The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  The couple in the front of the box do not seem to be paying much attention to the performance. She, it is true, has her face turned towards the stage, chin resting on her hand, but I do not think that she is taking any of it in. Her partner is sitting in such a way that the only thing he could be looking at is the brocaded partition that separates our box from its neighbour. He is entirely absorbed by planting light kisses on the lady’s free hand and arm, which he is holding in a way I have seen shopkeepers and auctioneers holding for inspection large precious objects—vases, bronze figures—with reverence and with extreme care lest they fall and shatter.

  Meanwhile on stage the poet is now alone, having promised presently to join his companions in Christmas merriment. The moment has come for the arrival of Mimi the consumptive seamstress, and it is as well, therefore, to stand on one’s perch again to catch a glimpse of her. She arrives with her candle: the singer possesses a fine voice and sings with considerable feeling and expression, but she is heavily built and not in the first flush of youth. It occurs to me that perhaps this is a performance better heard than seen, and I decide therefore to sit down once more, especially as the precariousness of my position could make me lose my balance and topple onto the pair in front.

  They, for their part, are totally absorbed by their curious ceremony. She has not moved at all: impassive, abstracted, her face still turned towards the stage yet paying no attention to it, there is no movement of her head, no ripple in her flowing hair that would suggest that her eyes are following the singers as they move around the stage. Her lover, on the other hand, has progressed from her arm to her neck. He is still holding the arm as though it were some precious fragile object, a holy relic perhaps, and this obliges him to rise slightly from his chair so that his lips might touch her nape to place the lightest of kisses on it.

  The lovers on stage have departed into the moonlight and the first act has come to an end. Applause and curtain calls. There is, however, no interval. By an imperial edict of the late nineteenth century, still honoured in republican Austria, performances at this theatre must conclude no later than 10.15 pm. For that reason, the four acts of La Bohème are performed here with only one interval. Nevertheless a pause is necessary while the elaborate scenery of this thirty-year-old production is changed. The house lights are raised to a dull glow, providing enough illumination for you to consult your programme or the contents of your bag, yet indicating clearly that it is not time to go out for a drink, to smoke or whatever other pursuit is appropriate for intervals during performances of opera. This is a time for polite, murmured conversation over the hammering and thumping coming from behind the curtain. The lovers in front of me do not converse but continue their silent pantomime, a courtship ritual like those of insects that you can see, much magnified, on television. They are wholly absorbed by this ceremony, she in her stillness, he in whatever elaborate code governs the path his lips trace around her hand, arm, neck and shoulder. Dedicated to their ritual, they seem beyond place and time, trapped in a private and exclusive universe.

  The second act begins, and I resume bobbing up and down. But I find that my attention is distracted more and more from festivities in the Café Momus. This is one of those plush productions from the sixties, when vast amounts of money could be spent by directors and designers to fill the ample stage of this theatre. Several square miles of Montmartre seem to have been transferred to the Vienna State Opera, at least as far as I can judge from the segment visible from my perch. A milling crowd fills the terraces of streets at the back, while at the front of the stage, outside the café, Mimi and the bohemians, Musetta and her wealthy admirer sing the familiar music. It is all very lively, colourful and not a little hectic. Yet I grow increasingly absorbed by the lovers sitting in front of me. They have now progressed to the next stage of their curious and mysterious ritual. The gentleman’s left arm is now twined around the lady’s back and, fingers clenched, he is stroking her cheek with his nails, while his right hand is placed firmly under her armpit. He now looks like a musician playing some exotic stringed instrument, except that no sound, no response emerges from it: she is sitting as before, frozen in her posture—a wax dummy, a mannequin, a plaything.

