Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  Ticket in hand, Alma tried her best to banish Labor from her thoughts and focus instead on the conviviality of this Golden Hall with its gilded ceiling and caryatids of carved oak. This was her cathedral, her sanctum sanctorum, this splendid concert hall that boasted the best acoustics in all the empire.

  She perused the program. The Vienna Philharmonic and the Singverein’s choir of three hundred voices were performing Bruckner’s Mass in D Minor, as well as the premiere of a brand-new piece called Frühlingsbegräbnis by the twenty-eight-year-old composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. Zemlinsky himself was conducting.

  When the young man made his way to the podium, he struck her as comical, almost a caricature, with his chinless head and bulging eyes. But the instant he started conducting, he held her and the entire auditorium in the palm of his hand. To achieve such mastery so young! Her chest ached with her own frustration, her shame at Labor’s thinking she wasn’t good enough.

  Zemlinsky conducted Bruckner with the utmost competence, but it was his own work, performed after the intermission, that had her perched on the edge of her seat, her heart pounding in awe. Frühlingsbegräbnis, the Burial of Spring, was a cantata for orchestra, choir, and solo soprano and baritone set to an allegorical poem by Paul Heyse. Though dedicated to the memory of Brahms, the piece, with its stirring horns and woodwinds, seemed more reminiscent of Wagner. Alma drank down the music as if it were vintage champagne. It seemed at once whimsical and breathtakingly innovative. During the dramatic finale, she completely forgot herself.

  “Bravo!” she cried, her program flying as she leapt to her feet and cheered with gusto until she realized that she was the only one offering a standing ovation while the rest of the audience delivered a spatter of lukewarm applause. Making a spectacle of herself in a city where it was the greatest faux pas to clap out of turn.

  From his podium, Zemlinsky stared at her, his face as red as hers must be. A young lady in the first row—Zemlinsky’s sister, his sweetheart?—turned around to throw Alma a glacial stare. Even Labor glanced in her direction, as if recognizing her voice.

  Chastened, Alma sank back into her seat and ducked her face inside her boa. But she couldn’t stop smiling no matter how much of a spectacle she’d made of herself. Zemlinsky’s music was the purest elixir, raising her spirits all the way to the ornate ceiling. How could she not abandon decorum in the face of such genius?

  A cloud of mirth enveloped Alma when she stepped back out into the cold and headed to the tram stop in the gathering darkness. The icy cobbles underfoot were so slick that she had to take tiny, careful steps. Farther down the street, she saw a man take a spill, his hat and familiar walnut cane spinning out of his grasp. Too proud to shout for help, Labor kept struggling to stand only to fall again.

  “Herr Labor!” she shouted, rushing toward him as quickly as she could without falling on the ice herself.

  Alma took his cane in one hand and his arm in the other, and pulled him to his feet. How had she never noticed how slight he was, how thin and frail?

  “It’s me, Alma Schindler,” she added, though he seemed to know exactly who she was.

  “Bless you, child,” he said, when she handed him his hat and cane. His voice was gruff, as though he was trying to hide his embarrassment. “I’ll be fine now.”

  “We’re going the same way, are we not?” Alma kept a firm grasp on his arm lest he fall again. “We can walk to the tram together.”

  It amazed her that she could be so congenial to this man who kept shattering her dreams. If that’s the best you can do, you better give up. But even Labor at his gloomiest couldn’t dampen her high spirits after hearing Zemlinsky’s music. Or so she told herself.

  “Alexander von Zemlinsky is truly first-rate,” she told Labor. “Weren’t you impressed by Frühlingsbegräbnis?”

  “I’ll grant that it showed some originality,” her teacher said, “although it lacked both melody and unity.”

  “But he’s only twenty-eight!” Alma could simply not quell her enthusiasm. “One day he’ll be as revered as Wagner. A talent that brilliant can’t go unnoticed.”

  “Fräulein Schindler, I think it can and often does. Most genius in this world goes unrecognized, unacknowledged. Buried and forgotten.”

  “But then it dies,” she said, with a nauseated pitch in her stomach, as though it were her own music that Labor had harpooned yet again. Was he implying that she should abandon hope?

