A Nervous Splendor Read online

  For Rudolf, Wilhelm was a contemporary, an allied prince, and a bête noir since boyhood. That weekend the papers reported a speech made by the new Kaiser of Germany. Setting sail for Russia on his yacht the Hohenzollern, Wilhelm had expressed much slightly condescending cordiality for the Crown Prince of Austria.

  For the time being Rudolf had to accept even that.

  For the time being. The phrase governed his life. For the time being he had no power to change anything, including his country’s inertia vis-à-vis other lands. For the time being he must even play along with the German Emperor’s airs.

  The day before, he’d sent Wilhelm a copy of the freshly published Volume I of The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture. Rudolf was not only its editor but author of the first chapter, which happened to be about the very landscape through which the train was passing—the Vienna Woods. Rudolf’s personal inscription to Wilhelm (“to my dear friend and cousin”) was as effective a camouflage as the banalities to which he limited his article. In it, he invoked the loveliness of the Vienna Woods, foothills to the Alps, the lyric rise and fall of forest slopes which undulated in his compartment window now. His chapter dilated on the Schwarzföhre, the black fir, into whose twigs the breeze stirs a hiss that is also a melody; on the woods’ silence; the lonely sweetness of occasional bird songs. And on the relative absence of animals interesting to hunters.

  Nowhere did the author mention that he himself had bought a hunting lodge just here, in the heart of the Vienna Woods, at Mayerling. The lodge had been inaugurated by the Crown Prince and Princess, with many Imperial huntsmen and gypsy violins attending, in the fall of the previous year. But Rudolf had many better shoots available. Gun and hound weren’t heard too much after he took possession of Mayerling. “I must have a nook to myself,” he said to a friend baffled by the Crown Prince’s partiality to the isolated lodge. “There has to be a place to run to, when the Krippelg’spiel [mummery] gets to be too much.” It got to be too much rather regularly. Often he “ran” to Mayerling alone, as he did on this July afternoon. Often in special company. He was not the most conjugal of husbands, nor the merriest of archdukes, nor the least devious and willful of crown princes. Elsewhere he went through the charade of acceptance. Not necessarily here. This fall his father’s government had prepared a gorgeous agenda of Imperial renewal and rejuvenation. Rudolf did not necessarily believe in all the gorgeousness. And in this corner of the Vienna Woods he could escape it. At Mayerling he did what was best done in seclusion.

  Rudolf got off the train in Baden. Heels clicked, caps levitated. He allowed himself to be bowed past the view of another presumable detective, jumped into the one-horse phaeton held ready for him, drove fast, too fast, through the Helenen Valley, past the ruins of Rauhenfels and Rauhenstein, and within half an hour ground his wheels onto the gravel driveway of a rather simple farmlike building. His lodge at Mayerling.

  Through the rest of the night the few servants heard little more than the rain which had begun and the hiss of the black fir.

  Chapter 2

  Rain covered the Empire that weekend. In Vienna a slow drizzle kept promenaders from the Ringstrasse, and the weather made drearier a raw spot still left on the most grandiloquent part of the boulevard: In the square opposite City Hall, a huge shape bulked, hooded in canvas, obscured by scaffolds.

  The thing looked like a gargantuan butterfly not yet emerged from its cocoon. Workmen had been laboring on it for no less than sixteen years, longer than on any other edifice on the Ring; yet its opening, scheduled for September, had been postponed again. It was the one showpiece of the boulevard that remained unfinished. A magnificent laggard, it seemed to mirror the Austrian condition. When it reached completion, finally, sometime in the fall, then perhaps Vienna would complete its own passage to modernity.

  That Austria had much catching up to do was a hoary truth by 1888. But whereas Rudolf wanted fundamental reform, his father often thought in terms of cosmetics. In 1857 the young Franz Joseph had made a characteristic concession to the need for change. By that time every other Western metropolis had long since torn down its fortifications. Now the Emperor ordered that his capital’s ancient ramparts should be razed, too, at last. Their removal and replacement by the Ringstrasse had been plastic surgery on a gigantic scale. It had produced doubt at the very outset from Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s most trenchant playwright:

  Vienna’s confining parapets

  into the sand now fall.

