Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

by Ben Fountain

  In 1829, however, there was a break. Some say it was due to an incident at the comte de Gobet’s, where Visser was accused of cheating at cards; his legendary success and extra finger had long made him an object of suspicion, though others said that he was discovered making free with the fifteen-year-old daughter of a baron. Visser was, whatever the cause, refused by society, forced out into le grand public to make his living, this at a time when there were few adequate venues for touring virtuosos, and concert managers tended to have the scruples of slave traders. Visser billed himself as The Man with Eleven Fingers, the freakshow aspect of virtuosity made explicit for once, and over the next two years of playing in rowdy beer gardens and firetrap opera houses he perfected his florid stagecraft: the regal entrance, the lavender gloves portentously removed, then the excruciating pause before his hands fell on the keyboard like an avalanche. It was early noted that his audiences were disproportionately female; more remarkable was the delirium that his performances induced, a feature that grew even more pronounced with the addition of the Fantaisie pour Onze Doigts to his repertoire. Hummel, who heard it played in a ballroom in Stuttgart, called it “a most strange and affecting piece, with glints of dissonance issuing from the right hand like the whip of a lash, or very keen razor cuts.” Kalkbrenner, who happened on it at a brewery in Mainz, compared the chill of the strained harmonies of the loaded right hand to “a trickle of ice-cold water down the back,” and added: “I believe that Visser has captured the very sound of Limbo.”

  The effect on audiences was astonishing. From the first reported performance, in October 1831, there were accounts of seizures, faintings, and fits of epilepsy among the spectators; though some accused Visser of paying actors to mimic and encourage such convulsions, the phenomenon appears to have been accepted as genuine. Mass motor hysteria would most likely be the diagnosis today, though a physician from Gossl who witnessed one performance proposed theories having to do with electrical contagion; others linked the Fantasy to the Sistine Chapel Syndrome, the hysterics to which certain foreign women—English spinsters, chiefly—sometimes fell prey while viewing the artistic treasures of Italy. In any event, the Fantasy was a short-lived sensation. From its debut in the fall of 1831 until his death the following January, Visser performed the piece perhaps thirty times. He was said to be traveling to Paris to play for the princess Tversky’s salon—the fame of the Fantasy had, conveniently, paroled his reputation—when he was killed stupidly, needlessly, in a tavern in Cologne, knifed in a dispute over cards, so the story goes.

  People naturally believed that the Fantasy died with him; even the stupendously gifted Liszt refused to attempt it, rather defensively dismissing the piece as “a waste of time, an oddity based on an alien formation of the hand.” One might study the score as scholars study the texts of a dead language, but the living sound was thought to be lost forever, until that day in 1891 when Leo and Hermine Kuhl brought their six-year-old daughter to the Vienna studio of Herr Moritz Puchel. Herr Puchel listened to the girl play Chopin’s “Aeolian Harp” Étude; he gave her a portion of Beethoven’s A-flat Sonata to sight-read, which she did without stress; he confirmed, as her current teacher Frau Holzer had told him, that the child did indeed have perfect pitch. Finally he asked Anna Kuhl to stand before him and place her hands on his upturned palms.

  “Yes,” he said gravely, much in the manner of a doctor giving an unhappy diagnosis, “someday she will play Visser’s Fantasy.”

  Herr Puchel himself had been a prodigy, a student of Czerny’s, who in turn had been a student of Beethoven’s; though he was an undeniably brilliant musician, Puchel’s own career as a virtuoso had been thwarted by the misfortune of thin, bony hands. He had, instead, made his reputation as a teacher, and by the age of sixty had achieved such a degree of eminence that he accepted only those students who could answer in the affirmative the following three questions:

  Are you a prodigy?

  Are you of Slavic descent?

  Are you Jewish?

