A Nervous Splendor Read online

  But Wolf also wrote her privately. He sent Melanie a letter to a post-office box in Rinnbach. His lines from Vienna to the Salzburg Alps crossed another extramarital missive in the rain, traveling in the opposite direction.

  The other letter, written on July 5, was not carried by ordinary mail like Wolf’s. A courier conveyed it on the fastest train in a pouch sealed with the All Highest insignia. After all, that letter belonged to one of the most august unconsummated affairs in history.

  “My dear gracious lady,” wrote Franz Joseph, the Emperor and Apostolic King, from Bad Gastein to Frau Katharina Schratt, the Imperial and Royal Court Theater actress. “The weather certainly could be better. But on the other hand, it also could be worse…” Then, in the same conciergelike vein, His Majesty proceeds to describe how he is fairly content in his modest rooms at the Hotel Straubinger. How he rises at 5 A.M. (much later than usual, but then he is on vacation); works on State papers till 7 A.M.; then climbs, alone, to the chalet high on the mountain where the Empress resides and where he gets his coffee; climbs down again for more State papers between 9 A.M. and lunch; climbs up again, again alone and usually in the drizzle, for some sour milk at 2:30 followed by a hike; climbs down again to his hotel at night to sleep; and how he remains Madame’s most devoted and adoring—Franz Joseph.

  This was the rainbow sovereign whose palaces in Vienna, Budapest and Prague totaled ten thousand rooms, who raised field marshals and erased prime ministers, who decreed the Ringstrasse’s splendors, who in his working days loomed in a cloud of palatines, chamberlains, equerries, and adjutants.

  Despite or because of all that, Franz Joseph maintained a paradoxical relationship with greatness. His official world moved to a steady drumroll of magnificence. And magnificence was just what he liked to exclude from his private hours. The Emperor slept on an iron bedstead, ate boiled beef, drank beer, and had a love life consisting of a hopeless petty-bourgeois crush on a lady of the stage. If Hugo Wolf required an extravagant affair to maintain his spirit and his art against a milieu of threadbare improvisation, Franz Joseph needed a homey attachment to make tolerable life on the loftiest pedestal.

  What complicated the monarch’s yearning for the prosy was his wife. He had married a superb sonnet of a woman, an absentee Empress. At fifty Elisabeth was still Europe’s great beauty, neurasthenic and fugitive, a legendary wanderer, parsing a poem by Heine on some Adriatic shore or skipping veiled down the alleys of a Mediterranean port. Franz Joseph admired Elisabeth abstractly. Concretely she gave him nothing that he wanted.

  Frau Schratt did, thanks to her attractive limitations. In her the Court Theater had a competent comedienne. Offstage she was not mesmerizing but endearingly bubbly, even in the face of majesty. When the Emperor had the sniffles, she would bake him little cakes in the form of handkerchiefs. She cooked him goulash and fed him the backstage gossip he relished. Their “soul friendship” (as he called it) was not only good therapy. It was also politically right just because it happened to be a mésalliance. If Franz Joseph had turned to someone more fitting—a princess, a lady of the Court—his attachment would have been interpreted as the triumph of one Palace cabal over another. Frau Schratt, however, stood delightfully beyond the pale. She was His Apostolic Majesty’s beloved commoner. The actress humanized his exalted lot by reducing it to domestic proportions.

  Of course he could have taken possession of her by discreet Imperial fiat. He never did; not physically. Instead he chose to adore her with all the ardors of unfulfillment. He adored her in countless letters breathing sheepish passion and homely humors. He knew he must never have the woman he desired; just as he must have known, somewhere in a corner of his mind, that the gorgeous Empire he ruled could never last.

  Consecrated to two impossibilities, the Emperor and Apostolic King walked the mountains of Bad Gastein in July. He trudged up the steep meadows, alone in his plain green loden coat. He nodded at shepherds who had learned not to be amazed at greatness passing among cow turds.

  On the same July weekend, one of Franz Joseph’s subjects faced the same Austrian rain and experienced a rather modern uncertainty. He wondered yet again whether he deserved to be himself. That is, he wondered whether he merited greatness.

