Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  On one such occasion she met Trude’s elder brother Rudolf. He was a dentist like his father, already thirty-three years old and in the process of taking over his father’s practice; and he was looking for a woman to marry.

  The modest perfection with which Alice played immediately entranced Rudolf Kraus, even though, as he was the first to admit, he knew very little about classical piano music. The first time he took her out, Alice noticed, however, that he was naturally musical. He followed the current custom of taking her to a coffee house which turned into an intimate dance hall in the evenings.

  When Rudolf asked Alice to dance, she was over the moon. She had never danced so passionately before, nor had she ever been so physically close to a man. To the strains of a piano and violin duet she danced waltzes, foxtrots and tangos late into the night.

  From then on Rudolf and Alice went out together twice a week, usually ending the evening in that same coffee house. By that time it was often so late that there were just one or two couples left, and Rudolf and Alice had the dance-floor to themselves. Even when they paid calls on one another at home, sooner or later they began to dance. Rudolf had given Alice a recording of tango music which made distorted crackling noises when it was played on the gramophone but it moved her nonetheless.

  With her success in the master class and her love for Rudolf, 1922 was the happiest year of her life so far. She might even have forgotten Jenö Kalicz’s stubborn attempts on her virtue had it not been for an almost fateful encounter between the two of them at the final concert of the master class.

  When Conrad Ansorge informed the four finalists (the others were Gisela Kettner and Margarete Lössl) that they had to put together a half-hour program and that, if possible, it should focus on one composer and one of his most important works, Alice made it plain that she would play Schumann’s Fantasy in C major, Op. 17. She had always loved Schumann’s work above all others. The piece she had chosen was a sonata-like composition, but a freer, sensitively improvised piece, the three movements of which Schumann had so individually fashioned from a variation, a rondo and a song.

  “Alica, have I heard correctly, you will play the Fantasy in C major?” Jenö asked her one day. “Do you know how piece written?”

  As Alice did not reply, Jenö went on: “Schumann wrote this Fantasy in 1836, when he was very much in love and in despair over Clara Wieck. Father had tried to prevent love. Clara had to travel, Schumann must stay at home. C Major Fantasy is infinite longing, infinite despair. How do you want to play Fantasy without one time kissing Jenö Kalicz?”

  Alice laughed but Jenö would not be put off.

  “How you play love piece without knowledge of love?”

  “I am full of love: love of music, love of nature, love of mankind,” said Alice. “Therefore I shall play this piece with a feeling of … love.”

  But Jenö shook his head pensively and revealed to her that he was also going to play the Fantasy in C major. “But I will not think of nature and of a lot of people. I will think of just one person, and who will win?”

  On the night of the concert, the atmosphere was tense. All the members of the master class were present together with many students from the German Academy and their relations. It was now almost commonplace that Alice would finish her program with bravura. There was no criticism raised about her technique, and she also produced a convincing interpretation of the Fantasy, but in Jenö Kalicz’s music there was something that stood out, the sound of longing, something unfulfilled and despairing which gripped the audience.

  The jury deliberated after the concert. Finally Conrad Ansorge walked on to the podium. “It is the opinion of the jury that all four contestants have allowed us to hear outstanding performances, but our verdict is unanimous for all that. We will now ask this evening’s winner to come forward and play his program once more … on the Förster grand; applause now for Jenö Kalicz from Hungary.”

  Jenö bowed low to the audience, and allowed his gaze to wander through the auditorium to Alice, and he stared at her for an instant. Then he sat down at the grand piano, his grand piano. This time Alice sensed that he was playing for her alone. And he played exceptionally beautifully, in dark, transfigured tonal colors, bringing out Schumann’s intended mood of elegiac abandonment with something approaching genius. Even Alice, otherwise so optimistic, was gripped by a strange feeling of apprehension which left no room for what was actually the natural emotion of that moment: disappointment.

  “You can only love one man,” she thought. “And I don’t love Jenö, I love Rudolf.”

