Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The hysteria around this event was stoked by its being, in the dumbest way, a sequel. Haydn’s Creation had been a vast success, pushed for by a group of visionaries in Vienna who wished to revive the public religious works of ‘old music’, meaning Bach but above all Händel. Together with his late symphonies these pieces made Haydn a universal celebrity of a new kind, anticipating Beethoven and deliriously crowning a career which had so largely been spent in the restricted and private world of the Esterházy family. The chief genius behind The Creation was Gottfried van Swieten, a multi-talented sometime civil servant, composer and librarian and one of those facilitative figures who make all cultural life possible and yet who tend to fall away from any lasting public recognition.

  Van Swieten and his wealthy associates had racked their brains as to how Haydn could cap The Creation, a difficult act to follow by all sorts of criteria. They eventually settled on James Thomson’s pantheistic long poem The Seasons, which van Swieten hacked to bits to provide a suitable array of incidents for Haydn to set. The two hours of elaborate and varied music of The Seasons turned out to be Haydn’s last major effort and he finished it in a blur of fatigue and mental decay. After an enormously long, varied and marvellous career, the man who would have a fair claim to win any Best Habsburg Subject contest was at last collapsing.

  The Creation and The Seasons became for the Empire a sort of extension of the normal religious experience (just as Händel’s oratorios did in Britain), ritualistic elements in the calendar comparable to major feast days. The Seasons is, like all sequels, less good than the original. Haydn himself complained that some of it was just ‘Frenchified rubbish’, particularly hating the music he was obliged to write imitating frogs on a pond (which is, of course, charming). The score has many wonders – a thunderstorm, a riotous hunting party – but it is perhaps too schematic to have any real forward movement (is it autumn yet?), although it could be said that The Creation has the most schematic subject of all and nobody complains.

  There may well be later examples, but The Seasons is a sort of nostalgic summary of centuries of Habsburg nature-worship. Its concerns are relentlessly old-fashioned and conservative, as carefully vetted representatives of the rural community sing about their place and function – sowing and reaping, picking fruit, spinning flax. Like scenes in medieval miniatures, the people of the countryside are caught beneath a monstrous zodiacal wheel, with the eternal shift from season to season germinating yet further tasks. Indeed one of the threats of The Seasons is that once performance has begun it may go on indefinitely, with spring swinging back into view (‘Behold, harsh Winter flees’) at two-hour intervals with no escape. The tone is almost unchanged from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s great paintings of the seasons (most famously Hunters in the Snow), which came into the collection of Rudolf II’s younger brother Ernst when he was ruler of the Spanish Netherlands in the 1590s and which now make visiting Vienna worthwhile just in themselves. Rudolf himself, as one would expect, festooned himself in related seasons-based drawings, paintings and engravings by figures such as Savery, Sadeler, Bril and the wonderful Pieter Stevens. If Scorpio is in the sky and the pigs are rooting in the woods, then you know it is October. As one of the earliest forms of non-religious and non-court art, these images have a peculiar quality of asking their viewer almost to step into them – with even the simplest elements of a few trees and a stream taking on an air of wizardry.

  To see portrayal of the seasons as an instrument of social control would be a bit reductive – as with the ancient gods, there is a strong element of relief that they simply provide amusing decorative challenges for artists – and the seasons decorate everything from dinner services to summer-houses in a dopily apolitical way all over the Habsburg lands, as elsewhere. One way of looking at them is as representing a world in which people are relentlessly at work and the interlocking demands of each season are all necessary to basic survival, with neglect or failure leading almost at once to disaster. The appearance of a band of soldiers, plague, or flood, or of March’s weather in June would sweep the entire sequence away, with selections from The Seasons being sung with some sarcasm by any haggard survivors. So even in the decorative context of an oratorio for an urban audience there is an implacable message about life in the country, particularly with so many of the Habsburg lands under a constant and dramatic threat of disaster. Much of the Viennese audience, of course, lived a large part of the year on their country estates and indeed received a large part of their income from them, so The Seasons would have spoken very directly to their neuroses.

