Every now and then he would choose books which were then in vogue, but in order to form a judgment of those who read them, rather than of the books themselves. Ganghofer meant nothing to him, whilst he greatly praised Otto Ernst, with whose works he was familiar. Of modern plays we saw Frank Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen and Der Meister von Palmyra by Wilbrandt. Adolf read Ibsen’s plays in Vienna without being very much impressed by them.
As for philosophical works, he always had his Schopenhauer by him, later Nietzsche too, yet I knew little about these, for he regarded these philosophers as, so to speak, his personal affair – private property which he would not share with anybody. This reticence was possibly due also to the fact that we shared a love of music and this provided us with common ground more rewarding than that of philosophy which for me was rather a remote subject.
In conclusion I should like to stress the same point with regard to my friend’s reading that I have mentioned before in describing his professional studies: he read prodigiously and, with the help of his extraordinary memory, stored up an amount of knowledge which was far above the standard of a twenty-year-old – but he avoided any factual discussion about it.
When he urged me to read a certain book, he knew in advance that I would never be his equal in any argument, and it is even possible that he selected the books which he recommended me to read with this thought in mind. He was not interested in ‘another opinion’, nor in any discussion of the book.
His attitude to books was the same as his attitude to the world in general. He absorbed with fervour everything he could lay his hands on, but he took great care to keep at a safe distance from anything that might put him to the test.
He was a seeker, certainly, but even in his books he found only what suited him. One day when I asked him if he really intended to complete his studies by the aid of books alone, he looked at me, surprised, and barked: ‘Of course, you need teachers, I can see that. But for me they are superfluous.’ In the further course of this conversation he called me an ‘intellectual scrounger’ and a ‘parasite at other people’s tables’. I never felt, and particularly not in those days when we were lodging together in Vienna, that he was seeking anything concrete in his piles of books, such as principles and ideas for his own conduct; on the contrary, he was only looking for confirmation of those principles and ideas he already had. For this reason his reading, except perhaps in German mythology, was not a mater of edification, but a sort of check-up on himself.
I remember him in Vienna expounding his many problems and usually winding up with a reference to some book, ‘You see, the man who wrote this is of exactly the same opinion as I am.’
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Chapter 18
Nights at the Opera
The high spots of our friendship were our visits together to the Hof Opera, and memories of my friend are inseparably connected with these wonderful experiences. The theatre in Linz saw the beginning of our youthful friendship, and this was re-affirmed whenever we visited the foremost opera house in Europe. As we grew older, the contrasts between us made themselves increasingly noticeable and the difference in our family back-grounds, our professional aspirations and our attitude to public and political life separated us more and more. Yet our fervent enthusiasm for everything that was beautiful and noble, which found its highest artistic expression in the performances of the Vienna opera, linked us ever more closely. In Linz our relationship had been smooth and harmonious, but in Vienna the conflicts and tensions grew, largely due to our lodging together in a single room. It was fortunate that at the same time the influence of our common artistic experiences fortified our friendship.
True to tradition, we humble, poverty-stricken students had to fight hard for the chance of seeing these performances. It is true that in theory there existed cheap tickets for the promenade which, in Vienna as in Linz, used to be our aim, but we never got one, not even through the Conservatoire. So we had to pay the full price – two crowns – a lot of money when one thinks that Adolf, after having paid his rent, was left with fifteen crowns for the whole month. Moreover, although we paid the full price we had to fight hard to get even these tickets, the sale of which started only one hour before the performance began.
Having finally secured the ticket, there started a rush towards the promenade which was fortunately not far from the box office. It was below the imperial box and one could hear excellently. Women were not admitted to the promenade which pleased Adolf hugely, but on the other hand it had the disadvantage of being split up into two halves by a brass railing, one for civilians, one for the military. These young lieutenants who, according to my friend, came to the opera less for the sake of the music than for social reasons, paid only ten hellers for their tickets whilst we poor students were fleeced twenty times that amount. This always made Adolf very wild. Looking at these elegant lieutenants who, ceaselessly yawning, could hardly wait for the interval to display themselves in the foyer as though they had just come out of their box, he said that among the visitors to the promenade artistic understanding varied in inverse proportion to the price of the tickets. Moreover the military half of the promenade was never full, whilst in the civilian half students, young employees and artisans trod on each other’s toes.
One disadvantage was that the promenade was usually the haunt of the claque, and this often spoilt our pleasure. The usual procedure was very simple: a singer who wanted to be applauded at a certain point would hire a claque for the evening. Its leader would buy their tickets for his men and in addition pay them a sum of money. There existed professional claqueurs who worked at a fixed rate. So it would often happen that at a most unsuitable moment, roars of applause would break out all around us. This made us boil over with indignation. I remember once, during Tannhäuser, we silenced a group of claqueurs by our hissing. One of them, who continued to shout ‘Bravo!’ even though the orchestra was still playing, was punched in the side by Adolf. On leaving the theatre, we found the leader of the claque waiting for us with a policeman. Adolf was questioned on the spot and defended himself so brilliantly that the policeman let him go, but he was in time to catch up with the claqueur in question in the street and give him a sound box on the ears.
