The Vienna Salonblatt despised Mahler for “exploiting with his concoctions the divinely gifted author of Der Freischütz.” The Abendpost accused Mahler of monotonous rhythms and a pseudo-Wagnerian garishness which distorted the charm of Weber’s melodies. The supreme Hanslick in the Neue Freie Presse allowed that “Herr August [sic] Mahler” showed some skill in orchestration and in the mimicking of several Weber idioms. But he sniffed at Mahler’s cumbrous use of percussion and found his brass tones heavy for a light opera like Die Drei Pintos. He also noted that the public seemed rather bored during the second act.
Mahler hadn’t even come to Vienna for the occasion—all too wisely as it turned out. He forged ahead with his Ring Cycle in Budapest. But here, too, the critics started to complain. The Royal Opera was being magyarized, yes. But that meant the banishment of the very divas who had given the house a cosmopolitan glitter and pulled in the landed grandees from their puszta manors. Now the grandees no longer came so often, for what was being offered was just plain good music. The Princesses Esterházy and the Princesses Palffy, if they did appear at all, no longer dressed up as much.
That was one side of the carping. On the other, nationalists growled that this new German-speaking conductor imposed the ultra-Teutonic Wagner on the Magyar tongue while Hungarian opera composers were still being criminally neglected.
Official Vienna now had less reason to rejoice. Mahler forged ahead. He couldn’t help it if Princess Esterházy wore her second-best stomacher to Rigoletto. Nor was it his fault that neither Mozart nor Verdi nor Wagner had been born in Debrecen. He persisted, ignoring some very sour ironies. For example, one of his nationalist scourges, the Budapest journalist Maurus Vavrinecz, had so poor a command of Hungarian that he wrote his anti-Mahler anti-German maledictions in German, then had them translated for publication in the fanatically Magyar journal Fövárosi Lapok.
Mahler forged ahead. Day and night he rehearsed the Ring Cycle; lived, slept, ate in the opera house: threatened, begged, seduced, overwhelmed his singers and musicians. On the twenty-sixth of January he got into his tailcoat, shuffled to the lectern, bowed, and lifted the baton for the world premiere of Das Rheingold in Hungarian. The music surged, the Rhine Maidens soared—and the audience screamed in panic. One of the Maidens suddenly sagged in the ropes. She had fainted in midair because she had seen flames licking toward her. A fire had broken out on stage.
People cried, some stampeded. Mahler, monomaniacal as ever, kept conducting and compelled the orchestra to contain the terror with the sheer force of great sound. The fire was put out. The performance proceeded. Mahler forged ahead.
At the final curtain the entire house stood up to shout its homage as only Hungarians can. In the newspapers the next day most critics jubilated. Even Vavrinecz’s translated gruffness had to dole out some praise.
The glory was Mahler’s in Budapest that week. Yet Rudolf, indirectly, dominated the news. Suddenly opera was upstaged by Parliament.
On the twenty-fifth of January—that is, on the eve of the magyarization of Richard Wagner—Count Stefan (Pista) Károlyi rose to make an astounding speech to his fellow deputies. He attacked the new Army Bill which required Hungarian reserve officers to pass a German-language examination. Others opposed the bill, too, of course. But—Károlyi! Károlyi was known to be among Rudolf’s closest hunting companions. In fact, the Budapest papers ran his speech together with the report that he had been asked by the Crown Prince to host a reception for a common friend returning from an African safari.
Until now the Crown Prince had publicly and passionately upheld German as the single, unifying language of command in the motley-tongued Empire. Count Károlyi would never assume the contrary view without his high friend’s encouragement. Had Rudolf joined the Magyar nationalists? Was the rumor true that he would let himself be crowned Hungarian King? That he would turn against Franz Joseph and take away the royalty from his Imperial and Royal father? What had happened to Rudolf?
Chapter 21
Many things had happened to the Crown Prince. Among these the most insidious might have been a twinge of hope.
