Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Alice and Mizzi were due to deliver their lines last. Alice got hers in first: “Optimists always see the best; they spread happiness,” she said. “Pessimists are the worst, they scatter gloom.” Mizzi had the last word and her line lodged itself in the girls’ minds for days: “Pessimists see the truth, optimists ignore it.”

  That afternoon the twins talked about the lesson with Daisy and Helene. Helene was still in the Altstadt Bürgerschule, but she came round often to the Herzes’ house and was an optimist like Alice. Sofie Herz listened carefully to the discussion and the girls liked it when their mother took an interest in what they had been doing. When Helene asked her whether she could explain why Mizzi, as opposed to Alice, was so anxious, pensive and always a little on the pessimistic side, Sofie answered frankly: “Mizzi has certainly inherited my nature, as I also see the darker side at first. And Alice is very like her father, who has a joyful nature. For him the glass is always half full, for me it is half empty.”

  Helene was not only hugely imaginative, she was also observant and it did not escape her notice that the twins were treated very differently. Mizzi had to be the little princess, and was rarely, for example, obliged to take part in the weekly cleaning. Alice, on the other hand, thought it only right to lend a hand. Helene felt this extremely unjust, but she did not dare raise the matter with Frau Herz. Nonetheless, she succeeded in stirring up trouble.

  “There is one thing I always wanted to ask: why is it that Marianne has a pet-name, and Alice not?” she asked one day. Sofie’s mother hesitated for a while before answering, then said: “The explanation is quite simple: all Austrians shorten the name Marianne and say Mizzi or Mizzerl. There is no shortening for Alice, or do you think Alizerl is a fitting pet-name?”

  The answer was unsatisfactory, and Helene would not give up. “All children like to have a pet-name. I am also called Lene. And there is no reason that Alice…” “You are quite right, but Alice is already so short and pretty that it is like a pet-name,” Sofie riposted. “Or do you have a better idea?”

  Helene was a bit unprepared for this sharp response, but she refused to be intimidated. Alice’s pet-name needed to have as many syllables as “Mizzi” and sound similar. Suddenly she lit up: “If the M at the beginning of Mizzi stands for melancholy, then Alice’s pet-name must start with G for good-naturedness … That means Gigi!”

  Sofie Herz smiled: “That’s a very good idea!”

  From that moment onward Alice’s friends, and soon her relatives as well, began to call her Gigi. She was Alice only to her parents and Irma.

  * * *

  IN THE third year of the war its effects were becoming obvious, even to children. The food supply had gotten dramatically worse soon after the beginning of the conflict and by the end of 1916 almost all food was rationed.

  All through the war, Friedrich Herz was able to provide for his family reasonably well. He had important customers in the country who could supply him with potatoes, butter, eggs and every now and then a bit of meat—although the prices had soared. Luckily, Alice had a modest appetite and was happy with a small portion. She can’t remember going hungry between 1914 and 1918 or having been noticeably colder than usual. Her father clearly always managed to find sufficient fuel to heat the two stoves in the kitchen and the drawing room. The bedrooms had never been heated.

  By 1915 bread coupons were issued and the longer the war continued the more stamina was required to buy a simple loaf of bread. Many people waited all night outside a shop when a delivery was due. The Herz children took it in hourly turns to stand in the queue at their local baker’s. The bread they finally acquired was a rough mixture of unidentifiable ingredients with a persistent taste of turnips.

  And throughout these years of hardship there was scarcely a family who had not been touched by loss. Irma and Georg mourned their dead friends, and Alice and Mizzi grieved with their brothers and sisters.

  By November 1916, when Georg had applied to work at the Skoda weapons and steelworks in Pilsen and he was taken on at a monthly salary of 280 crowns, when most of the healthy young men were doing war service, Georg was now twenty-eight and a confirmed rake. No one knows how long he held down his job, but a letter to Felix Weltsch of 27 November speaks volumes. Relations between father and son were icy: “Can I ask you kindly to go to my father and get him to advance me 150 crowns so that I can last the first month here in Pilsen. I will then pay off the sum month by month.”3

  Felix Weltsch carried out his brother-in-law’s request and acted as an intermediary between him and his parents. He was always an even-handed negotiator and master of well-chosen words. Yet at the time he was facing some very serious problems, both in his professional and private life.

