The Habsburg Cafe

by Andrew Riemer

  For the Vienna of 1991 Freud is no more a real presence than he is for the Australia of the time. Though this is the site of the beginning of those mysteries that have spread to most corners of the globe, its significance and potency are no more striking or glamorous than those of other deserted shrines. The rooms are largely empty. A discreet notice advises the pilgrim that Freud’s possessions, the arcana of his ministry, the relics of the new religion, are preserved in Hampstead, that place of Egyptian exile from the homeland. Instead of the actual and presumably potent cult-objects we are greeted with a series of photographs, reproductions of letters, testimonials, a few books and pamphlets and a number of lesser holy objects—pens, inkwells, spectacles, cigar-cases. But the essential items of the mystery, the consulting couch, the statuettes, are elsewhere: they fled with their oracle. The strange emptiness of the Freud Museum in this dour thoroughfare is an eloquent reminder of the emptiness of the city itself. It too is an attempt to reconstruct a lost past. It too has to be content with the reproduction in place of the original.

  Having lost the rich stream of neurosis, obsession and myth-making that primed the pump of its culture—the painters, poets, musicians and writers of the fin-de-siècle—Vienna has sunk into the desuetude of imitation, reproduction, nostalgia and kitsch. It is no longer that hothouse where a basically Jewish bourgeois culture ran into headlong conflict with the older values of Catholic Austria. The spunk has gone from this world, leaving behind merely pale imitations of its former glories.

  DEFENCE OF THE REALM

  One of my last days in Vienna brings me back to the opera, for the five hours of Wagner’s Lohengrin. The experience of my earlier visit led to a decision of considerable gravity. Yesterday I joined once more the queue that forms on most days at the box office and exchanged my seat in the third tier for one in the stalls. The expense is probably unjustifiable, but (I comfort myself) five hours is a long time and, moreover, the opera is to be performed by those stellar names that you usually encounter only on record labels. Those expectations are frustrated as soon as I look at the ominous slip of paper inside the programme: the world-famous conductor and two of the principals are indisposed; they are to be replaced by three no doubt excellent performers whose names are, nevertheless, completely unfamiliar to me. I wonder what terrible affliction has visited this august establishment, and whether the change of cast is at all connected with the world-famous conductor’s spectacular row with the management—which has even attracted the attention of the arts columnists in distant Australia.

  Wagner described Lohengrin, probably his most popular work, as a ‘Romantic Opera’. Dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerians usually sneer at this relatively immature opera, but for most audiences, such as the well-dressed Viennese gathering here on this late afternoon in autumn, it represents the most accessible of the composer’s demanding music—even though it goes on hour after hour after hour. Vienna did not take readily to Wagner’s overblown music-dramas and he, in turn, poured all the scorn of his contempt on this frivolous public. He smarted from their rejection of Tristan and Isolde, that ‘undemanding’ love story he had written to woo their patronage. Budapest, a decidedly provincial town during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, developed Wagner-mania earlier than this much more sophisticated and musically cultivated city.

  Yet Vienna also succumbed to the sinister magic of those outrageous essays in self-aggrandisement, dangerously addictive drugs which, once tasted, can never be abandoned. As the first, high notes of the prelude begin sounding on the violins, I, only a halfhearted Wagnerite, and one more conscious of the tedium of Lohengrin than of its magic, find myself entranced by this absurd tale of maligned maidens, knights of the grail, dark enchantments and miraculous restorations. As the wonderful sonorities rising from the orchestra pit fill the auditorium—this is after all arguably the world’s finest orchestra—I become a willing accomplice in an act of artistic vandalism. I know that these bombastic music dramas—among which Lohengrin may indeed be the most refined or at any event the least barbaric—represent a perversion of all that music, culture and civilisation should strive to achieve.

  The cult of Wagner emerged in step with the rise of Fascism, National Socialism and the other ultranationalist totalitarian movements that swept over much of Europe. The spirit of das Volk—the people, the tribe—could be heard pulsing through the Master’s music. This was not the carefully crafted, elegant music of patrician culture. It had nothing to do with the classical virtues of restraint, moderation and economy of means. Instead it unleashed demons lurking within the listeners’ veins. It did not appeal to the intellect or even to the sensibility, but principally to the emotions—raw, unmediated, residing not in the individual consciousness but in the consciousness of the tribe.