As nobody was admitted to the promenade in hat and coat, we left them behind when we went to the opera so as to save the cloakroom fee. To be sure, it was often bitterly cold coming out of the heated theatre into the night. But what did that matter after Lohengrin or Tristan?
What was most annoying for us was that we had to be home by ten o’clock at the latest if we wanted to save the Sperrsechserl. It took us, according to Adolf’s precise calculations, at least fifteen minutes to walk home from the opera, and so we had to leave there at a quarter to ten. The consequence was that Adolf never succeeded in hearing the end of those operas which finished later and I had to play for him on the piano what he had missed.
Richard Wagner’s musical dramas were still the object of our undivided love and enthusiasm. For Adolf, nothing could compete with the great mystical world that the master conjured up for us. Thus, for instance, when I wanted to see some magnificent Verdi production in the Hof Opera, he would bully me until I gave up my Verdi and went with him to the Volksoper in Währing, where they were doing Wagner. He preferred a mediocre Wagner performance a hundred times to a first-class Verdi. I thought differently, but what was the use? I had to yield, as usual, for when it was a question of a Wagner performance, Adolf would tolerate no opposition. No doubt he had heard of a much better performance of the work in question – I do not remember whether it was Lohengrin or Tristan – at the Hof Opera, but this was not the point at issue. Listening to Wagner meant to him not a simple visit to the theatre but the opportunity of being transported into that extraordinary state which Wagner’s music produced in him, that trance, that escape into the mystical dream world which he needed in order to sustain the enormous tension of his turbulent nature.
The standard of the cast and orchestra at the Vol
ksoper was remarkably high and much superior to anything we had been accustomed to in Linz. Another advantage was that one could get a cheap seat there without having to spend a long time in the queue for the box office. What displeased us was the cold, modernistic style of the building, and the dull unimaginative interior of the theatre, which was matched by the lack of glamour in its productions. Adolf used to call this theatre ‘the people’s soup kitchen’.
Our theatre-going in Linz had given us the grounding for the full enjoyment in Vienna of the immortal master’s work. We were thoroughly familiar with his operas, without having been spoilt, and consequently the Hof Opera, and even the modest theatre in Währing, seemed to create anew for us Richard Wagner’s world.
Of course, we knew by heart Lohengrin, Adolf’s favourite opera – I believe he saw it ten times during our time together in Vienna – and the same is true of the Meistersinger. Just as other people quote their Goethe or Schiller, we would quote Wagner, preferably the Meistersinger. We know, of course, that Wagner intended to immortalise his friend Franz Liszt in the figure of Hans Sachs, and to attack his bitter enemy, Hanslick, in the person of Beckmesser. Adolf often quoted from the third scene of the second act:
And still I don’t succeed
I feel it and yet I cannot understand it
I cannot retain it nor forget it
And if I grasp it I cannot measure it.
In this my friend saw the unique, eternal formula with which Richard Wagner castigated the want of comprehension of his contemporaries and which, so to speak, applied to his own fate, for his father, his family, his teachers, although they had certainly ‘felt’ that there was something outstanding about him, for the love of God could not understand it. And when people had, at long last, grasped what they wanted, they still remained incapable of ‘measuring’ the extent of his will. These lines were for him a daily exhortation, a never-failing comfort which helped him as did the picture of the great master himself before which he stood in his darker hours.
We studied with libretto and score those works of Wagner that we had not seen in Linz. So Wagnerian Vienna found us well prepared and, naturally enough, we entered at once the ranks of his worshippers, and wherever we could we acclaimed the work of the master of Bayreuth with fervent enthusiasm.
What had been for us the height of artistic experience in Linz was reduced to the level of poor, well-intentioned provincial performances after we had seen the perfect Wagner interpretations by Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Hof Opera. But Adolf would not have been Adolf if he had contented himself with regretful memories. He loved Linz, which he always thought of as his home town, even though both parents were dead and there was only one human being left there to whom he was passionately devoted: Stefanie, who still did not know what she meant to the pale youth who had stood and waited for her day after day at the Schmiedtoreck. The cultural life of Linz had to be brought to a level commensurate with that of Vienna; with savage determination Adolf set to work.
On leaving Linz he had put great hopes in the Theatre Rebuilding Society, of which he had become an enthusiastic member, but these worthies who had got together to give Linz a new, dignified theatre were apparently making no headway. Nothing was ever heard of it and Adolf’s impatience grew. So he started working on his own. He took pleasure in applying to his own home town that style of monumental architecture with which he had become familiar in imperial Vienna.
He had already removed from the central area of the town the railway station with its ugly workshops, smoke-stained sheds and cumbersome railway tracks, and transferred it to the outskirts. This enabled him to enlarge the park, add a zoo, a palm house and, of course, an illuminated fountain. It was in the centre of this well-tended park that the new Linz opera house should be erected, smaller in size than the Vienna Hof Opera but its equal in technical equipment. The old theatre was to become a playhouse and be put under the same direction as the opera. In this way my friend got over the deplorable conditions of his home town and all the greater was the enjoyment he derived from Vienna’s artistic attractions.