  At sixty-three Johann Strauss commanded a renown even more overwhelming than the Emperor’s. Second only to Queen Victoria in international popularity polls, he was the world’s first pop celebrity, a composer-performer who set vast crowds pulsing, from Bosnia where peasants imitated his mustaches, to Boston where he had directed a choir of twenty thousand to celebrate the American republic’s centennial. The continents waltzed to his fiddle. It was as though he were leading a new revelry which not only enthralled the globe but expressed its acceleration. Strauss had become a mass idol without benefit of mass communications, a feat surpassing the Beatles’.

  In July of ’88 he summered in his country villa at Schönau in the Vienna Woods, about a dozen miles southeast of Mayerling. The “delicious” young Adele was his newly married third wife. He had just composed the Emperor Waltz, a symphonic enchantment in three-quarter time, in honor of the forthcoming fortieth anniversary of his sovereign’s reign. And he was being sued for fifty thousand kronen (by the lyricist of “The Gypsy Baron”) as befitted a preeminent composer. His studio was ringed with rose beds in Schönau, peacocks strutted in his garden, and like other Viennese he was jousting with the phantom of true greatness. His very name epitomized the genius enthroned in his own lifetime. And yet he resembled Hugo Wolf, that obscurely steaming spirit: Johann Strauss still struggled toward his “true vocation.”

  Everyone said that he was incomparable. He suspected his incomparability. What if he was incomparable in a second-rank genre? He craved the first-rank, though he had lived for over sixty years without essaying it. Now the time had come for that—now or never. In 1888 most of his summer nights were consumed in the attempt. If he succeeded he would deserve to be Johann Strauss.

  By daylight he displayed a witty, charming, affable mask. After the sun went down; after the admirers, the interviewers, the fawners, his business agents and card-playing cronies were gone, he changed. He began to be his fiercely aspiring self once more. Only then did he walk to the candlelit piano.

  This creative angel of lilt and light fed on darkness and rain. “Rain, nothing but rain,” he once wrote to a friend, “…infinitely wonderful. The worse it gets the better I feel…I want no sunshine while I labor.” Rain at night was best. At night his hooded eyelids opened, the coal-black irises glittered, his black-dyed mustaches and his black-dyed hair rose in powerful disorder. His fingers bore down on the octaves, his pencil raged against the paper.

  There must have been much such raging in July 1888. Johann Strauss, lord of the operetta, was now finally daring what he had waited to do all his life. He was writing Ritter Pazman, his last, his first, his only opera.

  Two other Viennese escaped the rain, but not the compulsions of greatness. Both were in their late twenties, contemporaries of Rudolf, Hugo Wolf and Klimt. Both still lived in the homes of their parents. But this summer they traveled abroad, in better weather. In that early July of 1888 this pair of overreaching, over-assimilated Jewish dandies from Austria met on the fashionable English seaside. “At Brighton I had a brief conversation with Theodor Herzl,” Arthur Schnitzler notes in his autobiography.

  It couldn’t have been a very airy encounter. Schnitzler suffered from the highest literary ambition. But to the future author of La Ronde, to the finest dramatist of the fin de siècle, all such hopes were oppressive dreams in 1888. Here he was, a custom-tailored drone whose father, the famous surgeon, financed his British tour. Here he was, an unknown physician with a whole shelf of unfinished novel drafts, unpublished stories, unproduced plays. Here he was, “unable to create for myself the necessary freedom with which to indulge my literary activities. The time for achievements had come, but I was unable to distinguish myself…I gave vent in my diary…to all the misery within me.”


  What a contrast to that dazzling litterateur, Theodor Herzl! Once the two had been fellow students at the University of Vienna. But Herzl had pulled “twenty paces ahead.” Schnitzler envied Herzl’s “ironic dash”; envied Herzl’s effortless style (at a party, Herzl had tightened Schnitzler’s sloppy cravat in passing); above all, he envied Herzl’s success as essayist for the Vienna papers. Hadn’t Herzl already published two collections of his pieces?

  Envy is a form of ignorance. Schnitzler never suspected that only a few months earlier Herzl had screamed into his diary against “this constant, wasting, travel-piece hacking…Journalistically I have arrived. But at the same time, I fear, I am finished…If I fail now, I’ll be a beaten and broken man, poorer than ever because I have lost youth’s courage.”

