, not rejuvenated or removed much, and uncanny indeed is the stillness which broods over Europe.

  What will come of all this? When will the thunderbolts of fate hammer out those decisions that will form the beginnings of a new era? The oppressiveness cannot last forever, surely the year of change will arrive. To bear up against the oppressiveness, to keep spirit and flesh strong for the time of action, that is the task which Your Imperial Highness has set for yourself, and this task is being executed daily by you with unceasing endurance and dynamism. You never tire, as do so many others who yield to the apparently inevitable. And since the Crown Prince does not tire, we maintain our hopes in a great, glorious, free and prosperous Austria.

  You, Imperial Highness, have had to experience much malice and treachery, but you have shaken it off with remarkable aplomb. It is well known that you desire great things, that you are capable of achieving them, and he who does not know it of you, certainly senses it. Therefore you are now being attacked in various ways and barriers are being thrown into your path to the future. You already have many adversaries and enemies. But you rely on yourself, on your own resources, on your genius, your strength and your endurance, and you may justly depend on these qualities. Add to this just a little luck—not even as much luck as your sincere admirers and friends wish you—just a bit of this luck and you will accomplish great things for the Monarchy, for our Fatherland, for your own glory and for the people attached to you…

  * * *

  * The opera—Der Corregidor—would not be written until 1895.

  Chapter 19

  The year 1889 did not begin well—certainly not in a sweet-tempered vein. The weather was uneven, enervating, and the general vexatiousness closed in on the new Court Theater. There’d been those earlier complaints. Now, suddenly, three months after the theater’s opening, sporadic discontent changed into concerted attack. Hugo Thimig, a pillar of the theater’s ensemble, cried out against “this ornamentation-choked mausoleum which makes performing a misery for me as well as for my colleagues.” And on January 6, the drama critic of the Neue Freie Presse, Ludwig Speidel, loosed a curse at the impersonal pomposity of the house which killed all sophisticated acting, all the more subtle modulations of speech. “The incredible fact must be faced,” he wrote, “that the spoken word…the very soul of our dramatic art, cannot come into its own in this house…Only the most drastic measures can save our Court Theater tradition. Either a new, simpler, more artistically responsive house must be built; or the theatrical space in the present house must be radically reconstructed, brick by brick.”

  No new New Court Theater was ever built. Not until eight years later were acoustics and sight lines improved. But even instant improvements would not have produced smiles in Vienna. Behind all that abrupt dismay was a more general apprehension: Would the capital of this old grand Empire never achieve anything that was both new and great? For how many New Year’s Eves could this failure be repeated?

  In the week following the New Year of 1889, the town seemed unable to manage even its most assured brilliancys: the carnival. Fasching, as carnival was called in Vienna, started the day of Epiphany on January 6. But this year it sputtered rather than glowed.

  Of course an external reason acted as dampener. Though the death of Franz Joseph’s father-in-law had taken place months ago, Limited Court Mourning was still in force. The Court balls were canceled. A blight also fell on the Industrialists’ Ball. Usually blessed with the “All Highest Presence,” it was the most splendid of all the nonaristocratic balls, with the most expensive yet most sought-after tickets. Millionaires and notables who were genealogically inadequate to come to the Emperor at Court balls had their day at this affair, when the Emperor came to them.

  Everyone knew that Katharina Schratt’s first informal and fateful conversation with His Majesty had taken place at the Industrialists’ Ball of 1885. But in 1889 Court Mourning precluded Franz Joseph’s attendance. Tickets proved unsalable. The Polish Ball suffered a similar fate. It was another evening whose glory was nothing without The Presence.

  Disappointment rippled down through all the strata: from the sybarite Salonblatt, which complained of the lack of fiacres roistering through the streets after midnight, to the pawnbrokers in the poorer districts who didn’t do the business they’d counted on. The carnival affected every street corner. In Vienna there was no station of life, no concierges’ fraternity, no sanitation men’s guild which did not have its own ball. And if the mood were right, no decent working man would hesitate to pawn his silver watch in order to buy his daughter a new fan or his wife a new fichu for their particular carnival celebration. If the mood were right. A lot of silver watches in a lot of pawnbroker windows would have indicated a feschen Fasching—a fun carnival.

