Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  “Isn’t she a joy?” she whispered to Gustav, who seemed equally smitten.

  A child formed out of my music, my deepest longing. They named their new daughter Anna Justine, after Alma’s mother and Gustav’s sister. But they called her Gucki for her huge wondering eyes.

  Instead of buying Alma flowers to celebrate the new birth, Gustav combed Vienna to purchase her favorite cheeses to satisfy her inexplicable postpartum cravings. Since the birth had been so uncomplicated, Alma hoped she would be back on her feet after a week, but she was struck with a severe case of mastitis that left her bedbound for nearly a month.

  Leaving Alma in her mother’s care, Gustav set off alone for Maiernigg.

  “You know how much I hate to be parted from you, Almschi,” he said. “But I can’t spare a single day of my summer if I’m ever going to finish my symphony. It’s simply a duty.”

  After Gustav departed, Alma kept her bedroom window wide open day and night, for Vienna lay in the grip of a heat wave, as though the entire city shared her fever.

  When not holding the baby or trying to nurse her through the pain, when not trying to comfort Putzi, who was fractious and jealous of the baby and heartbroken that her papa wasn’t there, Alma sought consolation in reading a volume of the letters Richard Wagner had exchanged with his lover and amanuensis, Mathilde Wesendonck. Like Alma, Wesendonck had spent countless hours copying successive drafts of her beloved’s compositions—his operas Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the first two acts of Siegfried, and most of Tristan und Isolde. But Wesendonck had also continued to write her own poetry, and Wagner, in turn, set five of her poems to music.

  While Alma knew she couldn’t compare Wesendonck and Wagner’s adulterous liaison to her marriage with Gustav, reading their correspondence left her pensive. Why couldn’t Gustav soften his stance and give her music even the slightest attention or encouragement? Instead, he rammed Kant down her throat, his favorite philosopher who believed in stark moral absolutes. How would Gustav react if he knew she was composing on the sly? It was almost as though she were having an illicit affair with her own creativity. And now that Gustav was away she would indulge in that affair.

  Alma sent her baffled maid to fetch the book of Beethoven sonatas and bring it to her to read in bed. With a sluggish breeze drifting through the lace curtains, Alma looked over the score she had hidden there, composed in a rush during the onset of labor. Not allowed to leave her bed and sit at the piano, she hummed her work under her breath, letting Elise and Mama think that she was chanting a lullaby to the baby in her cradle. Alas, for all the pains she had taken, it sounded like a chaotic jumble of notes that not even Alex at the height of their mentor-student relationship would have taken seriously. Her old teacher Labor would have hurled it out the window.

  Why does it hurt so much to give up composing if I seem so bereft of true talent? Why can’t I just put those old dreams aside and be content with what I have?

  Little Gucki woke up crying and Alma eased her from the cradle so she could nurse her at her swollen, fevered breasts. “What will it be like for you?” she asked her newborn, wondering if either of her girls would succeed in accomplishing anything in their own name.

  Maybe Gustav would nurture his daughters’ potential instead of smothering it, as he had done with hers.

  26

  August of 1904 was the happiest in Alma’s memory, her long-delayed summer idyll saturated in golden light from the moment she stepped off the train in Klagenfurt to be engulfed in her husband’s arms. She was so thin from her convalescence that he could lift her off the ground.

  “Almschi, you’re here at last!” Gustav pressed a bouquet of wildflowers into her hands, then kissed her so passionately, right there on the railway platform, that he caused the upstanding Klagenfurters to tut in disapproval.

  When Mama cleared her throat, Gustav finally turned to greet her, the nanny, and the children.

  In deference to Alma’s still-fragile state of health, Gustav had hired the carriage with the smoothest suspension he could find to convey them to their summerhouse. Cradling baby Gucki in her arms, Alma rode as if seated on a cloud while the Haflinger horses with white-gold manes trotted between the lake and forest. Gustav held Putzi in his lap while he told Alma and her mother of the progress he was making on his symphony.