  Wagner broke with the conventions of opera both spiritually and physically. The Festival Theatre at Bayreuth, built to his own specifications and embodying his ideals, has none of the social gradations of theatres like this one in Vienna. Its rows of seats rise without interruption from the first row to the last: there is no gallery, no boxes, apart from a couple of discreetly placed private recesses which were reserved for his family in the original design. The justification for this in the rhetoric of nineteenth-century cultural politics was the example of ancient Greece, where the design of the great amphitheatres—at Epidauros, Delphi and in many other places throughout the peninsula—did not establish social distinctions between various groups within the audience by erecting physical barriers. Gone too were the elaborate decorations in gold, marble, plush and paint that contrived to turn many of the opera theatres of the ‘old’ Europe into jewelled cases to display the audience as much as the spectacle on stage.

  Bayreuth may have been intended as a reproduction among the green Franconian hills of the virtues of the Attic world. It is, for all that, a setting for shamanistic rituals. The mature music dramas (even Lohengrin) deliberately and consciously set out to subject their audiences to trials calling upon all their physical (and also spiritual) resources. You have to give up your whole being to The Ring and Parsifal. You cannot squeeze in a performance between dinner and seduction: Parsifal keeps you captive in the theatre for six or six and a half hours; even Rhine-gold, the shortest of the tetralogy of music dramas comprising The Ring, requires almost three hours to perform, and there is no break for an interval in that score. Wagner demanded—and obtains from enthusiasts—the sacrifices of the devout.

  Such sacrifices and discomfort (the seats at Bayreuth are not padded) are appropriate to acts of religious mystery and worship. The audience willingly subjects itself to these hardships because it is no longer composed of individuals, each with his own consciousness of the demands made upon him, but of a group, an entity, a Gestalt perhaps, totally absorbed by the revelation it is privileged to witness. The music dramas are static and statuesque. Very little ‘happens’; there are usually only one or two personages on the vast, cavernous stage. They are gods, mythological beings, above and beyond ordinary emotions and preoccupations, obsessed and tormented by grand, abstract concepts—Fate, Godhead, Duty and Love. Their lengthy monologues and slow-moving vocal disputes deliberately shun movement and vivacity. The music itself achieves its greatest effects through lack of variety. The endlessly recurring thematic units (the notorious leitmotif) the deliberate rhythms, the emphasis not so much on melody as on massive blocks of sonority all contribute to this replacement of entertainment (the disgraceful frivolity of opera, according to Wagner) by ritual. The audience at Bayreuth (as in other theatres where the Wagner cult came to flourish) are too disciplined to sway and chant in shamanistic ecstasy; there is, nevertheless, something of the possessed in their demeanour as they sit immobile on their hard wooden seats for two-hour stretches at a time in a darkened theatre.

  Wagner’s sounds and the images he conjured, those transparent poetic and theatrical emblems, became the holy relics of that nationalist movement which emerged in the beer halls of Munich at the same ti
me as his works discovered those enthusiastic audiences which had largely eluded him for most of his creative life. Its thumping rhythms were heard on the streets of Munich, Berlin and Vienna as full-throated youths yelled for the cleansing of decadent and foreign pollution from the holy German realm. The bombastic praise of German art as the citizens of Nuremberg gather in the festival meadow at the end of The Mastersingers was heard again at the vast rallies conducted in that most German of all cities. Wagner accompanied the march of intoxicated hordes, heeding the call of the race deep in their pulse, sweeping aside the bourgeois and therefore decadent virtues of compassion, tolerance and magnanimity to defend the realm of purity. He liberated ancient forces that had lain dormant in the blood of the German race, which had been shamefully subjected to the domination of decadence from the west—the frivolous French—and from the east: the Jews, gypsies, Slavs and other denizens of the Balkan peninsula, the threat Oswald Spengler had seen flooding over the great Central European site of civilisation.