  Russian troops had marched into eastern Galicia and Bukovina and their arrival had unleashed a monstrous tide of Jewish refugees who converged on the west. For most German-speaking Prague Jews it was the first time they had set eyes on these “eastern Jews” culturally so different from themselves. They were mostly women, old people and children, for the young men had naturally been recruited into the armed forces. The German-speaking Jews of Prague veered between pity and repulsion at the sight of their poverty. Alice and her siblings saw Talmudic scholars on the streets of Prague for the first time.

  While the Prague Czechs and even the Czech-speaking Jews kept their distance, the German Jews were deemed to be responsible for looking after the refugees. Life’s necessities were organized, a Jewish soup kitchen opened, clothes were collected, shelter was prepared and a strange cultural life grew up including a refugee school at which both Max Brod and Felix Weltsch enthusiastically taught. Meeting the refugees proved traumatic to the young intellectuals; it made them more conscious of their Jewishness and confirmed their conviction that the Jews needed their own state.

  Felix Weltsch took regular Hebrew lessons and gave courses for refugees; the unpaid work seemed to make him happy. “My father-in-law keeps saying that this is no use, that with my talents I should be giving my course on the Altstadt Ring Road before an audience of 2,000 people, and that it should be written up by the Neue Freie Presse, that I am starting out too modestly and on too small a scale etc.”4

  At home, it was increasingly clear that Irma’s temper, always fiery, was getting worse. His friends had seen it coming from the earliest days of their relationship. He felt trapped in his marriage, although he was ready to recognize that Irma’s “persistent and only occasionally interrupted angry abuse” was a sickness. “Ninety percent of what she says consists of insults, which range at their most extreme form from hatred to the vilest nastiness imaginable. The most common epithets are murderer, crook, blackguard, corpse, brat…” It was one of the lowest points of Felix’s married life.5 “You might even admire the linguistic creativity; she has a kind of genius when it comes to insult and belittlement.”

  He remembered that his wife had exposed her negative character just after they had married in 1914: “There was a terrible storm against her parents, which made me very concerned at the time. She called them ‘those dogs.’” Irma had flown into a rage because in her opinion her parents were not sufficiently concerned about Alice, who remained strikingly small, while Mizzi was developing normally. To be fair, it must be said that Sofie had tried to obtain money from her husband to send Alice off to an orthopedist. Irma had been present at this conversation and had bluntly argued Alice’s case. After a battle of words, Friedrich Herz finally produced the money. For Alice the consequence meant regular and painful treatments, where she was stretched for hours in an orthopedic machine with only limited success; she never grew taller than 1m. 52cm.

  It is a mystery that the sickly Mizzi grew normally while the much more robust and independent Alice stopped growing early. For Irma, however, it was a good reason to fuss more about Alice in the next few years and to invite her round to the Kirchengasse more often.

  * * *

  THE AUTUMN of 1918 was the bleakest Friedrich Herz had ever experi
enced. People had only good things to say about the philosopher and revolutionary commander Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, who with the blessing of the victorious powers declared the independence of Czechoslovakia on 28 October. In the course of many talks, Friedrich’s son-in-law Felix had endeavored to open his eyes to the advantages of democracy. The manufacturer was prepared to listen, but remained loyal to the Habsburgs. There was no question that he was hard hit by the long-awaited truce between Austria-Hungary and the Allies. Five days later the war was well and truly lost. Friedrich Herz had invested a considerable part of his fortune in war loans. The money was gone. As he told his children: “Now we have to start again from the beginning.”

  The rebirth of nationalism brought on by the creation of the republic threatened to turn to hysteria. For the first time in more than a millenium the Czechs were to rule again in their own land, and many Czechs felt a desire for vengeance for the injustice they had suffered. There was a serious threat that this would be translated into a real, even physical danger for the German-speaking minority. German was frowned upon and already Alice got used to speaking Czech most of the time she was out in public.

