The fathers thought that this season’s Fasching, which had started so slowly, now looked as if it were accelerating too fast. It was getting a bit out of hand. Where was Steffi?
The fathers shook beards in unison with Steffi’s father. Where in God’s name was Steffi? Steffi had had her dance card filled out nicely in advance by young men, all of whom were known and well regarded. And she had danced off nicely with Partner No. 1 on Dance No. 1. But then the Gentlemen’s Island had gone into action.
The Gentlemen’s Island consisted of a dense black cloud of tailcoats at the center of the dance floor, an unpredictable core around which the dancers turned. Every so often a tailcoat would shoot out toward a pair, touch heels, bow, and take the lady away from her partner. Partner No. 1 had lost Steffi to such a depredation. And that was all right, that was Fasching, it couldn’t be helped. But when would the predator return her? Or had he in turn lost her to yet another rogue from the Gentlemen’s Island? It was now Dance No. 4. What was going on?
This year many Steffis seemed to be getting lost more often and staying lost longer. The other fathers didn’t like it any more than Steffi’s. It was an example of what was going wrong in the city. They began to talk about it, lighting grave cigars. They agreed it was a lack of discipline. That’s what kept the Empire from progress: a lack of discipline in morals and in politics. Elsewhere the carnival proceeded in saner fashion, and so did life in general. Other countries were on the move; right now in January they were executing cunning strategies, while Austria whirled about heedless. The recent engagement of Princess Alice of Hesse, now there was an instance. The fathers saw clearly through that one. They agreed that it was Bismarck himself who had sabotaged the Princess’s tender relationship with Prince Battenberg, the Austrophile. Why? So that she could become affianced to the Crown Prince of Russia. It was an alarming hint of Berlin’s tilt toward St. Petersburg, away from the Austrian alliance. Why did Parliament bicker instead of legislate when even Japan was about to regenerate itself with a new constitution modeled on Prussia’s? And speaking of Germany, that new military agreement between the Germans and the Italians—did anyone at the Foreign Ministry here in Vienna keep an eye on that? Who paid attention in Austria? What waltzing statesman or goblet-happy politician? Except for the ever sober and watchful Emperor—poor man, long may he live!—who couldn’t attend to everything himself? And who had, uh, Steffis, though not necessarily of Steffi’s sex, in his own family?
But the less said about that, the better. The fathers exchanged glances of deep knowledge and dark resignation, grimly content to share such problems with the All Highest father. Then they addressed themselves to Schönerer, the right-wing fanatic who took a good point like the excess of Jews in the intellectual professions and exploited it for hysterical self-promotion. No telling what unrest the man might create now that he had just been let out of jail. Then there were the Social Democrats who had just organized themselves into a party with a near-seditious manifesto condemning private property and class privileges. Not to mention those hotheads in Budapest lately who were trying to abolish German as the language of command in the Imperial and Royal Army. The Hungarians were out to destroy the Monarchy’s most important unifying force. And where was Steffi?
Yes, where? The mothers wanted to know, too. They kept their gold-handled lorgnettes poised for a sign of the girl. It was getting to be a bit much. What had happened to Steffi? The fathers banded together to search for her at the buffet. The mothers sipped tea and blamed Johann Strauss. In their youth this sort of thing had happened rarely. And in their mothers’ day—the pre-waltz day, never. The minuet, the quadrille, the cotillion, hadn’t that been much more graceful, easy, thrilling and yet safe? The ladies shook their coiffures. They could remember the waltz when it had still been hopped instead of sinuously glided as it was now. This polkalike hopping betrayed the waltz’s true origin. It came from the peasants! The ladies recalled their parents’ shock when those bouncy embraces had broken the gallant symmetry of a minuet into rank couples, if not couplings. But of course—and the ladies were all of one mind here—it was just the lasciviousness of the waltz which had attracted the nobility. That’s, why Johann Strauss had lent his divine melodies to the waltz: to please the aristocrats and, incidentally, to corrupt youth—heavens, there was Steffi at last.