  What does it matter?

  We are still ringed round by a Chinese Wall…

  Grillparzer had died in 1872, but his skepticism survived in Rudolf and a thoughtful few. Throughout Europe and America great powers led the race toward the new century. And Austria? In Austria it was drizzling on Ringstrasse marvels still not finished after sixteen years.

  In Austria contradictions danced an ornate quadrille. In Austria the Crown Prince could ride roughshod across all traffic regulations; but before the need for reform, he must stand perfectly still. In Austria the monarch could assume unlimited power over a limited Monarchy. In Austria only Parliament made the law of the land; yet article fourteen of the constitution let the Emperor make laws himself whenever Parliament did not sit—and His Majesty could dissolve any session. In Austria Franz Joseph, a “latent absolutist,” could emerge from legend into politics to supersede the legislature or to sack a prime minister. In Austria old privileges began to show their age while retaining, somehow, an entirely undiminished luster. In Austria the gonfalons of a feudal Crown still flew over subject nations hissing with an unruliness that was already republican.

  How long could such anachronistic confusion last?

  The likes of Rudolf worried. But around Franz Joseph one hoped that many problems would give way to the season starting this autumn in the Imperial capital. Vienna’s Chinese Wall—everything that insulated, antiquated, parochialized the city—would sink away before a series of progressive spectacles already announced by the newspapers. Soon the Crown Prince would help inaugurate a modern new trade exhibit. Then Wilhelm, Emperor of Germany, would come to town to pay homage to Franz Joseph in a state visit that would establish Vienna as a principal center on the international scene. Franz Joseph would celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his reign, a significant milestone. And, at the season’s summit, the canvas would drop from the last important construction on the Ring. The titanic butterfly would be released from its cocoon of sixteen years: The new Court Theater would finally shine forth with a stage electrically lit and a technology worthy of the coming century. Vienna would mark that premiere with an éclat surpassing the debut of all other Ringstrasse buildings. And then, at last, the season would wreak its miracle. The Ring would be whole and Austria would be launched into the greatness of its future.

  Would it not?

  In the new Court Theater, which was to signify such consummation, a young man of Rudolf’s generation labored. Sometimes he whistled, though not as sentimentally as Bratfisch; sometimes he cursed when a bit of paint fell onto his face. By the time of our rainy July weekend of 1888 he had been on the job for months. High above an immense staircase, so close to the roof that he could hear the drizzle drumming, he lay on a scaffold and moved his brush to the weak glow of an “electric lantern.”

  He was not Michelangelo painting Noah on the Sistine Chapel. He was the then obscure artist Gustav Klimt finishing a ceiling panel called The Chariot of Thespis.

  He could not judge what he was doing. Though the mural was meant to be viewed from the staircase, the sight lines from there were blocked by the scaffold. But if Klimt could not really see his work, he couldn’t really believe in it either. He didn’t believe in programed grandeurs. Not in the Ringstrasse’s, which rehearsed the architectural swagger of the past. And not in these ceiling frescoes representing highlights in the life of the drama muse, cliché after overblown cliché. Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and his associate Franz Matsch had been hired to depict thespian landma
rks through the millennia, leading up, by implication, to the new Court Theater as their zenith.

  It was prestigious hackwork for three unknowns in their twenties. It was also a sweaty bore for Gustav Klimt. Like the Crown Prince he was harnessed to the ornamentation of an old mode while all his instincts demanded the creation of something new.

  For The Chariot of Thespis he had drawn a preliminary sketch that included two florally intercurved women kissing each other. Baron von Wilbrandt, in charge of the theater’s decor, had put a quick stop to that. Klimt’s finished panel showed the two women standing demurely side by side.