  Herzl felt socially stifled. By the 1890s he would emerge as the Zionist messiah. In 1888 most of his fellow Semites seemed odious. Good Jewish society was to him the slum of fashion. “Yesterday a grand soiree at Treitel’s” he wrote his parents during a stay in Berlin. “Some thirty or forty ugly Jews. Hardly a consoling sight…” And from Ostend beach: “Although there are many Budapest and Viennese Jews here, the rest of the vacationing population is pleasant.”

  No, he did not have the companionship he deserved, and his career (no matter how awesome to Schnitzler) had failed him bitterly so far. His by-line in the papers he saw as a mere stepping stone from which he should have long since leaped. His métier was to dazzle his audience on stage; to light up the world from a new, unexpected angle with the greatness of his wit. He burned to be what Oscar Wilde was about to become. But the theater managers who mattered either rejected or postponed his comedies. Only two weeks earlier he had finally received a positive letter from the Court Theater. It accepted his one-act comedy The Refugee; in fact it planned to star Frau Schratt as his heroine. But the Court Theater also warned that production might be far off. The Court Theater could schedule only a few one-acters per year and a number of others were already accepted but still unscheduled; besides, the Court Theater’s move from the old into the great new still-unfinished building would delay everything yet further. Would Herr Dr. Herzl therefore content himself in patience? Dr. Herzl tried. Meanwhile he worked the journalistic treadmill. Three times a week he must manufacture Sunday Supplement insights out of tourist sights. The cultured middle class had developed an appetite for such products. Herzl must feed it with endless departures and arrivals and deadlines.

  Yet he did not allow the strain to mar the perfection of his frock coat, the grooming of his blue-black beard, the urbanity with which he poured tea for Schnitzler at Brighton; nor the wit with which his dispatch to the Neue Freie Presse savaged John Drew’s acting troupe doing The Taming of the Shrew in London (“The actors barely missed playing badly enough to make the show amusing”). Nor did Herzl let the strain disturb the brisk, happy, good-boy genius tone marking his almost daily postcards to his parents that summer. “Dearest Father and Mother!…Cable me as soon as you can as soon as you see my latest article in print…Your advice is very good, dear mother, I’m keeping my umbrella handy.” This on July 3. And on July 18: “No, work doesn’t really tire me, dearest of parents. But if I do feel fatigue, I stop writing…I really feel very well.”

  Then and always Herzl knew much elation and much desperation. But he never felt really well. Nor did he stop when tired. He was still too far away from greatness.

  The absence of greatness also gnawed at Sigmund Freud, M.D., now in his thirty-third year. But in July of 1888 he worried less about his stature than about his solvency. Every month Frau Freud found it more difficult to cope with the rising price of sugar and everything else. Her husband had done so well in graduate and postgraduate studies; the Freuds had been entitled to think that their investment in a good address would pay off. Maria Theresienstrasse 8 lay right by the Ringstrasse, a neighborhood of arrived doctors and distinguished professionals. Anton Bruckner, for example, lived opposite at Hessgasse 7 and could afford the rent, having only himself to support on his joint salaries as instructor at the Conservatory and organist at the Palace Chapel. But if the old musician ever troubled to look down from his fourth-floor clutter to the young doctor’s orderly household on the second floor across the street, he would have seen precious few patients in the waiting room.

  Greatness, or at least great success, hovered somewhere around the corner, but it did not enter here. Freud was as stymied as anyone else in Vienna. At the start of his career he had tried a cocaine cure on depressives—disastrously. Some patients became addicted. And though young Dr. Arthur Schnitzler—as it happened—published an article praising Freud’s cocaine experiments, the medical establishment turned against him. Now he was using bath cures, rest cures, electrotherapy and, finally, hypnosis in partnership with Josef Breuer.

