Ghost Variations

by Jessica Duchen

  As a student he had spent much time here, for this was the district in which Berlin’s nightlife had sprung up in the old days and mesmerised the city’s artistic community. The westernmost end of the Ku’dam had boasted one of the best spots, opposite the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the Romanisches Café – he remembered seeing Bertolt Brecht in there once, and you might well have found yourself admiring the flair of the cross-dressers, or pretending not to notice activities suggestive of an illicit affair or several, or eavesdropping upon some outrageous philosophical idea being promulgated at the next table. Even if Ulli, as a pianist in training, considered himself not remotely part of such a crowd, he had the underrated gift of being able to blend into the background to observe everything without having to take part. Nevertheless, he was a tall, fair, attractive youth, and sometimes he had been quite successful with the women there.

  Now Berlin seemed quiet – too quiet – and he was certain not only because of the chill east wind blowing in from Poland. Circular pillars for advertising – often glorifying the wholesome delights of the Reich and its achievements – offered the only jolt of colour in this clouded November: bright-blocked, chunky-lettered posters showing fast trains, jagged mountains, blonde women, green fields, raised fists.

  He wandered past the sprawling palace, searching for ghosts of his old life. Other than the shape of the roofs, the angles at which streets met and a few newspaper sellers and flower stalls that were unchanged, little remained to suggest the lure the city had held. The Romanisches Café had been raided and a riot staged there as long as a decade ago – the Nazi Party’s thugs out to destroy the left-wingers’ favourite haunt. All the life seemed to have been sucked out of the place. Now an air of numb obedience lingered around the figures making their way towards the opera house, many seeming determined to vanish into safe and inconspicuous anonymity.

  The Deutsches Opernhaus, previously called the Städtische Oper, was a solid yet elegant building seemingly from a bygone era – even though 1912, if he thought about it, was not really that long gone. All the people he remembered from its administration had left or been thrown out. Ulli approached the front entrance under the façade’s five giant windows, but soon noticed crowd barriers all around, traffic police directing cars away from the closed road and a red carpet that had been rolled from kerbside to central doorway, ready to welcome the Reich’s leaders to this historic event.

  Midday in a down-at-heel suburb of Berlin was not quite what Ulli had envisaged for the modern world premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto. But Goebbels and the Reichsmusikkammer, together with the state’s leisure-time organisation Kraft durch Freude (KdF) – Strength through Joy – had developed some novel aims. They wanted to take music out of its concert halls and bring it to the people, in accessible venues that would not intimidate them with their formality and where tickets would be affordable for the ordinary man on the Charlottenburg tram. These concerts took a different form from mainstream events: the programmes were shorter, they might be held anywhere from a sports stadium to a factory, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, and they might involve not only music but recitations, political speeches and, occasionally, audience participation. The Violin Concerto was to take wing as part of this series, and as the centrepiece of a KdF conference; hence the opera house.

  Eleven thirty: half an hour to go before his beloved concerto was to reach the world’s ears for the first time, and Ulli, fumbling to find his ticket and identity documents on the way in, halted in his tracks. Into this sizeable, usually welcoming foyer were filing not only audience members, but innumerable officials in uniform; two giant swastika flags decked the far wall, dominating the pale stone with scarlet, white and ebony. Barked instructions from security staff alarmed him; he tried not to show it. The personages of the Reich were on their way; everything else was subordinated to their security.

  He kept his distance from the Streckers, who as the concerto’s publishers were expected to be accorded due recognition at some point. Ulli refused to put himself through another encounter with Goebbels. For all he knew, that man would be having his every step watched. He remembered the face of the minister of propaganda looming at him over that outsize table and felt sweat erupting on his forehead. ‘Nothing is ever “just a piece of music”… ’

  ‘Ach, Ulli,’ his mother had said at Sunday lunch, ‘you’re not yourself.’

  ‘I can’t sleep.’

  ‘You’re very pale and you don’t seem able to keep still for a minute. You must take care. You know you’re all I have left.’ She turned the thumbscrews of guilt, but of course it was true. Nothing had been the same since that meeting in Berlin, at which Ulli found himself on the edge of a ravine, staring into what might lie beneath.

  Inside the auditorium he found his seat, glad to be near the back and not with his employers among the dignitaries. He could feel tension pervading the place as it filled: people sitting in silence or, if talking, chattering too hard, too fast or too quietly; fingers twitching across handbags or against sleeves, knuckles pallid, gazes darting up towards the largest box, which was festooned with the usual regalia, yet still empty and waiting.

  And then he was there. He was to awaken the Schumann Violin Concerto with a personal kiss of approval. The audience – the congregation, perhaps, of this church of political art – stood at once. Feet struck the floor. Arms swept upwards. Gathered voices rose like an aeroplane engine, and there in the box was a dark, flop-haired, moustachioed figure, arm outstretched in salute, gaze scouring the crowded theatre beneath. The cheering assaulted Ulli’s eardrums. Having no choice, he stood too, and saw his own arm rise to match the angle of everyone else’s, because it would look very obvious if it did not, and it occurred to him that he had never in his life seen or heard anything like this roar of heightened energy in one mass of people.

  He noticed a woman in early middle age occupying the seat beside his. She had not risen to greet the Führer, but sat in her chair, immobile.

  ‘Why aren’t you standing?’ someone behind her challenged.

  ‘I have a bad knee,’ said the woman over her shoulder. Then she stared straight ahead. Ulli noticed the man take a breath to fortify the accusation, but fortunately for his neighbour the proceedings now demanded silence.

  The Führer sat, and the people followed suit. The conductor, Karl Böhm, strode to the podium. A crash of cymbals: Wagner, the grandest of the Führer’s favourites, the strings galloping through shimmering triplets, the horns bouncing along in their pomp and grandeur. The Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin. In the opera, it would introduce a wedding scene after which everything goes horribly wrong, but so stirring was its mood that now the context was ignored.

  Here it was an introduction, as it turned out, to Goethe’s Prometheus; Friedrich Kayssler took the stage alone to recite. Ulli had not seen the actor, an imposing 60-something with an aquiline profile, since the days when the great man had been based at the Berlin Volksbühne – the ‘people’s theatre’ – where he had taken over from Max Reinhardt as director back in 1918. Goethe’s poem addressed Zeus as a self-appointed human deity, deriding the old gods. There was no mistaking the intent of these words in Hitler’s presence.

  And the Führer? How insignificant he would look if you passed him in the street without his uniform and moustache. It was all one big show, a manufactured identity complete with music, pictures, camera angles and stage management – yet people swallowed it whole, inexplicable and irrational as that might be. Ulli’s head felt hot, yet he shivered; perhaps anxiety, perhaps the smoked fish at breakfast. There seemed to be no air in the theatre. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply.

  Kayssler finished and bowed in gratitude to the crowd’s applause. Robert Ley took his place – the head of the German Labour Front, the official state replacement for the banned trade unions, which ran the KdF. Fighting some worsening stomach cramps, Ulli let Ley’s words wash over him, straining his ears beyond the man’s slightly peculiar diction �
�� was he drunk? – for any strand of music seeping out from backstage. But one more speech remained; this time, the figure Ulli prayed nightly that he might never need to see at close quarters again.

  A blanket of silence smothered the theatre as Goebbels prepared to speak.

  ‘Today,’ the minister of propaganda intoned, ‘thanks to the generosity of the Führer, Schumann has entered Valhalla!’

  The concerto started at last, with a pulsing on the strings and a rush of sound. Not as much of a rush as Ulli would like; Böhm was not noted for sprightly tempi. This was portentous, stately, ceremonial; it squared with the Reich aesthetic, less so with the personality of the composer. Kulenkampff, waiting for his first entry, betrayed no emotion; when his opening phrase arrived, it sounded all in a day’s work. Ulli tried to imagine how he must feel. Soloist in the first performance of a concerto on which hung so much expectation, playing to Hitler and Goebbels. Was this really the opportunity for which poor Jelly had longed?

  He glanced at Hitler, in the dignitaries’ box. The Führer seemed absorbed, his head and hands moving jerkily, as if, deep down, he had discovered a would-be conductor who was longing to get out, take control and make the music move just a little faster.

  Ulli was wishing to high heaven he had not eaten the smoked herring.

  The slow movement began. Schumann’s violin solo seemed disconnected from the cello’s counter-melody: drifting over the top, lost in his own world, or perhaps trapped there. Heads turned; people glanced at their companions to see if they, too, were puzzled. Was it meant to sound like this? Was Kulenkampff’s timing wrong? Ulli, who had worked on every note of the piece, knew it was right. If Kulenkampff and Böhm, those most rational musicians, could not make sense of the concerto, how could anybody?

  And yet… within this musical jungle lay a naked beauty so exposed that it seemed almost indecent. Schumann’s soul might be damaged and suffering, but he still gave its entirety. Could it ever have been right to leave this music unheard?

  And yet, and yet… there was madness here, a precipice lying ahead in the fog and snow; a spirit filled with love, but lost, unable to master itself. For the first time, Ulli began to wonder what happens when insanity is unleashed through art into the souls of others. What exactly did Joachim and Clara know about this piece that made them put it to sleep?

  The transition sounded and the Polonaise emerged into the daylight. The Führer was smiling.

  Ulli forced himself to listen to the detail. Kulenkampff’s version was considerably altered, whereas Yehudi had eagerly declared that he wanted to play every note exactly as Schumann had written it, without even the hushed-up Hindemith adaptations. Kulenkampff, ignoring Schumann’s funereal metronome mark, played it as a true polonaise; yet though his delivery was graceful and elegant, its triumph felt empty. Everything would be all right, it seemed to say, when Ulli knew full well that it would not: only a few months after creating the blazing conclusion, Schumann threw himself off the Düsseldorf bridge into the black Rhine.

  Final chord. Kulenkampff, domed forehead shining with sweat, his bow aloft, gaze locked for an instant with Böhm’s. The orchestra standing, tired, inscrutable. The Führer, on his feet. The whole audience rising to ape him. And applause. And… Ulli sensed their puzzlement. This was no triumph. That slow movement – exquisite, yet out of kilter; was this concerto after all an insane work for an insane land? What had they done, letting it out?

  While he searched his own soul, wondering why this malign potential had never struck him before, or whether the idea was just a creation of his own mind, in which case perhaps he too was losing his senses, the concert moved on to a group of patriotic songs. Strength through joy. Everyone sang along. The volume was submerging him.

  Ulli suddenly knew that his stomach was about to lose its battle. A chorus of tutting and shushing followed him; as he stepped across his neighbours, trying not to tread on anyone’s toes, a woman with her hands plunged deep within a fur stole heaped a curse on him. ‘Please excuse me – something I’ve eaten,’ Ulli said. Glimpsing her face upturned towards the Führer, he spotted a gleam of tears, not of sorrow.

  Were people so completely fooled? How could they be so stupid, so believing? Would they gulp down, dog-like, whatever was put in the feeding bowl in front of them because it was so easy?

  Outside, the world whirling around his head, icy air punched him in the guts. He staggered away from the entrance and doubled up – just managing to remember that at least now he would not have to see his employers being presented to the leaders of the Reich and congratulated on their achievement in rediscovering a great German concerto by a true German artist.

  *

  ‘It can’t last,’ Willy Strecker said, two days later, safely back in Mainz. ‘All these things come to an end.’

  ‘But when?’ said Ulli. ‘And how?’

  Willy shook his head. ‘Don’t start being heroic, Ulli. You’ve done your bit. And remember, you’re playing by the rules now… ’

  Ulli had scarcely eaten since the Charlottenburg concert. He wasn’t sure that even during the deprivations of his childhood he had felt real despair before. Some of the country’s best composers had been banned or had gone into exile; the greatest one had been conscripted as a signature tune to a mad dictator; now, so had this unstable and heart-rending concerto. Many times in the past he and his friends had grumbled about politicians’ lack of artistic awareness. Yet today they had some who knew the power of music too well and could use it for their own ends, and this was a great deal worse.

  Every postal delivery was a source of terror lest it contain the call-up papers that could be the Reich’s revenge on an employee who had made the mistake of championing Jewish musicians. One of his friends, a young historian who had openly challenged the government’s racial policies, had been arrested; nobody knew where he had been taken, or whether he was still alive. And Ulli’s own handwriting had appeared on the envelopes in which the great Aryan Schumann concerto had flown the country into the hands of Jelly d’Arányi and Yehudi Menuhin. If that were noted and traced… Ulli could no longer tell which of his fears were justified and which the products of his frazzled insomniac brain. Trying to pick up the telephone to call Jelly again, as he had promised to do, his hand shook and sweated, his head spun and he could not continue.

  To leave the country and find sanctuary elsewhere; to give up the job he loved and gamble on the outcome. Was it braver to stay or to go?

  ‘What are we going to do, Willy?’

  ‘All we can do is wait. Wait for the cycle to turn, because it has to, eventually. Wait for it to end.’

  ‘Das Ende.’ Ulli quoted Wagner’s Wotan. ‘Das Ende… ’

  And beyond the deep windows of the Schott’s headquarters, beyond the pink cathedral, the conservatoire that had thrown out its Jews, and the swastikas fluttering like crows on the Rathaus, the autumn winds were gusting in from distant mountains, bringing with them the first hint of snow.

  Chapter 17

  ‘The Nazis’ biggest propaganda party of the year,’ Adila fumed. She was trying to tune in to German radio to hear Kulenkampff’s performance, fighting the wireless’s unreliable tuning and cursing in Hungarian, by far the best language for it. Across the Atlantic, they’d been informed, Yehudi Menuhin was not only listening but had a journalist with him to monitor his reactions.

  Jelly imagined her beloved concerto ready to sound its marvels in Berlin; more imprisoned now, in front of a capacity crowd swelled by Nazi dignitaries, than it had ever been while cocooned in its safe, quiet file in the Prussian State Library. She didn’t want to hear it at all. She escaped to the Green Room with some magazines to wait until it was over.

  ‘Didn’t you want to know what he’s done with it?’ Alec asked, astonished to find Jelly there a little later, lying on the chaise longue and leafing through the latest Vogue, circling dress designs she liked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jelly, without flinching, ‘but not yet. He’ll re
cord it, for sure. I’ll hear it sometime – after I’ve played it.’

  ‘You might be interested to hear,’ Alec said gently, ‘that Goebbels made a speech. Then Kulenkampff played the concerto. And now they’re all singing rousing nationalistic songs together with their Führer.’

  Jelly’s magazine slid to the floor. ‘What did Goebbels say?’

  ‘The usual.’ Alec picked up Vogue and placed its bright colours face down on the chaise longue. ‘It’s not your fault, you know. You could never have imagined this when it all began.’

  Jelly, usually so swift to tears, could find none. She couldn’t let the import of what had happened drill through her shell, or…

  ‘There, there, old girl.’ Alec patted her arm. ‘I’ll leave you in peace.’

  She sat still, listening to his steps fading on the stairs. Her Sleeping Beauty had been awakened by the wrong prince. Could the spirits not see into the future? Could they not have known, when they chose to speak through the glass game, that the first person on whose ear the concerto would fall might be Adolf Hitler?

  ‘They don’t tell us what will happen,’ Adila affirmed that evening, ‘only what is, with their wider perspective.’ Erik had arrived after dinner; Jelly found them all in the music room, drinking coffee, the baron looking as shattered as Jelly felt. ‘Even then, they’re sometimes wrong. Several times this has happened.’

  ‘Do you remember, they thought we should look in Weimar?’

  ‘Yes, and one of them said, “My child, we do not know everything,”’ said Erik.

  ‘The spirits are only human,’ said Adila.

  ‘There’s no reason why a spirit fallible in life shouldn’t also be fallible after life,’ Alec remarked, his eyes smiling above his moustache. ‘They’re the same people, one presumes… ’