  This, the Catholic Puchel believed, was the formula for greatness, and Anna Kuhl qualified on all counts. The Kuhls came from Olomouc, in Moravia—a town, as would often be noted, that has some claim as Visser’s birthplace—where Anna’s grandfather founded the textile factory on which the family fortune was based; by the time of Anna’s birth, Leo and his brothers had built a textile empire substantial enough to be headquartered in the Austrian capital. The Kuhls were typical of Vienna’s upper-class Jewry: politically liberal, culturally and linguistically German, their Judaism little more than a pious family memory, they devoted themselves to artistic and intellectual attainment as a substitute for the social rank which would always be denied them. And yet the desire to assimilate, to be viewed as complete citizens, was strong; theirs was a world in which any departure from convention provoked intense, if grimly decorous, fear, and the Kuhls were so horrified by Anna’s deformity that they considered amputation in the hours after her birth. When the doctor could not ensure them that the infant would survive the shock, the parents relented, though one may reasonably wonder if they were ever completely rid of their instinctive revulsion, or of the more rarefied, if no less desperate, fear that Anna’s condition threatened their tenuous standing in society.

  Great pianists manifest the musical impulse early, usually around age four; for Anna Kuhl the decisive moment came at two, when Frau Holzer, giving a lesson to Anna’s older brother, discovered that the little girl had perfect pitch. On further examination the child revealed astonishing powers of memory and muscular control, as well as profound sensitivity to aural stimulus—she wept on hearing Chopin for the first time, burst into fierce, agonal sobs as if mourning some inchoate yet powerfully sensed memory. Frau Holzer undertook to form the child’s talent; by age four Anna had composed her first song, “Good Morning,” and by age six had mastered the Versuch, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and most of Chopin’s Études. That year she performed at an exhibition of the city’s young pianists, playing with such artistry that Grunfeld, the notoriously saccharine Court pianist, was seen shaking his head and mumbling to himself as he left the hall.

  “A prodigy,” Frau Holzer wrote in her recommendation to Herr Puchel. “Memorizes instantly; staggering technique and maturity of expression; receptive to hard work, instruction, challenge.” Regarding what Frau Holzer chose to call the child’s “unique anatomy,” Puchel was matter-of-fact to the point of brusqueness, devising technical drills suited to Anna’s conformation but otherwise focusing, for the present, on the traditional repertoire. Herr Puchel—stout, bushy-bearded, with a huge strawberry of a nose and endearingly tiny feet—had concluded after forty years of teaching that his students would never be truly happy unless coaxed and cudgeled to that peak of performance in which nervous breakdown is a constant risk. Students, by definition, could not reach Parnassus alone; they were too weak of will, too dreamy and easily distracted, they had to be cultivated into that taut, tension-filled state without which pure and lasting art is impossible. Thus it was that visitors to Herr Puchel’s studio could hear “Falsch!” regularly screamed from the teaching room. “Falsch!” der Meister would shriek at the first missed note, “Start over!”—his screams punctuated in summer by the swack of the flyswatter with which he defended his territory against Vienna’s plague of flies. In moments of extreme aesthetic crisis he would push aside his student and sit at the piano, hike up his legs and pound the keyboard with his dainty feet, legs churning like a beetle stuck on its back. “You sound like this!” he would howl at the offender, though his gruff tenderness could be equally effective. “Don’t be afraid to stick your neck out,” he is said to have told one student after a risky, rubato-laced Polonaise. “You might find that it gets stroked instead of chopped off.”

  A dangerous man, yet prodigious in his results, and apparently Anna responded to this sort of treatment. By all accounts she was a preternaturally serious little girl, self-assured, disposed to silence but precise in speech, with an aura of u
napproachability that discouraged all but the very determined or very frivolous. A photographic portrait made at the time shows a girl as slender and graceful as a tulip stem, with long, ringletted masses of black hair, deep-set dark eyes, high Slavic cheekbones, and skin as pale as January snow. At this age she seems unconscious of her unique right hand, or perhaps trusting is a better word; she has allowed herself to be posed with her fingers draped to full effect across the back of a Roentgen chair.