We saw almost all Richard Wagner’s works. Die fliegende Holländer, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger have remained unforgettable to me, as has also Der Ring der Niebelungen and even Parsifal.
Occasionally of course Adolf saw other operas as well, but they never meant as much to him as Wagner’s. In Linz we had already seen a surprisingly good Figaro, which had filled Adolf with delight. I still remember his saying, on our way home, that the Linz theatre should in future concentrate on operas which, like Figaro, were within its scope. A production of Die Zauberflöte, on the other hand, was a complete failure, and Weber’s Freischütz was so bad that Adolf never wanted to see it again, but in Vienna, of course, everything was different. We saw perfect performances, not only of Mozart operas, but also of Beethhoven’s Fidelio. Italian opera never attracted Adolf, although Italian composers like Donizetti, Rossini, Bellini and especially Verdi and Puccini, who was then still very modern, were highly appreciated in Vienna and played to full houses.
The Verdi operas we saw together were Un Ballo in Maschera, Il Trovatore, Rigoletto and La Traviata, but Aida was the only one which he liked at all. For him, the plots of Italian operas laid too much emphasis upon theatrical effect. He objected to trickery, knavery and deception as the basic elements of a dramatic situation. He said to me once, ‘What would these Italians do if they had no daggers?’ He found Verdi’s music too unpretentious, relying too much on melody. How rich and varied by comparison was Wagner’s range! One day when we heard an organ-grinder playing La donna é mobile, Adolf said, ‘There’s your Verdi!’ When I replied that no composer was safe from such debasement of his works, he barked at me furiously, ‘Can you imagine the Grail story on a barrel organ?’.
Neither Gounod, whose Margarete he regarded as vulgar, nor Tchaikovsky, nor Smetana, met with his approval. No doubt he was handicapped here by his obsessions with German mythology. He rejected my contention that music should appeal to all races and nations. For him nothing counted but Germany ways, German feeling and German thought. He accepted none but the German masters. How often did he tell me that he was proud to belong to a people who had produced such masters.
Time and again we came back to Richard Wagner. In the course of my professional training I obtained new, substantial insight into the compositional creativity of the master, and with it grew my understanding, my penetration of his music. Adolf took a lively interest in this development of my musical conception. His devotion to, and veneration of, Wagner took almost the form of a religion.
When he listened to Wagner’s music he was a changed man: his violence left him, he became quiet, yielding and tractable. His gaze lost its restlessness; his own destiny, however heavily it may have weighed upon him, became unimportant. He no longer felt lonely and outlawed, misjudged by society. As if intoxicated by some hypnotic agent, he slipped into a state of ecstasy, and willingly let himself be carried away into that mystical universe which was more real to him than the actual workaday world. From the stale, musty prison of his back room, he was transported into the blissful regions of Germanic antiquity, that ideal world which was the lofty goal for all his endeavours.
Thirty years later, when he met me again in Linz, his friend whom he had last seen as a student of the Vienna Conservatoire, he was convinced that I had become an important conductor, but when I appeared before him as a humble municipal employee, Hitler, by then Reich Chancellor, alluded to the possibility of my assuming the direction of an orchestra.
I declined with thanks. I no longer felt up to the task. When he realised that he could not help his friend with this generous offer, he recalled our common experiences at the Linz theatre and the Vienna Hof Opera, which had elevated our friendship from the commonplace to the sacred sphere of his own world, and invited me to come to Bayreuth.
I should never have thought that those outstanding artistic experiences of my Vienna st
udent days could still be surpassed. And yet this was the case, for what I experienced in Bayreuth as the guest of the friend of my youth was the culmination of everything that Richard Wagner had ever meant in my life.
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Chapter 19
Adolf Writes an Opera
Soon our life together showed its drawbacks because of the different subjects that Adolf and I were studying. In the morning, when I was at the Conservatoire, my friend was still asleep, and in the afternoon when Adolf wanted to work, my practising disturbed him. This led to frequent friction.
Conservatoire, fiddlesticks! What did he have his books for? He wanted to prove to me that, even without the Conservatoire, he could equal my achievements in the musical field. For it was not the professor’s wisdom that counted, he said, but genius.
This ambition led him to a most extraordinary experiment and I am still at a loss to say whether this experiment was of any value or not. Adolf harked back to the elementary possibilities of musical expression. Words seemed to him too complicated for this purpose, and he tried to discover how isolated sounds could be linked to notes of music, and with this musical language he combined colours. Sound and colour were to become one and form the foundations of that which would finally appear on the stage as an opera. I myself, convinced of the truth of what I had learned at the Conservatoire, rejected these experiments somewhat disdainfully, which annoyed him very much. He busied himself for some time with these abstract experiments, perhaps because he hoped to strike at the roots of my superior, academic knowledge. I was reminded of my friend’s essays in composition when a few years later a Russian composer caused some sensation in Vienna by similar experiments.
The Young Hitler I Knew Page 22