  This pantomime continues throughout the performance. They are still at it when I return to the box after the interval; they do not cease for the melancholy parting of the lovers in a bitter, snowy dawn, or for their reunion in the artists’ garret where they first met, or for Mimi’s pathetic death in the arms of her lover. As before, nothing distracts them from their absorbed ecstasy. And then, at the end of the performance, as the applause begins, and as the singers, including the resurrected Mimi, come to take their bows in front of the plush curtain, the couple rises briskly from their chairs and squeeze their way out as efficiently as they had when coming in.

  Throughout the years I have lived in Australia, a land where musical culture, especially opera, is not very firmly entrenched, where audiences often seem unaware of the conventions of good manners and respect to which art claims to be entitled, I have often thought about these older societies where the arts are valued, where audiences are well-informed and well-mannered, where they will not start chatting about their problems with dishwashers or differentials at a moment of sublime beauty. Yet here, in the world that had become an object of veneration and longing throughout an antipodean exile, a quite different possibility now presents itself. Central Europe’s much publicised respect for culture, its putting the things of the spirit and the mind well above the claims of Mammon may be one of the lies, one of the instances of dishonesty that have marred the political and social life of this part of the world. Opera as the communal symbol of a coherent society, where all respected their proper places in that order—whether in the stalls, the boxes or the balcony—yet came together under the one roof in celebration of the finer things of life, may have been no more than a ruse, a pretence to mask instincts which, in the final count, had little to do with those reaches of the mind. It is for that reason that the boxes in these theatres used to be furnished with a curtain that could be pulled down, obscuring the occupants in their cosy cubicle, and why in some of these theatres—as in the opera house in Budapest during my childhood—a couch was placed at the back of the box, well out of sight.

  It is just after ten o’clock as I leave the theatre. Perhaps, it occurs to me, that imperial edict about the time by which performances must end had little to do with public convenience, with ensuring that patrons may catch the last horse-tram or whatever conveyance was in use at the end of the nineteenth century. It may well have been designed in order to allow ample time for silent lovers to reach the climax of their performance in some overfurnished apartment in the heart of the imperial city.

  RELIQUARIES

  Vienna’s churches echo with memories of the opera. Even the interiors of venerable gothic piles underwent thorough modernisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to transform them into God’s theatres. The churches constructed in that epoch are often indistinguishable from the court theatres of the age. The Karlskirche, a basilica dedicated to St Charles Borromeo, ‘Reliever of the Plague,’ the masterpiece of Fischer von Erlach, the virtuoso of the Austrian baroque, reveals its essentially theatrical design from the moment you set foot inside the porch. It is a miniature foyer—your eyes scan its wall and corners in search of the cloakroom and buffet. The church itself is embellished with every variety of coloured, veined and patterned marble. The high altar is displayed behind an ample proscenium arch, its curtain raised to reveal a stunning spectacle of marble, gold and bronze. The organ gallery, protected by an elaborately carved balustrade, occupies the position of a royal box. The architect’s flamboyant manipulation of space, light, colour and texture contrives to suggest tiers of galleries and boxes rising in a semicircle around the altar.

  The various strands that constitute the dreams and fantasies of this world come together more clearly in this place than anywhere else in the former imperia
l capital. Here distinctions between vulgarity and refinement, between the secular and the spiritual, between substance and shadow all vanish. A temple dedicated to the worship of an all-powerful Creator, before whom all human vanity and ingenuity must be humbled, is an extravagant display of the human arts of construction, decoration and illusion. It is a baroque Tower of Babel, a challenge to the Almighty to excel, in his own theatre of nature, the ingenuity and brilliance of the Habsburgs’ architects, painters, sculptors and masons. The Karlskirche, like the other flamboyant instances of the South German baroque, seems more a monument to human megalomania than an expression of humility and adoration.