  “Maybe it does die,” Labor said, with an underlying melancholy.

  Was he so harsh to her, Alma wondered, because his own compositions had been mocked and derided, his own dreams dashed to pieces? What if he was simply too jaded to fairly appraise her work? To think he couldn’t even summon up the least excitement for someone as gifted as Zemlinsky. Find a new teacher! Resolve filled her. Now or never. You have no more time to lose.

  Several days later, at Berta Zuckerkandl’s soiree, Alma learned what she could of Alexander von Zemlinsky from her hostess’s store of facts and gossip. His grandfather hailed from Hungary. The aristocratic von added to his surname was an ornamental flourish of his father’s invention—none of them were descended from nobility. His family was Jewish, educated, and poor. Zemlinsky lived at home with his parents and sister, whom he supported with his income as kapellmeister of the Carlstheater and with what he earned as a freelance conductor.

  “He also teaches composition,” Frau Zuckerkandl said. “Arnold Schoenberg is taking counterpoint lessons from him.”

  Counterpoint lessons! Alma could not keep herself from smiling. It was as if the Muses themselves had brought Zemlinsky to her attention.

  “But I saved the best morsel for last,” Frau Zuckerkandl said. “His opera, Es war einmal, is premiering at the Court Opera in two weeks. Mahler himself is conducting.”

  Golden sparks of light seemed to fly through the air like confetti. Alma wanted to grab Frau Zuckerkandl’s bejeweled hands and polka across the room with her. I was right about Zemlinsky! And if she had been right in believing in him, perhaps she wasn’t crazy to have a little faith in herself.

  “May I go to the opera with you for the premiere, Frau Zuckerkandl?” she asked, imagining herself viewing Zemlinsky’s triumph from the Zuckerkandl’s private balcony.

  “I’m so sorry, Alma. I already invited Helene Gottlieb and her parents, and I fear the performance is sold out. But there will be other performances. If you want to meet Herr Zemlinsky himself”—Frau Zuckerkandl smiled deliciously, as though she could see the hopes that danced inside Alma’s head—“he’s invited to the Conrats’ party at the end of the month. As are you, dear Alma.”

  The Conrats’ fete was held in honor of their daughter Ilse visiting from Brussels, where she was studying sculpture with the renowned Charles van der Stappen. This was to be the party of the season, with the most influential people in all Vienna in attendance. Accordingly, Alma made sure to wear her brand-new gown of sea-green silk with accents of midnight-blue velvet. She fastened a collier of moonstones around her throat.

  The Conrats lived in lordly style in the Walfischgasse, in the very heart of Vienna, only a short stroll from the Court Opera and the Musikverein. After the servants ushered Alma and her family through the colossal double doors, she wandered through the four palatial reception rooms that swarmed with people, each lady more elegant than the next. She wondered how she would even find Zemlinsky amid this crush of bodies.

  “Alma!” Erica Conrat embraced her and kissed her cheeks. “Come see Ilse.”

  Her friend led her to the throng of admirers gathered around Ilse, who stood beaming beside her marble bust of Johannes Brahms. The sculpture portrayed the late composer as a benevolent patriarch with a long flowing beard. Brahms, who had died two years ago, had been a close family friend.

  “Ilse, congratulations!” Alma cried. “It’s a masterpiece.”

  She tried to mask her monumental envy of her friend’s success, her body of work that was literally carved in stone. No one coul
d dispute her artistry or dedication. Ilse seemed years beyond Alma in maturity and sophistication even though she was a few months younger.

  “Alma, you look like a vision tonight,” Ilse said, hugging her. “One day I must sculpt you!”

  But Ilse’s attention was soon diverted when the director of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts came to shake her hand. The man wanted to commission Ilse to sculpt a Brahms memorial for the Vienna Central Cemetery! They all toasted Ilse’s success with Heidsieck champagne. Alma smiled until her face hurt. Why did Ilse’s accomplishments make her feel so small?

  Meanwhile, Erica confided to Alma about her dreams of attending university. “Since they won’t admit women to the School of Medicine, I’ve applied to study art history. If they accept me, I’ll be the only woman studying for a degree in the entire department.”