High time, too. The gas chandeliers had already been turned down for the last five half-lit numbers. But there was Steffi, looking excited and exhausted at the same time, the egret feather in her hair a bit askew, pressed close to some inscrutable mustache from the Gentlemen’s Island. If Papa saw her! Perhaps it was best that Papa himself had, for some reason, still not returned from the buffet with the other fathers. Mama kept her eye on Steffi and shook her head over Johann Strauss.
Johann Strauss could have shaken his head over himself. If the Fasching was anybody’s, it was his. And yet it was not for him. He did not go to any of the thousands of balls where many hundreds of thousands of couples swirled to the melodies which had first sounded in the solitude of his study. He never danced himself, did not know how. He had become too rich and too preeminent to be a regular conductor like his brother Edi. And he was too tired to undergo again and again the Johann Strauss role of the honored guest. Above all, that resistant opera of his had to be seen through, and the best time to get on with it was at night.
But at least he was over his “phase.” He could bear the sight of other people again. So the billiards instructor came back to the palais in the Igelgasse to improve Adele’s cue positions for a better game with him before lunch. Afterwards the cartooning teacher arrived to show Johann how to make a funny drawing of Johannes Brahms. Various friends called for an evening of tarok in the Coffeehouse Room.
After they left, and while the city reveled, he sat alone by the harmonium, playing and penciling, penciling and playing another aria for his opera Pazman.
When he did go out, he avoided the carnival and went to the Ronacher, the big cabaret-revue theater.
“Unfortunately I’ve already ordered a box at the Ronacher,” he wrote his friend Adalbert Goldschmidt who had proposed a dinner with Anton Bruckner. “I would like to cancel it for your and Bruckner’s sake. But I cannot change my plans because I have a rendezvous there fat the Ronacher] with friends. I hate the very idea of such an evening. Just now I have a lot of work, and such get-togethers always last much longer than seems necessary. They keep me from my task. Evenings like this start at the Ronacher and end at Brady’s [Brady’s Wintergarten, a popular nightclub] and usually don’t see me returning home before dawn—which I hate. Then I get very upset over my frivolity, and get so very angry at what can no longer be undone that I can’t accomplish a thing in the days which follow. I just pace up and down in my study and can’t concentrate. I can only work when I have no petty upsets…”
The carnival lit up Professor Bruckner’s isolation. After his Christmas sojourn in Kremsmünster he was back in Vienna, teaching at the Conservatory, playing the organ at the Palace Chapel, re-reworking the Third Symphony, sketching out the Ninth, and being alone. He saw very few of his colleagues. Johann Strauss was one of his remote celebrity acquaintances; but when plans were made for a meeting, something always happened to abort them.
He suspected that “something” might be the Brahms-Hanslick clique, his shrewd enemies with whom Johann Strauss cultivated friendships. He feared he wouldn’t feel welcome at most of the city’s Fasching affairs. He felt very awkward with the sophisticated dissipation at which Vienna was so good.
On January 11, Bruckner did go to one affair: the Upper Austrian Foresters’ Ball at the Blumensaal. As the city’s most prestigious Upper Austrian, he had been invited as honorary guest. For the occasion he had asked his Frau Kachelmayer to fish out black socks instead of the customary white from the disorder of his clothes cupboard. The foresters were mostly employees of Viennese magnates with Upper Austrian possessions. In a way they were salaried hicks like himself; they spoke
his dialect. At their urging he finally took a dirndled maiden by the waist and for the length of an oom-pah-pah Ländler bobbed around the hall with her.
Then he was done, thank God. That January he was more uncertain with women than ever. During his Christmas stay at Kremsmünster another adorable young girl had confounded his blood. Her name was Mathilde Fessl, a lawyer’s daughter, and she had asked him nice questions about music in the most pleasing way. But then they’d started talking about Lent. And he couldn’t believe his ears. She was a freethinker! An infidel! An atheist girl of seventeen! To Bruckner the world was more incomprehensible than ever. No wonder it was the kind of world that celebrated Brahms but acted so meanly towards him. It was not the kind of world which set him dancing.
Brahms did no dancing at all, his countless ball invitations notwithstanding. Fasching amused him, as the Viennese did in general, but it was much too unbuttoned a joy for his North German temper. Besides, he never changed his regimen of rising at 5 A.M. And even if the carnival had kept more sensible hours, say, right after his nap in the early afternoon, Brahms would still have been too busy for extracurricular gaieties in January 1889.
