The Emperor Waltz

by Philip Hensher

  With a trill, something that might have been a run of notes and a high sound, near a shriek, the singer finished and the pianist concluded with a few thumped chords. In her day, this last coda would never have been heard; applause would not have waited long after the last note. Now it waited, the audience talking over the pianist’s last contribution indifferently. The donkey with its ears dyed red at the tip sneezed, shook its head. There was a spattering of applause and, from one of the students, an ecstatic brava brava brava, a leaping to the feet. Fritz found that he was looking at the inessentials again. The glimpse of the unreal, the ideal, the ungrasped truth had been brief, as it always was. He was not sure what the name of the enthusiastic student was. He was very young. Like the others, he was working on the design for The Euclidean Ballet and had followed eagerly when Fritz had suggested a trip to the theatre. In Dessau, that meant a trip to the Variété with its experimental-music orchestra and its superannuated turns expounding the taste of forty years ago.

  The girl sitting next to him explained that Leoš came from a small village in Bohemia. German was his third language. Before he had come to study at the Bauhaus in Dessau, he had never been to any city but Brno, and had never been to the theatre in his life. For him, the girl explained, this was all too wonderful for words.

  Her name was Stasia. She came from Berlin, of course, she felt the need to go on to remind Fritz. Another of the boys, a quiet one who looked at everything with a gleam of delight, was called Felix. He was said to be the son of one of the Masters.

  The compère announced in his grating voice the last act of the first half. He retreated to the piano, and began to bang away at a circus polka. A small tuba in the pit marked the emphatic notes in the bass. A juggler came onstage and began to hurl two coloured balls into the air; then from his pocket a third; then a fourth. A second juggler came on, and repeated the feat; then a third. They were dressed in jockeys’ shirts of silk in different brilliant colours, spring green, electric pink and a comic orange. To the side, the compère, in his white tie and tails, continued to grin at the audience and to thump at the piano; with the end of each phrase, he hurled his hand upwards to his shoulders in a startled flourish. At a change of key, the jugglers turned smoothly to each other, and began to juggle not in solitude but tossing balls one to another. Fritz watched carefully. There was no need for him to narrow his eyes. Here was geometry revealed onstage. He waited for one of them to drop a ball, for the geometry to be broken and re-established. But it did not happen. The act came to an end; there was some applause; the lights in the auditorium were raised before the jugglers and the compère were all off the stage.

  Fritz got up heavily and led his group out of the auditorium. The boy from near Brno came first behind him, applauding all the way and turning back towards the stage. The boy who was dressed as a pierrot followed in the rear. His costume was stained and dirty and his face paint was approximate. A waiter walking ahead of him with four masskrugs of beer turned and paused; he was an elderly man with a large, yellow, uneven moustache and heavily bagged eyes; he had, you might have thought, seen everything by now. But he stopped and stared, and the boy in the dirty pierrot costume made a floor-deep gesture of obeisance, almost a curtsy. He did not always wear the costume. He wore it mostly in the evenings. Nobody knew where he came from. When asked, he would say, ‘From Bergamo, my homeland’ – a theatrical line – in an affected, high, reedy voice with a fey gesture of the hand. During the day, he often wore a billowing white shirt and tight black jodhpurs with no makeup. His name was Egon.

  ‘That was simply wonderful,’ Leoš said, when they were out in the open air.

  ‘It was as if nothing had changed since 1893,’ Stasia said.

  ‘I think the stage should be painted white and lit pink,’ Fritz said. ‘I am sure of it.’

  ‘Like Bergamo, my homeland,’ the pierrot called Egon whiffled. ‘Like a great pink harvest moon over everything, and triangles and hexagons all dancing in the moonlight.’

  1.2

  In this weather, you wanted to leap out of bed and go to your window, to lean out dangerously over the curved railings to see as much of the building as you could. It was exciting to see other people doing exactly the same thing, however early you woke up. Today, with the sun shining through the thin drapes at the window, Ludo had been woken at six and had wanted to get up immediately. Those people in the big heavy buildings, with no windows, with stone and gargoyles and brick and ornament! How would they get up! How would they see the beauty of the blue-skied day and fling themselves into it!

  The school was set in neat-trimmed lawns, and the road that ran alongside it was broad and empty. From his fourth-floor window, he could see brilliant white angles and a flash of window among the birch trees on the other side of the road. They were the Masters’ Houses – cubes of chalk with bursts of interior colour, set among the birches like a prerequisite to thought. In there, great minds were already at work in the perfect diffused light of their private studios. Klee was preparing his knives and his pencils and his paper, and putting the contents of a just-finished dream onto a flat surface to dry. Or perhaps they were having their breakfast, ham and hard-boiled eggs and horseradish and nice black bread with their coffee, and feeding their children, who sat on their knees, from plain white plates with plain steel spoons. One day all families would be like that, in square white buildings, well lit, well constructed, without dragons or plaster gods at the door, without vine leaves on their knives and forks, without any attempt to make a plate into a flower or a teapot into a cabbage. Ludo opened the window and, bare-chested in his pyjama trousers, stretched out his arms and inflated his chest with the good summer air. There was a wonderful smell of grass and birch trees and summer. He smelt himself in this fresh summer air, raising his right arm and sniffing at his animal armpits with joy. Down there on the lawns, in exercise drawers and a vest, his friend Klaus was making great star jumps on the grass. ‘Seven!’ he shouted, as Ludo watched, and went on to make nine more star jumps before shouting, ‘Eight!’ He looked beautiful in his white vest and shorts, his skin burnt brown already by their lake expeditions and the sun of the last month. As he jumped, he looked like the last star of the night, blazing on into the morning.