He had spent the final days of 1888 in Austro-Hungarian winter chic at Abbazia, the Monarchy’s Cannes on the Adriatic. It was warm there and sunny and very archducal and dull. Orchids, palms, exotic shrubbery ornamented the gardens of the Villa Angiolina where the Crown Princess resided and where he could stand it for barely forty-eight hours. He sat through the ennui of one soiree with the Grand Duke of Toscana and went on the obligatory trip on Archduke Johann’s yacht Bessie. Then all the talk about horse races and dog breeding and King Milan’s old bedroom problems with Queen Natalie in Serbia became too much. On the twenty-ninth of December he took the night train back to Vienna.
In the capital the cold air pricked him into new life. He did not yet take flight into new trysts with Mary Vetsera. He felt like standing his ground. On January 1, an Army Command Conference took place to discuss revisions in promotion procedure. He was the Inspector General but his presence had not been requested because (so the War Minister explained) His Imperial Highness was thought to be in Abbazia. Well, His Imperial Highness was no longer in Abbazia but appeared, invited or not, at the conference. He spoke out in favor of curtailing aristocratic privilege as a factor in rank promotion. There seemed to be the impression that the generals listened. On January 2, he answered cheerfully New Year’s greetings from Berthold Frischauer, Moritz Szeps’s right hand at the Tagblatt: “May the year 1889 not be too bad for all of us. May it bring us stirring, interesting months. I hope we shall meet again this year on a few interesting political expeditions.”
Yet the first expedition he was summoned to was apolitical, uninteresting, debilitating. He had to join the Emperor’s hunt at Mürzsteg in the province of Styria. Rudolf liked the chase, but not with his father’s retinue, which consisted of just the kind of archducal dunderpates Rudolf had escaped in Abbazia. The Emperor’s formality with him, and the various highnesses’ endless asininities, pressed on his nerves. Just two years ago, on this very shoot in Mürzsteg he had almost shot his father by mistake.
This time the Mürzsteg hunt passed harmlessly, except to animals. It was on Rudolf’s return to Vienna on the sixth that January turned difficult. Carnival had begun. This year it flung over his shoulders a sort of epauletted straitjacket.
The season was much more oppressive for him than in previous years. Usually Emperor and Crown Prince would appear at a number of balls together, an assignment not altogether onerous for Rudolf. At least his father would never linger on such occasions. As soon as Franz Joseph had done his duty at the cercle (the reception), having strolled the round, having extended the favor of minimal chats, he would turn to the ball president with the ritual nine concluding words: “Es war sehr schön. Es hat mich sehr gefreut.” “It was very nice. I enjoyed it very much.” Then His Majesty would depart to fanfares along an avenue of bowed heads. Afterward Rudolf could either leave himself, free for the rest of the night, or stay on without the constriction of the All Highest presence.
In January 1889, however, Court Mourning eliminated all balls from Franz Joseph’s schedule. Instead the monarch gave a great number of dinners which Rudolf must attend in their entirety. In addition, Franz Joseph instructed his son to host further dinners himself. And that was even harder for a Crown Prince already wracked by protocol and emptiness.
Again and again he had to sit all evening long tethered to one gilded chair or another, bound over to the wrinkled prattle of some duchess to his right, some jeweled bore to his left. Highnesses from abroad thronged to Vienna for the season and he had to labor through the posturings of high hospitality. On the sixth of January he must give a dinner for Leopold of Bavaria. On the night of the seventh he must take Leopold to the Ronacher Theater for a cabaret revue he had seen three times before. The evening after that must be spent at his father’s state table; the Emperor was entertaining Russian potentates. On the night following he must dine the Russi
ans—the Russians whom he so hated, of all people—at his own apartments.
And that was just the beginning. More princes had announced their visits. He became the prisoner of his Lord Chamberlain’s schedule, of sashed, bemedaled drudgery. Court dinners, diplomatic dinners, cabinet dinners also lay ahead. And as if that weren’t enough, Crown Princess Stephanie arrived from Abbazia on the ninth. She just adored playing the hostess with tiara and long train. One could count on her to prolong hours excruciating to Rudolf.
Sometimes during those endless evenings he managed to stroll away for a quick glance from the window. Outside, the Fasching ranged through square and street, free as the wind. Figures flashed up in the lantern light, in the masks of their dreams. People outside were playing tag with their most drastic fantasies. He, the Crown Prince, who was himself the fantasy of many others, could only go back to the confinement of his dinner seat.
