Last Days in Old Europe

by Richard Bassett

  Within six hours of delivering this note, my request was granted and I was ushered into the maestro’s presence in a large room at the side of the opera house. The room was thick with cigar smoke and, between long puffs, Maazel gave me an acidic tour d’horizon of his difficulties in trying to modernize the Vienna opera. His manner had undoubtedly been sharpened by the conflicts of the previous weeks and one could see the clash of two worlds in every gesture. Energetic, innovative and reformist, he had crossed swords with an establishment which was conservative, complacent and anti-American. Spearheading the attack was the redoubtable critic of the local Vienna newspaper, Die Presse, Franz Endler.

  Endler saw himself as the heir to Eduard Hanslick, the nineteenth-century critic whose articles could make or destroy a musical career in a single edition. After hearing Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, Hanslick had famously written, ‘No doubt these strange sounds have a place in the musical future of our world but it is not one that I can look forward to with any equanimity.’ For decades afterwards the symphony was hardly ever played. A century later, Endler was deploying the same withering sarcasm in his ‘appreciations’ of Maazel’s efforts.

  By the time of our meeting, Maazel’s fate had been sealed. Herr Endler had penned one hostile critique after another and Helmut Zilk (appropriately nicknamed ‘Zilk Cut’), the Austrian minister responsible for the arts (and later Mayor of Vienna) had asked the critic to draft a letter firing the maestro. That the letter, a supposedly confidential ministry document, had been drafted at Endler’s home soon became public knowledge, and indeed it was published soon afterwards in Die Presse. Nothing demonstrated the social cohesion of the Viennese political Gesellschaft more effectively than this episode.

  Herr Endler met me for coffee at Sacher’s a few days later. He seemed worn out by the battle he had fought and won, betraying only the slightest hint of triumph in his demeanour. Looking at this exhausted, wrinkled figure, a nervous, chain-smoking man who would be difficult to notice in a crowded room, I recalled the words of Kurt Vorhofer, the veteran and kind political editor of the Graz newspaper, the Kleine Zeitung: ‘Journalism may be dirty [schmutzig] but cultural journalism? That my friend is filthy dirt [dreckiger Schmutz].’

  The Vienna State Opera advertised discreetly for a new musical director to replace Maazel. A month later I was hastily summoned back from a weekend in Arezzo to interview Maazel’s replacement, Claudio Abbado. The interview was scheduled for 8.30 a.m. The night express Remus which had departed from Florence at 8.33 p.m. arrived punctually at the Vienna Southern Railway Station at 8.05 a.m. and twenty-five minutes later I was being shown by Abbado himself into the penthouse of a block of flats just behind the Sacher Hotel on the corner of the Neuer Markt. He was diffident, boyish and strikingly low-key. The contrast between the Italian and his predecessor could not have been greater. And although both were superb musicians, Maazel had exuded the air of a man accustomed to command while Abbado appeared shy, hesitant and modest. It was hard to think of him as a person on whose every word a hundred of the finest (and most demanding) orchestral musicians in the world would hang. I could not help wondering how this seemingly self-effacing maestro would deal with an orchestra as notoriously difficult as the Vienna Philharmonic. The great conductor Otto Klemperer, a protégé of Mahler’s, had memorably said shortly before he died in 1973, ‘I prefer the Vienna Philharmonic to any of the American orchestras and even to the Berlin Philharmonic. The sound, especially that of the strings, is magnificent, although individual members of the orchestra can be highly disagreeable.’

  Other orchestral musicians, let alone members of the general public worldwide, have little idea of the extraordinary prestige, status and musicianship of the Vienna Philharmonic. The Philharmonic is like an extended family, entry to which is governed primarily but not exclusively by standards of the greatest musicianship. Family tradition also plays an important part in the recruitment process. The ensemble of the orchestra, the unique richness of its string sound, the magical timbre of its horn section; these are quantifiable and are demonstrated in countless performances and recordings. Less tangible is the idea that the Philharmonic really operates like a living organism linked with the past directly through performing works that are part of a tradition handed down from one generation of players to another. Especially where the greatest achievements of Brahms or Bruckner or Mahler are concerned, the collective memory of the orchestra can draw on the wisdom and experience of the very musicians who first performed these works.

  The Viennese component is important in all kinds of ways. The members of the orchestra are predominantly Viennese and therefore, as Gombrich suggested, it makes music in a way which subconsciously reflects the intonation and cadences of their dialect. Its placing of chords and its lyricism add to its ability to play with the utmost crispness and precision. Nothing perhaps expresses this better than its unrivalled performances of the much underestimated but enormously demanding Johann Strauss canon each New Year’s Day.

  A conductor who attempts to impose too much of his own interpretation on these works is inevitably in for a difficult ride because the orchestra will always know the work better than he does. The musicians need a lot of persuading to play their beloved classics in ways that deviate from their established parameters. Without a very firm intellectual grasp of the score, a degree of charm mixed with authority and a seamless command of the German language, a new conductor faces a daunting task. If the conductor is Viennese it helps, but the players will nevertheless prefer a non-Viennese conductor who lets them sing (for example, Mehta) to a Viennese one who tries to get them to play everything according to his own, as they see it, ‘misguided’ views.

  I write ‘his’ views because, even though the orchestra has admitted since 1997 some female members, the overwhelming majority of the players and all its conductors are male. Although I counted four female players last time I saw them perform in the Musikverein, I would not be surprised if at the end of this century it, along with the Vatican, remained one of the two great European institutions exclusively dominated by men. These two institutions, like the Brigade of Guards and the Treasury in the United Kingdom, bring only defeat and ruin to those who challenge their traditions. Harold Macmillan could have added the Vienna Philharmonic to his list of institutions ‘one should never pick an argument with’.

  As the flagship of Austria’s status as a musical superpower, the orchestra – which also supplies the musicians for the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera – is financially unassailable. Its members enjoy a security and pension provision of which other musicians can only dream. To all intents and purposes they are civil servants with consonant privileges. To see them walk on to the stage of the Musikverein on Sunday mornings attired in 1950s diplomatic dress, or Stresemann as the Germans call the combination of pinstripe trousers, black coats with waistcoats and spongebag ties, is to witness the ritual of one of Europe’s last but most enduring musical elites. Such concerts remain the highlights of the European orchestral calendar, yet in the 1980s any impoverished Viennese could attend at least the second half of the concert by simply wandering ticketless into the Musikverein during the interval and avoiding the not-too-discerning eye of the attendants, who even sometimes shepherded the newcomers to the best standing places at the rear of the stalls.

  In the more competitive climate of the post-Cold War years, all these factors continued to ensure that the orchestra weathered the storms of globalization better than its rivals, notably the Berlin Philharmonic, which lost some of its unique tone quality and cohesion after the Cold War ended. Abbado, however, still found it no easy ‘band’ to conduct. He left as Director after barely two years, although not before he had introduced audiences to an account of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which was of such lyrical beauty and unthreatening Latin grandeur that even die-hard German nationalists in the audience must have been transported. Like Abbado’s later Bruckner readings, his Beethoven removed all vestiges of Teutonic martial inte
rpretations. No one could level at Abbado the accusation, often aimed by the Viennese these days at Thielemann, ‘Dass er macht unser Bruckner a bisserl zu Deutsch’ (He makes our Bruckner a little too German).

  After the departure of Maazel, the State Opera quickly settled down under Abbado – there were limits to the amount of cultural blood-letting permitted, even in Vienna – and guest conductors replaced the old guard of repertory conductors who had too often produced static performances of the classics. One of these newcomers electrified both the orchestra and the audience with his performances of Verdi’s Macbeth. Giuseppe Sinopoli towered above the pit, and appeared literally to jolt the Vienna players out of any sense of apathy. Under his direction they played like men possessed. His performances easily ranked with Abbado’s conducting of the same opera at La Scala in 1979.