  Breuer, however, was a leading physician in town, doctor to the city’s most distinguished neurotics, summer resident of a spacious house on the Gmundner Lake. Freud, younger and much less deft with patients, spent the first July weekend of 1888 in a little pension which made do as a summer resort for his family. Because of his train phobia during those years the doctor took the horse coach to the village of Maria-Schutz in the Semmering Alps, just beyond the Vienna Woods, but only twenty miles from Mayerling. He arrived drenched by the same rain as Rudolf’s hunting lodge, brushed at by the same breeze that hissed through the twigs of the black fir. Among the rootwork of these pines grew large tangy mushrooms, the Herrenpilze which Freud liked to eat and loved to hunt during damp weather. But when could he find time? His mind was already swarming with great surmises. They all went against the dogma of the University Psychiatric Clinic. Freud was kept from an appointment there by his own ideas, though he had little leisure to explore them that summer. In the city he spent himself with his nerve-doctor chores. On his country weekends he did medical hackwork. Right now, in July 1888, he was grinding out anonymous articles for Villaret’s Medical Dictionary together with a translation of a French alienist’s treatise. He had (as he confessed later) the temperament of “a great adventurer, a conquistador, a Pizarro.” Yet that summer he maintained a drudge’s resignation and pretended to an iron fatalism.

  “Life goes on tolerably well here,” he wrote to his most intimate friend, Wilhelm Fliess. “We live in constantly increasing unassumingness. When our little Mathilde-baby chuckles, we think it the most beautiful thing that could happen to us. Otherwise we are not very ambitious…My practice grew a little in the winter and spring and is now dropping off again, but it just keeps us alive. Such time and opportunity as there has been for work has gone on…matters not worthy of note…In short, life goes on, and life is known to be very difficult and very complicated, and, as we say in Vienna, many roads lead to the Central Cemetery.”

  Freud’s mood may have been colored by the inclemency of that early summer of 1888. The exact meteorological records of Iglau, a small Moravian town seventy miles northeast of Vienna, are unknown. But another man, of Freud’s age, religion and talent, wrote even darker lines to his friend that season:

  “You are right,” Gustav Mahler wrote. “If this goes on I shall soon cease to be human. I am in the emotional state of my First Symphony.”

  By that time, though, Mahler had not only striven but risen mightily. Upward strife was in the family. His father had begun as an aggressive liquor vendor who kept in his cart a French dictionary for cultural improvement. Mahler senior ended with a distillery and a couple of taverns in Iglau, and an ambitious brood. His son Alois once rode through the streets costumed as a medieval German mercenary, one trouser leg blue, the other red, to announce to his parents: “One day I shall ride past the Imperial Palace in Vienna like that, and the Crown Prince will see me and say, ‘Who is this handsome horseman?’ and will summon me to give me a great position.”

  Among the Mahler boys, though, it was not Alois but Gustav who went off to Vienna, toward glory. The pursuit left little room for Gemütlichkeit. Only for a little whil
e did he take time out to be young. During his Conservatory days he’d joined a raucous, Socialist-tinged, German-nationalist vegetarian society where he thumped out “Deutschland über Alles” on the piano while Hugo Wolf barked out the lyrics. Soon afterwards he embroiled himself in his career.

  Socks drooping, sloppy, hurried and harrying, scurrying about with an oddly jerky gait, satanically intense, he grated on musical tempers in the pit or on stage. Mahler stormed in and out of a succession of increasingly important opera houses in Hall, Laibach, Kassel and Prague. In July of 1888 he had just broken with Leipzig. Few singers and hardly any orchestra members could keep up with the demands and visions of the pince-nezed little fiend up at the lectern.

  Often the dislike was mutual. Mahler hated “this hell of a theater.” Hated it not only because of the insufficiencies all around him but also because it kept him from composing, which was a more satisfying agony and therefore his proper mission.

  The summer of 1888 had already seen the successful production of Die Drei Pintos. This opera, though, wasn’t really his, being the uncompleted work of Carl Maria von Weber which Mahler had only finished. He had already written his haunting Songs of a Wayfarer, yet they were very rarely sung. Most painful of all, he had composed his First Symphony to very little avail. Its intensities and vehemences surged far beyond the bounds of the respectably romantic. It thundered, fluted, trilled and wailed the anguish of a soul stretched to its farthest limits. The Titan symphony (as Mahler titled it) was ablast with the demonology of greatness. This work contained most of his future ideas, and no established orchestra would play it.

  So much for his composing. But 1888 did not seem to be a good conducting year either. After his bitter divorce from the Leipzig Opera, Mahler could not count on a single promising prospect. His “subterranean” problem, piles, already afflicted him. He had just gone through an operation, very discreetly, in Munich. He felt better. But what next? What nincompoop music managers would he have to battle next? And where?