The middle of the month brought other Army Command Conferences, this time on a revision of drill. Again Rudolf made sure to participate. He spoke up, and his Uncle Albrecht, the Archduke and Field Marshal, gave a slight smile. It was to Albrecht’s smile, not to Rudolf’s words, that the generals responded. Their orders were to salute and to ignore the heir apparent.
The inanity of his vacuum became less and less endurable. He had a puissant mind, made more powerful still by an excellent education. He had an imperial temper and the impatience of an unemployed talent of thirty. Everywhere people hymned his charm, his grace, the certainty with which he would lift his realm to greatness—someday. But right now he must do nothing, touch nothing, say nothing, think nothing, move nothing. He was charged up and tuned up, and forced to glisten in emptiness, a coroneted marionette.
Politically his impotence continued. In Serbia, for example, King Milan, the crumbling Austrian satrap, crumbled still further. But the Austrian government did not—as Rudolf advised in still more memos on the subject—shift support to a more popular alternative. Here, too, the Crown Prince must look forward, helplessly, to inheriting yet another avoidable danger.
Even his social position was laughable. He was the Emperor’s first and most glamorous subject. Yet he could not sponsor a ball for his favorite cause. Together with Vienna’s great surgeon Dr. Theodor Billroth he had founded the Rudolfiner Association bearing his name. It aimed to provide nursing care outside the limitations and prejudices of the Catholic Sisters who had controlled nursing almost exclusively so far. Despite resistance from clerical forces around the Emperor, the Rudolfiner had become a respectable institution. But it had never obtained all the funding it needed. The camarilla undercut it quietly and effectively. Rudolf, at whose feet were laid the protectorships of numberless fetes, deserving and undeserving, this same Rudolf found himself unable to launch one carnival event on behalf of his Rudolfiner.
Those were the walls that shut him in. He was growing tired of pushing against them. He no longer used Mayerling as a retreat in which to frame anonymous articles for the Wiener Tagblatt. Writing had always been his best recourse. By January he lacked not just the time but the energy and the concentration to take firm hold of his pen.
And he could cope less and less with inner pressures. There was an old gonorrheal infection whose recurrence he feared. He took morphium for that persistent cough. And a bit more morphium and more champagne-Iaced-with-cognac against all those hours, dawn after palace dawn, when he could ring for his footmen to bring him everything except sleep. “I am,” he sometimes said to friends, “the most nervous man in the most nervous century.”
Of course there was a quick way out of the nineteenth century. For quite a while now the suspicion had been with him that he would be ground up slowly but wholly, long before the coming of the twentieth. He’d been strolling toward that other, faster exit. And then away from it again. And then around it. It led beyond a dark rim, into the mystery of the Prague Jewess on whose grave he had dropped the too-late roses and whose face he saw exhumed in the features of Mary Vetsera.
“I must make a confession…” Mary Vetsera wrote her nurse on January 14. “I was with him yesterday evening, from seven to nine. We both lost our heads. Now we belong to each other, body and soul. On Saturday I hope to get away from a ball, and then I’ll rush back to him.”
Immediately after writing this, she went to Vienna’s most expensive gift shop, Rodeck’s, and ordered a gold cigarette case with the inscription, January 13—in gratitude to destiny. It was a present to her lover.
Lovers they had finally become on the evening of the thirteenth. Very soon they became still more: partners in an ultimate pact. Actually Rudolf had proposed the idea of suicide to another woman first. Mitzi Caspar, whom he still saw, had heard it the month before. But Mitzi did not live as close to the cliff as he. She had laughed at the suggestion—surely it was a joke—and he pursued it no further.
Mary Vetsera did not laugh. She cried, she hugged him, she merged the idea into their passion. It made her glow. She was already the queen of fashion. But fashion staled so fast. Soon her name would assume a luster that decades could not tarnish: Mary Vetsera, Crown Princess before History.
After the decision was talked out, agreed to, covenanted, he felt different about her. He no longer needed to be so very secretive about their relationship. The liaison between his flesh and hers was less important now than the affair ahead, between their skeletons. The skull he kept on his desk: was it important what hair it had once worn? No, only the bones of Mary Vetsera were unique to him. The life washing around them was more ordinary, the life of a girl among the many other girls he had known.