  Religion and even spirituality in this world have little to do with the mysterious bonds of meditation and prayer that bind creature and Creator. There is not even the incense-heavy mystery of the churches of the eastern rite, enamelled saints and prophets glowing darkly in a vague, indistinct sea of burnished gold. Here everything is light, pomp and spectacle. The emphasis is always on communal celebration, not on private worship. God and the Emperor seem to have been on equal footing here, notwithstanding the pieties of humility God’s anointed might have declared while kneeling before the shrine of the Invincible. Church and state merge within the operatic interiors of these buildings just as cathedral, palace and opera house define the cardinal points of the imperial capital.

  In another, though cognate, sense these shrines of regal might and magnificence are also treasuries and armouries, guarding securely the wealth and the armaments to ensure that this realm, its monarchs and its people may continue to enjoy their unique privilege as those most favoured by God. No doubt in some ecclesiastical office somewhere in this city there must be a register listing the holy and venerable relics cocooned in their reliquaries of gold, crystal, precious gems and the rarest of marbles. How many splinters of the True Cross or how many thorns of the Passion are listed in that register? Does anyone have an accurate count of saints’ bones, nail clippings, hair, bits of parchment-like skin, dried organs and viscera? Is there a fragment here of the swaddling bands in which the immaculately conceived Virgin wrapped her infant son, the Incarnate God? Is a piece of the scourge with which he was flayed after his betrayal by the Jews, preserved in an imperial or episcopal chapel? How many ampoules of his most precious blood lie hidden in chests and tabernacles?

  These relics, objects of worship and veneration, provide guarantees of salvation or at least of remission. The holy places of Vienna are a pharmacopoeia for the next world, a spiritual pharmacy containing the best and most costly drugs to ensure immunity against perpetual damnation, a powerhouse of weapons with which to fight sin and the devil. These engines may be turned, nevertheless, against God too. So much of his power is concentrated in this realm, and so many of his lieutenants too (albeit in bits and pieces) that their possessor might well attempt to vie with the all-powerful, denuded as his treasury is of its potency.

  The iconography of baroque absolutism (in Austria as much as in the rest of Europe) was obsessed with apotheosis. On the ceilings and in the domes of civic halls, rooms of state and audience chambers in this city, the Franzes and the Josefs, the Ferdinands and the Rudolfs are depicted borne aloft in glory, their ceremonial robes billowing in the breeze, flights of angels guiding them through the swelling clouds. The deification of kings and emperors may have been more than a poetic fancy, a metaphor for their terrestrial greatness. Perhaps they believed that through the possession of so many of God’s treasures, and because of the pomp, pride and circumstances of the temples they had constructed—temples of art and power as much as temples of religion—they could challenge God and displace him on his throne.

  Berggasse is a thoroughfare dedicated to a shrine for darker dreams. There is nothing magnificent, imperial or even imposing about this drab street of solidly dull blocks of apartments and shops catering for the mundane necessities of everyday life—a flyblown grocery, a couple of bootmakers, a down-at-heel café or two. The Vienna of pomp and circumstance seems light-years, not merely hundreds of metres, away.

  It is not difficult to imagine ghosts wandering towards the tightly-barred entrance of Number 19, where a small brass plaque advertises the opening hours of the Freud Museum. It is many years since those creatures of fable—Dora and the Wolf-Man—sought admission to the sanctum of cigar-smoke, priapic figurines and Oriental carpets. The shrine is now empty, its god or oracle fled long ago. What you may admire for the modest entrance fee of a few Austrian schillings is as much a dim echo of the past as the remnants of Mycenae or the bare ruined choirs of the English countryside. The museum is a reconstruction—as is so much else in this city—an attempt to pretend that time has not passed and is, in a sense, stationary. The memorialisation of Freud is as irrelevant to the Vienna of today as the careful preservation of a pompous palais, an exuberant church interior, or those relics slumbering in their costly repositories. When, as an act of almost incredible generosity, the Nazi masters of the city exiled its octogenarian citizen, even allowing him to take with him his tools of trade and household gods—instead of reserving him for the inevitable fate of his kind—it pulled down the shutters over a heritage it could never recover.