There was fancy work to be done. Joseph Joachim, the violin virtuoso, was in town again, preparing another Brahms concert. The composer himself would accompany on the piano in his newly published Violin Sonata in D-minor. For such personal appearances Brahms left absolutely nothing unprepared, down to the bows he planned to take. For these he preferred the conductor to pull him, with gentle force, out of his hiding place behind the curtain. He liked to tune his applause as if it were a fine piano. That was his carnival.
During Fasching Dr. Sigmund Freud hid himself with much more conviction. He was more of an outsider than ever, taking no part at all in the carnival. The city sang with a million throats, danced with millions of legs, but he was deaf to rhythm. Quite literally. Frau Freud suggested that they take advantage of post-Christmas sales and buy a piano, so that little Mathilde could play it one day. But the master of the house laid down a veto which lasted into his most prosperous years. No piano, no violin, nothing of the kind. He proscribed music in the world’s most musical city.
Carnival disrupted his one conviviality, the Saturday tarok game. Dr. Rie and Dr. Königswärt, card partners and fellow physicians at the Pediatric Institute, went to balls on some tarok nights. Freud had no room for Fasching in his budget. He had to husband money and time for more essential concerns. At this season his late-afternoon walks around the Ringstrasse often took place in a darkness crowded and brightened by people in evening dress on their way to excitement. “What a stage for the sparkling, beauty-minded, thoughtless world…It’s a marvelous tumult in which to be alone…” A teenage Freud had written that about Vienna’s World’s Fair in 1873. Now it was still true for him as he strode through the carnival of 1889. He’d arrive in his study at the Maria Theresienstrasse, a continent away from the masked faces that passed laughing below his second-floor window. And the paper on hysteria, waiting for him at his desk, removed him still further. Not even friendly colleagues like Breuer or Chrobak could keep him company here. His paper took him on a journey longer and more unauthorized than he realized himself.
He began that paper as a neurologist. He ended it as a psychologist. In crossing this watershed he had to separate himself from the great fathers of neuropathology—Helmholtz, Brücke, Meynert—titans whose books had been his scripture, whose ideas he had admired. To them, and therefore to nineteenth-century science, man’s consciousness was firmly embedded in the anatomy of the nervous system. Freud started his paper with that premise intact. But as he went on he arrived at an insight which subverted the ground on which his mentors stood: He saw that consciousness was a world unto itself, a world of depths that could outwit and overrule the anatomical verities of traditional medicine.
Freud worked on this paper before, during and after the carnival of 1889. The title: “Quelques Considerations pour une Étude Comparative des Paralysies Motrices, Organiques et Hysteriques” (“Some Points in a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Paralyses”). He wrote it in French, perhaps logically so, since he aimed to publish it in Archives de Neurologie, edited by Jean Charcot. But the mind is indeed a devil of deviousness that sneaks essence into incidentals. It was no accident that Freud lived pianoless in a rigorously musical town. That he wrote in a language no one else was talking around him. And that he, apparently deaf to the abandonments of Fasching, had begun to listen to an unheard-of wantonness inside the soul.
A thousand meters down along the Ringstrasse, Arthur Schnitzler did have traffic with Fasching. There was no way to avoid it, even if he wanted to. It poured right into his house. On New Year’s Day his father gave a house ball. The date was a bit premature since officially carnival didn’t begin until five days later. But the fete was held to toast the forthcoming marriage of Arthur’s sister Gisela. And when Privy Councillor Professor Dr. Johann Schnitzler invited, the world came. Fiacres with the great stars of Court Opera and Court Theater drew up to Burgring 1. Charlotte Wolter and Katharina Schratt were there, as were others of Professor Schnitzler’s patients and friends. Naturally Arthur attended. But he could not bring his sweet girl, Jeanette.