And that in itself he found freeing. He was not infatuated—had he ever been?—with the breathing Mary. Anything touchable could bind or betray him no longer. And he discovered another freedom. He played his own life as if it were a mere gaudy flashback from a much more solid and enduring vantage point. After the Decision in mid-January, the world had turned into a cascade of make-believe which would expire very soon…as quickly as Fasching vanished on Ash Wednesday.
From then on he had his own secret carnival. The roles assigned to him by his official heraldic life—they all became costumes worn by a rogue to different brief balls. Henceforth all his enemies would be stalemating nothing but a mask.
In the last two weeks of the month Rudolf managed to impersonate flawlessly several disparate men. On January 15, the deposed sovereign of Bulgaria, Prince Alexander Battenberg, arrived in Vienna. Rudolf screwed on his Crown Princely countenance and bore the full brunt of etiquette. He visited Battenberg in his suite at the Imperial Hotel; was at home for the Prince’s return visit to the Palace; with Stephanie gave a dinner for Battenberg in his apartments; took the Prince to see Wilhelm Tell at the opera and to eat Tafelspitz at the Sacher.
He did all this so well that on February 1, i.e., on the other side of the brink, Battenberg wrote an amazed condolence: “I had the good fortune of seeing His Imperial Highness fit and well and in his fullest prime, of talking to him, and of deriving pleasure and delight from being face to face with this magnificent prince.”
But Rudolf also seemed fit during more odious rigmaroles in mid-January. With the Crown Princess he bowed and smiled during a dinner they gave for high Court officials; during another dinner tendered to ambassadors of the diplomatic corps; during yet another where the guest of honor was Prime Minister Taaffe, his second most effective frustrator. And with number one, the Emperor, he attended a ballet evening. They saw Puppenfee and Wiener Waltzer, sitting together in the Imperial Box of the Court Opera on January 22: smiling, smiling, smiling at ovations tendered them by their subjects.
He appeared alone at the Carl Theater on January 15 and applauded von Suppé’s operetta La Vie Parisienne. And on the twenty-third he went to the Theater an der Josefstadt for Die Gigerln von Wien, the comedy success of the season. A great cheer broke around him when he was discovered in the audience. He deserved it, too, if only for his contribution to the play’s theme. A Gigerl was a Viennes
e gay blade, absurdly chic and sportive in costume and in manner, a caricature of the ideal represented by the Crown Prince himself.
In those January weeks he carried the ideal to wonderful extremes. If his evenings unrolled luminously at soirees and entertainments, he was on his feet again at sunrise with rifle and binoculars. Despite the cold, he put up a good show in Lower Austrian shoots. He brought down six wide-tailed eagles at Mannswörth on January 13; bagged three more at Orth on the twentieth and again three on the twenty-first. On the twenty-third he killed five antlered deer and two marten; and on the twenty-fifth, stalking some ice-free ponds in the Danubian swampland with Archduke Otto, he got no less than twenty-six ducks.
But he also found time for work on the second volume of The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture. In such activities he was the amazingly informal people’s prince. Unlike other archdukes he never summoned commoners through his Lord Chamberlain. To ask his co-editors for a conference he sent each a cordial handwritten note on plain unmonogrammed stationery: an unaffected straightforwardness which Hanslick, music consultant on the project, thought “characteristic of the Crown Prince’s attractive and modern simplicity of manner.”
Perhaps it was also “modern” of Rudolf to conclude at another Army Command Conference on the afternoon of January 22 that he, Crown Prince, Field Marshal-Lieutenant and Inspector General, was being ignored once too often. Perhaps in his “modern” alienation he let himself be drawn by Hungarian friends into an adventure which would explode with Count Károlyi’s speech before the Budapest Parliament on the twenty-fifth. Or, more likely, he wasn’t really in it at all. Flirting with sedition was just another mask-thin part. Politics was pretense, costume paint, now that it no longer had substance or hope. His plan with Mary Vetsera had reduced the world to vapor. To phantasmagoric preamble at best.
A Nervous Splendor Page 20