Alice's Piano

by Melissa Müller

  Joseph Reinhold was an indulgent host, and let his colleague Adler have first choice as he only rarely attended the concerts. Reinhold respected him as a highly cultured intellectual for whom reason always took precedence over sentiment. He was therefore not surprised that Adler decided straightaway that he wanted to hear Bach’s Partita in B flat major. Boronow immediately protested. It was unthinkable to begin an evening by the fire with Bach: they had all come for a romantic evening, not an intellectual one. Besides this he wanted to sound off yet again about his view that Bach was overrated—“when you come down to it he only wrote sewing-machine music.” He insisted on the first movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata.

  Reinhold found it hard to come to terms with such conflict at his cozy soirée and suggested a compromise, the first movement of the great Schubert sonata instead of the Beethoven. Emil Orlik, however, was enjoying the argument and provoked his fellow guests by proposing that the concert should begin with an atonal piece by Schönberg. All those present were all mature enough to appreciate the modern age, surely?

  The guests’ protestations amused not just Orlik but Alice too. Before he was able to put the guests in a bad mood she seized the initiative and played Schumann’s Fantasy in C major. At last everyone was happy, except Orlik, who thought they were all too happy. He proceeded to torment them until late into the evening with a highly skillful imitation of how the distinguished gentlemen had listened to the Fantasy: Joseph Reinhold constantly wiping the tears from his eyes; Emil Adler, with the reflective features of the intellectual, benevolently nodding as a sign of his appreciation; Ernst Boronow, torn between being emotionally moved and physically tired, tossed this way and that, and finally shedding a few tears.

  When Orlik wasn’t busy teasing the others, he would take up pencil and paper and begin to sketch. Even as a little boy in the ghetto he had caricatured the principal characters of Prague’s old town with an astonishing gift of observation and wit. In Gräfenberg he made numerous drawings. To thank her for the music she played in the time they spent together, Orlik gave Alice engravings of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Igor Stravinsky and her master, Conrad Ansorge, and, two years before his death in 1932, he gave Alice a sketch he had made of her, too.

  * * *

  FROM THEIR first meeting a deep friendship developed between Alice Herz and Ernst Boronow. Boronow sent Alice frequent letters recounting his experiences of concerts in Breslau and she was happy to answer him because he always provoked fresh thoughts on music. When she left Gräfenberg after her first trip in 1927 he invited her to come and visit him as soon as possible in Breslau, so that she could meet his family and because he wanted to organize a concert for her in the great hall of the Breslau piano manufacturer Scheitmayer.

  In his letters to Alice he wrote of the negotiations with Scheitmayer and the support he sought from the city’s Jewish community. Boronow also wrote about his wife and their two children and his work, so that when Alice paid her first visit to Breslau in the late autumn of 1927, she felt she was among close friends. Boronow’s wife was not only an attentive host but she was gifted musically and played the piano well. Her brother, a successful conductor, suggested to Alice just after she arrived that both of them practice a duet and perform it at home. They played together all week long in the Boronows’ house.

  Alice’s concert in the Scheitmayer Room was a great success, for both Alice and Ernst Boronow. He had volunteered to sell the remaining tickets because he wanted Alice to have the pleasure of performing to a full house. The evening began with Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, Op. 80, followed by Novák’s Eroica Sonata, Op. 24, which was enthusiastically received by most of those present despite the fact they had little experience of modern Czech music. Alice had won over her audience by the time she reached the interval, so in the second half she rewarded her receptive listeners with a few Chopin pieces. Before she left she had to promise Boronow that she would warn him in good time if she were going to play the Novák concerto again in public.