Arthur kept busy with other Fasching matters, also directed by his father. Professor Schnitzler, in his capacity as head of the Polyclinic, had charged his son with preparations for the Polyclinic Ball and all the tediousness that involved. Early in January, tedious became downright unpleasant. It turned out that a member of Arthur’s ball committee, acting on his own, had placed an advertisement for the affair in the Deutsches Volksblatt, an anti-Semitic sheet. Young Schnitzler called a meeting and after some ugly exchanges obtained a vote which declared the man’s action arbitrary and out of order. The affair was settled…for the moment.
At the same time something more cheerful happened. On January 15, Arthur’s first contribution to a prominent literary weekly broke into print. An der schönen blauen Donau finally published “My Friend Ypsilon.” It was a slight, arch piece about an oversensitive writer who in the end falls victim to the nemesis he’d invented for his protagonist. Oddly enough, the opening of the tale describes this author as being “sad when he was working on a sentimental theme…for example…about a prince who died of a broken skull…”
At the month’s end that last phrase would take on reverberations sounding to the ends of the Empire.
Chapter 20
The final week of January, Rudolf’s name kindled a sensation in Budapest politics even though he himself remained in Vienna.
Leading up to the shock was a more familiar overture, namely Hungarian students screaming for their country’s autonomy. At Budapest University, demonstrations had been as regular as lectures. This January, however, some fire-eaters shouted for the end of the common customs union between the two halves of the Empire. The demand struck at the lifelines that kept the Dual Monarchy breathing.
Newspapers and coffeehouses buzzed in Vienna. Then it seemed as though the commotion would subside again. Fasching waltzes closed over the unsuitable assonance. Only people like Gustav Mahler were seriously inconvenienced by it. That’s why State Secretary Baron Bernizcky kept a close watch on him from Vienna. After all the Baron, in charge of all of His Majesty’s theaters everywhere, had appointed the young Austrian head of the Budapest Royal Opera House. Nobody knew better than Bernizcky that in those overheated precincts music was apt to turn political if not downright martial. Mahler had to run his Opera as though it were a castle under siege. So far, thank heaven, the boy was doing well.
Actually Mahler had engaged the problem at the very outset of his tenure. Magyar irritabilities must be placated; Magyar caprices, pampered. Mahler reined in his own touchiness. He took Hungarian language lessons and made the most of two Jewish Hungarian friends who helped him assimilate. He had Moritz Warman decorate his hotel apartment à la Hongroise. And Sigmund Singer, through his connection to the Hungarian nobility (less anti-
Semitic than its Austrian counterpart), briefed Mahler on the cultural tastes of local aristocrats. Within five days of his arrival in Budapest in the fall of 1888, Mahler dined with Count Albert Apponyi, a power in the Budapest Parliament.
Yes, in Vienna Bernizcky could report good things to the Emperor who was also King of all Magyars. With characteristic speed Mahler had learned to adopt Hungarian urgencies overnight and promptly voiced them in his first speech to his staff. Henceforward, he said, there would be no more truckling to foreign stars at the Budapest Opera. No more prima ballerinas like Madame dell’Era, who had demanded and received a six-horse gala coach with a Negro page at her disposal for her entire three-week engagement. No indulging a Pauline Lucca who would only sing if eight new costumes were made specially for her according to her bizarre specifications. No more foreign-star cult. From now on the Royal Budapest Opera House would develop a Hungarian ensemble and draw more on Hungarian talent in singing, dancing, designing and composing.
Almost instantly Mahler had managed to initiate the magyarizing of the casts for the fall productions. By January the house was in a fury of activity under the leadership of this gnarled young prodigy, this odd little Austrian giant, with his jerky-gaited hurry, his stuttering eloquence, his driving ubiquity. Official Vienna noted it all with satisfaction.
He was bending the stupendous range of his energies to a task that demanded them: the creation, for the first time ever, of a Ring Cycle sung in Hungarian. He didn’t let himself be distracted even by the Vienna premiere of his own opera, Die Drei Pintos, on January 18, nor by the rather viperish treatment he received at the hands of the Viennese press.
One would have thought that the Viennese reviewers could—like State Secretary Bernizcky—appreciate that the man’s musicianship had smoothed Austro-Hungarian relations. One might have hoped that the carnival at least had sweetened the critics’ tempers. Not a bit. They were in no Fasching mood when it came to Mahler’s contribution to the Weber-Mahler opera.
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