Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  By the time they were living in Linz, and his father was dead, he had already made up his mind to be an artist, and he had found another outlet for that ‘feeling’, for that need for the consolations provided by large spaces, large noises, bright colours, ritualized experience: opera.

  Sometimes alone, sometimes with his only real friend of those days, Gustl Kubizek, who was going to study music, he had gone to the opera. Gustl liked Verdi and thought it was worth saving up to go to the grand opera house, the Royal Opera. The processional march from Aida was all right, of course, but there was something about Verdi that Gustl’s friend disliked; maybe it was his geniality. Once, when they were walking along a street, they passed an organ grinder with a monkey, playing ‘La donna e mobile’! ‘There’s your Verdi,’ he had said, ‘imagine a monkey-organ grinding out tunes from Lohengrin!’

  No, he preferred the much cheaper theatre, the Burgtheater, where he had seen his earliest productions of Wagner and fallen under the Master’s spell. In Rienzi the young demagogue who came from nowhere took all the Roman crowds with him. In Lohengrin the mysterious stranger from afar came to rescue a chaotically and badly organized little German state. Had Lohengrin passed any exams? Did he belong to a high social class? Was he fifth grade, sixth grade? He came because he was sent by destiny to awaken the power of the German sword.

  The music worked its hypnosis over his soul. It was better than anything you got at High Mass or Benediction – the same, but better, especially when the massed choruses came. (That was the only drawback of the great Ring cycle, which he only came to learn later – so few choruses.)

  His career as a teenage artist foundered. The Viennese Academy of Architecture, which was one possibility, would not take you without a diploma from the building school, and they wouldn’t give you a diploma unless you had reached a certain grade and passed for a diploma at the Realschule – and it was too late for all that sort of thing now. He would just have to stay at home with mother and prove them all wrong, with his architectural drawings (he already had plans, aged sixteen, for the total rebuilding of Linz) and with his stage designs. It was time for him to design the sets for Lohengrin. His mother could keep him until he found his feet.

  Even when trouble struck, at the beginning of 1907, he had not really understood. His mother Klara had been to see the ‘poor people’s doctor’, Dr Eduard Bloch, a gentle clever Jew. A grotesque relation, Aunt Johanna, a dwarfish hunchback, had come to keep house for him and his younger sister Paula while Klara went to hospital to have a breast removed. When she came out she was too weak to climb the stairs, so they crossed the Danube and found a flat in a pleasant suburb of Linz called Urfahr. He wouldn’t allow himself to dwell on what was happening to his mother. The doctor, at her request, did not tell her son that she had cancer. He filled the summer days by pacing the streets of Linz, making detailed plans for the town’s reconstruction, and by nursing a Platonic passion for a girl who hardly knew him. Stephanie her name was, a tall blonde. As the hot summer wore on, he was programmed by some accursed protective device fashioned by nature not to notice his mother’s illness. He thought her tears were the tears of pure motherly affection when he told her that the time had come to leave her, to go to Vienna to seek his fortune. And he’d gone, and shared a flat with Kubizek, and tried to get into the Academy of fine Arts.

  ‘Test drawing unsatisfactory’ – that was their verdict. Test drawing unsatisfactory. It was a humiliation from which no recovery was truly possible. He kept it a secret even from Kubizek who, with his second-rate talents, had easily passed into the Academy of Music. He pretended to attend the Academy of fine Arts, while actually wandering the streets in a state of abject sorrow. But that sorrow was as nothing, absolutely nothing, compared with what was to come.

  He came back to Linz after a few weeks. The postmaster’s wife had written to him to say that Klara, his sacred mother, was … It wasn’t possible. Dr Bloch, sorrowful and sympathetic, said that the operation on Klara’s breast had been performed too late. The cancer had spread. Already there were metastases on the pleura. The only possible cure was an expensive and very painful procedure in which large doses of iodoform were applied to the open wound.

  Expense! No expense would be spared. Autumn turned into winter. All their money was spent on iodoform, a stinking balm that was applied to gauze and held against the wounds of the suffering patient. They moved her into the kitchen since, as the weather became colder, it was the only room in the flat they could afford to heat.

  A terrible calmness descended. He, the postmaster’s wife and the hunchbacked aunt, often without words, nursed Klara twenty-four hours a day, taking it in turns to tend her. Sometimes a very faint whimper would come from the patient who was in such agony and occasionally a terrible shriek would pierce the whole apartment. But on the whole she was silent and they were silent. Her great grey-blue eyes looked back at his with intense yearning and sorrow. This was the terrible secret of the universe, which Wagner confronted in his last works: the sheer pitilessness, the irredeemable burden of suffering under which all sentient beings moved.

  Caught up in the drama of the illness itself, however, you only half confronted the truth, as it progressed from one dressing, one turning of sore limbs, one wake-tormented sleep, one sleep-heavy vigil to the next. On 21 December 1907 the inevitable happened. In the darkened early hours, by the lights of a Christmas tree he had put up in the corner of the kitchen to cheer her, she died.

  Two days later, wearing a frock-coat and a tall black top hat, he followed her coffin to the grave, which had been dug beside her husband’s. She was forty-seven years old.

  The next day, Christmas Eve, he went to the doctor to settle up the cost of all those innumerable home visits, those seemingly endless applications of balsam to the dying one’s wounds. His memories of the scene were all disconnected – his sister and his half-sister in their full mourning dresses, chatting to the doctor in an almost social manner about arrangements. His producing the money and wondering if some mistake had been made – for, though it had eaten into about a tenth of Klara’s savings, the bill was far, far less than they had expected. He had looked up at the kindly old doctor and grasped his hands. ‘Never, never will I forget this kindness, your … kindness…’ He could not finish his words.