  “But won’t that be lonely?” Alma asked her. “Won’t you feel odd and singled out?”

  “At least I might find a husband who respects my mind,” her friend said shyly. Though not yet seventeen, Erica sounded as though she had her life firmly mapped out.

  Alma reflected how brave Erica was. The Conrat sisters were boldly striding into their futures, venturing where none of their sex had previously trod. Wasn’t that what she herself aspired to with her composing? But she felt none of their unwavering determination, only a chorus of doubts. If only she possessed a fraction of their fortitude, that long-term vision to turn her dreams into reality.

  When Erica excused herself to greet other guests, Alma wandered through the crowd, scanning the faces to see if Zemlinsky had arrived. Instead, she chanced to overhear the utterances of young Otto Weininger. “It’s all very well to make such a to-do of a flat-chested, frizzy-haired sculptress,” he said. “She’s too plain to find a husband. This entire New Woman business only serves to benefit mannish spinsters like her.”

  Alma burned to hear him mocking Ilse—in her own home, at her own party!

  “There’s not a single female in the history of thought,” Weininger went on, “not even the most masculine, who can honestly be compared to a man of fifth- or sixth-rate genius.”

  The contempt in his voice raised her flesh. Do men really hate us that much? She sickened to see his cronies circled around him nodding in agreement.

  Mama’s voice then echoed in her head. The third sex! For all Ilse’s achievements, she would only be lampooned and belittled.

  “Alma!” Gretl appeared and took her hand. “Come look at Herr Hoffmann’s plans for the new house!”

  Grateful for this reprieve, Alma followed her sister to the far corner where Josef Hoffmann had unrolled his architectural diagrams of the two semi-detached villas he intended to build on the Hohe Warte, a still mostly rural plateau on the northern outskirts of Vienna. In response to Mama’s complaints that their house in the Theresianumgasse was too small for the five of them, Carl had commissioned Hoffmann to design a new family home. Carl’s friends from the Secession then decided that they, too, required roomier residences. So Hoffmann was building an entire artists’ colony—the Secession’s most ambitious Gesamtkunstwerk yet.

  “We’ll lay the foundations this spring,” Hoffmann said. “By autumn 1901, the villas should be finished.”

  “Just think, girls,” Mama said to Alma and Gretl. “You’ll each have your own room again.”

  “But, Mama, I’ll never live there,” Gretl said. “By the time the house is finished, I’ll be married.” Her voice cracked, as though she found this deeply upsetting.

  Alma thought she saw the glint of a tear in Gretl’s eye—so unlike her sister. She was about to ask her what the matter was when Berta Zuckerkandl made her grand entrance, her arm linked with Alexander von Zemlinsky’s. Up close, he didn’t appear any less chinless or goggle-eyed than he had in the concert hall, and it astonished Alma to see that he stood no taller than Gretl.

  “And this is Fräulein Alma Maria Schindler.” Frau Zuckerkandl smiled beatifically. “She’s a great lover of music and a composer herself, aren’t you, my dear? And a great admirer of your music, Herr Zemlinsky. She attended the premiere of your Frühlingsbegräbnis.”

  “I distinctly remember,” Zemlinsky said, as blunt as he was short. “You were the enraptured fan who gave me the one-woman standing ovation.”

  He had such a direct way of looking at her. Alma found herself flushing to the roots of her hair. But the mere sight of him was enough to wipe her mind clean of Otto Weininger’s hateful talk.

  “Now if you’ll both excuse me,” Frau Zuckerkandl murmured with a wink to Alma. “I must congratulate our dear Ilse on her magnificent sculpture.”

  “Standing ovations are terribly old-fashioned,” Zemlinsky told Alma. “Don’t you know that modern souls are meant to view the world with cynical disdain?”

  Alma gathered a strong sense of an underlying cynicism in his nature. But there had to be more to him than that if he composed such dazzling music.

  “Just imagine,” she said, adopting a light and breezy tone, “I’m so old-fashioned, I haven’t seen your new opera yet.”

  “Then you better hurry, Fräulein. I don’t know how much longer it will be in the repertoire.”