  The oratorio wobbles around a bit in Winter as there is not much to do except spin or fend off the advances of a nobleman (in a notably limp sequence) or complain about the cold, but this clears space for the final, immense hymn of praise (‘May Thy hand, O Lord, give guidance! Give us strength and courage; then we shall sing, then we shall enter in the glory of Thy realm’), which keeps everyone warm. Although there are pantheistic elements to The Seasons which make its sensibilities late eighteenth century, it is also an enormous, specifically Catholic experience – a countryside peopled by hard-working, rooted, God-fearing men and women united in their loyalty to the One Church. It is not surprising that a member of the Imperial family sang in the premiere and everything in the music conforms to Franz I’s icy enthusiasm for everyone just doing as they are told.

  A principal enjoyment of researching this book has been to engage in a cock-eyed interpretation of The Seasons by wandering around the countryside at different times of year, and revelling in more extreme weather patterns than those generally felt in south-east England. All countries furnish their own musical, literary and painterly hymns to their countryside, but it is done very well in Central Europe. I have often found myself humming extracts from Schubert’s The Beautiful Mill-Girl as I wander along by some blameless stream and it only needs to get a little bit Alpine and heroic before incoherent chunks of Mahler’s Third pop up. An otherwise perhaps almost featureless Bohemian valley is ennobled by Dvořák and bleak bits of Transylvania turn spectral and highly flavoured thanks to Ligeti.

  The greatest master of this Habsburg Seasons pantheism is the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, at his peak in the 1840s, whose series of stories and novels is of an almost eye-watering brightness and beauty, with his characters both exalting in and hemmed in by the rural worlds (mountains, meadows, forests) they traverse. You have to pick and choose a bit with Stifter’s work – his late novel Indian Summer is a book of unyielding tedium, with a featureless narrator paying repeated visits to a house which is in a perfect relation to God and nature, with everyone tending trellises and drying fruit so that you want to scream. I was encouraged that one contemporary German critic said that he would offer the crown of Poland to anyone who could get to the end. So little happens that it could be that the whole novel is (like Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual) a staggering exercise in authorial self-control, with the entire structure devoted to the final page, on which there will be a grotesque, head-busting revelation which depraves and poisons all the previous five hundred pages of boredom, now suddenly rotting and bubbling in all their undraped luridity. But, alas, despite two efforts my high-water mark is shown by page 300 being turned down and I will never pursue this remote chance of a good result.

  But setting aside Indian Summer, Stifter is a writer who can be read over and over, not for the stories themselves (although these are absorbing) but because he sees everything through such strange eyes: ‘Rock Crystal’, ‘Limestone’, ‘Brigitta’ (a sensational wolf attack!), ‘Abdias’, ‘The Forest Path’. Stifter was a remarkable landscape painter as well as writer, whose almost crazy level of precision in trying to show how, say, a slope of rock is reflected in a mountain lake is equalled in his fiction, where (oddly) he manages in a few words to be more vivid than in his paintings. His wonder-work is probably the short novel The Bachelors, where a young man, full of vigour and with his whole life ahead of him, walks ecstatically through a seri
es of mountain valleys to visit a mysterious uncle who, crushed with misanthropic bitterness, lives in an abandoned monastery on a lake. If you have managed to persevere, Indian Summer-like, with reading my book to this point, then I can only plead with you to drop it and switch to The Bachelors.

  There is a moment in the novel when as the young man, Victor, is being rowed across the lake (over which towers a mountain, in a scene of photorealist hallucination) to the monastery island a church bell rings out, and the rower stops his work and says the prayer of that hour. Perhaps what is most thrilling about Stifter is that he clearly has some emotional and mental ideal in which God, Man and Nature are perfectly aligned, but this vision is so extreme and hard to achieve (we are too lazy, too venal, too distracted) that it is always threatening to spring into pieces. I went, in a semi-pilgrim frame of mind, down to the far south of Bohemia where Stifter grew up, the remote small town of Horní Planá, looking out over the almost empty hills and mountains separating the area from Austria. There is a little Stifter museum and a genuine feeling of being in the back of beyond, and yet even here the twentieth century has really reached in its claws, with the vandalized stump of a First World War monument and an almost entirely new Czech-speaking population after the Germans were all expelled. Stifter’s original visionary community has therefore entirely vanished, but this God–Man–Nature idea was always, outside the frame of its own artistic brilliance, a disturbing and intolerant one. It left out many Central Europeans and it made rural life a moral force in its own right (a message that even I was able to glean from Indian Summer despite an increasing preoccupation with my own mental health as I dragged through each page). Like The Seasons but more hectically, this vision was very German, very Catholic and with a sense of order and hierarchy which even as Stifter was writing was already under acute threat. For all his worship of nature Stifter spent much of his life in cities, not least Linz, which has a terrific statue to him. The Bachelors ends in a sort of frenzy of God-supervised multi-generational ruralism, but in practice the cheerful Victor would probably himself, by the time his author died in the 1860s, have been wondering about slinking off to some obviously more desirable and sinful city. And virtually all the actors in the The Seasons itself would have been on the first train to Vienna, singing about the joys of factories, giant beer-cellars, consumer goods and not having to give a stuff about the seasons any more.

  The Habsburg monarchy had always been a sort of patchwork of nearly empty lands (mountains, swamps) and verdant countryside dotted with Seasons-style individuals working for their noble masters and (by western European standards) small, generally German-speaking towns acting as goods exchanges and fortifications. The great story of the nineteenth century was the transformation of these towns, as hundreds of thousands of people headed into them, running as fast as they could from the remorseless rural cycle.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A warning to legitimists » Problems with loyal subjects » Un vero quarantotto » Mountain people

  A warning to legitimists

  Growing up, we had a set of French ‘Happy Families’ playing cards featuring Heroes of France, picked up on holiday one year. While other children were playing the same game sensibly featuring those old favourites Mrs Bones the Butcher’s Wife and Mr Soot the Sweep, we were engrossed in swapping cards featuring little paintings of historical personages. So we would swap Marie de Médicis for Bertrand Duguesclin – ‘pig-faced soldier of destiny’ – or a nicely dressed Henri III for Clemenceau. We must have spent a huge amount of time over the years on this game. What in retrospect seems rather attractive is the way that we never had any idea who any of these people were (except for an unrealistically gamine and available-looking Joanne of Arc) and stubbornly refused to engage in any way with their identities. We never learned anything historical from handling King Clovis or the funny-looking Marshal Ney, and the Duc de Richelieu may as well have been Master Bun the Baker’s Son.

  I mention this because it was thanks to the game that as an adult reading about post-Napoleonic France, I found myself taking an odd interest in Charles X. He was perhaps the most inflexibly idiotic of all French rulers but his card in ‘Happy Families’ – an ironic context, given that his family was really not that happy, what with all the executions – made him look dashing and smart in a lovely blue cavalry uniform. I was therefore somewhat smitten with him and have always found his era much more interesting than I should.

  The ghost of Charles X stalked his contemporaries like a nightmare. After the turmoil of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the new world order after 1815 was based around the return to legitimism, the God-backed right to rule based on dynastic succession. Charles X was the true King of France – brother of Louis XVI, uncle of the dead child Louis XVII, brother of Louis XVIII and without a doubt next in the queue. And yet in only six years of rule he managed to alienate almost everybody, behaving as though the Revolution had never happened, insisting on an incense-laden, knee-breeches coronation in Rheims Cathedral and passing a demented, non-market-tested law to make stealing a chalice and host from a church a capital crime (with the felon’s offending right hand cut off as a preliminary to his execution). This was not really the tone for the Paris of Delacroix and Balzac and, in a harmless and rather stage-managed version of 1789, Charles was forced into exile.

  That a man who had so much going for him – ruling against a backdrop of war-exhaustion and genuine pan-European conservatism – should mess up so badly had a chilling effect on other dynasties. Charles was offered asylum by Franz I, settling ultimately in Görz, a somnolent but lovely Habsburg town north-east of Venice, where he died of cholera. His family continued to be based in Görz, an angry and rather mad group waiting for the call to return, thronged by needy toadies and decayed snobs while real life in France continued without them.