  Alongside such mesmerizing conducting, Vienna produced casts of exceptional quality: Lucia Popp, Edita Gruberová and Gundula Janowitz (then nearing the end of her career but unforgettable as the countess in Figaro), as well as Agnes Baltsa in Carmen and Hermann Prey in Meistersinger and Bernd Weikl in Fledermaus. Performances of Second Viennese School masterpieces such as Lulu and Wozzeck were played regularly and more conventional tastes were consoled by Pavarotti in Rigoletto or Traviata. Although the number of operas performed each year had been scaled back in the wake of Maazel’s reforms, it was still possible to go to the opera twice every week for three months and see a different work performed each time. Productions remained conventional but inoffensive, in harmony rather than in competition with the music. The Regisseur in those days had not yet been gripped by the dead hand of the Dummes Deutsches Theater Regie (literally, Imbecilic German Theatre Production) set to destroy opera production at the Salzburg Festival for many years to come.

  These public performances were complemented by chamber music in a variety of houses in the Vorstadt. Rare were the occasions wandering through the Josefstadt when one did not hear the sound, floating from a window, of a piano or other instrument in a room above. Classical music, increasingly peripheral in other European cities, still remains part of daily life in Vienna. Where else on the underground metro system does one find oneself sitting next to someone studying a score or reading Furtwängler’s essays? The role of an orchestral musician is considered the highest calling, one that dwarfs in prestige any commercial activity. Even in the Heurigen of the Vienna woods, the Schrammel (Viennese popular music) – of course played live – remains a prized accompaniment to an evening otherwise devoted to food and wine. The songs sung by these musicians accompanied by violin and accordion have a bitter-sweet quality which is quintessentially Viennese. The zither, an instrument immortalized by The Third Man, is also often present. Its plucked chords conjure Central Europe in a way almost no other instrument can, just as the Zymbalon appears to embody the mysterious brooding character of the Hungarian plains and their gypsy inhabitants. It is often forgotten that the zither was a court instrument before the First World War and that Charles, the last Austrian Emperor, commissioned pieces from his resident zither composer. These haunting melodies continue to be played to this day.

  In the mid-1980s, a picture of Austria’s conservative musical taste was always available on Austrian Radio One, which was devoted to classical music. Coming from England, where Radio 3 in the 1970s was one of the glories of cultural life, I found the Austrian classical channel limited. There was no serious analysis to help one think about a complex symphony. Nor, ironically, was there a Hans Keller to engage the audience with deep knowledge and bold assertionsfn12 delivered in the only exception to received pronunciation then tolerated by the BBC: a thick Viennese émigré drawl. Instead, the Austrian channel simply announced, ‘Beethoven. Symphonie Nummer Drei in Es dur, gespielt von der Wiener Philharmoniker unter Herbert von Karajan,’ before a technical assistant placed the stylus on the record and the music began. It was nearly always Beethoven, Brahms or Bruckner; very occasionally there was Mozart or Schubert. Apart from these announcements, delivered with the gravitas of an authority calling for immediate evacuation to the air-raid shelters, no words were spoken on this channel: no debate, no commentary, above all no unrushed introductions to the music we were about to hear. I took it for granted that this contrast was permanent.

  In fact, in the 1990s, the Austrians moved on to the BBC’s former intellectual high ground, more or less at the same time London abdicated it and introduced the spurious breeziness of the chat show to Radio 3.

  It was inevitable that sooner or later this Viennese douceur de vivre would come to an end; London expected me to cross the ‘Curtain’ as a foreign correspondent. The arrival of Gorbachev in the Kremlin in March 1985 was widely seen as potentially shaking things up, but diplomats were sceptical about whether a man with strong KGB links would be in a position to change much in ‘the evil empire’. Settling into a routine of providing regular correspondence, my days became more frequently punctuated by quick telephone exchanges with the Foreign Desk followed by the two hours of writing and telexing a dispatch. I was quickly encouraged to visit Prague and Budapest at the earliest opportunity. But here was a dilemma: if I were to go on a journalist’s visa, I would almost certainly be monitored rather more closely than if I visited as a tourist.