  Every year Alice gave three solo concerts in Prague. She frequently performed in the Mozarteum, an intimate space that held around 250 people. On 6 March 1928 Alice performed an almost identical program to the one she gave in Breslau. Marianne, who was eight months pregnant with her son Heinz, was sitting next to Ernst Boronow in the hall. This time the critic’s chair was reserved for Felix Weltsch’s old friend Max Brod, who reviewed the concert in the Prager Tagblatt:

  Every piece that she plays is interesting and seizes you with its particular, masculine lack of sentimentality and individualism … The technical perfection reveals the performer’s particular class in the great crescendos of Novák’s Eroica Sonata or in the stupendously difficult Prokofiev Toccata. There was a whole series of modern compositions in the second half. Alice Herz masters the tonal richness of the impressionists as well as she plays classics like Beethoven. She gives an example of this when she plays Debussy’s l’Ile joyeuse with its evocation of a Parisian street singer. A Ravel Capriccio was striking in its strange guitar effects that made it seem blown in by the wind. The concert was as rich as it was beautiful and provoked the liveliest applause from every corner of the auditorium.

  The day after the concert Ernst Boronow visited Alice at her parents’ home. When he saw the simple wooden chair on which Alice sat to practice the piano he went straight to the Prague branch of the Sudeten German piano manufacturer Förster and ordered the latest adjustable, comfortably upholstered piano stool. It was one of many presents he was to give Alice over the next few years.

  Boronow admired Alice and her art and, knowing that she had already decided that Leopold Sommer was the man she loved, was content with the role of avuncular friend and patron. He was loyal to her for three decades and for three decades Alice returned his loyalty.

  * * *

  AFTER MARIANNE moved to Gräfenberg, only Paul and Alice were still living with their parents. Paul was approaching thirty and had abandoned his studies at the Military Academy. He had been a disappointing if well-loved cadet, and it was said that to the delight of the other cadets and his superior officers he played his violin every night in the mess. His father was worried that Paul lacked both the organizational ability and the ambition to take over the business after his death. His mother was also concerned that Paul showed no sign of giving up his bachelor life and his occasional lady friends were never brought home. From time to time, but a good deal less than when they were children, Paul and Alice found the time to play music together.

  Of all the five children, it was Alice who worried the most about her parents. Both had health problems. Her mother suffered from a thrombosis and lived in constant fear of a life-threatening clot. Her father had had heart disease for more than two decades and had survived a heart attack before Alice was born. Although Friedrich never spoke to Alice about it, she was aware that he was regularly overcome by severe chest pain and shortness of breath. He was examined many times and each time the diagnosis was the same—his heart. Even as a child Alice had often lain awake at night and listened to her father suffering from an angina attack. Her mother regularly tried to alleviate the problem by alternatively applying hot and cold compresses. Later Alice took over and her anxieties about him often kept her awake at night.

  At the end of the 1920s her father’s health took a marked turn for the worse. One morning in 1930 he came out of the office and into the drawing-room at an unusual time. Alice was sitting at the piano and at first paid no attention to him, but when he went silently past her and hurried on into his bedroom with unusually heavy footsteps she leaped up and ran after him.

  Friedrich Herz was pale. His mouth was open and his hands were pulling at his collar as if he was fighting off someone who was trying to strangle him. He collapsed on the bed. Alice tried to speak to her father, but he did not react. Terrified, she called out for her mother. Sofie Herz rushed from the kitchen and stared at her husband as if she had been preparing for his death for years, a death li
ke this.

  “Fetch the doctor.” She said no more that day.

  Alice ran out in a panic, but the family doctor’s door—which she normally entered unannounced—was locked, with a temporary sign on it directing patients to another doctor a few streets away for the duration of his holidays. Alice ran there, too.

  “Please come at once, my father has just died,” Alice begged. The doctor clearly did not view a dead man as a patient. He said he had no time to come at the moment and tried to persuade Alice to leave, throwing her into a rage in the process.

  “You say you are a doctor.” In shock, she screamed louder than she intended, but it had the desired effect. The doctor accompanied her to Bělsky Street, but there was of course nothing he could do.