  After New Year’s Day of 1889 the silver-watch index read very low in the pawnshops of Vienna. But soon a harbinger of fesch was heard in the land. The Hairdressers’ League proclaimed far and wide that Archduke Ludwig Viktor would send the band of the Archduke-Ludwig-Viktor Regiment to the Coiffeurs’ Dance. The gesture intimated that though the sovereign himself could not attend the carnival, some members of the Imperial Family might. And things started to look better fast.

  The Vienna Skating Club, which at first had difficulty disposing of tickets for its costume party, noticed a strong rise in demand. Indeed, a week before the event, the club could afford to be choosy about would-be participants; it announced that hunting attire would not be acceptable because it was too commonplace a costume.

  On January 15, the club produced the carnival’s first success. Electric lights and Bengal illuminations flickered over the ice where a real Siamese prince, furred-up as an Eskimo, glided about arm in arm with the real Countess Apponyi dressed as Yum-Yum of The Mikado. Rosa Papier, the great soprano (interpreter of new talents like Hugo Wolf), became a Biedermeier doll that did lovely figure eights, while a whole slew of chimneysweeps pursued polka-dotted red mushrooms. In actual life these skating fancies were for the most part money barons and real-estate comtesses. And what did that matter?

  Soon it seemed as though the city, wanting to make up for its earlier dejection, rushed into abandonment. It took its pleasures freely at the Opera Redoute, once the classic bluebloods’ revel. In 1889 as in other recent years, the aristocracy kept to itself in the opera boxes to watch the haute bourgeoisie below. But how unburgherlike the saturnalia down there! For this night—and for this one night only—a parquet floor had been laid across the top of the orchestra seats of the Court Opera so as to form one continuous level with the stage. Edi Strauss led his waltz orchestra in the middle. Hussar bands fluted and fifed in the promenade halls. Rainbow blizzards of confetti blew. Gentlemen cruised in tailcoats and top hats. Ladies must come masked, and that January dozens tripped about as Sarah Bernhardt, who had made such an exciting exit from town.

  As usual, the disguised sex took a gamut of liberties with the naked-faced one. In the scented melee any decolleté domino was free to touch any gentleman with her fan; to wipe a drop of sweat from his cheek; to steal his top hat; to flirt or flee or both at once; to invite him to a waltz, tease him into a goblet of wine or a caviar canapé; to tantalize him over her identity, play scullion or princess, whore or nun; to bandy iridescent ambiguities as they strolled, arm-linked strangers, along candlelit and champagne-splashed marble; and then, if she wished, to stay with him and come face to face when midnight tolled and all mas
ks fell.

  The next highlight came on January 22 with the Hotelkeepers’ Ball. Last year the Crown Prince’s presence as its sponsor had provoked a sumptuous exorbitance in the ladies’ costumes. This year it was feared that the expense necessary to breast the competition would discourage many from doing any breasting at all. Groundless pessimism. Rudolf was absent because of mourning, but he did send his First Lord Chamberlain Count Bombelles, and the sumptuousness was there in great numbers. So was Edi Strauss, conducting. So were Herr and Frau Sacher of the hotel and torte, laughing together and thus dispelling dismal rumors about their marriage. So were the unexcelled ladies’ favors, this year’s being silver sachet balls.

  Even such merriment was overshadowed by the Donaudampf-schifffahrtsgesellschaftsball, an evening with the longest name and the most panoramic decor. For this Danube Steamship Company’s Ball the entire premises of Harmony Hall turned into a giant steamship, complete with the swash of real water, the sounding of real foghorns, with sailors, sea nymphs, and a waltz band revolving vertically on a titanic paddle wheel. At the height of the nocturnal “voyage” the real Chief Admiral of the Austro-Hungarian Navy appeared on the “bridge” and watched gentlemen launch a number of ladies in “lifeboats” into the “sea.” But nobody really disembarked before 6 A.M.

