Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  The funereal first movement laid to rest a dead hero. But the longer Alma listened, the more the music seemed redolent with a cynicism that rendered the titular resurrection improbable, even farcical. What could it even mean in this modern world where everything was stripped of its meaning? Why am I here? Alma found herself wondering. What is the point of my suffering and sacrifice if all this will just end in inglorious death? What if my entire existence is some cruel joke? Such was the despondent pall this music cast on her. It didn’t help that the first movement was followed by five minutes of silence—Gustav’s attempt to force his audience to confront their darkest fears concerning the mysteries of death and life. Alma wondered if his critics would skewer him for this and accuse him of being unbearably pompous.

  The idyllic second movement, in contrast, was redolent with sweet nostalgia for an irretrievable past. Alma caught the briefest glimpse of the girl she had once been, playing her own songs in a Venice hotel while Klimt looked on with admiration and desire. Oh, that kiss that had transfixed her! Then the third movement tore this reverie to shreds with a caustic mockery of youth’s broken dreams. It culminated in a death shriek before the orchestra died away. Alma quietly dried her eyes, hoping no one had noticed her tears. This music dragged all her demons into the starkly glaring light.

  But she trembled and softened to hear the mezzo soprano open the fourth movement with “Urlicht,” so plaintive and naïve, drawn from a folk song filled with the soul’s yearning to return to its creator, that primeval light that existed before the dawn of time.

  Not even this could prepare her for the majesty of the final movement. Monumental crescendi of percussion and brass signaled the bursting open of graves and the long dead arising for the last judgment. Offstage brass sounded a fanfare from heaven. The nightingale, the bird of death, called out in flute and piccolo, then faded into silence. Very quietly and mysteriously, a choir of more than two hundred voices began to sing: Rise again! Yes, you shall rise again, my dust.

  This resurrection, when it finally burst out in the first two verses of Friedrich Klopstock’s well-known hymn, appeared like a blinding revelation, all sense of punitive judgment now irradiated in pure divine love. The music rendered Alma weightless. It sent her soaring and she arose, suspended in space, lost in staggering, heartbreaking beauty. Nothing on this earth remained but her husband’s music that transported everyone around her to the fullness of rapture. Old men wept openly, just as she did, while young couples fell into each other’s arms.

  Spinning on the podium, Gustav looked at her, and it was all she could do not to tear out of her seat and embrace him, in thrall of his genius that kept seducing her over and over again.

  25

  After the Basel concert, Alma and Gustav traveled to their summerhouse in Maiernigg, where Mama and Putzi awaited them. Here Gustav might at last enjoy a well-deserved rest in the stillness of their lakeside retreat. Except that he seemed incapable of remaining idle for even a day. Loathe to waste his precious time at Maiernigg, he plunged straight into drafting sketches for his Sixth Symphony as though some limitless inner urgency was driving him. But when Gustav wasn’t working in his composer’s hut, he spent hours playing with Putzi, carrying her around and holding her up to dance and sing. He looked so young to Alma then, as if twenty years had melted off him.

  A golden aura seemed to enclose her young family that entire summer. While Mama and Miss Turner looked after Putzi, Alma could join her husband on long hikes up the steep forest paths, just the two of them. Gustav in his oldest clothes and she in a cool white summer dress that shone even brighter in the full blaze of the sun. Unlike the previous summer, Alma was unencumbered by pregnancy and able to savor these walks and the strength in her limbs and her slim body without having to fear any dreadful consequences for her exertions.

  Carl photographed her in loosely flowing reform dress as she smiled and held her beautiful, healthy daughter against the backdrop of the hill-ringed lake. She read Rilke’s poetry while little Maria played with Putzi.

  But the most precious moments were kept secret. Late at night, when the moon shone over the lake like a lover’s face, Alma crept up to Gustav’s room and slid into her husband’s bed. What could be more natural, more freeing? She broke through his fortress of artistic solitude and called him to embrace the pure eros of being alive in this beautiful world.