  At the funeral Alice walked arm in arm with her mother directly behind the coffin. Marianne and Emil Adler had broken off their holiday in Sicily and hurried back to Prague. Alice had telegraphed the couple in Palermo and Marianne received the news early in the morning: it confirmed a dream from which she had just awoken, in which her father had been dying.

  Many more people came to the cemetery than Alice expected. Leopold Sommer stood beside her at her father’s grave and his presence gave her great strength and comfort. Besides friends and relations all his workers and former colleagues from his firm wanted to say goodbye, the faithful Franta included. Clearly Alice’s father was an exceptionally well-loved man, something about which she never gave the slightest thought.

  It was this view of her father which preoccupied Alice after his death, far more than her grief at his passing. For so many years Alice had accepted her mother’s opinion that one could hardly speak to such an uneducated man, and certainly not about art or culture. But through caring for him, she had been given the chance of getting to know her father properly at last and she realized that she had more to thank him for than she had ever known. Had he not been an example to her with his industry, his conscientiousness and his readiness to apply himself one hundred percent? Were the two of them not very similar—much more similar than she and her mother?

  Before the year was out Sofie Herz had sold the factory buildings, but she hung on to the living quarters for the time being. Paul still clung to his mother’s apron strings and lived from day to day without much purpose except for his daily game of chess in the coffee house. Georg did not come to his father’s funeral, nor afterward. The family received fragments of news of his existence as a gambler and drinker in Vienna. He finally returned home in 1931, already a very sick man, and died soon after in a Prague hospital. He was not even forty-five years old.

  * * *

  LEOPOLD SOMMER now came more regularly to Prague than before. As often as he could afford it he got on the night train and spent the weekend with Alice. They played music in her parents’ home, they invited friends round, they went to concerts; it was very clear they belonged together.

  They had never spoken of marriage, but Alice was aware that Leopold had been looking for a job in Prague for some time. He obviously believed that he could only ask for Alice’s hand if he had taken the necessary steps to provide for a family. It did not worry Alice much that it was not easy to find a job as a merchant. Her income as a piano teacher was sufficient to feed a family.

  After a particularly lovely evening at a concert, the couple were standing on the ramparts of the castle looking down on the sea of lights that was Prague, when all at once Alice blurted out:

  “Look, I have something important to say to you.”

  “What is it?” asked Leopold.

  “We are going to get married this year,” she said.

  Leopold was thrilled that Alice had the courage to speak so plainly.

  “And you are completely sure?”

  “Absolutely sure,” said Alice with a laugh, “and we will spend our honeymoon in Hamburg. I want to see what you have been up to all these years.”

  In the spring of 1931 the banns were published and Alice finally married her Leopold. After the ceremony in the registry office there was a small wedding party in her mother’s flat. As in Marianne’s case, it was composed entirely of members of the family. Before they sat down to dinner there was a small concert in which the newlyweds themselves played. Their obvious empathy and joie de vivre brought even Sofie Herz out of her shell. She was happy with her daughter’s choice and thought her son-in-law a wise man. After the meal she broke the habit of a lifetime and got up to speak. She handed Alice an envelope with a check in it and recounted in a few sentences how she and Friedrich had put the money aside some years ago for Alice’s dowry. It was sufficient to furnish the three-room flat that the couple had rented at number one Sternberggasse right next to the exhibition hall, about halfway between her mother’s flat and Irma’s home.

  Leopold’s parents also surprised them with a generous present. They knew that Alice had been saving up for years for a Förster grand and now they gave her the money she needed.

  The imposing grand piano immediately became the heart of the Sommer residence. The married couple not only used the largest room to eat in but also for Leopold’s chamber music evenings. Double doors led through to the piano, and another set of double doors led to the bedroom. Next to the small kitchen there was a cubbyhole, hardly big enough for the maid Anitschka to sleep in.