  Spending a few days in Gorizia (now split, with the old town of Gorizia in Italy and Nova Gorica in Slovenia), I was overjoyed to discover that my old ‘Happy Families’ friend was buried in the nearby Franciscan monastery of Kostanjeviča, on the Slovenian side of the border. First puffing up an alarmingly penitential hill to the monastery with rain pounding down so hard it threatened to knock me to the ground, and then stepping gingerly down some chilly steps to the crypt, there, suddenly, in all their desperate flummery were the tombs of dynastic failure: Charles X and the mad parallel universe of his son ‘Louis XIX’ and grandson ‘Henri V’. Henri V made his grandfather look relatively free-and-easy when through the unexpected implosion of Napoleon III’s state following the Franco-Prussian War there was a genuine move to re-establish the monarchy. These negotiations foundered on Henri’s surreal refusal to rule over a country which used the blood-soaked tricolour flag and his insistence it revert to Charles X’s pure white flag. This sort of nonsense meant the moment that had been awaited in Gorizia for some forty years passed over in silence and Henri in due course joined the part of his family residing in the cold vaults of Kostanjeviča rather than that buried in the ancient royal abbey of St Denis.

  There is an acute sense of sadness about these helpless tombs, with their dogmatic claims (Roi de France et Navarre, par la grâce de Dieu) and long-life legitimist wreaths. Where was the man in the light blue cavalry coat, saluting on his horse, who I had admired as a youth? The family’s subsequent fate was chaotic. The monastery was destroyed in fighting during the First World War and the fading Habsburg regime of Karl I had the coffins and their haughty contents hauled off to Vienna. Once the monastery was rebuilt they were taken back in 1932 to Kostanjeviča (then under a brief period of Italian rule) and buried again, with a rather impressive turnout judging from the photos. After the Second World War they found themselves as refugees in the unsympathetic Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (by about five hundred metres), but survived this interlude to be under the care of the genial Republic of Slovenia. Representatives of the Bourbon family have been trying to persuade the Slovenian government and the Franciscans to let them
move the unfortunates yet again, this time to Paris, but their nutty request has been sensibly refused.

  I have to admit that I have a weakness for legitimist tombs and once spent an ecstatic afternoon at the luxurious Orléans family burial chambers at Dreux, a playground of white marble, religious peculiarity and thwarted pride without equal. But I cannot pretend, alas, that it has even the faintest relevance to this book. Charles X has, however. His fate ravaged other legitimist rulers. It made Franz I and Metternich ill with worry. Decades of fighting had not crushed revolutionary populism back into its box. The only justification for legitimism turned out to be its effectiveness – a contradiction in terms. The gloomy conclusion was that the monarch could only receive the instinctive obeisance of his grateful subjects if they were infiltrated by secret police and watched with unsleeping vigilance. It was in this period that Austria’s notorious censorship system blossomed, which managed to be both stifling and inept in a unique mixture. Charles X flouncing around with his Ultra friends, pretending Robespierre and Napoleon had never happened, was not going to be enough. Gorizia beckoned for those who failed.

  With the other like-minded monarchs, Franz and Metternich searched the horizon for fresh signs of revolution, hosting congresses around Central Europe to ensure that a united front would prevent the emergence anywhere of pro-Revolution revanche. The great square where they met in 1820 can still be seen – much altered – in the centre of Ljubljana (then Laibach). When these characters met up it must have been hilarious, with row upon row of gorgeously tricked out cavalrymen and the elaborately uniformed rulers giving each other stiff embraces, medals and spurs clinking and everything awash in expensive gentleman’s fragrances. Franz may have been cold and unintelligent, but he was an effective Emperor, full to his fingertips with belief in his God-given right to rule. If conservative vigilance could only be maintained – if Austria, Prussia and Russia could stick together – then God would allow him to strike down any threat to his rule. Alas, disaster for Franz came from his own, incredibly legitimate DNA. In a final flourish of Habsburg genetic stupidity he had married his double first cousin Maria Theresa (who sang in The Seasons), daughter of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, himself another legitimist horror. The entirely predictable result was that their eldest son Ferdinand suffered from innumerable physical handicaps and terrible fits, and could not father children himself. But legitimism could not make exceptions. Charles X may have been stupid, vengeful and incompetent, but he was the rightful King of France. For Franz I to pass over his son Ferdinand for a more suitable heir would be dangerous as well as virtually republican. So the inflexible and God-fearing Franz insisted on being succeeded by someone effectively incapable of ruling.