The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War

by Alexander Waugh

  LEFT: Entrance hall at the Wittgenstein Palais, Vienna.

  BOTTOM: The Palais, seen here from the Alleegasse (later renamed Argentinierstrasse), was razed to the ground in the 1950s.

  TOP: Gretl, Jerome and their son, Thomas Stonborough, with Aimee Guggenheim (Jerome's sister) and Delia Steinberger (Jerome's mother) at St. Moritz, 1906.

  LEFT: Karl Wittgenstein, c. 1910.

  TOP: Ludwig, Helene and Paul enjoying a joke at Hochreit just before the outbreak of war, July 1914.

  ABOVE: On leave from the war at Neuwaldegg, summer 1917. From left: Kurt, Paul and Hermine Wittgenstein, Max Salzer, Leopoldine Wittgenstein, Helene Salzer and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

  RIGHT: Kurt Wittgenstein, shortly before his death in 1918.

  TOP: The Wittgensteins' mentor, blind composer Josef Labor, at the organ.

  ABOVE: Paul, one-armed pianist, c. 1921.

  LEFT: Ludwig, schoolteacher, c. 1922.

  ABOVE: Villa Toscana, the Stonboroughs' elegant summer house on Lake Traunsee at Gmunden.

  LEFT: Leopoldine Wittgenstein is read to by her late-life companion, the retired soprano Marie Fillunger, at Hochreit, c. 1925.

  Gretl's new house on the Kundmanngasse in Vienna, partly designed by Ludwig, spring 1929.

  Christmas at the Kundmanngasse. From left: Delia Steinberger (now Stonborough), Jerome, Thomas, Gretl and Ji, c. 1929.

  LEFT: Paul's friend Marga Deneke with her dog in her garden at Oxford, c. 1928.

  BOTTOM LEFT: Gretl Stonborough, c. 1930.

  BELOW: Hermine Wittgenstein, c. 1934.

  RIGHT: Austrian picnic. From left: John Stonborough, Arvid Sjogren and Marguerite Respinger, c. 1930. Ludwig proposed to Marguerite (originally a Cambridge friend of Thomas Stonborough's) on condition that they would not have to have sex.

  BELOW: Christmas at the Palais, 1934. Paul sits with Helene on his right, and Hermine is at the head of the table.

  RIGHT: Paul in a photograph taken for his Cuban passport, 1941.

  BELOW: Paul performing the premiere of Schmidts Piano Concerto. The composer (blurred) conducts the Vienna Philharmonic at the Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, February 9, 1935.

  LEFT: Hilde Schania, c. 1936.

  BELOW: Hilde with her daughters Elizabeth and Johanna, Vienna, 1938.

  LEFT: Paul with Johanna and Elizabeth in Cuba., 1941.

  BELOW: Paul with his son Paul Jr., c. 1950.

  RIGHT: Ludwig at Cambridge, 1946.

  BELOW: A late portrait of Paul, c. 1960.

  Ludwig on his deathbed at Dr. and Mrs. Bevan's house in Cambridge, April 1951.

  The Wittgenstein family grave at the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna--final resting place of Karl, Leopoldine, Hermine and Rudolf Wittgenstein and their servant Rosalie Hermann.

  From these prickly beginnings Paul put Prokofiev at his ease by telling him that as far as the commission was concerned he could compose whatever he wished at his own discretion. Meyerhold's wife was enraptured with Paul's musicianship, and explained to Prokofiev afterward "how he played with such love. I felt for his spirit that such a man should have lost his arm in the war." But Prokofiev was not impressed and replied to her: "I don't see any special talent in his left hand. It may be that his misfortune has turned out to be a stroke of good luck, for with only his left hand he is unique but maybe with both hands he would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists."

  Paul liked Meyerhold and his wife despite his preconceptions about their Bolshevism, but they were never to meet again. In 1938 the Stalinists closed down Meyerhold's theater in Moscow and murdered Zinaida. Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and shot in prison on charges of "Trotskyite activism."

  In January 1931, four months after Paul's first meeting with Prokofiev, he accidentally slipped in the street in Vienna, fracturing his thigh and rupturing a blood vessel, causing a hematoma. On the 20th he performed the Korngold Concerto in Vienna with his leg in a bandage and was still hobbling about in a splint in March when he read in the newspaper that Prokofiev was coming to play in Vienna. Straightaway he sent a letter urging the composer not to stay at the Hotel Imperial but at his Palais instead:

  You will have your own room with your own piano, no one will bother you. It is a principle of mine that guests in this house have only to say if they wish to be woken in the morning, if they want coffee or tea, if they will be in for dinner etc., other than that they live here as if they were at a hotel or pension.

