The Young Hitler I Knew

by August Kubizek

  In those weeks, Adolf wrote a lot, mainly plays, but also a few stories. He sat at his table and worked until dawn, without telling me very much about what he was doing. Only now and then would he throw on to my bed some closely written sheets of paper or would read out to me a few pages of his work, written in a strangely exalted style.

  I knew that almost everything he was writing was set in the world of Richard Wagner, that is to say, Germanic antiquity. One day I remarked, casually, that I had learned during lectures on the history of music that the outline of a musical drama about Wieland the smith had been found amongst Wagner’s posthumous writings. It was, in fact, only a short, hastily sketched text, and no drafts for a stage version existed, nor was anything known about the musical treatment of the material.

  Adolf immediately looked up the Wieland legend in his book on gods and heroes. Strangely enough he did not object at all to the plot of the Wieland legend, although King Nidur’s action is entirely motivated by avarice and greed. The hunger for gold, so important an element in Germanic mythology, produced in him neither a negative nor a positive response. Nor was he at all impressed by the fact that Wieland kills his son out of vengeance, rapes his daughter and drinks from beakers fashioned from the skulls of his sons. He started to write that same night. I was sure that in the morning he would surprise me with the draft of his new drama, Wieland der Schmied, yet things turned out differently. In the morning, nothing happened, but when I returned for lunch I found Adolf, to my great surprise, sitting at the piano. The scene that followed has remained in my memory. Without any further explanation, he greeted me with the words, ‘Listen, Gustl, I am going to make the Wieland into an opera.’ I was so surprised as to become speechless. Adolf enjoyed my reaction to his announcement and went on playing the piano, or what for him passed as playing. Old Prewratzky had taught him something in his day, undoubtedly, but not enough to play the piano as I understood it.

  When I had recovered, I asked Adolf how he imagined he would set about it. ‘Quite simple – I shall compose the music, and you will write it down.’ Adolf’s plans and ideas always moved, more or less, on a plane above normal comprehension – I had long since grown used to that – but now, when my own special domain, music, was in question, I really could not keep up with him. With all due respect to his musical gifts, he was no musician; he was not even capable of playing a musical instrument. He had not the slightest idea of musical theory. How could he dream of composing an opera?

  I remember only that my pride as a musician was hurt, and I walked out without uttering a word, and went to a small café nearby to do my homework. My friend was not in the least offended by my behaviour, however, and when I returned home that evening he was somewhat calmer. ‘Now, the prelude is ready – listen!’, and he played from memory what he had thought up as the prelude to his opera. Of course, I cannot recall a single note of this music, but one thing remains in my memory: it was a sort of illustration of the spoken word, by means of natural, musical elements, and he intended to have it performed on old instruments. As this would not have sounded harmonious, my friend decided in favour of a modern symphony orchestra reinforced by Wagner horns. That was at least music which one could follow. Each separate musical theme in itself made sense, and if the whole impressed one as so primitive, it was only because Adolf could not play better; that is to say he was incapable of expressing his ideas more clearly.

  The composition was, of course, entirely influenced by Richard Wagner. The whole prelude consisted of a sequence of single themes, but the development of these themes, however well chosen they were, had been beyond Adolf’s ability. After all, where should he have acquired the necessary knowledge? He lacked entirely any training for such a task.

  Having finished his playing, Adolf wanted to hear my judgment. I knew how highly he valued it and what my praise in musical matters meant to him, but this was no simple problem. The basic themes were good, I said, but he had to realise that with these themes alone it was impossible to write an opera, and I declared my readiness to teach him the necessary theoretical knowledge. This roused his wrath. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ he shouted at me, ‘What have I got you for? First of all you will put down exactly what I play on the piano.’

  I knew only too well my friend’s mood when he spoke in this manner, and realised that it was no good arguing. So I wrote down as faithfully as possible what Adolf had played, but it was late, Frau Zakreys was knocking on the door and Adolf had to stop.

  Next morning I left early and when I returned for lunch, Adolf reproached me for having run away ‘in the middle of working on his opera’. He had already prepared the music paper for me and immediately began to play. As Adolf stuck neither to the same time nor to a uniform key, it was hard to take down what I heard. I tried to make it clear to him that he had to keep to one key. ‘Who is the composer, you or I?’ he ranted. All I had to do was write down his musical thoughts and ideas.

  I asked him to start again. He did, and I wrote. Thus we made some progress, yet for Adolf it was too slow. I told him that to begin with I wanted to play through what I had taken down. He agreed, and I sat down at the piano, and it was his turn to listen. Curiously enough, I liked what I was playing better than he did, perhaps because he had a very precise idea of his composition in his head and neither his own poor playing, nor my notation and playing, corresponded to it. Nevertheless we concentrated for several days, or rather nights, on this prelude. I had to put the whole thing into a suitable metric form, but whatever I did Adolf was not satisfied. There were periods in the course of his composition in which the time changed from one bar to the next. I succeeded in convincing Adolf that this was impossible, but as soon as I tried to render the whole section in one time, he protested again.