  * * *

  AT THE beginning of December 1922 much of the country was already covered by snow, and Alice and Rudolf went off to the Riesengebirge with a few friends. They took rooms in a hotel for a long weekend. They skied by day and danced by night.

  They might have had a romantic time had it not been for the fact that with every day there was an ever-growing tension between the couple, and Rudolf was getting increasingly impatient. He was a man in his prime and just dancing, however intoxicating, was not enough to satisfy him, but Alice would not respond to Rudolf’s attempts at more than a quick kiss on the lips. The nineteen-year-old believed there was no question of giving yourself to a man before marriage.

  Neither of them said anything about it at the time, but when the couple returned to Prague their mood was troubled. A horse-drawn sleigh took Alice and Rudolf to the station and as time was short before the departure of the train, the coachman drove his horses at the gallop. Alice never understood why the horses then suddenly bolted, but the sleigh turned over and all three of them—Alice, Rudolf and the coachman—were thrown from their seats. Alice escaped with slight bruises, but Rudolf broke his right hand and could not practice for weeks.

  From that moment onward Rudolf was announced less and less at Alice’s home. After weeks of uncertainty, she learned that he had developed an interest in another woman. Alice knew her: she was often to be seen at the Krauses’ flat. She was not just a lot taller, but, in Alice’s imagination, she was a lot more attractive and more flirtatious than she was. When Alice received the news of Rudolf’s impending marriage she was devastated: “How shall I live without him?” It didn’t help that Rudolf’s mother had told her privately how much she had been looking forward to having Alice as a daughter-in-law. Rudolf Kraus remained the great, unfulfilled love of Alice’s life.

  As had been so often the case, music provided Alice with the great support she needed, and all the more so when she learned that Alexander Zemlinsky was going to conduct Mahler’s Eighth Symphony again and that he was going to bring in the student choir from the Academy. Over a decade before, at the beginning of his career as a conductor in Prague, he had put on the Symphony of a Thousand. It had been a dazzling success. Alice threw herself body and soul into the rehearsals. She had already finished with the master class, but she was continuing to study theory at the Academy. In the first few weeks Zemlinsky decided that the participating choirs should be divided. Two weeks before the performance the conductor took over the rehearsals himself, with a choir of over 200 male and female voices.

  It was not just Gustav Mahler’s music but also Zemlinsky’s personality, capability and dedication which inspired Alice. “He always sings every phrase and performs every scene with theatrical expressiveness, the intensity and power of his characterization, his fullness of spirit, and the humor and the splendor of his coloration is astonishing,” was the view of Louis Laber.3 The writer Franz Werfel (who subsequently married Mahler’s widow, Alma, in 1929) also commented: “As soon as he straightens his back and lifts his baton, it is music; the spark leaps into the air with the upbeat.”4 And Igor Stravinsky, who was famously mean with praise, nonetheless characterized him as the “most universal conductor” he had ever met.5 Hardly surprising then that Mahler entrusted Zemlinsky with the first performances of two of his symphonies.

  Under Zemlinksy’s direction the choirs excelled, each member forging their voices toget
her in powerful harmony. The performance in May 1923 of the Eighth Symphony was an outstanding success, so much so that two weeks later they had to repeat it. For Alice Herz it would be one of the most impressive musical experiences of her life.

  * * *

  IN THE winter of 1923, on Václav Štěpán’s recommendation, Alice was offered the chance to make her debut playing Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor with the Czech Philharmonic the following year. It was a great honor, but a monumental undertaking for such a young performer. Alice was still only twenty.

  For months Alice prepared for the concert. For months she clung to more or less the same strict ritual—the ritual she kept all her life—while continuing to give piano lessons to her pupils. Perhaps it was for the best that her private life was now so uneventful. When she heard that not only was Rudolf Kraus happily married but that the couple were already expecting a child, she bravely dealt with the melancholy in her soul. She had seen nothing of the rather too amorous Jenö Kalicz; rumor had it that he was drinking more than ever.