  Freud is in all probability our most accurate guide to Vienna at the greatest moment of its cultural history. That moment did not have the grandeur or bombast of the mighty imperial dream. It did not conquer nations with the sword or preside in strutting arrogance over a motley array of subject peoples. Rather it had the greatness and allure of decay, of a world in disarray and on the brink of disintegration. Freud thought that he had discovered the universal secrets of human behaviour, the wellsprings of what had previously been called the soul. Yet what he chronicled in his painstaking and obsessive studies of bourgeois neurotics and paranoiacs was the malaise of an age and of this particular world, rather than the secrets of all humanity. The pantheon of obsessions, repressions and neuroses he uncovered and interpreted—the tormented fantasies of those who shuffled along the cobblestones of Berggasse—represent the glory of that world, an imaginativeness which was capable of producing images that have fascinated the modern world, and have provided raw material for great writers as much as for amateur psychiatrists.

  Freud liberated Mitteleuropa to itself. He allowed it to celebrate its most characteristic preoccupations as valuable cultural assets. Before Freud, because of the aristocratic and imperial insistence that neurosis, obsession and indulgence in erotic fantasy were bad form, the bourgeoisie of this world had to sweep its most persistent preoccupations under the cultural carpet. You entertained fantasies of killing your father or sleeping with your mother in the silent confessional of the bedroom. Then came Freud who allowed such sinful thoughts and forbidden desires a public face. He made them respectable: the innermost life of the Viennese middle classes, (their most cherished possession, truth to tell) could henceforth be displayed in the terms of their own culture—which those people always treated with the utmost respect. The fantasies of the bedroom and the bathroom—like Proust’s little secret chamber at Combray—now had the cachet of respectability: they could be discussed in terms of Oedipus and Hamlet, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The characteristic self-absorption of this world—reflected perhaps by the curious design of Germanic lavatory-pans noted many years ago by Erica Jong in Fear of Flying—could form the basis of public concern and high art. Mahler’s symphonies are inconceivable in a world innocent of Freud; without that spirit Mahler would have become no more than a bombastic Smetana. The atmosphere of Freudian Vienna was the licence which allowed Mahler to indulge in the vulgarity, neurosis, sugary sentimentality and endless repetition of often childish formulae and devices, and to transform them into sublime art.

  Freud believed to the end of his life that his work was scientific and therapeutic. Its real value and object, however, were much more cultural and artistic. It gave shape and definition to the obsessions of this world—the tightly shuttered, overheated salons and bedchambers of bourgeois Vienna and of
the domains of the Habsburg world—making its petty jealousies, snobberies and rivalries seem significant and momentous. A shabby domestic squabble could assume the proportions of an epic tale; an adolescent’s clumsy explorations of sexuality could be seen as replicating the Fall of Man. What the old culture of patrician and aristocratic Vienna considered beneath contempt, much preferring the glories of the battlefield and the intrigues of the boudoir, became the preoccupations which its practitioners and consumers considered high art. Each time a Viennese or Hungarian matron experienced the anguish of jealousy provoked by the antics of an errant husband—which was the case with my grandmother—she could comfort herself that she was reliving the greatest of mythic events evident both in the tales of antiquity and in the latest bestselling novel on the shelves of fashionable booksellers.

  That dream spread beyond the confines of Vienna and of the Habsburg world. No figure of the late nineteenth century or of the early twentieth provided novelists, playwrights, poets, film-makers, musicians and painters with as much material as Freud. With the passing of time he himself became the subject matter of fictions as highly-coloured as the fantasies of his own patients. The novels in which he appears as a character form an impressive list in English alone. He has even crossed the equator, together with the other cultural baggage of the old world that arrived at various times on the shores of the antipodes. Brian Castro’s Double-Wolf manages to tell a tale in which the seedy guesthouses, cafés and second-hand bookshops of Katoomba rub shoulders with the stuffy consulting room of Berggasse 19.