  Today I can understand what brought him to the edge of despair during those strenuous nights and tested our friendship to the uttermost. He carried this prelude in his head as a finished composition just as he had had ready the plan for a bridge or a concert hall even before he put pencil to paper, but whilst he was complete master of the pencil and could give form to his idea till the drawing was completed, such means were denied him in the musical field. His attempt to make use of me made the whole thing even more complicated, for my theoretical knowledge only hindered his intuition. It reduced him to utter despair that he had an idea in his head, a musical idea which he considered bold and important, without being able to pin it down. There were moments in which he doubted his vocation in spite of his pronounced conceit.

  Soon he found a way out of the dilemma between passionate will and insufficient ability as ingenious as it was original: he would compose his opera, he declared determinedly, in the mode of musical expression corresponding to that period in which the action was set, that is to say, in Germanic antiquity. I intended to object that the audience, in order to ‘enjoy’ the opera properly, should be composed of old Germanen, rather than people of the twentieth century, but even before I had raised this objection, he was already working fervently on his new solution. I had no opportunity to dissuade him from this experiment, which I considered quite impossible. Besides, he would probably have succeeded in convincing me that his solution was feasible by insisting that the people of our century would just have to learn to listen properly.

  He wanted to know if there was anything preserved of Germanic music. ‘Nothing,’ I replied briefly, ‘except the instruments’.

  ‘And what were they?’ I told him that drums and rattles had been found, and in some places in Sweden and Denmark also a kind of flute, made of bones. Experts had succeeded in restoring these strange flutes and in producing with them some not very harmonious sounds, but most important were the luren, wind instruments made of brass, almost two metres long and curved like a horn. They probably served only as bugles between homesteads, and the crude sounds they produced could hardly be called music.

  I thought that my explanation, which he had followed with careful attention, would suffice to mak
e him give up his idea, for you could not orchestrate an opera with rattles, drums, bone-flutes and luren, but I was wrong. He started talking about the Skalds, who had sung to the accompaniment of harp-like instruments, something I had really forgotten.

  It should be possible, he went on, to deduce what their music was like from the kind of instruments the Germanic tribes had. Now my book-learning came into its own. ‘That has been done’, I reported, ‘and it has been shown that the music of the Germanen had a vertical structure, and possessed some sort of harmony; they even had, perhaps, some inkling of major and minor keys. To be sure, these are only scientific assumptions, so-called hypotheses …’

  This was sufficient to induce my friend to start composing for nights on end. He surprised me with ever new conceptions and ideas. It was hardly possible to write down this music, which did not fit into any scheme. As the Wieland legend, which Adolf arbitrarily interpreted and extended, was rich in dramatic moments, a wide scale of sentiments had to be translated into the musical idiom. To make the thing at all tolerable for the human ear, I finally persuaded Adolf to give up the idea of using the original instruments from the Germanic graves and to replace them by modern instruments of a similar type. I was content when, after nights of work, at long last the various leitmotifs of the opera were established.

  We then agreed on the characters, of whom only Wieland, the hero of the opera, had any substance so far, wherupon Adolf divided the whole action into acts and scenes. In the meantime he designed the scenery and costumes, and made a charcoal sketch of the winged hero.

  As my friend had not made any progress with the libretto which was supposed to be in verse, I suggested that he should finish the prelude first, to which he agreed after several rather heated arguments. I gave him a lot of help with it, and consequently the prelude turned out to be quite presentable, but my suggestion that the composition should be orchestrated and played by an orchestra as soon as an opportunity arose he rejected out of hand. He refused to have the prelude classed as programme music and would not hear of an ‘audience’ – which was in any case problematical. Yet he worked feverishly on it as though an impatient opera producer had allowed him too little time and was waiting to snatch the manuscript from his hands.

  He wrote and wrote and I worked on the music. When I fell asleep, overwhelmed by fatigue, Adolf roused me roughly. I had hardly opened my eyes and there he was in front of me, reading from his manuscript, the words tumbling out over each other in his excitement. It was past midnight and he had to speak softly. This, in its contrast to the scenes of volcanic violence described in his verse, lent to his impassioned voice a sound of strange unreality. I had long since known this behaviour of his when a self-imposed task engrossed him completely and forced him to unceasing activity; it was as though a demon had taken possession of him. Oblivious to his surroundings, he never tired, he never slept. He ate nothing, he hardly drank. At the most he would occasionally grab a milk bottle and take a hasty gulp, certainly without being aware of it, for he was too completely wrapped up in his work. Never before had I been so directly impressed by this ecstatic creativeness. Where was it leading him? He squandered his strength and talents on something that had no practical value. How long would his weakened, delicate body stand this overstrain?

  I forced myself to stay awake and to listen, nor did I ask him any of the questions that filled me with anxiety. It would have been easy for me to take as an excuse one of our frequent quarrels to move out. The people at the Conservatoire would have been only too pleased to help me find another room. Why did I not do it? After all, I had often admitted to myself that this strange friendship was no good for my studies. How much time and energy did I lose in these nocturnal activities with my friend? Why then, did I not go? Because I was homesick, certainly, and because Adolf represented for me a bit of home. But, after all, homesickness is something a young man of twenty can overcome. What was it then? What held me?