  Many answered that call to arms which spread from Bayreuth, the holiest of shrines in this new religion, to the other opera houses of this world. From those places intellectuals, pundits, the politically ambitious and dedicated spread the gospel to those millions of people who did not usually venture into theatres and opera houses. A cultural phenomenon became political; it accompanied, indeed it was probably instrumental in generating, that terrible cleansing of the German lands, the holy realm of the Volk half a century ago, the effects of which still echo in this world. For that reason many people—and not merely Jews—still refuse to attend performances of the Wagner operas. Until very recently not a note of his music was heard in Israel.

  That is one account of the Wagner cult, a convenient historical fable, an easy division into ‘them’ and ‘us’, an occasion for expressing a sense of cultural superiority: why subject yourself to the bombast, vulgarity and tedium when there is Bach and Mozart? The other is more embarrassing, easily swept under the carpet, yet—especially in this theatre in Vienna—one that cannot be ignored. Wagner’s followers were by no means exclusively racial and political ideologues, men and women devoted to their holy cleansing mission, whose belief and dedication were reasserted each time they participated in the rites of the Master. Such people were, in all probability, a small (though by no means uninfluential) minority. In all likelihood there were not enough of them to fill the theatre at Bayreuth for the four weeks of the festival. Wagner attracted, from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until almost the middle of the twentieth, a bourgeois public who could not in many cases deliver guarantees of Teutonic or Aryan purity. The French, still smarting from their recent defeat by the Prussians, began flocking to Bayreuth as soon as the theatre opened in 1876. During the following decades the urban middle classes of Central Europe, many of them Jews, or at least people who would find themselves Jewish by virtue of the Nuremberg Racial Laws, flocked to theatres in order to be embraced by the gorgeous sonorities and mythic abstractions of Wagner’s music dramas.

  They attended performances of these works—which were to become the psalms and anthems justifying their destruction—in their own jewelled, marble-encrusted theatres. Few if any made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth. My father—a more ardent Wagnerite than I am—made that journey, from Sydney, only in the last months of his life. When he returned he said that he much preferred the ‘old way’ of performing his favourite operas. The ‘old way’, as practised here in this theatre, in Budapest, and in the Leipzig and Dresden of his student days in the 1920s, was an uneasy but seductive marriage of the essential superficiality and frivolity of the opera house—its flounce, its display, its rigid social hierarchies—and the deeply subversive intent of those works to which that public flocked with such enthusiasm. The citizens of Budapest and Vienna willingly disrupted the normal patterns of their lives to arrive at the theatre in the afternoon (as I have done today), foregoing the ceremony of the visit to the café, the evening meal, all the rituals of their middle-class existence, to submit themselves to the enchantment of the composer many of them referred to as the Master. During the intervals they hurried to the elegant buffets to sustain themselves with delicate sandwiches of caviar, salami, and mayonnaise. They would have scorned the sausages consumed in the long intervals of Bayreuth by the true devotees as outward and visible signs of their membership of the tribe.

  This afternoon, in this theatre where members of my family used to fall under the sway of these insinuating, infuriating and yet irresistible conjuring tricks, I am more aware than ever of the anomaly of their willing complicity. Even Lohengrin, perhaps the least ideological of Wagner’s works, should have been sufficient to fill them with alarm and apprehension. They should have realised that their caste-ridden rituals of bourgeois life were directly challenged even by this ‘romantic opera’, a heady world of magic and enchantment.

  Lohengrin begins in Brabant, on the banks of the Scheldt—Wagner’s plot is drawn (remotely) from a medieval chivalric romance. Henry the Fowler, defender of the realm, is rallying the warriors of Brabant to join him in opposing the Hungarians, that barbaric race from the east, who are threatening these lands, the centre and focus of Christendom. I wonder whether those people—my father, his relatives, the inhabitants of that world—ever listened to these words. Did they pay attention to King Henry’s call-to-arms, or was this only a lot of noise to them, a preparation for the heart-rending romance that, for them at least, was the justification for their five hours of discomfort?