  Ludo splashed water on his face and hurried downstairs. He did not trouble to dress. Klaus was between exercises, and panting heavily; he gave Ludo a great smile and a hug that knocked the air out of Ludo’s lungs. The animal pleasures of their joining bodies’ smell, out there in the sunlight, were wonderful to Ludo.

  ‘What is this!’ he shouted. ‘Lie in bed! Rise at noon! What is this thing called dawn!’

  ‘It is so beautiful a day that I was woken and thought I would get up early for once,’ Ludo said. It was not true. He was not a late riser. He liked to get up early and start work before nine. But Klaus was someone who got up early and cast himself into noisy exercise, and did not believe that anyone could match him in devotion or serious energy.

  ‘Now – the running on the spot,’ Klaus said. ‘You are running on the spot now? Good. Not too fast at first. The air in the lungs! For me it is a rest, a warm relaxation between strenuous exercise. For you it is to pump blood into the muscles. Yes? Good. Today I reflected on something important, Ludo. On Tuesday it was the eighth time that you and I practised sodomy together. It was in my room. Do you remember?’

  ‘I think it was the seventh time,’ Ludo said.

  ‘No,’ Klaus said. ‘I have kept a record and I am sure of my accuracy. This was the eighth time. It is good to give in to what you desire without consultation of the morality of the ornamental age on some occasions. Yes? We are in agreement? Now faster, like this – hup hup hup hup hup hup … And slower, hup, hup, hup, and down. Yes. Now, this giving in to the desire must be regular and agreed upon and not indulged without limit or structure, or we should be like monkeys in the trees.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ludo said. He had sometimes been ashamed of his desire to be like a monkey in
a tree with Klaus. That once – Klaus shining naked by a lake, doing his star jumps and glistening with lake water and a shine of sweat, a question mark of lake weed on his dark and blond-hairy thigh, and from his face, the white blaze of his perfect teeth.

  ‘That is good. Now we must set a date for the practice of desire next. I think it will be on the afternoon of next Tuesday, in four days’ time. That will be the day after the first performance of the ballet, and we will have had a good deal of rigour and discipline, which needs to be given a counter. Is that a suitable day for you, Ludo?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ludo said, now joining in with Klaus’s seamless move into more star jumps. He believed he was now fitter than he had been – at any rate he did not fall so quickly into breathlessness.

  ‘Good. So, on Tuesday afternoon, we will practise sodomy on each other, first you on me and then me on you. That will be the ninth time.’

  It filled Ludo with sadness that it would be only ten times, according to Klaus’s timetable of behaviour, they would meet for this purpose. It was important to carry on the occasional practice of desire without reference to the morality of previous, ornamental ages. On the other hand this must have limits, or it would expand and become worthless, like a mark that once bought a loaf becoming mere paper in a pile of worthlessness. For Klaus, the tenth occasion would be the monument at the end of possible lands, beyond which not an afternoon’s desire but illusions like love and sentiment and ornament lay. So with the tenth occasion they would shake each other’s hand and move on to the practice of desire with other friends. They were all agreed that this was a healthy and hygienic way to exercise an essential bodily and mental function. It was so sad. He thought that, with some organization, the tenth occasion could be delayed until September on their return from the summer, and then Klaus would feel that their meetings could continue a little longer.

  ‘Hup, hup, hup,’ Klaus said. ‘And now – hup-hup-hup-hup-hup, yes, yes, at the double, and the knees up to the chest like – like – like—’

  A citizen of Dessau walked past the building. There were two half-naked men doing violent exercises outside it and making too much noise when it was not even seven in the morning. Karl Richter, in his summer jacket and neat little trilby with a pheasant’s feather in the band, irritably noticed a small stain of his breakfast egg on his lapel. He thought he would get used to the new school building. His wife said she never would. It gave her heartburn to look at it.

  1.3

  The musicians were having their last rehearsal before the dress rehearsal. In the ideal new spaces of the school, a room had been designated for their use. It had quickly filled up with detritus, with the large number of musical parts from different musical works needed to supply the accompaniment to The Euclidean Ballet, with the manuscript linking passages supplied by the composer, or a composer, with scraps of paper giving indications, with the performers’ own annotations. As well as all of that, there were plates and cups that had never been removed and a garden fork that had been placed in the rehearsal room by a gardener, perhaps under the impression that this was now a lumber room.

  The garden fork was not obviously a musical instrument. It would not be needed. The other objects in the room that were not obviously musical instruments would need to be gone through today. Over the previous six weeks, the three or four composers and dramaturges had introduced some strange and interesting objects for the sake of their sounds.