  Prokofiev spent a happy time with Paul playing Schubert duets on the piano and as soon as he was back in Paris began to concentrate on his left-hand concerto. Paul had asked him for something that was "clearer than Strauss and less childish (from a technical point of view) than Franz Schmidt." Entitled Piano Concerto No. 4 it was finished in sketch form by the end of July 1931, but the composer was not altogether happy with it. The work is emotionally detached and one senses that Prokofiev's heart was not in it. Right from the start, he harbored plans (initially kept secret from Paul) to turn the piece into a two-handed concerto as soon as the Wittgenstein exclusivity contract had expired. On September 11 he sent the score to Paul with an accompanying note, showing that he was unsure of his reaction:

  I hope the concerto will prove satisfactory to you from a pianistic point of view and in terms of the balance between piano and orchestra. I am at a loss to guess what musical impression it will make on you. A difficult problem! You are a musician of the 19th Century--I am one of the 20th. I have tried to make it as straightforward as possible; you, for your part, must not judge too quickly, and if certain passages seem at first indigestible, do not rush to judgement, but wait a while. If you have any suggestions for improving the work, please do not hesitate to tell me them.

  If Prokofiev's autobiography can be believed, Paul wrote back bluntly: "Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it." The letter has since disappeared, and although Paul may have written those words there was certainly more to his letter than that, as the composer and pianist remained on warm and cordial terms. In an exchange three years later Prokofiev wrote to ask if he would mind his transforming the piece into a concerto for two hands. "Given the excellent relationship that exists between us and not wanting to do something that might be disagreeable to you I thought I should consult you on this matter first." Paul replied that Prokofiev was wrong if he thought the concerto had not pleased him. "That is not fair," he wrote. "Your concerto, or at least a considerable part of it, is comprehensible to me, but there is an enormous difference between a poem that displeases me and one whose meaning I cannot fully grasp."

  Paul responded to the delivery of Prokofiev's score with a note to confirm that he would be sending him $3,000 as the second installment of his fee. Prokofiev wrote back to correct him. "You don't owe me $3,000 but $2,250--that is $2,500 minus the 10% that Kugel [your agent] is taking." Until that moment Paul had no idea that Prokofiev and Astroff had settled for $5,000. He had taken his agent's word for it that the fee was $6,000 payable in two installments. When he discovered the plot to rob him of $1,000 he flew into a rage and sacked his agent on the spot. For a short while he signed himself to the music writer and impresario Paul Bechert, and when Bechert ran off to America in December 1932 leaving all his debts unpaid, Paul was temporarily without representation of any kind.

  Many hours were spent poring over Prokofiev's score, but Paul never understood the music and consequently never performed it. The first performance (with Siegfried Rapp as pianist) took place in Berlin in September 1956--three and a half years after the composer's death. As to the proposed two-handed version, Prokofiev never got around to making it, and remained equivocal about the quality of the work: "I have not formed any definite opinion about it myself," he wrote in his autobiography. "Sometimes I like it, sometimes I do not."

  LOVE STORY

  There were reasons why Paul was in such an excitable state at the time of the Ravel debacle that few could have guessed. His girlfriend was in se
rious trouble. Bassia Moscovici, a beautiful young Rumanian, is said to have been a singer, though no record of any of her public performances survives. Her father was a modest jeweler and watchmaker from Bucharest, and it is possible that Paul first met her as early as November 1928, when he stayed at the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest while rehearsing and performing the left-handed concerto by Bortkiewicz. In the autumn of 1930 Bassia moved to Vienna, where he put her up as a kept woman in a villa on the Vegagasse in Vienna's 19th District. It seems unlikely that he ever intended to marry her as she was born of a humble Jewish family and he, with his nervous temperament, was fundamentally unsuited to married life, but in 1931 her name was registered in the Austrittsbucher of the Jewish community in Vienna as a person who, on February 25, had voluntarily left the Jewish faith. It is therefore possible that her subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism and her adoption of the confirmation name Pauline were intended to clear a way for marriage to Paul. In the event a cruel twist denied her this chance.