  But as she calmly prepared for the concert, suddenly there was bad news. A few days before Alice’s debut, Moriz Rosenthal was due to appear with the German Philharmonic, and it was announced that he would be playing the Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E minor, the same piece that Alice herself was studying so diligently. Rosenthal’s explosive technique had led many to consider him to be the greatest virtuoso of his time. Alice knew the stories. He would apparently practice certain particularly difficult passages and sequences of notes for days on end, “while at the same time some weighty tome of history or philosophy lay open at the desk and he was totally absorbed by its most difficult intellectual content.”6 Alice’s well-meaning friends were quick to advise her: there was no question about it—she had to choose another concerto. Why not the Schumann, which she had mastered so well already? Why tempt comparisons with the world’s best at the beginning of your career? Why be so determined as to want the impossible?

  Her friends and advisers clearly knew little about Alice’s character and her ambitions. She was not planning to become famous. She played from passion and sheer joy in music—it was her door to paradise. She was not seeking direct comparisons with the maestro, but when fate decreed she was ready to rise to the challenge.

  “We will see if he works as hard as me,” said Alice to Irma with a hint of innocent cheek. Alice genuinely wanted to know how Rosenthal had become world famous. She found her answer in the Academy library: “Moriz Rosenthal, born 18 December 1862 in Lemberg,” she read in Walter Niemann’s Klavierlexikon: “since 1890 (after his American tour), a phenomenal technician of world renown and a superbly intellectual musician.”7 And in his book, Meister des Klaviers, Niemann wrote: “With Busoni and Godowsky, Rosenthal fights for the title of the greatest technician of our time … not just the best from the point of view of technique, he is the master who in his purpose, goal and conception embodies the modern piano virtuoso at his purest.”8

  In two respects Rosenthal was the born Chopin interpreter: firstly he was a pupil of Carl Mikuli, who for seven years was himself a pupil of Chopin, and secondly Rosenthal was influenced by his long-standing master Franz Liszt who could relay firsthand the views and playing style of his friend Chopin.

  “I will play as well as I can,” she told herself. “Not better, but not any worse.”

  The moment for Rosenthal’s guest performance came. He was as supreme as ever, true to Niemann’s appraisal: “Whoever hears Rosenthal play the adagio from a Chopin concerto today will take home the joyful certainty that he must be once and for all the undisputed and most eminent performer among piano virtuosi from the point of view of technique, and at the same time a truly great and soulful artist.”9

  Alice’s performance with the Czech Philharmonic came a few days later. Seats in the hall were completely sold out. Václav Štěpán and his wife Ilonka, Alice’s parents and her sisters Irma and Mizzi were in the audience. Alice knew that Irma was attending with mixed emotions. There is no doubt that her elder sister felt pride and satisfaction; she had been Alice’s first teacher and constant champion. She had taken Alice to Štěpán and given her the courage to leave the Lyceum and apply to the Academy. But mixed with the pride was envy, bitterness and dissatisfaction; dissatisfaction with her own fate. Hadn’t the great Zemlinsky smiled on her astonishing abilities at the piano? And what had she done with her talent? Why was she not giving concerts as Alice was doing? She had never been allowed a public performance. Felix Weltsch had an explanation for his wife’s chronic discontent: “It is my understanding that the constant excitement in which she lives is the problem, coupled with her constantly seething anger against mankind and the jealousy she bears every one or thing she can conceive of, from the meanest to the grand; not to mention disfavor, mistrust and incessant personal woes. Then comes practice, to which she applies herself with a mad determination.”10

  But her determination to practice eventually slackened off and Irma finally gave up playing the piano. According to her long-suffering husband, “Even if she is musical and has good taste, the bottom line is that she has no real feel for art. She plays the piano wonderfully, but she is self-obsessed. She spills her soul out on to the keys and fails to appreciate the work of art. The work is a means to express herself, or rather, her own unhappiness. That is what it was like before. She has long since given up playing the piano, as she has realized that she cannot ‘perform.’”11