  That wasn’t to say her demons were completely vanquished. Sometimes she was still possessed of an unbearable envy of Gustav’s work, his unstoppable fountain of creative inspiration that elevated him to such a high plane that she could only gaze up at him in reverence. And sometimes, in spite of her present happiness, she still yearned with all her soul for the girl she used to be—Alma Maria Schindler, who aspired to compose symphonies and operas. But in the blinding light of midsummer, it was easier to keep the shadows at bay and count her blessings, to revel in her time in the sun.

  One August afternoon, Gustav took Alma’s hand and led her up to his composing hut.

  “I’ve tried to express you in a musical theme,” he said, sitting at the piano and making space for her on the bench beside him. “Whether I’ve succeeded or not, I don’t know.”

  He began to play an ascending and descending line in a major key—the rest of his work in progress was in A minor. The theme was energetic, sinuous, willful, and tender.

  “What do you think, Almscherl?” he asked. “Have I captured your essence?”

  She laughed and caressed his cheek. “It sounds like me climbing up the stairs to your room, Gustl.”

  They shared a long lingering kiss. Then Gustav sprang up and closed the door to his hut. Their arms around each other, they fell to the floor in a tangled embrace.

  When they returned to Vienna in September, Alma was expecting their second child. This time she was determined to enjoy her pregnancy. Motherhood no longer terrified her now that she had some clue what to expect, and Mama assured her that this birth would be easier than the first.

  But as she settled back into their Vienna routine, a sinking sense of loneliness gnawed at her. Surely she must be allowed to have some excitement in her life beyond being a mere spectator of her husband’s career. If she had any say in the matter, she would love to host her own salon of composers, artists, and writers, on par with Berta Zuckerkandl’s circle. But Gustav would never stand for such disruption of his solitude and peace. Instead, Alma elected to do the next best thing, inviting Arnold Schoenberg and his wife to dinner. How could Gustav possibly object to sharing his table with the most innovative young composer in Vienna? His accomplishments were even more impressive considering his humble lower-middle-class background and the fact that, apart from his lessons with Alex and a few others, he was self-taught and had never seen the inside of a conservatory. He couldn’t even play piano but managed to compose inside his head—the feat of a true genius.

  Alma had begged Schoenberg to bring some scores from the song cycle he was working on, the Gurre-Lieder. After dinner, their esteemed guest, only twenty-nine years old and already as bald as an egg, sat beside Gustav on the sofa while Alma played a few of his songs and his wife, Mathilde—Alex’s sister!—sang in a haunting contralto. Gustav applauded wildly, his eyes alight with enthusiasm.

  How good it was to see her husband like this, so relaxed and expansive. A few carefully chosen guests were good for him, Alma decided, if only to distract him from the tangled politics at the opera. His stagehands were in revolt, demanding better working conditions, complaining that the Herr Direktor had found the funds to build an expensive and controversial new orchestra pit but not to increase their paltry wages. The Schoenbergs’ visits helped keep these worries at bay.

  Alma befriended Mathilde, also the mother of a little daughter. One morning she visited Mathilde at her home. Her hostess showed her into the music room, its walls hung with Arnold’s paintings, art being the twin passion to his music. Alma’s eyes riveted on a portrait of Alex, his expression at once soulful an
d sardonic.

  One look at the apartment with its peeling wallpaper and threadbare rugs was enough to reveal how poor the Schoenbergs were. She and Gustav should anonymously purchase some of Arnold’s paintings, she decided. Anything to give the Schoenbergs a foothold.

  One winter evening the Schoenbergs came to dinner accompanied by a surprise guest—Alex himself. Alma struggled to keep her composure as her former lover chastely kissed her cheeks and offered her a bouquet of white roses for her table before gravely shaking her husband’s hand.

  During dinner, Alex addressed Gustav with the utmost deference. One hand on her belly where her unborn baby was kicking up a storm, Alma listened and interjected when necessary to keep the conversation flowing.