  In the summer of 1931, Bassia discovered that she was pregnant with his baby. Paul, in desperation, turned to his sisters for help and Gretl, with her big heart and bossy inclinations, took command of the crisis by arranging for the twenty-one-year-old Rumanian to undergo a secret and illegal abortion. Bassia desperately wanted to have the baby but was browbeaten by Gretl into believing that abortion was the only possible and acceptable course of action. The dangerous, late and incompetent backstreet operation went badly wrong.

  Bassia became extremely ill and she was still not fully recovered in the late autumn of 1931 when she discovered a swelling on her shoulder caused by rhabdomyosarcoma--a cancer that was spreading through the muscles of her upper arm. At the beginning of November she underwent an operation to have the tumor removed from her shoulder, after which Gretl tried to persuade her to go for a period of recuperation somewhere outside the city. Distrusting her motives, Bassia insisted on remaining close to Paul, but Gretl, determined as always to have her way, booked her into a sanatorium at Mauer bei Amstetten in the Dunkelsteinerwald fifty miles to the west of Vienna, sending an ambulance to her flat in the Ve-gagasse to pick her up and take her there. The hospital, a well-known clinic for nervous or mentally disordered patients--which was opened in 1902 by the Emperor Franz Joseph with the infamous words "It must be nice being an idiot in Mauer"--was not to Bassia's liking. After a few days she discharged herself and returned to the city, complaining to Paul that Gretl was some kind of evil spirit. By then the cancer had spread to her lungs, the wound from her operation was infected and she was suffering a high fever. Gretl, she claimed, had forced her to have the abortion and deliberately sent her to a dirty hospital where her condition had worsened. None of this, she argued, would have happened if she had only been allowed to have the baby.

  At this stage only Gretl and Paul knew that she was dying of cancer. The doctors had not informed Bassia of the severity of her condition. Paul became extremely solicitous, "touchingly good" according to his sister, and Gretl, in a spirit of reconciliation (if not driven by feelings of guilt), offered to take Bassia into her house at the Kundmanngasse for a month. By mid-January 1932 everyone, including the patient herself, knew that she was going to die and there would be no question of her moving out of Gretl's house. Through January, February and March, as Bassia's condition worsened, the relationship between her and Gretl gradually improved, with the occasional smile passing between them. Gretl herself was far from well, suffering from acute fibrillations in her chest, and she spent most of the day lying down. When Marga Deneke came to visit her she recorded: "Putting out her hand to greet me, [Gretl] explained that the doctors were strict in their rules about her heart trouble and remained semi-recumbent lying like a statue on the folds of a red and golden shawl, surrounded by a blaze of coloured flowers."

  Gretl rose only for Bassia, hoping to prepare her in some mental or philosophical way for death, but was unsure how to go about it. Bassia's visions or presentiments of her own death struck Gretl as fey and comical and she regretted not being able to take them more seriously. By mid-March Bassia was thin, pale and gaunt. The last vestiges of beauty had forsaken her, but she struggled on with Paul in constant vigil at her side. On April 22 she was visited by Ludwig's friend Marguerite Respinger, who wrote: "Bassia has been in agony since yesterday evening. She will die soon. I am thinking only of Paul..." That evening her decline was so severe that Paul stayed with her throughout the night, holding her hand until the moment of death. Miss Respinger returned the following morning to pay her respects. "It made a great impression on me," she wrote. "Not because it was frightening to see a dead person; but to lie there with such a peaceful expression, I wondered: what type of human being would one have to be? Good."

  Hermine returned from the Hochreit to find Bassia's mother, Esther Kirchen, holding her dead daughter's hand and speaking to her as though she were still alive, tenderly informing her how pretty she once was, and how sad that she had not been looking so pretty of late--a spectacle that Hermine found both touching and gruesome. She spoke only a little to her brother about it and afterward reported cryptically to Ludwig: "Paul has lost a lot and he admits it. I am not sure though whether he thinks the same as me when he admits it..."