  “A perfect breeze of a girl,” is how the Salonblatt, Vienna’s snob- society newspaper, described the young Anna. “A perfect breeze who turns into an exquisite storm when seated before the 88 black and white keys.” Puchel believed that the loftiest musical heights could be reached only through the ordeal of performance; he wanted Anna to start playing in public immediately, and arranged through court connections her society debut at a soirée of the princess Montenuovo. Salonblatt rhapsodized over the playing of this “mystical” child whose arpeggios “flashed and shimmered like champagne,” while the baroness Flotow left an account in her diary of a charmingly poised little girl who devastated the company with Chopin’s nocturnes, ate cakes and drank Turkish coffee with the ladies, and complained about the quality of the piano.

  She continued awing the impressionable aristocracy for several years, until Puchel judged that she was seasoned enough for her concert debut. In October 1895, the Berlin Philharmonic was scheduled to perform in Vienna; when Julius Epstein, the featured pianist, fell ill, Puchel arranged for Anna to take his place, and after the monumental program of Beethoven’s C major Concerto, a set of Rameau variations, the Weber-Liszt Pollacca, and a Chopin group consisting of the Berceuse, the E-flat Nocturne, and the E minor Waltz, the girl prodigy left Vienna gasping for air. Brahms toasted her in absentia that night, at a banquet intended to honor the suddenly forgotten Epstein. Mahler enthused over her sonorities and golden tone, while both traditional and Secessionist critics marveled at her luminously refined technique, her uncalculated emotion and spontaneity. Agents and concert managers came seething; after interviewing numerous candidates, Leo and Hermine settled on the well-known agent Sigi Kornblau, who appears to have been the kind of dry, hustling administrator that every genius needs, although Anna reportedly told her cousins that visits with Herr Kornblau were “not much fun,” and “rather like going to the dentist.” Within weeks the young virtuoso and her entourage—her mother, her French governess, a servant girl named Bertha, and Herr Puchel, who carried along a dummy keyboard for practice on the train—had embarked on her first European tour, and for the next three years she alternated between prolonged seasons of close-packed concert dates, and equally demanding, if more solitary, periods of study and practice.

  Many have speculated as to the brutalizing effect of such a life on someone who was, after all, a mere child. Regulating Anna’s program would seem to have been within the power of her parents, but it appears that Leo and Hermine were no less susceptible than their fellow bourgeois to validation by the aristocracy. Through Anna they might cross, for brief moments at least, the glacis separating them from the remote nobility. Their daughter’s labors brought them acceptance, and whatever the cost to Anna in personal terms, the strain seemed not to diminish—perhaps even enhanced?—the remarkable message of her playing. Like all virtuosos, she had exemplary technique: critics wrote of her fluent, almost chaste clarity, the pinpoint accuracy of her wide skips and galloping chords, the instinctive integrity of her rubato, and her broad dynamic range, from shadowlike pianissimo to artillery-grade forte. But more than that there was the singularity of her sound, the “golden sound” that the critics never tired of describing, along with a tenderness of expression that ravished her listeners. This was not yet another robotic prodigy pumping out notes like a power sewing machine; there was, rather, a quality of innocence in her playing, an effusion of trust and vulnerability all the more remarkable for being conveyed through supreme artistry.

  “The child,” wrote Othmar Wieck, a critic not known for charity, “is a veritable angel come down to Earth.” And in Vienna, a city that more than cherished art, that craved it as an escape from the gloom and pessimism that had settled over the Empire in the century’s final years, it was perhaps only natural that people would project their fears and longings onto the young virtuoso. Haut bourgeois concertgoers openly wept at her performances, while for others she became an object of obsession, her name turning up with arcane frequency in suicide notes or the vertiginous ramblings of the mentally disturbed. But even those of sturdier, less enervated natures would lapse into deep melancholy after one of her concerts, as if they had sensed within their grasp some piece of information crucial to existence, only to feel it slip away as the last note was played.