  However tense Alice must have been on the evening of her debut, she gave no indication of it to the audience. She sat on the stage with a radiant smile on her face which gave the impression that she was not worried. Beside the great concert grand she looked delicate and fragile, and yet she was fired up with energy and conscious of her goal. The next day the Prager Abendzeitung recorded the “unusually loud applause”12 from the critical Prague public. The Czech paper Česke Slova admired “Sureness, her brilliant technique in some passages and quite particular ability at bringing out the piano’s finer tonal nuances.”13 The Prager Abendblatt also praised Alice for “the beautiful way she overcame the technical difficulties,” going on to say: “The tight composition of this difficult work comes to a natural flourish in the second movement and in the third breaks out into a mass of light-hearted trills. In the hands of this young virtuoso, a pupil of Ansorge’s and Štěpán’s, it becomes brilliant and tender; she fetches up each motif with delicate force, and reveals the whole, exciting freshness of her youth.”14

  The most respected of all the German-language papers in the city, with a Europe-wide reputation, was the Prager Tagblatt, which was more than content to compare Alice with her illustrious predecessor:

  An emerging talent on this scale has muddied the waters around Rosenthal’s performance a few days ago. Alice Herz would not be swayed from making her own interpretation and it has to be said of her that in the warmth of her sensitivity and the intimacy of her expression she surpassed her famous colleague. Also the sparkling clarity of her technique, which grew with the orchestra but retained her personal voice, made you sit up and listen. It announces a promising future for this young artist, who has already won considerable acclaim.15

  Alice was exhausted when she stood up for the ovation, and for a fraction of a second she searched among the sea of faces for the figure of Rudolf Kraus, then just as quickly she put the thought away again. Her destiny was not to dance tangos, but to play the piano.

  One of the first people who came to her after the concert to congratulate her was her teacher. “Words fail me, Alice. It was wonderful,” said Václav Štěpán. However, he had one small criticism, which remained with Alice for years. “Nothing and no one is perfect, Alice! You forgot to shake the conductor’s hand to thank him!”

  * * *

  IT WAS the first day of the Christmas holiday in 1924. Alice was on leave until the New Year, she had nothing planned and had promised her mother that she would relax. She thumbed through the latest issue of Selbstwehr (Self D
efense) which her brother-in-law Felix Weltsch had brought round. The Zionist periodical had been founded in 1907 and claimed to be an “independent Jewish weekly” for the “whole of Bohemia’s Jewry.” It was a “declaration of war against all that was rotten, half-hearted and lazy about the Jews.”16 Felix had been its editor since 1919 and consequently had become well known in Prague.

  “A call for you, Alice,” Friedrich Herz called from the ground floor. Telephones had become part of everyday life and Friedrich Herz had been one of the first in the Seventh District to have one installed. The set stood in the director’s office still, as Friedrich had decided that having one in his private apartment was an unnecessary luxury.

  Alice ran down the stairs and picked up the receiver. The quiet voice at the other end belonged to Mr. Klemperer, her friend Daisy’s father. “Something terrible has happened.” It came out in gulps. “Daisy died yesterday. Quite suddenly.” Alice dropped the telephone and like a madwoman she ran out of the room and up the stairs. She didn’t listen to her father who called out: “For God’s sake what has happened?”

  Upstairs Alice collapsed. She was shaking all over.

  “Daisy is dead,” she whispered between tears. And then over and over again “Daisy, you have not died…”

  When her mother came into the drawing room, Alice was crouched unconscious on the floor.

  “Friedrich,” Sofie Herz called out to her husband in horror, but he had been standing next to her for a while. Together, they carried Alice to her bed.

  The doctor diagnosed some sort of herpes attack. As a result of the shock her immune system had broken down. For two weeks Alice lay in a darkened room, lost to the world.

  FIVE

  Marriage