  Later he would be notorious for the sexuality of his portraits, stretching the female body in sensuously skewed geometries. Now this impulse could express itself only through small mischief: he suggested slight elongations in his nudes; and he made the statues in his five mural panels more flexible than the “live” figures.

  The first, still hobbled, stirrings of a giant were in the brushstrokes that touched the ceiling of the new Court Theater. Within the decade Gustav Klimt was to spearhead an assault on Vienna’s art galleries and museums; to break up all the pompous gesticulation with an erotic whiplash; to stand forth as one of art nouveau’s foremost, most radical exponents. His work would be central in a movement that many decades later still dotted space-age lofts with Tiffany lamps and dream-touched posters.

  And there were others like him in this town, names destined to be trumpet blasts—though they gave off only struggling sounds by the Danube in the summer of 1888. Vienna, that scrollworked bastion, smoldered with more demons of the future than the most forward-minded cities of the West. Its officials were obsessed with the need to continue a great Imperial image. The true greatness gathering in these streets was often as unofficial as a guerrilla band.

  Greatness was a precocious concern to the rained-on son of a small shoe-shop owner in the Jewish district of Vienna. At fifteen Arnold Schönberg paid no attention to the soaking of his Sunday-best yellow topcoat. In decades to come his audacity with chromatics and harmony would outdo Klimt’s with color and line. He would not just revolutionize music but reinvent it. Atonality, as he would develop it, was to polarize the new music of the twentieth century. This July weekend of 1888, however, he was far from being a new master. He was a worshipful apprentice. He was standing just outside the covered pavilion of the First Café by the Prater Amusement Park. He couldn’t afford to go inside. It would cost at least twenty kreuzer to sit down under shelter for a cup of coffee. Therefore he stood as near as possible to the rim of the pavilion so that he could discern, through the rain, the music coming from the cafe’s bandstand. Once Beethoven had performed there in his last public appearance as a pianist. Now, in fact, the military band went from a waltz to the overture of Fidelio. Schönberg edged forward. He had no other way of hearing important music free. It didn’t matter that he was not only listening but dripping. This was as near as he could get to greatness.

  Greatness was a hypnotic ghost in Vienna that summer. Another musician pressed still closer to Beethoven—closer physically to the greatest composer of them all—though Beethoven was over fifty years dead in 1888. Anton Bruckner managed to share his pince-nez with the Olympian corpse.

  Some days before our rainy July weekend Bruckner had boarded the horse-tramway to Währing Cemetery in outer Vienna. Against the protest of a policeman he had barged into a chapel where scientists bent over an opened casket. Beethoven had just been exhumed for skeletal measurements prior to removal to a belated Grave of Honor in the Central Cemetery. Bruckner brushed past specialists at work, clamped on his pince-nez, grasped the skull with both hands. A doctor tried to interfere, but Bruckner at sixty-four still had the single-minded enthusiasm of a boy.

  “Now ain’t it true?” he said to the skull in his Upper Austrian dialect, “…ain’t it true, dear Beethoven, that if you were alive today you’d allow me to touch you? And now them strange gentlemen here want to forbid me that!”

  He was forbidden, with some mild physical force. On the way home he realized that his pince-nez now had only one lens. “It must have fallen in when I stooped over the casket,” he said to his companion, Karl Hruby, and seemed “quite happy” about it.

  He couldn’t be sure, though. The lens might have dropped out at home. His housekeeper, the formidable Kathi Kachelmayer, conducted one of her grim searches through Bruckner’s four rooms in the Hessgasse. She detested the barnlike dishevelment of the place which defied all her attempts at order. She plowed through heaps of manuscripts, score sheets, books, and God knows what else under which the piano, the organ, even the desk were buried. She assaulted similar piles in the bedroom where an ever-proliferating chaos of paper spilled across the bed, the only furniture. In vain. The lens was gone. Kachelmayer glowered. Bruckner rejoiced.