  “I hear you’re teaching counterpoint to Arnold Schoenberg,” she said, just to remind him that she was an aspiring composer, not just a silly girl who made a fool of herself at concerts.

  He shrugged. “The man is a bank clerk who wants to be a great composer and he’s in love with my sister. What can I do?”

  “Was it your sister sitting in the first row at the concert?” Alma smiled at him boldly. “She didn’t seem to care much for my display of enthusiasm.”

  Now it was Zemlinsky’s turn to blush. Alma noted, with some satisfaction, that the tips of his sizeable ears were glowing red.

  “No,” he said in a small voice, as though all sarcasm and cleverness had deserted him. “That was my acquaintance, Melanie Guttmann.”

  Acquaintance? Alma felt like snorting. Sweetheart, more like. Changing the subject, she asked if Zemlinsky was pleased that the star soprano Selma Kurz and tenor Erik Schmedes were singing in his opera.

  “Kurz is flawless,” he said. “But Schmedes seems half-asleep. Perhaps a heartthrob like him feels it too lowering to be in my obscure little opera when he could be off chasing skirts.”

  Schmedes’s adulterous affairs were the scandal of Vienna. Alma joined Zemlinsky in denouncing the tenor. “He’ll ruin his career, as well as his reputation, if he carries on like that.”

  Even as they conversed, other men were trying to catch Alma’s attention and draw her away from Zemlinsky.

  “Excuse me,” she told them coolly. “I’m speaking to Herr Zemlinsky.”

  She watched how the young composer blushed, how his eyes softened, as if in spite of himself, to receive this audience with her now that he could see how sought-after and desirable she was. At moments like this, she felt like a queen, full of quiet power. At ease in her own skin.

  “My feet are killing me,” she said. “I don’t suppose there’s a place where we could sit.”

  “Over here, Fräulein.”

  A shiver of delight ran through her as Zemlinsky took her arm and guided her to an empty loveseat. His face was bright red, as if he was all too aware of the other men’s envy. She smiled to herself when he sat beside her, their knees almost touching.

  “It appears you’re very popular, Fräulein,” he said archly, as though taking refuge in his cynicism.

  Alma laughed dismissively, as if such notions of flirtation and conquest were beneath her. But the air between them seemed to vibrate. She could not stop smiling.

  Zemlinsky started in on the critics’ reception of Frühlingsbegräbnis. “Do you know what that old crank Josef Labor wrote about it in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt?”

  “That it’s lacking in melody and overall unity?” Alma studied Zemlinsky’s face as he reddened yet again. “Oh, don’t listen to him. His generation simply can’t keep up with the pion
eering young composers. He’s been quite savage to my work as well, you know.”

  Zemlinsky grinned and leaned closer. “I tell you what, Fräulein. If we can think of one person with whom neither of us has a grudge, we can toast their honor.”

  “Gustav Mahler!” Alma cried, raising her glass, for it was Mahler who had selected Zemlinsky’s work for the Court Opera.

  “To Gustav Mahler,” Zemlinsky echoed. His eyes never left her face. “What do you think of Wagner then?”

  “The greatest genius who ever lived!” She didn’t care if she was gushing.

  “And your favorite work of Wagner’s?” he asked.

  She wondered if this was a test to see if her tastes were sophisticated enough for his. “Tristan und Isolde.”

  She half expected some sarcastic retort that this was just the kind of opera he expected a girl like her to swoon over, but instead a delight shone on his face, transforming him. His eyes warmly aglow, he became truly handsome.

  “Fräulein Schindler,” he said, clinking his glass to hers. “We understand each other.”

  “You must come to call at my home,” she said, her heart pounding in her throat. “I’m looking for someone to teach me counterpoint. What about Monday in two weeks,” she suggested, not wanting to sound too desperate or eager. “Say eleven?”

  He nodded. “I’ll reserve the date for you, Fräulein. And you must send me your musical scores. I’d like to see your compositions.”

  Alma felt as though she were floating to heaven on a magic carpet. Not leaving the sofa, they discussed Wagner’s genius until she jumped in shock at Mama tapping her shoulder.

  “Alma, it’s past midnight. Come, it’s time to say good-bye.”