  “I’ve composed a symphonic poem,” Alex told them. “About a mermaid.”

  For the most fleeting instant, he glanced Alma’s way, as if to privately signal that she was the capricious siren who inspired the piece. When she met his brown velvet eyes, she saw no bitterness, only fondness and goodwill. An incredible softness stirred within her, like a long dormant flower coming back into bloom.

  “Alex,” Alma said later, accompanying him to the door when her guests were saying their good-byes. “I would very much like to resume my lessons with you.”

  She handed him his hat while her heart beat in hope that she could indeed have all she desired—both Gustav’s love and Alex’s friendship and musical guidance. Her husband had seemed so kindly disposed toward Alex this evening. Surely now, when Gustav appeared to be approaching the very zenith of fame and success, he could give her the liberty to take the occasional counterpoint lesson. To compose as a hobby, a dilettante’s diversion. This one boon Gustav could grant her.

  “I’ll take no money from you, Alma.” Alex smiled and used the familiar Du. “That would seem like an insult. But I’ll gladly visit you from time to time and play piano with you.” He gently took his hat from her hand. “That would be a great honor.”

  A giddy sense of possibility gripped Alma when Alex rang her doorbell two weeks later, his briefcase full of sheet music. She had hoped they might play through his symphonic poem about the mermaid, but instead he opened the score of Schubert’s “Die Forelle.” When they sat down to play, Alma couldn’t help noticing that he perched as far away from her as the piano bench allowed.

  It seemed that Alex had selected the most cheerful piece of music he could find, yet “Die Forelle” was fiendishly difficult. Alma welcomed the challenge, anything to distract her from her turbulent feelings about playing with him again after all this time. With full concentration, she threw herself into these swiftly rippling arpeggios intended to portray a trout leaping upstream.

  “You’ve lost none of your technique,” Alex said, in a tone of polite amazement, as if he had expected marriage and motherhood to have turned her brain to porridge.

  Alma wished he would critique her so she might use this stimulus to improve herself. Even his usual sarcasm would be a welcome relief from this patronizing joviality. She had hoped that Alex’s mere presence might rekindle her inspiration to compose. But here they sat playing Schubert while Putzi looked on from the nanny’s lap and attempted to sing along in her baby jibber-jabber. So much for a tête-à-tête with her former lover. This tableau was so eminently respectable, so sickeningly bourgeois, it could have come from a Biedermeier painting.

  Perhaps all the magic of their old collaboration had stemmed from the passion that had once ignited between them, the love and lust that had seemed powerful enough to move worlds. However, it appeared that whatever attraction Alex might have felt for her was now eclipsed by his awe of her husband, which rendered her as sexless chattel. And how could it be otherwise, seeing as she was heavy with child?

  So these were to be no formal, professional lessons then, nothing that would help her progress as a composer or resurrect her shattered dreams. It was almost as if Alex had divined the ultimatum Gustav had imposed on her and he didn’t want to be guilty of leading another man’s wife into the unholy temptation of creative desire. Instead, he was offering to play a bit of Schubert with an accomplished housewife when he had the odd free hour. Still, it was a most generous offer on Alex’s part given his hectic schedule.

  When he took his leave, Alma made an effort to smile warmly to hide her disappointment. Her most disconcerting thought was this—what if, as her once rapturously fruitful collaboration with Alex attested to, her creative inspiration came from the same murky depths as her passion for him? What if she couldn’t write or compose without all these forbidden desires surging to the surface and demanding to be acted upon? Was she depraved enough to betray her husband and seduce Alex just to get her music back? As if Alex would allow himself to be seduced by a pregnant woman.

  Alma felt so filthy that she longed to run away to some remote mountain spa and plunge herself into a hot sulfur bath until the stain of her unholy urges could be washed away.