  Many troubles pressed on him. He was a country boy plunged by an incongruous talent into a difficult and important city career. He could construct the most intricate of harmonies into which to pour the humble fervors of a village Mass. His compositions were admired by some, but ignored and snickered at by more. He earned general recognition—and a fair living—only as a master organist. Right now he was reworking his Third Symphony and finishing his Eighth, risking again the contempt of the city’s musical hierarchy. But it didn’t matter; not in a good week like this one in early July. Then he had the joy of a peasant acolyte for whom death is a mystery as superb as a young girl’s loveliness. Then he thanked the Savior for His bounties. To share a pince-nez with the bones he loved! Wasn’t that to partake of their greatness? And another solace: Soon he would depart for Bayreuth to commune a while with Richard Wagner, also a great friend who resided in God’s mercy within a tomb.

  A fellow Wagnerian, indeed one of Bruckner’s few sympathizers, seemed to be an exception in July 1888. He appeared to have let up at least temporarily on the pursuit of greatness which absorbed others in town. Indeed this man might have had good reason for relenting. Born in the remoteness of a Styrian valley, Hugo Wolf had already made true a bit of the dream that drove a gifted young provincial to Vienna. No one in the city was ready yet to share the consensus of musicologists of later generations: that Wolf was the supreme master of the modern Lied, the peer of Schubert and Schumann. But he had already gathered a certain small following. Sponsors arranged domiciles for him, like the one at Mayerling in 1880. Hugo Wolf lived here a few hundred yards away from what was to be the Crown Prince’s hunting lodge. When just past his teens, he rolled his cigarettes at Mayerling, worked his coffee machine, ate his vegetarian milk-and-groats, wandered the black-fir woods, bedded in farmhouses a girl named Wally Frank and wrote the “Mausfallsprüchlein,” an exquisite song uncanny in view of Mayerling’s future. “Mausfallsprüchlein” sings about a romantic idyll with a sweet little mouse—which turns sinister as a cat joins the party.

  Now in July 1888, not yet thirty and just over five feet tall, Hugo Wolf was “a dancing little powerhouse of a man, stocky, broad shouldered, thick necked like a young faun, yet so light and delicate, as graceful in posture as Puck the elf.”

  In the months preceding he had finished the initial group of Lieder based on the verse of Eduard Mörike. It was Wolf’s first great cycle and perhaps the first group of such songs ever which didn’t just accompany lovely words with beautiful sound as Schubert had done—but used music to serve the most fragile intentions of poetry. “Wolf’s Poetic Supremacy Act of 1887,” a critic would one day call this approach, revolutionary for a composer. But Wolf himself suspected that in the last year he had brought about a turning point. “I have just written down a new song,” he wrote to a friend. “A divine song, I tell you. What I write now, I write for posterity…How far shall I get?…What will the future yet unfold for me? This question torments and distresses and preoccupies me waking and dreaming. Have I a vocation?”

  After the spring’s tremendous spurt, though, he appeared merely to coast through July of 1888. As usual, he was very close to being p
enniless. A few friends put him up at the Schloss Bellevue, a frayed castle-inn on a hill in the Vienna Woods.* Wolf seemed to be busy with nothing but the repair of an old piano when it rained, as it did during the first July weekend of 1888. When the sun shone, he hiked. Even his closest friends thought he was lolling through a restful interlude.

  Actually it was nothing of the kind. It was a summer dedicated to an intensity nobody knew. Hugo Wolf was conducting, and at the same time concealing, a grand passion. The woman was Melanie Köchert, wife of his most generous patron. The coded personal advertisement in the July 5 edition of the Neue Freie Presse, the very edition traveling with Rudolf to Mayerling, was addressed by Melanie Köchert to Hugo Wolf.

  To my most beloved love: Have you forgotten me entirely?…Write! Greetings and kisses from your R.

  R. signified Rinnbach, where the Köcherts had their country house in the Salzburg Alps. “Write!” was a plea he had answered through his work. He had addressed Melanie when he had composed such Mörike songs as “Insatiable Love”: “A thousand years you’d try in vain to kiss away your passions’ pain…caresses but augment it…”