  Alice lived her life to the full. At first marriage did not alter her everyday routine. She practiced before lunch and taught in the afternoon. In the middle of the day she often looked after her mother and two nights a week she and Leopold had dinner with his parents. On Saturday nights there was music-making in the Sternberggasse and sometimes Rudolf Kraus and his wife came, for Alice, not without some effort on her part, remained on good terms with her first great love. On the remaining evenings Alice and Leopold often went to a concert or to the theater.

  Like Leopold, Alice was receptive to the ideas of the avant-garde. When Emil František Burian opened Theater D 34 in 1933, they quickly became regulars. Leopold particularly loved Burian’s cabaret-style one-man shows. The funnier Burian’s comic attacks became, the more uncontrolled was Leopold’s inimitable, almost girlish, high-pitched, squeaky laugh. The man from Pilsen had made his name as a composer, actor and director and he, too, was pleased when he heard that Leopold was in the audience, as his bursts of laughter were infectious, inspiring not only the rest of the audience but also the performer himself to greater comic heights.

  One morning in March 1933, practicing as she did every morning, Alice suddenly leaped from the piano stool, ran to her desk and started frantically searching for a letter from the secretary of the Vienna International Piano Competition. The competition had been announced months previously. It was to be the greatest piano competition of all time. The judges would be the best-known pianists and conductors of the period: men like Wilhelm Backhaus, Alfred Cortot, Emil Sauer, Moriz Rosenthal and Felix Weingartner, and competitors had to be under thirty.

  Alice’s thirtieth birthday was imminent, but she was still just eligible and had immediately applied, with a program of three pieces that she had already mastered so well that she would not actually have to practice them for the competition. The organizers wanted a “classical” work; she chose the Beethoven Opus 110 Sonata—a “romantic” piece, Schumann’s Symphonic Studies; and a modern work—for which she opted for Bohuslav Martinů’s Three Dances. She wanted to see for once in her life if her talent was up to international standards.

  She finally located the letter and quickly opened it. A glance at the date and her watch confirmed her worst fears: at that precise moment she should have been sitting at the piano in Vienna playing Beethoven. Alarmed, she sped off to the post office and sent a telegram to the organizers of the competition, excusing herself for the lapse and asking if she might play the next day. She then took the next train to Vienna, where her mother’s brother met her at the station.

  Otto Schulz had lived in Vienna for years. Before the war, Alice and the rest of her family had often visited thei
r uncle there and Otto also frequently visited them in Prague. He was horrified that she had forgotten the date of the competition, since he thought it was a great opportunity for her. The organizers, on the other hand, were more understanding. Alice was allowed to perform her Beethoven piece the next day, and her uncle, himself a capable piano player, was in the audience, watching nervously.

  Alice played extremely well and went through to the second round. It was then she suffered her second misfortune. She was supposed to play Schumann’s Seventh Symphonic Study, but instead she began the Eighth. The piercing sound of the jury bell interrupted her playing.

  She was sure she had ruined her chances of playing in the final but, despite this mistake, she played the eighth variation majestically and was praised by the jury. Out of roughly 200 entrants, just 25 got through to the last round, including Alice. She did not win the competition, but the finalist’s diploma she received was proof of an important achievement.

  When she told Ernst Boronow he persuaded her to write to Artur Schnabel in Berlin and to ask for a chance to play for him. Schnabel was then the most successful pianist in the world and since 1925 had led a master class at the State Music Academy. Two weeks later Alice received an answer from Schnabel: she was to come.

  Alice traveled to Germany with mixed feelings. Hers was a musical world and she was largely immune to political events. Although the National Socialists had been in power for a few months and Jews had been banned from public life since 1 April 1933, Alice was less concerned about the boycott of Jewish businesses than by her anxieties about Schnabel. Her Berlin friends had warned her about him, not least that he was notorious for charging exorbitant fees.

  Her general disquiet was not helped by her first impressions of Artur Schnabel. She remembers him being “unaesthetic and squat” and felt that she couldn’t breathe when she played for him. Throughout her performance he was wreathed in smoke, sucking in an unappetizing way on the cigar he kept turning in his fingers.