Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  This sheer productivity swamps everything – spectacular piano trios, a great sequence of string quartets, a hundred and seventy-five works for baryton (a defunct kind of bass viol favoured in Esterházy circles), operas, masses, a whole pile of concertos, piano sonatas, scores to accompany a marionette theatre – it is the high road to madness to try to encompass all this stuff. I love his music, but it is a bit disconcerting to realize that you could die in extreme old age and still only be familiar with a mere handful of the baryton trios. In that sense his own oeuvre becomes a deeply considered meditation on human frailty, even beyond his own Catholic devotion.

  He lived so long that he tipped over into a Napoleonic world very remote from his roots in traditional Austria, one in which he became extremely famous and rich. But this came from the mere chance of living so long. One oddity is his extraordinary work The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, written for orchestra but with versions for string quartet, oratorio and a stark piano transcription. In a sort of welter of traditional devotional feeling of a kind Joseph II would have bristled at, Haydn tried to dramatize in music each of Jesus’s final exclamations (‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ and so on), a commission for the highly severe Good Friday ceremonies in Cadíz cathedral. It is austere to the point of comedy, and is perhaps the last link in those near private sacred works like Biber’s Rosary Sonatas which had been used to channel the meditations of the Bishop of Salzburg over a century before. One of Beethoven’s teachers summed up a new scepticism by daring to suggest that Haydn’s setting of the words ‘I thirst’ in practice did very little to convey Jesus’s need for a drink. But then, there always seems to be a comment one can point to which appears to mark the end of traditional Habsburg Catholic devotion – and along comes Bruckner, or Webern.

  Without doubt something is waved goodbye to in Haydn’s time, with his comparative isolation preserving forms of baroque piety hammered elsewhere by Joseph II. A perfect place to observe this is in Eisenstadt, where Haydn spent so many years of his life. This is a very sleepy town, part of an old, now drained swampland focused on the sprawling, surreally unpleasant Neusiedler Lake at the linguistic frontier where Germans and Hungarians bump into each other (as perfectly expressed by Franz Liszt/Liszt Ferenc being born down the road). A highly contested part of the world, as can be imagined, everything just peters out – into the forests, into the scuzzy lake, into bleak and tiny villages, an effect much exacerbated by the old line of the Cold War Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. It will take many more years before the normal circulation of people can be re-established, or perhaps the enforced doziness will become permanent.

  Eisenstadt is the home of the ‘Mountain Church’ where Haydn was finally buried. The church is a classic of severe Jesuit teaching, featuring a ‘holy staircase’ whereby the devotee clambers ever upward through heaps of tufa, past statue groups dramatizing the principal acts of the Passion. First put together in 1701, these have been much patched and repainted and gone through periods of being so unfashionable that they then required serious repairs. The tableaux seem as distant from any realistic form of worship as can be imagined, and yet they clearly fill the same religious world as The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. For me the highlight was the scene of Jesus’s clothes being split up among the soldiers, a scene much enlivened by the spiders’ webs which filled the soldiers’ fingers.

  As a church owned by the Esterházy family, it seemed a good place to bury Haydn, but he suffered many indignities to get there. After his death a couple of crackpots stole his head to prove various phrenological theories,1 and he was buried with a substitute skull to make it all more dignified. Eventually the real one re-emerged and was donated to the Musikverein in Vienna in 1895. Prince Paul Esterházy in the 1930s managed to find a sculptor so sensationally retro and backward in his enthusiasms (Oskar Thiede) that he could put together a plausibly early nineteenth-century-style tomb for Haydn and he was reburied there in 1932 but still without his real head. Esterházy was subject to a nightmarish show-trial in Budapest after the War and imprisoned until the Hungarian Revolution when he was able to escape abroad. In the meantime, in 1954, the head was at last secured, the tomb reopened and Haydn was complete for the first time since shortly after his death. In a final, very peculiar twist it was decided to keep the ‘original’ head there too as it had, after all, been caught up in the first obsequies and retained a sacred enough tinge that it could not really be chucked away. So Haydn now rests easy in Eisenstadt, surrounded by a political framework at an almost mad distance from his own, but with the familiar holy staircase still circling above his heads. Tittle-tattle about a composer’s corpse is a shameful diversion, when all that really matters is to put on the opening of the ‘Sunrise’ Quartet, or the second movement of the catchily named String Quartet in G Major, Op. 64, No. 4, Hob. III: 66 – and be completely happy.