  Paul undertook all the necessary arrangements and two days later, on Monday, April 25, 1932, Bassia was buried in a prestigious spot close to the main gates at Vienna's Zentralfriedhof. She left no will, but 14,000 Austrian schillings (worth twenty-eight times the average monthly wage) were registered in her possession--presumably a gift from Paul. After the funeral, demonstrably heartbroken, Paul presented Gretl with a glittering tiara and each of the servants in her house with a "most handsome present" for having looked after Bassia; but his distrust of Gretl never healed. Even though she had done so much to help, he continued in his belief that her interference had been detrimental. They discussed their relationship together and both acknowledged that it could never work. Aside from the simple fact that Paul's and Gretl's attitudes to life were entirely opposed, Hermine also thought she detected unpleasant undertones between them. "Paul can only lose here but we cannot change it."

  HIS AMERICAN DEBUT

  At the time of Bassia's demise Paul's nerves--never his strongest attri bute--were strained to their uttermost and, as a direct consequence, his piano playing became inaccurate and aggressive. A Polish tour at the end of the year produced an adverse response from the critics. Pawel Rytel of the Warsaw Gazette wrote: "Despite our admiration for the artist we have to stress that there were shortcomings." The Warsaw Courier similarly hinted: "Performances by single-handed pianists should not be judged in the same light as two-handed interpretations, but nevertheless I have to say that the pedal was overused." "Obviously one hand cannot replace two," said the critic of Polska Zbrojna, while the journal Robotnik noted: "As to those compositions composed especially for him, Paul Wittgenstein was expected to play them impeccably but the general impression was not good for reasons of faulty pedalling and lack of technical skill among other things." The critics may have demurred, but audiences did not seem to mind how roughly he played. Even in Poland his concerts were cheered to the rafters as his hypnotic stage presence continued to exert its effect over listeners, in spite of playing that was rough, nervy and inaccurate.

  It took him nearly two years from Bassia's death to refind his form and, when it happened, his return was spectacular. An American tour in November 1934 took him to Boston, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Montreal. Everywhere he was greeted by a blaze of publicity, packed houses and rave reviews. At a concert in New York he was recalled to the stage for five encores. His performances astonished both critics and audiences. A review in the New York Herald Tribune is typical of many:

  Doubtless the greatest tribute that one could pay to Paul Wittgenstein, the famous one-armed pianist, is a simple statement of the fact that after the first few moments of wondering how the devil he accomplished it, one almost forgot that one was
listening to a player whose right sleeve hung empty at his side. One found oneself engrossed by the sensitivity of the artist's phrasing and the extent to which his incredible technique was subordinated to the delivery of the musical thought.

  Few dared to question what Paul was doing or whether the piano was worth playing with only one hand. One notable exception was the distinguished English critic Ernest Newman. Writing in the Sunday Times, after a Proms performance of Ravel's concerto, he wondered whether Paul--as Hermine and Gretl had frequently suggested--was attempting the impossible:

  I have every sympathy with Paul Wittgenstein in a loss of an arm during the war, and the profoundest admiration for the courage that enabled him to work up a one-handed technique afterwards. All the same I wish composers would stop writing one-hand con certos for him, or at any rate inflicting them on us ... The thing simply cannot be done; the composer is not only hampered in the orchestral portion of his work by consideration of the limitations of the pianist but even in the purely pianistic portions he is driven to a series of makeshifts and fakes that soon become tiresome. This concerto will certainly not help the fast-declining reputation of Ravel. From another point of view, it is true, the regrettable physical disability of Herr Wittgenstein may have half saved the work as a concerto for only one hand can, in the nature of things, be at worst only half as bad as it might otherwise have been.

  After three hectic months in America, Paul returned exhausted to Vienna on February 2, 1935, with just a week to prepare a new concerto by Franz Schmidt that was being premiered with the Vienna Philharmonic as part of the composer's sixtieth-birthday celebrations at the Grosser Musikvereinsaal. Hermine heard him practicing in his room and reported that the piece held little interest for her. "It seems to me that one could continue with the sort of compositions one hears today. It's a shame that he cannot commission anything really good these days." Paul was of a different view. "The first and second movements I think are really great music," he wrote to his friend Donald Francis Tovey. The third movement he found a little light so he made some alterations to enrich it that the composer approved and the concert was a storming success--perhaps the greatest single success of his entire career. Schmidt conducted a program consisting entirely of his own works, including the premiere of his great masterpiece, the Fourth Symphony, and fourteen German-speaking newspapers carried reviews extolling the concerto and Paul's inspirational performance of it. With the Ravel concerto, the American tour and now this widely lauded achievement, Paul's career despite its many breaks had reached another high peak. At the same time as all this his personal life was, once again, on the verge of major crisis.