  “I’ve vowed to finish my Sixth by the end of September,” he said merrily. “Or else I fear it shall finish me, ha!”

  Alma, her mother, and Miss Turner all laughed, borne aloft on Gustav’s high spirits.

  When they reached the villa, a surprise awaited Putzi. Gustav had built an enclosed play area where she could dig in the sand to her heart’s content with no danger of falling into the lake. Alma sat in the grass and nursed Gucki while watching Putzi and five-year-old Maria playing together. With jubilant cries, the two little girls tossed golden sand in the air.

  The celebratory mood continued with the arrival of Ilse and Erica Conrat. As if to atone for leaving Alma behind in Vienna after the baby’s birth, Gustav had encouraged her to invite friends to stay.

  Those two young women were so stimulating, their companionship a balm to Alma, who still didn’t feel strong enough to go rowing or hiking. Instead, the three of them sipped coffee on the stone terrace and discussed poetry, sculpture, and painting. Erica bubbled with enthusiasm about her studies at the university and all the clever people she had met there. With her inexhaustible good cheer, she never failed to draw Alma out of introspection when she felt herself slipping into melancholy after comparing her stasis to the Conrat sisters’ progress. While Erica and Ilse took turns holding the baby, Alma prayed that some of their brilliance would rub off on her daughter.

  “Imagine little Gucki growing up to be a sculptress like you,” she told Ilse.

  To celebrate Alma’s twenty-fifth birthday, Gustav and the Conrat sisters rowed her across Lake Wörthersee to the genteel resort town of Krumpendorf. While Alma sat at the helm in her white dress with Ilse facing her, Erica and Gustav shared the rowing.

  “This feels like a whole opera orchestra,” Erica said gaily, as she struggled to keep pace with Gustav. “I tremble for fear of missing a beat.”

  When they moored the boat and went to take coffee and cake at one of the lakeside hotels, it was like running the gauntlet, with well-heeled tourists and local townsfolk alike rushing to gawp at the famous director and his entourage. Gustav scowled impatiently while Alma kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. Erica kept exclaiming at how wondrous it was, being the center of such attention.

  On the journey back across the lake at sunset, Ilse shared the oars with Gustav while Alma chatted with Erica.

  “Oh, Alma, how I wish I could paint you!” Erica said. “With the sun setting behind you, your hair’s a halo of flame. You look like some beautiful beast of prey.”

  Alma caught Gustav’s eyes and laughed.

  Gustav smiled mischievously. “Almschi’s my lioness.”

  That night they sat out on the candlelit terrace. Alma, her mother, and the Conrat sisters sipped Heidsieck champagne while Gustav read aloud from West-östlicher Divan, Goethe’s lyrical poems inspired by the Persian mystic Hafez.

  Let me praise those living things that choose to die by fire.

  Despite the mildness of the evening, Alma found herself shivering and pulling her shawl around her shoulders.

  If you don’t comprehend what it means to die into being,

  you are but a dull guest on this dark earth.

  At the close of the poem, they all sat in contemplative silence until Gustav began to speak.

  “Seen from the eyes of eternity,” he said, “there’s no difference between a firework that shoots into the air and then vanishes into the lake, and a sun that shines for a billion years. And yet it should be our aim to create works that outlive our short existence and endure for posterity.”

  “Like Ilse’s sculptures,” Alma said, feeling once more that awful pang of creative loss, her living death
by fire. Her day-in, day-out sacrifice.

  “Like your beautiful children, Alma,” Ilse said, in a warm rush. “How can carved stone compare to Putzi’s living flesh?”

  “And Gustav’s music,” Erica said solemnly.

  Gustav began to speak of the wonder he experienced each time he heard one of his compositions performed for the first time, so different from anything he had imagined in his head. At that, he went inside the house. Through the open French doors, they could hear him playing Bach, each note as pristine as the stars blazing in the heavens above. Alma lifted her gaze to those endless constellations. Across the lake, she saw a flaming Catherine wheel fall into the dark water and extinguish itself.