  At the beginning of November 1918 Alexander von Zemlinsky, who had been chief conductor at the German National Theater in Prague, described the situation to his friend, pupil and later brother-in-law Arnold Schönberg: “German culture is going to collapse here, if it is tolerated, and the theater will go down with it. This might happen very soon; and what then?”6

  There were still separate German and Czech universities, a German and a Czech National Theater, a German and a Czech cultural world, but, as Zemlinsky observed: “everything turns round the Czechoslovak state! Jews and Germans and Jews above all!”

  Zemlinsky’s fears for German culture did not immediately turn to reality, even though the Czech language and culture began to take pride of place. With his strong convictions President Masaryk abided by the victorious powers’ wishes and protected the minorities of the successor states of the vanished Dual Monarchy. Immediately after taking office he gave his personal support for the future of the New German Theater.

  As the respected Prague Conservatory was made an official state institution, administered by a Czech directorate, there was no alternative for German artists but either to accept the situation or to found their own conservatory. This was easier said than done, given the lack of funds. In the end Masaryk approved state subsidies of 250,000 crowns per annum, which was about the same amount as that given to a provincial elementary music school, for the setting up of the German Academy of Music. For that reason the project was underfinanced from the beginning and the fees had to be set relatively high.

  Food was still in desperately short supply and Prague was soon afflicted by the onset of riots. “Give over your potatoes or there will be revolution,” cried the famished inhabitants of the big cities during their strikes and mass protests. They vented their despair on the familiar scapegoat—the Jews. On 1 December 1918 the rampaging Czechs could no longer be contained and attacked Jewish merchants in the streets of Prague’s old town terrifying them with cries of “hang the Jews!” Masaryk’s attempts to appease them had very little effect.

  The Herzes wanted to keep any echo of anti-Semitism away from their children’s ears, but “Gigi,” Mizzi and Paul were conscious of how muted the celebrations were that New Year’s Eve of 1918. That night, Alice and Paul gave their parents a present of a little concert and Friedrich and Sofie showed their heartfelt gratitude for the gesture. Then the young people left to visit their friends and bring in the New Year.

  * * *

  SIX MONTHS later, in the summer of 1919, Irma and Felix Weltsch spent their first holiday after the Armistice in the Salzkammergut. Alice, now almost sixteen, was allowed to go with them. They traveled to St. Gilgen on the Wolfgangsee, which Irma, as a passionate young pianist, had visited and fallen in love with because Johannes Brahms went there year in, year out to visit his friend the physician Theodor Billroth. Alice fell in love with the Alps, a love which deepened when she later traveled there year after year with the family of her piano teacher Václav Štěpán.

  Surrounded by the beauties of nature, away from the daily grind, the atmosphere was generally pleasant, even if Irma’s fury occasionally bubbled up and Alice had no alternative but to side with her brother-in-law.

  Soon after the holiday Irma found she was pregnant and became particularly irritable. Things went from bad to worse. In July 1920 she gave birth to a girl, whom Alice looked after from the start. Irma’s nervous disposition made it almost impossible for her to find the necessary peace of mind to feed little Ruth. At these times she would call Alice over to help her.

  “She is not feeding again, come at once!”

  Alice broke off her piano practice and ran up Bělsky Street to the Sochařská—the Malergasse—where for the past few months Irma and Felix had been living at number 333. Friedrich Herz had sold the block of flats in the Kirchengasse in an attempt to halt the downward slide of the family finances. When Alice took her little niece in her arms, she immediately stopped crying and allowed her aunt to look after her. It was a defeat for her fragile mother, which did nothing to calm her down.

  The longer that Alice was faced with Irma’s psychological problems, the more she began to think about the secrets of a fulfilled life and asked herself what causes one’s happiness or unhappiness. It was probably Irma’s difficult marriage and destructive attitude to life that gave Alice the powerful desire to be happy, to live a constructive life, and to pursue it for as long as she could.