  It wasn’t only the upper classes that caught the brightening beat. On January 15, the Master Bakers’ Ball swept through the halls of the Sofien Caterers. Male salt sticks whirled about with cleavaged apple strudels to an orchestra in chef hats, white aprons and black bow ties. “The gayest evening yet,” said Max Schlesinger, the Wiener Tagblatt’s senior ball critic, a man of uncompromising standards.

  A few days later the workers’ district of Hernals had its famous Laundrymaids’ Ball. Not just dressed-down duchesses came to frolic, but real pinch-’em laundrymaids in their working clothes of sleeveless bodices, pert head kerchiefs, and striped stockings visible to the knee during the faster waltzes. The aristocracy adored finding little adventures here.

  And then toward the end of January started the Gschnas Balls, with which Vienna’s carnival outdistanced all other cities still further. Gschnas was an ultralocal word, pronounceable and comprehensible only to the Viennese. Perhaps the closest semantic kin of Gschnas was the original meaning of the English glamour—namely, false magic. It was the kind of magic for which the Viennese had a heavenly weakness. Run by the city’s artists’ associations, the Gschnas fests celebrated with many-colored genius the defeat of gray reality.

  In January 1889 the outstanding Gschnas was the Fourth Dimension Ball, permitting no costumes or decorations that were even remotely rational or true to “regular” life. A lovely rose garden bloomed upside down from the ceiling with pre-Dadaist blitheness. At a banquet, lovely live witches in negligees rubbed up against knights made of solid wax. In a room called “Peking by the Danube,” scenes from Austrian history were enacted in the style of Chinese Opera. Waltzes jumbled into gongs and twangs.

  Throughout the city there was neither end nor limit to the Faschingslust—to the carnival-urge—to phantasmagoria, to the obsessive joy in sheer ecstatic make-believe. In the general stores, the food stalls up front were replaced by stands full of Japanese lanterns, masks, dominoes and fans. Dress shops turned into costume bazaars. At St. Stephen’s Square before the cathedral, the huge Rothberger clothing emporium stayed open all night to sell or rent tailcoats at any hour until dawn, with fitters at the ready—except, of course, for the night when the fitters had their own Fitters’ Ball on January 20.

  The ball season was also profitable for businessmen like Sigi Ernst, a name so proverbial that many of his advertisements did not need to specify what merchandise he sold. Everyone knew that Herr Ernst offered the best selection of condoms in the Imperial capital. On January 27, he informed the readers of the Neue Freie Presse that “in response to requests from his estimable clientele” he was opening an additional, more discreet entrance to his establishment in the inner courtyard of Kärtnerstrasse 45. We do not know whether he enjoyed the custom of Dr. Arthur Schnitzler (whose diary records a total of 419 unions with Jeanette by January 31) but one senses that the crush of business left Herr Ernst little time for waltzing.

  A number of physicians were also a bit pressed in savoring the joys of carnival, being so preoccupied with servicing its sores. Their advertisements mingled with those for masks and costumes. The same January 27 issue of the Neue Freie Presse, for example, featured a Dr. Hartmann’s announcement that a second “sequestered” waiting room had been set up at his office on Lobkowitz Platz 1, to accommodate patients with “secret diseases.”

  For Theodor Herzl that January was precisely what it was not for most others. For him it was a rather straitlaced time. He loved going to balls, both social ones and professional like that of Concordia, the journalists’ fraternity. Yet he always went with his “little” Julie. He was monogamous half a year before his marriage. In 1889 a Fasching night out meant to him not dissipation but dressing up to match some magnificent ensemble of his fiancée.