  At summer’s end, after the Conrat sisters had bidden their fond farewells, Gustav was almost dancing in his excitement to have finally finished his Sixth Symphony after two years of effort and so many creative blocks. His exhilaration proved contagious. Dashing ahead of him into the composing hut, Alma paged through the score. He had composed this work on an unprecedentedly grand scale, using instruments never before heard in a symphony—the celesta, cowbells, and even a whip and hammer.

  “Wait till you hear it,” he said, pulling her down beside him on the piano bench.

  The first chords pounded out a grimly determined march, making Alma think of a doomed army heading toward annihilation, but this mood of impending destruction was broken by the soaring theme Gustav had composed for her, so tender and lush. A pastoral interlude filled her heart with its lyric beauty, evoking their rural setting with the distant jangle of cowbells. The irregular rhythms of the scherzo movement made her smile at the way they captured Putzi’s and Maria’s tottering, zigzag dances. But a sense of unease settled like ice in her chest as those childish voices became more and more tragic until they finally died out in a whimper.

  Don’t take it to heart, Alma told herself. It’s just dramatic structure. A symphony without any shadows or tension would be mere kitsch, not compelling in the least. Gustav’s modus operandi in his previous symphonies was to starkly portray passion, pathos, and darkness, and then transform this gloom into the blinding, light-filled epiphany of spiritual triumph, the victory of pure love. She kept waiting for that final passage into transcendence, her husband’s signature of sublime transfiguration, but it never came. The mood only became more harrowing, downright nihilist in its pessimism. The final movement plunged her into a half-hour-long hallucinogenic nightmare, ending with three blows of the hammer and whip. Gustav struck those notes on the piano keys with such vehemence that Alma recoiled. She felt queasy.

  When Gustav turned to her, awaiting her verdict, he looked strangely pale, as if his own music had drained him of his lifeblood.

  “It was very powerful,” she managed. “Different from all your other work.”

  Those were the most diplomatic words she could find. Despite the symphony’s tender nods toward her and the children, its unbearable bleakness appalled her. It didn’t help when Gustav went on to explain that the three blows at the end represented his hero being struck by fate, the final blow destroying him. A chill stole over her, as though her beloved husband had become a stranger.

  “How can someone as warmhearted as you compose something so cruel?” Alma asked, shaken to her core.

  “It’s music, Almschi,” Gustav said, with an offended air, scrutinizing her over the rims of his glasses. “If it sounds cruel to you, it’s because I’ve thrown in all the viciousness I’ve suffered in my life. Now let me play you this.” He reached for another score. “And please think about art, not about cruelty.”

  Alma knew he had just completed a song cycle he had started years earlier—musical settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert. But when she saw the title, her vision went black. Kindertotenlieder. Songs of Dead Children. She pressed her hands to her temples when Gustav began to play and sing. No higher understanding of music and art could shield her from the horror. Rückert, she understood, had written these poems after losing his two young children, those soul-splitting verses dictated by unfathomable grief and loss.

  I often think they’ve only gone out.

  They’ll be back soon.

  The day is fine. Never fear!

  They’re only taking the long way back.

  Alma could take no more. In a flood of tears, she tore down the hill to find her own children, ignoring Gustav’s exasperated protests that life is a separate thing from art.

  By the time her husband caught up with her, Alma was sitting in the grass with Putzi in her lap and the baby in her arms.

  “I could understand your setting such frightful words to music if we had no children,” she said haltingly, staring into Gucki’s bottomless blue gaze. “Or if we’d lost our children.” Her voice broke. She attempted to calm herself so she didn’t upset the baby. “I can certainly understand why a grieving man like Rückert had to write them. But for you, with two beautiful girls, to compose those songs bewailing children who died suddenly even though they appeared in the best of health. Hardly an hour after their parents last hugged and kissed them.”

  She could say no more, only wipe away her tears before they fell on Gucki’s face.