  FOUR

  Music

  “He was still sober at nine…”

  IT WAS midnight and the grandfather clock was still striking the hour when Sofie Herz opened the door to the drawing room. Alice had been practicing for five hours without a break. In her determined way she kept going over the difficult passages in a Bach partita.

  Her mother went up to the piano and laid a reassuring hand on Alice’s shoulder. “It sparkles like a shower of crystal-clear water,” she said. “It’s perfect, not one single mistake. You are going to pass the audition. Don’t you think you should go to bed now?” Although fatigue was written all over Alice’s face, her eyes were still radiant with the inspiration which always seized her when she plunged into the adventure of conquering a new piece. When she practiced she forgot about the world around her and lost her sense of time. “Mother, you have never played before an audience. It is not enough to be able to play a piece, you have to know it a 100, no 200, or at best 400 percent before you can step on to the podium. It has to belong to you in some way; it has to become part of you, body and soul.”

  The Herz family and those members of it who still lived in the flat—Mizzi, Sofie and Friedrich—had learned to be tolerant of Alice’s prolonged sessions at the piano. Grandmother Fanny had died before the end of the war and Georg had moved to Vienna after the final break with his father. Paul—against his will—was at the Military Academy.

  Once again, it proved impossible to convince Alice to go to bed. Sofie therefore disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a cup of steaming chicken broth that she always had to hand, ready to reheat. It had become an affectionate ritual between mother and daughter whenever the sixteen-year-old girl wanted to carry on practicing well after midnight.

  * * *

  THE TWINS’ time at the Lyceum ended in 1920. Without any hard and fast ideas about what she wanted to do later, Mizzi went to a school of commerce to learn about business. Alice had no doubts about what she wanted: she intended to be a pianist and she applied herself to the task with uncommon rigor.

  Irma had told Alice that at the beginning of September that year the German Academy for Music and Drama would at last open its doors. The man who was carefully chosen as rector was Alexander von Zemlinsky, who had been born in Vienna in 1871. He was not just the most famous musician in Prague at the time, but was internationally respected as a composer and conductor. His te
acher and patron had been Johannes Brahms who had had a high opinion of his abilities, so much so that he gave the then fifteen-year-old boy his grand piano. Zemlinsky, however, already knew that he was not going to become a peripatetic concert pianist, but wanted to remain at home in Vienna to conduct and compose.

  In order to attract students from all over Europe, Zemlinsky created masterclasses for four disciplines: conducting, composition, violin and piano. Intended for trained musicians, they were nonetheless open to any student who wanted to apply. Zemlinsky appointed one of the world’s best violin virtuosi, Henry Marteau, to look after the violin class; when it came to the piano he tempted Conrad Ansorge from Berlin. Zemlinsky was hoping Liszt’s former pupil would make a splash, though he himself would be taking the first two masterclasses.

  Alice knew who Zemlinsky was but little more than that. Irma, on the other hand, had a good deal to say about him. Outwardly an unattractive man, but brimming with wit and charm, Zemlinsky had, almost a decade before, taught “the lovely Herz” for a year and during that time it was clear he wanted to be one of her suitors. In spite of this, encouraged by Irma, Alice decided that she would apply for a place.

  The high fees were, however, a stumbling block and it was only with difficulty that Sofie Herz was able to convince her husband that Alice’s happiness in life depended on his consenting to finance her studies.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT Alice carried on playing until one o’clock in the morning. The next morning at nine she was back at the keyboard. Around midday she emerged from her melodious world and went for a walk in the old town; this, too, was part of her usual routine. Alice loved Prague. She made her way directly over the Franz-Joseph Bridge (popularly known as the Elisabeth Bridge, later renamed the Štefánik Bridge) or she went the long way round through the narrow lanes of the “Lesser Town” which led to the inner city; or wandered around Wenceslas Square, enjoying accidental meetings with the friends and acquaintances who emerged from the midday throng. It was a necessary counterpoint to the solitary life of the pianist, for Alice was not solitary by nature—quite the contrary.