  Come June, Alma felt as enormous as the hot-air balloons drifting over Prater Park. But this didn’t stop her from going to the Burgtheater to see Gerhart Hauptmann’s verse play Der arme Heinrich. Drawn from a medieval tale of courtly love, it told of a knight stricken with leprosy who could be healed only by the heart’s blood of a virgin who willingly sacrificed herself for his salvation. The haunting cadences left Alma entranced, forcing her to relive the agony of the sacrifice that she had made for love. But from this catharsis, the very thing she had renounced rose phoenixlike, a pure gift. Music emerged in her head, its vibrations thrumming into her fingertips, her very bones.

  Even while she and Gustav walked home together after the play, the melody unspooled inside her. These verses shall be the libretto for my opera. The German composer Hans Pfitzner had already written an opera based on the tale, but hers would be utterly original. She could hear the overture, the arias, plainer than her husband’s voice.

  When she went to bed that night, she felt as intoxicated as though she had downed a magnum of champagne. Music filled her dreams, the notes so tangible and real that she could pluck them like jeweled fruits from the Tree of Paradise, singing-ringing rubies and opals that she threaded on spun gold, then wove on a loom of pure sound. My music. My brainchild. I have created this. I contain this. I hold it all inside me and now it wants to emerge.

  Now! Alma jolted awake to feel her waters breaking. A glance at the clock told her it was just before five. Gustav would still be asleep in his separate room. Even Elise didn’t rise until six thirty. Let them sleep.

  After changing into dry clothes, Alma opened the window to gulp down the fresh morning air. The pale blue sky was washed pink with the first hint of sunrise. All the rosebushes in Belvedere Park were in full bloom—she could almost taste their fragrance on her tongue. The birds’ dawn chorus filled the stillness, and even then, Alma’s music kept washing over her like a waterfall.

  She tiptoed to the piano. Her contractions had started, but there was still enough time between them to soft pedal the notes. She must work fast. The contractions were coming on stronger, swelling and subsiding waves in an incoming tide that would soon engulf her. In that clear, free space between the pains, she madly scribbled down her score one note at a time. Gustav slept on—she could hear his snores forming a counterpoint to her high-arching melody as she composed in a blaze of pure white heat. Nothing else existed but this. Exstase, she scrawled across the score. Ecstasy.

  “Frau Direktor, has your time come?”

  Alma wrenched her head to see Elise open the door and peer in at her with a pale, tight face. Alma couldn’t speak. She only wanted Elise to close the door and leave her alone.

  “Let me awaken the Herr Direktor,” Elise said.

  Alma shook her head, her tears streaming, but Elise was already trotting down the corridor to rap on Gustav’s bedroom door.

  While her husband was busy telephoning the doctor, Alma managed to jot down an entire bar before she heard his footsteps approaching the music room, giving her
just enough time to hide her unfinished work inside her book of Beethoven sonatas.

  “Almschi!” Gustav rushed in, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown. “Never fear, my love. Dr. Hammerschlag is on his way.”

  She writhed in his embrace, her body jackknifed by a particularly strong contraction. In a frantic attempt to distract her from the pain, Gustav sat her at his desk and began reading aloud from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason on the topic of the seeming futility of metaphysics.

  “‘Why then has nature afflicted our reason with the restless striving for such a path, as if it were one of reason’s most important occupations?’” he read with solemn authority, as though quoting a holy text. “‘Still more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason if in one of the most important parts of our desire for knowledge it does not merely forsake us but even entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us!’”

  Alma clutched her belly and groaned. In thrall of the contractions, she couldn’t understand a word he was saying.

  “Pay attention, Almschi!” Gustav cried. “Mental concentration is the only means of conquering pain.”

  Alma never thought she would be so overjoyed to see Dr. Hammerschlag burst into the room.

  Her labor was straightforward and the birth came fast, the baby crowning in a tidal wave of music surging through Alma’s brain. A baby girl born at midday on Wednesday, June 15—the middle of the week, the middle of the month, at the glorious peak of midsummer. A daughter with golden tufts of hair and wide-open blue eyes that seemed to delight in everything around her. Lost in that infant gaze, Alma fell irrevocably in love.