  “Inspiration is a mystery, Almschi,” Gustav said softly, after a long silence. “I can’t control what arises from the depths.”

  When Alma finally lifted her face to look at him, he appeared so youthful, so vulnerable, so loving. The doting father and husband. Another man entirely from the one who had composed such disturbing music.

  “Just because I write about death doesn’t mean that any of us will die,” he said. “But if it makes you happier, I’ll remove the hammer blows.”

  They returned to Vienna and life carried on, paved in good fortune. Gustav’s glory seemed to only increase.

  In October he was invited to Cologne to conduct the world premiere of his Fifth Symphony, that blissful ocean of lyricism borne of the first summer of their married love. Gustav was intent on Alma’s joining him there for both the rehearsals and performance. With her entire heart, she yearned to do just that. This was the symphony she had most closely collaborated on—she almost felt like its cocreator. Hadn’t she copied out the entire score, day by day, filling in the instrumentation and frankly telling Gustav what worked and what didn’t?

  So great was Alma’s zeal to join Gustav in Cologne that she weaned baby Gucki too abruptly. Not only was her little daughter inconsolable, but Alma made herself ill. Nature is not to be trifled with, she was forced to concede, struck down once again by mastitis. Dr. Hammerschlag forbade her to travel. When she wrote to Gustav to tell him this unfortunate news, he was utterly distraught.

  I beg you, Almschi, do all you can to recover. Perhaps you could be well in time for the concert. How awful it would be if I was left on my own for my world premiere. Something like being a guest at one’s own funeral. What if the critics hate it?

  Lying in bed with her engorged, infected breasts poulticed with cabbage leaves, Alma felt as though she were in a coffin with the lid nailed down. Concerts in foreign cities seemed as distant and unreachable as the stars in heaven. She plunged into a black pit of despair, for it seemed she was useless as a wife and—judging from Gucki’s ceaseless screams as Miss Turner attempted to bottle-feed her—an utter failure as a mother.

  Gustav’s letters lamented the negative reviews. Through her fever and nausea, Alma read the newspaper clippings he sent. The critics panned her husband’s Fifth Symphony as coarse and clumsy. An arrogant improvisation from a composer who never knew what would happen from one bar to the next. Poor Gustav! What philistines these German critics are! Their condemnation of the symphony dearest to her heart left her feeling even weaker.

  Meanwhile, Gustav rebuked her for being such a poor correspondent.

  Even if you’re too ill to write, you could at least send a postcard, Almschi!

  After the disappointing reception at Cologne, Gustav traveled on to conduct his Second and Fourth Symphonies at the Concertge
bouw in Amsterdam, where he received a much warmer response.

  By the time Gustav returned from his travels to direct his Third Symphony in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, Alma was again obliged to stay home. Just when she had recovered her health, both children fell ill, Putzi with a bad cold and Gucki crying around the clock with colic, her shrieks enough to bring down the ceilings.

  Alma’s sole consolation was that her daughters’ demands on her seemed to restore her lost strength. When she finally succeeded in lulling Gucki to sleep in her arms, a rare peace gripped her, a love that blurred all else. Suddenly, her life, which had lost its meaning, appeared to have a clear purpose once more. Her children needed her. This is why I’m alive—to be a mother to them. And Gustav? He needed her, too. But he could be so remote, so self-obsessed.

  In January, with her children back in good health, Alma could finally attend concerts again. She invited Alex and Arnold and Mathilde Schoenberg to join her in the director’s box when Gustav conducted the world premiere of Alex’s Die Seejungfrau and Schoenberg’s Pelléas and Mélisande.

  Seated at her right hand, Alex seemed beside himself, his lips parted, his breath catching, his eyes soft and adoring. She wondered if she had ever seen him so enraptured. Clearly, he was in love, hopelessly smitten—with Gustav this time around. Alex hardly seemed to take his eyes off her husband the entire evening. So deep was his reverence for Gustav, he didn’t presume to speak to him directly but could only blurt out his praise and gratitude to her, Gustav’s official intercessor.