  The well-dressed audience around me doesn’t seem too interested either. They are sitting politely, attention fixed on the huge expanse of the stage where, in a curious steely-blue twilight, the ranks of warriors loudly proclaim their loyalty to King Henry, Christendom and virtue. I wonder too whether any erotic adventures in the darkened boxes accompany this rousing chorus. Now a menacing figure, accompanied by a woman of obviously evil intent, begins to level accusations at the heroine: she has murdered her brother, he says, in order to seize for herself the duchy of Brabant. At this moment there is a notable change in the attention of the people around me, of the whole audience it seems. They are much more alert, concentrating on the soprano who now comes forward, to the accompaniment of sweetly chaste sounds from the orchestra. Every breath in the house seems to be held as the singer begins her account of a dream in which a knight clad in silver came to rescue her from her predicament.

  These people obviously know Lohengrin very well, and they know too that this is the moment at which the singer—whoever she is—is to embark on the great trial of her career, having stepped in to fill the role vacated by the world-famous exponent of the part. For them, it occurs to me, this is just another opera, an absurd fantasy, an occasion for fine singing. I can sense their attention waxing and waning throughout the long performance. When the hero arrives in his swan-drawn boat—indeed to rescue the maiden—they are obviously impressed by the skill of this celebrated tenor who is not (thank goodness) indisposed. They are less attentive at the beginning of the second act, where the sinister baritone and his full-voiced wife plot the maiden’s downfall by persuading her to break her rescuer’s prohibition that she must never ask him his name. Everyone seems to enjoy the wedding march (that wedding march) in the last act, and by the time of the final scene, when the people of Brabant are once more gathered on the banks of the Scheldt so that the grieving Lohengrin might bid farewell to his errant wife—she had, after all, asked him his name—many seem to be looking forward to the end of the performance. No-one appears to be much interested in King Henry’s lament that the knight will not be joining him in the crusade against the Hungarian barbarians.

  The people gathered here this evening, remnants of Kakania, might just be redeemed by their frivolity. As this long performance draws to its close it occurs to me that no-one—either on stage or in the audience—is taking any of this very seriously. The production is, to say the least, bland. The design and the costumes are atmospheric and pictures
que. The director seems to have been content with marshalling his large forces—principals, supporting cast, chorus and extras—on and off the stage with as little fuss as possible. There is no interpretation evident, not much emphasis on the text except to sustain the fairly thin narrative strand. It is all faintly old-fashioned, justifying itself by the gorgeous sound emerging from the stage and the pit, as may well be inevitable in a theatre where you have practically no view of the stage from many of the seats.

  This blandness, the refusal to take Lohengrin as anything but a romantic fable with some marvellous music, may imply that the old ghosts, the fire in the blood, are things of the past. Perhaps we are lucky enough to be living in a time that has gone beyond those outrages to which the citizens of this city assented as enthusiastically as their German brothers and sisters. This Lohengrin is a pretty, decorative affair, as befits a theatrical performance in a theme park. It may therefore be that the irritating and in many ways risible life of that theme park, which has been increasingly grating on me during my days here, is a way of neutering its inhabitants, ensuring that they will never again rise to the call of the demons of the tribe.

  That proves to be a cheering thought. Yet no sooner has this possibility occurred to me than I realise how mistaken it is. It may be very comforting to think of Vienna, and of those parts of Kakania that came under its spell, as the reservoir of the old aristocratic values which tried—vainly as it turned out—to stem the tide of demagoguery. It has been said often enough that Austrian antisemitism was fundamentally social, not political or malevolent. The princes of the blood might have scorned an eminent family like the Wittgensteins because Jewish blood coursed through their veins, but they would never, the legend insists, have sought their destruction. That may have been true of the rulers of this realm—though an innate scepticism makes me doubt that assertion. It was patently untrue of those urban mobs who howled for the final solution propounded by the Führer, who was nurtured in the pleasant city of Linz. The ugliness of the twentieth century emerged as much out of this Austrian world as it did out of the German soul and blood—and there was, moreover, the spring of 1938 when the citizens of this country eagerly embraced unification with the Reich.