  An interlude of rational thoughtfulness

  Joseph’s death was followed by the short, strange interlude of his brother’s reign as Leopold II – a two-year patch of capable, flexible and thoughtful rule almost without precedent within the family. In fact it might not be too exaggerated to say that he was the first genuinely shrewd and resourceful (but not disturbing) Habsburg ruler since Ferdinand I a quarter of a millennium earlier. His completely pointless death (ushered in by doctors messing around with him in an unknowingly dirty and infecting way) marked him out too as the last ever genuinely shrewd and resourceful (but not disturbing) Habsburg ruler. His successors were a narrow dullard, a simpleton, a narrow dullard and a non-entity, and those four get us to 1918. It is lucky that the interest of the story does not rely on these figures as otherwise the remainder of this book would be a trackless waste.

  The mayhem of the 1790s tends naturally to focus on France and its Revolution, but there is an equally strong argument for seeing a Europe-wide failure in this period which more broadly promoted irresponsibility and chaotic aggression. In the short time since the glory days of helping the United States gain independence, France had collapsed as a great power – demoralized, humiliated and financially broken down – and this had provided a peculiar and unaccustomed space for Austria and Prussia to muck about in without fear of French vengeance. Indeed one of the motors of the French Revolution was a new sense of national rather than merely dynastic humiliation: that the Grande Nation’s borders were being mocked by countries who would have previously shown much greater respect – most egregiously the Prussian invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1787 and the Habsburg crushing of revolution in the Austrian Netherlands in 1790.

  Joseph II’s endless schemes to swap around bits of territory and generally use the Holy Roman Empire as a sort of goody-bag had ravaged the political systems along the Rhine and to the east in ways which also affronted and confused France. He was also well on the way to wrecking the ‘magic circle’ which had until then generally protected the painfully vulnerable religious states and their tiny confederates. If in the east the Holy Roman Emperor wanted to sweep away feudal privileges and stamp out old-style clerical parasitism, then in the west the French Revolution favoured a far more extreme version of the same thing. The now friendless little states in between Paris and Vienna could perhaps be fed to any predator who made the right deal. The protections formerly available because a micro-ruler owned the nicely displayed bone of a saint, or traditionally held up a proud old banner during coronation ceremonies, suddenly seemed a bit threadbare.

  Prussian and Habsburg involvement in the First Partition of Poland was also an assault on an existing sovereign state of a kind which would have made the ghost of Louis XIV turn green with envy. He had waded through an ocean of blood just to snatch some grim bits of the Pas-de-Calais, while Vienna had with almost no effort at all tacked on a new territory almost the size of Portugal. All these changes (so many originating in Vienna) meant that any taboo on the wholesale shunting about of territory was long gone well before Revolutionary France began to wo
rk its spell. From a British perspective it is very hard not to feel that in the ensuing melee the states that wound up as allies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France were merely greedy and corrupt traitors. But the land-grab mayhem that dissolved the Holy Roman Empire had a back-dated logic.

  Joseph’s death left this mess to Leopold. The latter’s rule really could not have been more heavily compromised by his brother’s actions. Threatened and disliked, its moral authority shot and facing highly destabilizing threats from every side, both as ruler of the Habsburg lands (from February 1790) and as Holy Roman Emperor (from September), Leopold had to remake his office. The French Revolution itself was initially greeted by many European monarchs not as a shocking assault on the nature of kingship, but as a hilarious further implosion of a once-hegemonic rival. As it became clear that this was a most unfortunate misperception Leopold became concerned about the fate of his sister Marie Antoinette, but not concerned to overturn the Revolution. Indeed, a basic problem with each of the Coalitions that faced France was, right until the end, a vagueness as to what the desired outcome really might be. Nobody was interested in marching in to fix up a fresh, powerful, French super-state of a kind that had existed within living memory. And it was by definition impossible to fine-tune something which would be coherent and yet somehow oddly unthreatening without direct control over Paris, which the final Coalition would not achieve until 1814. As it was, the shambolic French state which emerged from the Revolution would be knocked into shape by Napoleon, thus ending the uncertainty and anarchism, but not quite in the way the Habsburgs had in mind.

  Before his premature death Leopold reorganized Vienna’s position, bought off his many enemies and prepared for war, but missed out on subsequent and embarrassing developments. Perhaps his key role was in ending the war with Turkey at the Treaty of Sistovo in August 1791. Unknown to him, this treaty marked the last of the wars which had shaped almost the entire course of his dynasty, from Ferdinand I’s first frantic improvisation of the Military Frontier. It is odd really that only a few months later the last talented Habsburg was dead. A critical element at Sistovo, now the Danubian Bulgarian town of Svishtov, was the decision to hand back Belgrade to the Turks. This gesture was designed to be generous enough to ensure that fighting could come to an end and troops move to France, but it had head-spinning and quite unintended consequences. If Belgrade had been part of the new Habsburg Empire as it emerged during the following decade, then not only would Vienna have controlled the only major hub in the northern Balkans, but the Serbs would have become an important group in the Empire much like the Czechs, rather than just a small element in parts of Hungary. The history of the nineteenth century then takes a dazingly different turn. As it was, the Serbs soon revolted and pushed the Turks out of Belgrade on their own. This formed the kernel of an independent state that would never have been allowed to exist if it had still been under Habsburg rule. But this shows the limits of counterfactual history – a contentious, but seemingly not earth-shaking decision back in 1791 to hand back a shattered fortress to the Turks put Serbia on a course which ended in the killing of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and the destruction of four empires. But what direction a Habsburg-ruled Serbia – bitterly and ferociously achieved only in 1915–18 – would have taken is too vague, unknowable and complex to be interesting.

  Leopold’s death resulted in his negligible and depressing son becoming Franz II. While it is unfair and unsophisticated to lumber him with the entire blame for the avalanche of setbacks which followed, he certainly did not help. The clever, flexible gestures which had allowed Leopold to fix what had been almost messianic Prussian hostility were quite beyond him. In a system where the Emperor had such a crucial role, Franz’s inability to visualize it convincingly had without doubt some impact on the sequence of fruitless one-sided defeats which decorate so many French battle-paintings and the lovely, full-colour The West Point Atlas of the Wars of Napoleon which I have on my desk as I type.

  Defeat by Napoleon, part one

  It would burst the bounds of this book to try to track the course of the coalition wars that followed. Indeed, I was just flicking through the queen of travel guides, Baedeker’s Austria-Hungary of 1911 (a possible strap-line: ‘the last edition – ever!’), shaking my head in disbelief at the futility of trying to encapsulate so much in just one book when I suddenly felt the icy Fingers of Hubris touch me in a premonitory sort of way. But, smiling bravely and paying no attention to the fingers, I need to keep moving ahead.

  The Allied effort remained for many years doomed, not just by French brilliance but, as mentioned, by Allied failure to come up with a new political idea which they could impose if they were to be so lucky as to defeat France. There was a good reason why in 1805 Napoleon could entertain himself by riding his horse up the Imperial staircase in the Habsburg abbey of Göttweig en route to occupy Vienna, rather than Franz doing something similar – and yet lugubrious and sprezzatura-free – at the Louvre. The British avoided this political problem by focusing on naval and colonial derring-do and feeding off their own generalized, deep-seated antagonism to France. The Habsburgs, and whichever luckless allies were also going down in flames that time round, did not have this luxury. France had not been successfully invaded for many centuries and on 20 September 1792 this formidable record was added to by the repulse of Prussian and Imperial forces at the Battle of Valmy. The battle itself was a Pythonesque shambles, but however woeful to students of strategy, Valmy and its resulting retreat were decisive. It was the only shot the anti-French coalition would get at stamping out the Revolution and their timidity then raised the curtain on twenty-two years of fighting. It would take the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of men and the reshaping of most of Europe before Coalition forces would at last grind their way through the hundred miles that separated Valmy from Paris.