  He had, at any rate, little time for revelry. His ambition was still to have a play produced in the new Court Theater’s first season. But Hugo Wittmann, his co-author of their half-finished comedy Love Poachers, found himself overburdened. Wittmann, as chief cultural correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, had had to deliver copy on Sarah Bernhardt as well as on scores of other esthetic urgencies throughout the winter. Time wasn’t the only lack. Presently Wittmann saw no way of solving the principal problem in Love Poachers—namely to lend a stale boardwalk intrigue a fresh twist—and wanted to give up his side of the partnership. Herzl had to write him a panicked letter: “I couldn’t let you go under any circumstances…You have pulled our common cart, as I have, pulled it through the worst. We cannot part before we have either failed or succeeded.”

  In the end Wittmann persevered, not knowing that Herzl had become, secretly, so doubtful about Love Poachers that he thought of shifting from part-time dramatist to full-time journalist. He decided to approach the Berliner Tagblatt, which had published him before. In a carefully drafted proposal to its editor he noted that he had been offered fifty gulden per article from Moritz Szeps at the Wiener Tagblatt, that he received forty gulden per piece from the Neue Freie Presse, but that he would accept less from the Berliner Tagblatt in exchange for a formal, long-range commitment appointing him cultural correspondent in Vienna.

  The letter was never sent. At the last moment Herzl decided to go on risking it as a split-level free-lancer, half comedy manufacturer, half serious feuilletonist. He would keep up the fortwursteln after all: he wrote a long, complex, wonderfully stylish and trenchantly perceptive defense of Zola’s latest novel (Le Rêve) in the Neue Freie Presse; and spent Christmas and New Year’s finagling new plot complications for Love Poachers.

  And so Herzl danced few nights away during the carnival’s first month. He and Wittmann were toiling their play to a finish. Officially, Love Poachers was not submitted to the Court Theater until February 4. But Wittmann, being culture chief of the Neue Freie Presse, was rather cozy with the theater management and the play reached the Direktor’s office informally around the third week of January.

  The verdict: all very well and good, but let the authors reword some of their suggestive language.

  This judgment was handed down while carnality ranged barefaced through Fasching Vienna, sporting frankly at balls, in newspaper advertisements, on street corners. But on the Imperial and Royal stage even the most indirect mention of sex was impossible. No matter how compromising the intentions of a libertine character, his lines must be lily-white if spoken in the Court Theater.

  Herzl and Wittmann did some quick laundering. Example: scene three of the second act. Here a father and a daughter (their true relationship unknown in the resort hotel that is the setting) pretend to elope together; actually the father wants to help the daughter to escape from her engagement to a man she loathes. The “unexpurgated”
scene:

  THE FATHER (to the hotel concierge): The next express to Cologne leaves at one A.M. doesn’t it?

  CONCIERGE: Yes sir, at one A.M.

  FATHER: I need a sleeping-car compartment for the lady and one for me.

  CONCIERGE: Very well, sir. I shall reserve by telephone instantly.

  Mentioning a man, a woman, and sleeping compartments in one sentence? The Court Theater regarded conversation of the sort ribald, and never mind how chaste the framing circumstances. Messrs. Herzl and Wittmann had to clean up the sound of the situation. Their new lines read:

  FATHER: The next express for Cologne leaves at one A.M., doesn’t it?

  CONCIERGE: Yes sir. At one A.M.

  FATHER: I need one place in the ladies’ car, and one place for me, first class.

  After such changes the Court Theater accepted the play, with an anonymous by-line as the authors requested. It was scheduled for early production and indeed rehearsals began within a month. The Court Theater retained its purity, Herzl exulted, the carnival swelled on and so did the boom in condoms and secret diseases.

  Was Vienna overdoing it? Wasn’t there too much laxness? And too much official hypocrisy under whose cover the laxness continued uncorrected? A few citizens thought so. It was an opinion shared, for example, by some of the older fathers sitting around the rim of the International Trade Ball, a substantial burghers’ festival which in theory was not supposed to be overdone.