  Her first “phase,” as the family neatly termed such episodes, seems to have occurred in the autumn of her thirteenth year. Engagements in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin were abruptly canceled, due to “temporary illness,” according to the notice released by Herr Kornblau’s office, though even then there were rumors of a nervous attack. Some said that Anna was under the care of the famous Professor Meynert; others, that she was in residence at the luxurious psychiatric retreat of Professor Leidesdorf, where doctors in white gloves and silk top hats administered the latest in electric and water-immersion therapies. In any event, the young virtuoso’s reemergence several weeks later marks the first known instance in which she kept her right hand purposely concealed. Anna, along with her parents and a number of family friends, attended the opening of the Kunstlerhaus exhibition in late October; she was observed wearing a tailored suit of steel gray bengaline, the long sleeves that grazed her palms even further extended by a ruffed trim of Irish lace. She carried in addition an embroidered silk kerchief wrapped as if casually about her right hand, and from that time forward the young pianist never showed her hand in public until the instant she sat before the keyboard.

  Commentators have noted in this eccentricity all the characteristics of a neurotic symptom. Without doubt, the compulsively veiled hand, as well as the “phases” during which she retreated from the outside world, indicate significant stress in the girl’s life. Some have portrayed these symptoms as a response to her treatment by the pan-German press, which, in the course of advocating the union of Austria’s German-speaking regions with the Reich, had begun to review her performances in the manner of anti-Semitic diatribes. Others surmise that these were a sensitive girl’s reactions to the more general malaise hanging over the city, although the pursuit of art, with its constant, debilitating risk of failure, not to mention the solitude and unwholesome narcissism that sustained concentration necessarily entails, is, even in the best of circumstances, enough to induce the entire range of psychopathy. That Anna was merciless with herself, and suffered accordingly, is evident from her cousin Hugo’s diaries. For instance, in the entry dated 11 November 1898, we find Anna telling Hugo:

  “It’s only when I’m with you that I’m allowed not to work.”

  And on 5 December, in response to Hugo’s entreaties not to strain herself:

  She looked down at her shoes and smiled to herself, as if I were a rather dense little boy who’d asked her to make the river stand still.

  “To play well—I suppose I’ve always assumed that it’s a matter of life and death.”

  It was Hugo to whom the family turned when Anna lapsed into one of her phases. Hugo Kuhl was destined to become a minor ce lebrity of the age, an ironic, deliciously blasé feuilletonist for the liberal press and the author of a number of drawing-room plays, of which The Escape Artist and Dinner with Strangers are still known to scholars. But at the time in question, Hugo was merely a literary-minded student at the University, known to his circle as a stylish, handsome wit of no defined vocational goal, also an accomplished amateur pianist with a sec touch. It seems that he alone, out of all of Anna’s siblings and numerous cousins, could give some organizing principle to the drift of her phases, during which Anna managed to dress and feed
herself, but little else.

  21 MARCH

  To Uncle Leo’s flat in the p.m.

  Anna listless, almost catatonic, Hermine tearing around like a fishwife, railing at her to practice—

  “Shame on you Anna, for shame! Herr Puchel will be so furious!”

  Anna silent, tears in her eyes; I could have cheerfully throttled dear Aunt at that moment. Chose instead to move A into the afternoon sun, onto the cut-velvet sofa by the window. Sat for a peaceful hour while I read Tantchen Rosmarin aloud, A’s head on my shoulder. For me, a perfect hour. For her, I imagine that existence was almost tolerable.

  In fact Hugo was basically helpless when confronted with a phase, and admitted as much in his diaries. His therapy seemed to consist of taking her out for long walks on the Ringstrasse, or among the earthier amusements and shops of the Prater. The two cousins were often seen strolling arm in arm, a strikingly handsome, fashionably dressed young couple, and yet mismatched for all their good looks and evident wealth: Hugo obviously too old to be Anna’s suitor, Anna clearly too young to be Hugo’s wife. Even so, some have suggested that their devotion to one another surpassed the usual bond of sympathetic cousins, and, indeed, there are aspects of the diaries that imply infatuation. Hugo notes even their most casual physical contact, as when Anna places her arm on his, or their legs happen to brush while riding in a carriage. He remarks frequently on her beauty, variously describing it as “radiant,” “precocious,” and “disabling,” and once comparing her, without his usual irony, to Rembrandt’s sublime portraits of Jewish women. And then there are the insights which come of close observation, as when he tries to make sense of Anna’s stern artistic will: