The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  From earliest youth, Paul contemplated a career as a concert pianist, in stubborn defiance of his father's wishes. Not just his father but his whole family tried to dissuade him from it. They told him that he was no good. "Does he have to pound the piano like that?" his mother used to ask. Even if he were a better player, he was told, it would be unseemly for a boy of his class and background to take up a career as a performing artist. Despite the vehemence of their entreaty Paul would not be deflected. In the holidays he took lessons from Marie Baumayer--a family friend and one-time pupil of Clara Schumann, rated in her day as one of Vienna's foremost interpreters of Schumann and Brahms--but his most cherished ambition was to be accepted into the classes of the colossus of piano pedagogy Theodore Leschetizky.

  Odd perhaps that Karl Wittgenstein--accomplished bugler, violinist, cousin of Joachim, a man who counted Brahms and Strauss among his friends, whose collection of original handwritten musical manuscripts was among the finest in the world, a man who, during classical concerts, would wipe the tears from his eyes with his index finger and proudly submit the glistening digit for his wife's inspection--odd that he, of all people, should have been so violently opposed to his sons' entering the music profession. Like many great men of commerce he had a shallow understanding of the psychologies at work in his family and was able to appreciate his sons only by measuring their achievements against his own. If they turned out to be less energetic, less able, less courageous or willing to take a risk than he, then they were deemed to have failed. The pressure on the Wittgenstein brothers--Hans, Kurt, Rudi, Paul and Ludwig--to make their own mark in the great iron, steel, arms and banking business that he had founded contributed to a nervous and self-destructive strain in all five of them.

  THEIR MOTHER

  Mrs. Wittgenstein's besetting sin was that she failed, on the one hand, to protect her children from the wrath and impatience of their father and, on the other, to compensate them with much warmth or motherly indulgence of her own. She was a small woman of long nose and round face--an intensely introverted and nervous character, detached and dutiful. In adult life she suffered regular attacks of migraine and phlebitis, a complication of the arteries, nerves and veins of her legs. "We simply could not understand her," wrote Hermine in a memoir intended for private circulation, "and she, furthermore, had no real understanding of the eight strange children that she had brought into this world; with all her love of humanity she seemed to have no real understanding of people." As Gretl remembered her: "My mother's devotion to duty made me too uncomfortable and I found her agitated character beyond enduring. She suffered from a constant overstress of nerves."

  Mrs. Wittgenstein's adult life was spent in sacrifice to the demands of her husband and her own geriatric mother, leaving her eight surviving children to scramble from the emotional void as best they could.

  From a very early stage [wrote Hermine] we children had the impression of a strange state of tension in our home, a lack of relaxation that did not emanate solely from my father's agitation. My mother was also very excitable, though she never lost her quiet friendliness in confrontation with her husband or her mother.

  According to Hermine their mother's neurotic obsession with wifely duty led to the eventual eradication of all traces of what must once have been her original personality: "I believe that our mother, as we knew her, was no longer completely herself... among other things we could not understand why she had so little will and opinion of her own, and we did not reflect on the impossibility of maintaining a will and opinion of one's own next to my father."

  An example given by Hermine: Mrs. Wittgenstein one evening retired to bed with her feet swaddled in a cloth that had been accidentally soused in pure carbolic acid, a very weak solution of which was believed at that time to offer relief from the discomfort of new shoes. During the night the acid burned itself into her flesh so that by morning it had caused a deep and repellent wound that would not heal for weeks. All night long she lay awake and in agony but dared not move or make a sound for fear of disturbing her husband's sleep.

  One by one, all eight of the Wittgenstein siblings came to realize that the best (perhaps the only) way to communicate with their mother was through music--for that was the solder that welded each disparate member of the family to her and to one another. In youth Mrs. Wittgenstein had taken piano lessons from the struggling Hungarian composer Karl Goldmark (long before he had made a big name for himself with his opera Die Konigin von Saba). Although her hands were tiny and her physical movements awkward, Goldmark managed to show her how to play gracefully, to sight-read almost anything, to improvise long pieces, to pick out tunes by ear and to transpose effortlessly out of one key into another. Too shy to perform in public, she enjoyed playing duets, chamber music or musical games with her family, and it was in this shared wordless activity that her maternal detachment was least disconcerting to her children. "It would have been impossible for her quickly to comprehend any complicated spoken sentence, and yet it was easy for her to read a complicated musical piece from the score or to transpose it into any key." Musical expression came naturally to Mrs. Wittgenstein and, when she played, "her face developed a new kind of beauty."

  Since the Wittgenstein siblings were brought up both to recognize and to idolize classical composers and musical performers, and since their best means of communication with their mother was through the wordless medium of music, it is hardly surprising that each of them should have pursued music with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological. When music was around them they were at their freest and at their most amicable. To witness the exuberance and passion of Paul, Ludwig, Hermine, Leopoldine, Karl or any of them singing or playing together, any visitor might have been forgiven for assuming that these querulous, volatile and complicated people formed one of the happiest and most united families of the Hapsburg Empire. Their performances were intense, glowing and passionate and as one enthusiastic guest at the Palais recalled long after the great building had been reduced to rubble and all of the Wittgensteins were gone: "They rocked with the rhythm of the dance, showing everyone just how much they enjoyed it."

  THE OTHER BROTHER

  Since Hans's disappearance in 1903, Konrad, or Kurt as he was known within the family, became by default the eldest of the Wittgenstein sons. He, like all of his siblings, was also a gifted musician who could play both piano and cello with flair and who took pleasure in duetting with his mother. But, unlike the others, he did not rate seriousness high among the virtues. At five foot six he was several inches shorter than either Ludwig or Paul, with fair hair, blue eyes and a prominent scar on his left cheek. By nature he was flip and jocular and, in the opinion of his family, lightweight and slightly babyish. After a period of study at the Technical University in Hanover from which he qualified as an engineer in 1899, Kurt volunteered for a smart dragoon regiment as a one-year conscript. At soldiering he did not excel (his final Military Academy report concluded that he was "not suitable" for active service) but by 1903 Kurt had succeeded nevertheless in registering himself as an officer in the Reserves. From the army he went straight into the steel business and in 1906, backed by his father with an income of 20,000 kronen, he set up a rolling mill with a partner, Sebastian Danner, at Judenburg on the banks of the River Mur. This was the first mill of its type to use electric arc furnaces that generated a more consistent and controllable heat than the old coal-fire variety and produced a molten metal that was no longer affected by impurities emanating from the heat source. More than a hundred years after its foundation Kurt's steel plant remains in business, boasting from its Internet Web site that the name Stahl Judenburg (Judenburg Steel) "stands for quality, flexibility, reliability and the systematic development of competence"--not perhaps epithets that can be easily applied to its founder.

  Kurt was never married. It is said that he failed in two courtships. He did not enjoy adult conversation and with strangers and guests sometimes appeared awkward or rude. He found happiness in
piano-playing, hunting, fast motorcars, toys and the company of children. His family dismissed him as a Kindskopf--an overgrown child. In a letter to Ludwig, Hermine wrote of him: "there is no depth to his character, but since you don't expect to find any, you don't miss it either." As a deathbed companion to his ailing father, Kurt was far from ideal.

  THE MIDDLE SISTER

  In August 1879, fifteen months after Kurt was born, the Wittgensteins had a third daughter, christened Helene, and subsequently nicknamed Lenka. She was the "third" daughter because between her and the eldest, Hermine, came little Dora, who died of complications in her first month. At the time of Karl's dying Helene inhabited a large apartment on the Brahmsplatz, a few streets from the Wittgenstein Palais in the Alleegasse. Plain, Rubenesque and often smiling, she was married in 1899 to a pillar of the Austrian Protestant establishment called Max Salzer, a minister in the government's finance department. After his retirement from the ministry he was chosen to run the Wittgenstein family fortune. Later he became senile and the family allowed him to continue his ministrations while ignoring all his advice. Max's brother Hans Salzer (married to a Wittgenstein cousin) was a pulmonary surgeon of international renown. Helene had four children. She sang beautifully, played the piano to a high standard and laughed more than was usual for a Wittgenstein. From the outside she may have seemed the most settled and relaxed of her siblings, but she too suffered from tensions of a pathological and neurotic kind. She was terrified of thunderstorms and was also anemic. With her children she was exceedingly strict. Of her two sons, the elder died from paralysis caused by polio at the age of twenty, while the younger, Felix Salzer, became a famous musicologist, who estranged himself from his parents at an early age. Life in the Salzer household was not always joyful.

  PAUL'S EARLY TRAINING

  A strange quirk of Austrian mentality in the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire manifested itself in society's reluctance to trust to the abilities of young men. The writer Stefan Zweig, a Viennese contemporary of the Wittgenstein siblings, complained of the "inner dishonesty" that refused to acknowledge a young man's manhood until he "had secured a 'social position' for himself--that is, hardly before his twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year." While a father would refuse consent for his daughter to marry a man still in his mid-twenties, employers equally deemed young men unfit for serious office. "All those qualities of youth," wrote Zweig, "freshness, self-assertion, daring, curiosity, youth's lust for life--were regarded as suspect in an age that only had use for 'substance.' "

  The visible effects of this attitude were bizarre. Whereas, in most societies, the old make efforts to appear younger than they are, in Vienna young men went to inordinate lengths to make themselves look old. A thick beard, a long dark coat, a sedate walk, a slight paunch and a walking stick--these were props that the young men of Vienna needed to gain the respect of their elders. Shops sold them gold-rimmed spectacles (which they didn't need for their sight) and bottles of quack unguent that boasted "Rapid Facial Hair Growth." Even schoolboys refused to carry satchels lest they be recognized as schoolboys.

  For this reason the Viennese concert-going public was reluctant to buy tickets to hear musicians under the age of forty--never mind that two of the city's greatest composers, Mozart and Schubert, never reached that age. Great music must be interpreted by mature artists, they assured themselves--an attitude that goes some way to explaining why Paul's concert debut took place at the late age of twenty-six. But the obstacle that was even tougher than contemporary prejudice was his own family. Paul's debut would never have taken place in December 1913 if his father had still been alive.

  In the long argument that raged in the Wittgenstein household over whether Paul should or shouldn't, could, couldn't, must or mustn't become a concert pianist, one person, perhaps above all others, helped to shift the tide in Paul's favor. His name was Theodore Leschetizky, a Polish octogenarian erotomaniac, hailed as the smartest piano teacher of his age. His pupils included Artur Schnabel, Ignaz Paderewski (who later became prime minister of Poland) and the brilliant, if volatile, Ignacy Friedman. In his youth Leschetizky had taken lessons from Karl Czerny, a pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven. His teaching method, insofar as he had one, was to insist on beautiful tone production, a virtue that he encouraged from his pupils by exposing them to the vagaries of his chameleon temperament. During lessons he could be despotic, irascible, sarcastic and volatile, or, without warning, effusive, sweet natured or embarrassingly tender and generous.

  He liked to enter his students' minds, to explore their private and spiritual lives and to share in their innermost secrets. His prettiest female pupils were subjected to excruciating conversations about sex, during which he found it difficult to keep his hands off them. In the spirit of this grand passion Leschetizky married four of his pupils in succession, the last (who enjoyed a brief concert career as "Madame Leschetizky") when he was seventy-eight years old.

  To be accepted at Leschetizky's classes, prospective pupils were required to audition in front of him. "Were you a child prodigy? Are you of Slavic descent? Are you a Jew?" he would ask as they entered the hall. If the answers were "yes," "yes" and "yes" he grinned broadly and the audition got off to a good start. One hopeful came to him with a Beethoven piano sonata and when he had finished playing it the master proffered his hand and with a cold, gnomic smile said, " Good-bye!" The prospective student was astonished. " Good-bye!" Leschetizky repeated. "We shall never meet again at the piano. A man who could play that with such bad feeling would murder his own mother."

  If the master had detected promise, he would send the applicant for one or two years' preparatory study with one of his assistants. The most prestigious of these was Malwine Bree. Paul seems to have fixed things in a different order, having enrolled with Miss Bree at the age of eleven without auditioning for Leschetizky first. In her youth, she too had studied with Leschetizky (with whom she had fallen in love) and also with Liszt. At various times in her life she counted Wagner, Anton Rubinstein and Mark Twain among her friends and she married a Viennese physician, Dr. Moritz Bree, who was fleetingly a famous poet. By the time Paul first met her she was widowed and her professional life was entirely dedicated to the service of Leschetizky. She groomed his pupils assiduously in piano technique and reverence for the master, and in 1902 wrote, with his approval, a book on his pedagogic methods that would ensure his international reputation for decades after his death.

  In September of 1910, after Paul had completed his military service, Mrs. Bree pronounced him ready to transfer to the master. At home he was already considered good enough to accompany his cousin, the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, and to play duets with Richard Strauss on his visits to the Palais. Leschetizky had high hopes of Paul's career and if he occasionally wearied of his student's hard-edged pianism (he dubbed Paul "the Mighty Key-Smasher") or if Paul sometimes resented his master's narrow musical tastes (Leschetizky considered Bach and Mozart not worth learning), their relationship progressed to firm friendship. Paul, to his dying day, professed an unwavering admiration for his old master: "he was both an artist and a teacher at the same time," he remembered. "To find these two qualities of intelligence and artistic inspiration (each of them rare) in one person is as rare as an eclipse of the sun and moon together."

  Leschetizky was not the only father figure in Paul's life for both he and his younger brother Ludwig befriended, adulated and revered a blind organist and composer called Josef Labor. Labor was a small man, not quite a dwarf but nearly so, who wore a bushy moustache and let his thick hair grow wild around his shoulders. A disconcerting glimmer of blind white eyeball showed through the slits of his half-shut eyelids, and the skin of his face was sallow and gray. A long chin and pointed bird-bill nose completed the image, confirming an impression of a menacing gowk from a nightmare or fantasy horror film. He was however a wise, intelligent and kind-hearted man. Ludwig regarded Labor as the greatest living composer, indeed as one of the six great composers of all time--Haydn, Mo
zart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms being the other five. Paul also held him as both man and musician in the highest regard. "What binds you and me together," Ludwig wrote to his brother, "is our shared interest in Labor's music."

  No one listens to Labor nowadays. If he is remembered at all, it is as a brief mentor to Arnold Schoenberg, or as a composition tutor to Mahler's future wife, the semi-deaf seductress Alma Schindler. When Alma applied for lessons with Alexander Zemlinsky, Labor was heartbroken. In her diary she recorded the emotion of her last session with him:

  Labor. He's lost for ever. Has abandoned me. "I can't do it," he said, "either Zemlinsky or me. But both--no." I was sobbing quietly. He must have noticed ... Otherwise he was uncommonly sweet--soothing my wounds. At the time it hurt me deeply. I've been studying with him for six years--haven't learned all that much, but always found him a warm-hearted sympathetic friend. And a true artist as well. A dear kind fellow.

  Labor, blinded at the age of three by an attack of smallpox, was educated at the Institute for the Blind in Vienna and later studied piano and organ at the Vienna Conservatoire. He lived for a while in Lower Saxony, where he was court organist to the libidinous King Georg V of Hanover. The king, who was also blind, became a close friend and when he was forced to move to Austria in 1866, Labor came with him.

  Paul went to him for "music theory" lessons, which consisted of long conversations about music, art, theater, philosophy, politics and life in general. While bravely resigned to his blindness, Labor had the ability to reduce those around him to tears of sympathy that sometimes spurred them to charitable action on his behalf.