  Post-Valmy, French forces more or less wandered at will into the Holy Roman Empire and set about a series of political changes that must have made more thoughtful Habsburg historians and military leaders sob with rage. The giant wars that had shaped western Europe since the time of the War of the League of Augsburg all seemed mocked by a sequence of events that had French armies, despite isolated setbacks, racing through the Low Countries and to the Rhine. Where were Eugene and Marlborough now? The British had a shot at taking Dunkirk and, in a rare instance of direct Austro-British cooperation in the field, were in the autumn of 1793 both defeated by the French. But British motives in wanting to pick up Dunkirk were almost comically political and contributed nothing to any imagined defeat of the French. The encircling of France by enemies, however ineffective, aided further radicalization in Paris and the issue of Marie Antoinette’s safety was at last resolved with her guillotining shortly after the Dunkirk disaster. In the following summer the Allies were cleaned out of what could now only very inaccurately be described as the Austrian Netherlands at the Battle of Fleurus, where an Imperial, Dutch and British force of seventy thousand men was devastated by the French, with the Coalition retreating through Waterloo, curiously. The Dutch Republic was now invaded and at the Peace of Basel in April 1795 France got the western bank of the Rhine too, again once a quite unrealizable dream of the Bourbon monarchy. Surely some of the surviving members of the dynasty must have relished this at least a bit.

  Now the dithering, faithlessness and incapacity of the Allies really came into play – at least as important as French success. Franz looked on in horror as the Prussians were bought off, with the French allowing them to create a sort of neutral protectorate over northern Germany, Prussia having already taken another piece of Poland. Prussian importance had now vastly increased thanks to the Revolution. Only months after the Peace of Basel, Prussia, Austria and Russia cooperated to dispose of the final pieces of Poland. Even if moral issues can be set aside – and it could be argued that Poland was so riddled with Russian influence that the options were only partition between the three powers, or a total Russian grab – the action meant that an
y French move, however outrageous, was happening in a world of comparable outrageous moves. The Battle of Fleurus was to be the last, lamentable outing for the Imperial forces and, even if it survived formally a little longer, the Holy Roman Empire was now up for grabs, with the role of its Emperor teetering close to the edge of redundancy.

  Franz continued to fight and in May 1795 a new treaty with Britain flooded the Austrians with money, but now the enterprising young Napoleon made waking up each morning in Vienna and reaching for a newspaper something to be dreaded. The Austrians had a consistent problem with the Alps – armies had to be sent both north of them, through southern Germany, and south of them, through Italy to attack the French without the risk of the unguarded route being wide open to Vienna. But this meant splitting forces with no chance of mutual reinforcement. Sadly, the problem did not seem so vexing for the French as they sent armies by both routes themselves too and defeated the Austrians. 1797–8 saw total mayhem, with such enormities as new republics being carved out of Italy, the Pope in a French gaol and the destruction of Venice.

  The Treaty of Campo Formio saw Austria expelled from western Europe, but also tempted into partnership with France. Napoleon’s sweeping away of the Venetian Republic removed another historic constant in Habsburg life – the large bloc that both kept Vienna from the Adriatic but also, and very usefully, provided a neutral, rotting wedge between the Alps and the sea. As the southern Netherlands and the bits and pieces of Habsburg patrimony in the Black Forest disappeared for ever, these might be replaced by fresh territories with a new focus remote from French interests: in Istria, Dalmatia and Venice itself. Culturally this was sensible enough: Venice had always been a key source of ideas, artists, money and trade for the Habsburgs and the coastal territories made sense of the previously somewhat joke port of Trieste, as well as having ethnic links with Slavonia and the rest of the Military Frontier. The Habsburgs were now at peace with France and still ruled a geographically massive European state, but their rule had been warped and remade in a humiliating, shameful way.