  Frankly it was just hours like those through which I was now living which bound me even more closely to my friend. I knew the normal interests of young people of my age: flirtations, shallow pleasures, idle play and a lot of unimportant, meaningless thoughts. Adolf was the exact opposite. There was an incredible earnestness in him, a thoroughness, a true passionate interest in everything that happened and, most important, an unfailing devotion to the beauty, majesty and grandeur of art. It was this that attracted me especially to him and restored my equilibrium after hours of exhaustion. All this was well worth a few sleepless nights and those more or less heated quarrels to which, in my quiet, sensible way, I had become accustomed.

  I remember that some of the opera’s more dramatic scenes haunted me for weeks in my dreams. Only some of the pictures which Adolf designed still stand out in my memory. Pen and pencil were too slow for him and he used to draw with charcoal. He would outline the scenery with a few bold, quick strokes. Then we would discuss the action: first Wieland enters from the right, then his brother Egil from the left and then, from the back, the second brother Slaghid.

  I have still before my eyes Wolf Lake, where the first scene of the opera was laid. From the Edda, a book that was sacred for him, he knew Iceland, the rugged island of the north, where the elements from which the world was created meet now, as they did in the days of creation: the violent storm, the bare dark rock, the pale ice of the glaciers, the flaming fire of the volcanoes. There he laid the setting of his opera, for there nature itself was still in those passionate convulsions which inspired the actions of gods and human beings. There, then, was the Wolf Lake on whose banks Wieland and his brothers were fishing when one morning three light clouds, borne along by the winds, floated towards them, three Valkyries in glittering coats of mail and shining helmets. They wore white fluttering robes, magic garments which enabled them to float through the air. I remember what headaches these flying Valkyries caused us, as Adolf categorically refused to do without them. Altogether there was a lot of ‘flying’ in our opera. In the last act, Wieland too had to forge himself a pair of wings with which to fly, a flight on wings of metal which had to be accomplished with the utmost ease in order to remove any doubts as to the quality of his workmanship. This was for us, the creators of the opera, one more technical problem which attracted Adolf in particular, perhaps because just in those days the first ‘heavier than air machines’ were being flown by Lilienthal, the Wright brothers, Farman and Blériot. The flying Valkyries married Wieland, Egil and Slaghild. Mighty horns summoned the neighbours to the wedding feast at the Wolf Lake.

  It would take me too long were I to recount the various episodes of the old saga; besides, I can no longer tell whether we followed it word for word in our work, but the impression of dramatic events driven on by wild, unbridled passion, and given expression in verses that inexorably engraved themselves on the heart, carried by just such inexorably severe and elemental music is still vivid in my memory.

  I do not know what became of our opera. One day new, pressing problems requiring immediate solution confronted my friend. As even Adolf, in spite of his immense capacity for work, had only one pair of hands, he had to put aside the half-finished opera. He spoke less and less of it, and in the end did not mention it at all. Perhaps the insufficiency of his endeavours had meanwhile dawned on him. To me, it had been obvious from the beginning that we would never succeed in our attempt to write an opera, and I took good care not to raise the subject again. Wieland der Schmied, Adolf’s opera, remained a fragment.

  * * *

  Chapter 20

  The Mobile Reichs-Orchestra

  My friend’s musical interests broke new ground in Vienna. Whereas hitherto he had confined his passion to opera, now he had leanings for the concert hall. Adolf had attended symphony concerts produced by the Music Society at Linz, and probably saw August Göllerich conducting on six or seven of these occasions, but his real purpose was to watch my performance as an instrumentalist. Maybe he considered that my quiet, submissive personality was not up
to such a large responsibility before the public and was interested in seeing how I made out. Whatever the reason, I noticed that after each performance he talked about my part in it more than about the concert itself.

  In Vienna it was different. Other circumstances interposed themselves. From the Conservatoire I received on a regular basis one to three complimentary tickets to concerts. I would always give one to Adolf, or sometimes all three if I was working late on a score. Since these were good seats, concert-going was not the same struggle as was the opera. From his remarks upon his return from these concerts I noticed to my surprise that Adolf quite liked symphony music, which pleased me, for it broadened our common field of interest in music.

  The head of the Conservatoire training school for orchestral leaders, Gustav Gutheil, also conducted the performances of the Vienna Concert Society. We also had a very high opinion of Ferdinand Lowe, Director of the Conservatoire, who occasionally led the Vienna Philharmonic when it played Bruckner. In Vienna there were violent differences between supporters of Brahms and Bruckner even though both masters had been dead for over a century. Even Eduard Hanslick, the hated Viennese music critic whom we nicknamed Benkmesser, was defunct by then, although the wounds he left were still open. Hanslick, our sworn enemy because he had denigrated in brutal fashion our hero Wagner, had come in on the side of Brahms against Bruckner.