  Hungary had abolished visa restrictions for Austrians a year earlier and, with Moscow’s blessing, appeared to be opening itself up to some Western influences. I thought it best to test these waters by visiting Budapest. Although I would have to call on the British Ambassador there for a briefing, I hoped it would not stir up too much fuss. It was generally thought that little notice was taken of a correspondent until the first article about a place behind the Iron Curtain had been published over a by-line. One morning in spring 1985, I waited at the Hungarian embassy in the Bankgasse in a long line of applicants for visas and presented my passport for stamping. The Hungarian officials were polite and correct with a formality bordering on the old-fashioned. A former Hungarian colleague from the Ljubljana opera corps de ballet arranged for me to stay in a family flat in Budapest.

  Before setting off for the Westbahnhof to catch the afternoon train I had one important visit to make. My English journalist colleagues urged me to interview the dissidents in Budapest but, on closer questioning, none seemed prepared to give me their names, addresses or telephone numbers. Through the indefatigable and generous Georg Eisler, I was introduced to Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, who lived near the Franziskaner Platz, a few moments’ walk away from the Stadtpark.

  The Coudenhove-Kalergis are one of the most remarkable families of old Austria. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi had been a friend of Churchill’s and Leo Amery’s, and had founded the Pan-Europa Movement after the Second World War. He had therefore been a progenitor of the idea of European unity and by extension of the European Community and European Union project. His ideas on European integration were radical and innovative at the time, although they have long since become mainstream. His father, the Austrian Ambassador to Tokyo before the First World War, had fallen in love with a Japanese lady-in-waiting. The resulting intermarriage of races from the Abendland (Occident) and Morgenland (Orient) had scandalized Vienna before 1914. One socially aloof member of the family had grandly asked the Japanese fiancée on her arrival, ‘What does it feel like to be marrying into a family of 500 years of unbroken noble ancestry?’ The Japanese girl had coolly responded, ‘I do not know because my family is more than 2,000 years old.’

  The Japanese genes invested the next generation of Coudenhoves with distinctive features. An elegant, intelligent lady smilingly motioned me towards a chair. On a table near where I was asked to sit, I noticed a fine black and white portrait of the older Austro-Hungarian-Japanese couple, he standing resplendent in Austrian uniform, she demure and fine-featured in a white kimono.

  Barbara knew many of the dissidents and happily gave me their numbers. She kept referring to them as ‘writers’. When I ineptly asked her, ‘What about the dissidents?’, she replied with
a faint twinkle in her eye, ‘But these Schriftsteller [writers] are they!’ Thus prepared, I was ready to set off on my first official foray into the Communist Hungarian landscape. At nine the following morning I left the Westbahnhof and, after gliding slowly past Schönbrunn and its Gloriette, we soon reached the Hungarian border at Hegyeshalom, where the train waited for twenty minutes and our passports were politely checked.

  The direct rail route from Vienna to Budapest still runs through the picturesque little town of Győr. As the train steamed in – there was still no electric locomotive – I was struck by the beauty of the railway station’s 1930s architecture. Baedeker referred to a branch line which would take me from here to a Benedictine monastery and school, at Pannonhalma towards Veszprém. I was intrigued to see how the Roman Catholic Church and monastic life in particular coexisted with Communism, an ideology in theory dedicated to its extinction. How would Pannonhalma compare with Altenburg and Melk, or even Heiligenkreuz, the destinations of many a happy weekend in Austria?

  We had completed passport and customs checks so I jumped off the train. Walking past the classical lines of the station’s façade, I asked an official in German when the next train to Veszprém departed. The polite railway official in a red cap pointed to another steam locomotive across the platform which at that moment was loading up with Asiatic Soviet soldiery, their boots and astrakhan headdresses striking a note of exotic orientalism beneath the Ionic portico of the stationmaster’s office. A high-ranking Soviet officer in a cape, attended by a military servant, gazed on impassively from one side of the platform.