  There was a neat little anvil and a shining little hammer. There was a typewriter. There was an aeroplane propeller. There was a pile of large white plates to be hurled and smashed. There was a crazy broken old violin and a phonograph with two records, Beethoven’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage on the turntable, and to one side in its brown envelope, a record of jazz music. It was called Shufflin’ Mose and was performed by Eric Borchard. These two would be alternated throughout the performance, whatever the other musicians were playing. There was a wooden chair and a saw to cut it up. There was a crate of eggs, to be broken and beaten during the performance. This was not a waste of food: omelettes would be served after the performances to the audience, as they had been served during rehearsals to the hungry dancers. All these sounds, loud and quiet, curious and familiar, distinctive and mysterious, would be performed by Elsa Winteregger, the school’s junior tutor in silversmithing, and one of her students. The student was here. Elsa had not yet arrived.

  These sounds would alternate with the performance of music from the four proper musicians. An associate of one of the Masters, someone who taught art in a local school, turned out to be a good cellist, and he knew a clarinettist. The director of the ballet had insisted on there being a violinist of theatrical, tired appearance, and he had found one, a seventy-five-year-old veteran of the tea dances. They had worried about this musician, but nothing surprised Hans; he had, too, a foul mouth and a steady supply of obscene stories about his time in Paris in the seventies. Thomas was the pianist. He alone was supposed to know how everything would work.

  ‘What now?’ Hans said.

  Thomas, from behind the piano, explained. At this point they would play the first four bars of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony sixteen times, while the aeroplane propeller was cranked up and Elsa Winteregger beat time by smashing the plates. When they were done with that, Thomas would signal –

  ‘Oh, we can count to sixteen,’ Hans said genially.

  – and they would move on to the foxtrot written on sheet – on sheet – on sheet—

  ‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ he said, rifling through his folder. ‘The slow fox.’

  ‘There are two foxtrots,’ Christian the cellist said. ‘There is one which is on a page I’ve labelled seven B and another on page nineteen. I don’t know which one you mean. The one on page seven B is in D, the other one – let’s see – no, that’s in a strange key of your own invention, I believe. Two sharps, but F sharp and G sharp, yes?’

  ‘It’s the other one,’ Thomas said. ‘It should be labelled nineteen. Is that right? Everyone together? Yes? And then a small pause, while Fräulein Winteregger and Siggi break some eggs and pour water from a great height into the bathtub, and then the Strauss waltz, the first one hundred and twenty-seven bars exactly. It just breaks off. And then—’

  ‘It is wonderful to me that we are still playing these shitty old tunes,’ Hans said. ‘At the tea dance, I understand. I remember playing that Strauss waltz, the Emperor, thirty years ago with a great orchestra, an orchestra of eighty. We still play it at the tea dance. There are just three of us: I, the pianist Frau Schmidt and her sister who plays the cello. The old people who come, they like the Emperor Waltz, they like to stand still in the introduction and catch their breath and perhaps to talk a little to their friends. And then they like to waltz, quite slowly, but as in the old days, some of the ladies with each other. I do not know how people who are so advanced as you came to know of the Emperor Waltz at all.’

  ‘Times change,’ Thomas said briefly, not really listening.

  ‘Oh, I know that times change,’ Hans said, smiling. ‘I am not a shitty old fool like my brother Clemens, who says everything is gone wrong, that everything is falling to pieces, that people are worse than they used to be and that there are people, the Jews you know, who want to destroy Germany for ever. What is astonishing to me is that things sometimes stay the same, and it is astonishing to me that you want to play the Pastoral symphony and the Emperor Waltz at all. For myself, as I say, it is always nice to play the Strauss waltz, even the first hundred and twenty-seven bars ending in the middle of a phrase, even with Fräulein Winteregger imitating the pissing of a cow behind me.’

  ‘What am I meant to be doing?’ Elsa Winteregger said, bursting in. She was wearing an old and loose green man’s shirt, frayed about the cuffs, and her short hair was wild about her head. ‘I am so late for everything. I must be gone by half past ten. Tell me when it is half past ten. My sister was sick this morning, and her husband nowhere to be seen. You! Where were
you? My sister said you left at dawn, leaving her alone with her sickness. I had to comfort her.’

  They always forgot that Elsa Winteregger’s sister was married to the suave cellist with the haunted look. The three of them, it was believed, actually lived together. It was hard to imagine Elsa Winteregger living on her own. The two of them mostly made a habit of not speaking to each other in rehearsals. The cellist muttered an apology to his sister-in-law, and Thomas brought them back to the rehearsal.

  1.4

  The dancers in The Euclidean Ballet were assembled and dressed. The costumes were an essential part of their movements, which were at root simple and straightforward. The dancers complained to each other about the chafing, sometimes to a state of being rubbed raw, that the costumes had brought about. They were brightly coloured and bulky, the costumes, and very heavy, being made out of frames of wood with dyed silk stretched over the top. There had been some talk about constructing the frames out of something light, like balsa wood, but at the first attempt, the balsa-wood frames were crushed and broken. Something stronger and more resistant was needed, and unfortunately those strong and resistant woods were painfully heavy to lug about the stage.