  Thirty years afterwards orders were given, by Martin Bormann, to have Dr Bloch, who was still practising from the same consulting room, photographed in the same spot, with the chair, now empty, where the Leader had sat in this abject, mythologically giant moment.

  The last time he had truculently agreed to go to church with his mother had been after her operation, perhaps a couple of months after. He had insisted that if they were to go to church they should do the thing properly and attend the cathedral at Linz. It was Good Friday, the day when the Church remembered the Crucified, and the choir had been singing the grief-stricken and imagined words of the Saviour. It was incomprehensible, of course – what abject bloody nonsense to be singing Latin to good German people, it was an affront in many ways. But the atmosphere of it came back to him in those days after Klara’s death. He was now bearing a Crucifixion, he was now bearing an intolerable sorrow.

  The miasma of the sorrow surrounded the whole of consciousness, it was not really possible to speak or to hear through it. You were in a sort of fog of sorrow and other people, or trivial events such as purchasing a tram ticket or buying a cup of coffee, happened a long way off, noises heard through water. That Herr Treibel, for example, the owner of the apartment where Klara had died. What tomfool or perfidious reason had he had for visiting?

  But he was trying to be fatherly. ‘With your talents … And your dear mother always said to me that you had a passion for the opera. I like a good opera myself – The Merry Widow, now there’s a good one. But the funny thing is … and I don’t know if it will be a help, but every little helps, they say, every little helps. This man Roller, now. Alfred Roller. Heard of him?’

  The ans
wer to this question, happening somewhere out there in the sunlit realm where no grief was felt, and where people could go on talking about today and tomorrow without howling, the answer was an astonishing no. He had not at that date heard of Alfred Roller. And this man in Linz who owned a bit of real estate and happened to be their landlord was a friend, or acquaintance, of Alfred Roller, the greatest designer of opera sets in Vienna.

  That first, fantastic Tristan, which he had seen during his few weeks in Vienna when the bastards at the Academy of Arts had turned him down. Could anything have been more magical than that Tristan? Gustav Mahler was on the podium, conducting, and when the brooding, everlastingly unsettling opening prelude was completed, the curtain went up and there was Roller’s ship, at a right angle to the stage, with wind flickering the sails and Tristan in the prow.

  Never to be forgotten Roller! But, when asked through the fog of grief ‘Heard of him?’ he had only shaken his head sadly, unaware of what Herr Treibel was suggesting, namely the impossible: that there might exist a link, in real life and not in fantasy, between the desolate kitchen in a flat in Urfahr, where happiness itself died to the light of Christmas candles on a tree, and a man who invented the magical scenery of the Court Opera in Vienna.

  Treibel had scribbled out a note of introduction and recommendation. ‘Go to Roller. Go and say old Treibel recommended you. He’s a good man, Roller, he’ll help you – who knows, maybe get you doing set designs for the operas? Now Offenbach – there’s one to get your feet tapping.’

  So back to Vienna he had come. He had spent some money on clothes before he arrived, a dark hat, a gentleman’s overcoat, none of your rubbish, a walking cane. The letter remained propped on the chimneypiece of the small room he shared with Kubizek. Every day Kubizek went out to the Academy of Music and studied – in reality. Every day, he in turn would walk the streets pretending to be at the Academy of Arts, and he would come back to the room and stare at the envelope addressed to Professor Roller. Eventually he developed enough courage to take the envelope down. He had by now filled a portfolio with drawings. There were some proposed sets for Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. There were all the architectural drawings for the complete rebuilding of Linz, of course. He was beginning to wonder whether it might not be advantageous to demolish Vienna and rebuild from scratch; but that would come later. And he had set out for the Court Opera House, with the portfolio and the letter of introduction.

  But what would he say when he was stopped at the door? ‘Excuse me, I have come to see Professor Roller?’

  ‘I’m sure you have, Sunny Jim, and I’m just off to see the Emperor, good day to you.’

  What if he met with mockery? His grief was still at the raw stage when any setback, however slight, was capable of provoking either the most abject misery, actual sobs, or a return of his old rages. In a café the other day he had ordered a particular type of cake with a pot of coffee. The waiter had brought the wrong cake. When he saw the waiter coming, with a nut-and-walnut concoction instead of the cherry-and-cream one upon which he had set his heart, he felt the universe collapsing. Looking at the callous waiter, who couldn’t give a damn whether he brought a cherry gâteau or a plate of raw human flesh, he had made one very firm decision: he was not going to burst into tears just to satisfy this young sadist. Quite the opposite. But although the decision had been made to stand firm, he had not quite reckoned on what happened next, since the wave of pure vitriolic rage that shook his whole being at the very moment of the waiter’s arrival had in fact taken him completely by surprise. The cake had been hurled, the plate had been smashed, but much more dangerous had been the coffee pot flying through the air, raining its contents on the shoulders of others in the café. Naturally, he had found himself being escorted from the premises and set down on the pavement, with pompous comments about his good fortune not to have been handed over to the police.

  Fearing a revisitation of such an outburst, he had come to the door of the Opera House. In fact, the commissionaire, in his splendid uniform with frogging and epaulettes, had been friendly, asking ‘Sunny Jim’ whether he could help. When he had shyly, almost inaudibly, mumbled the name of Alfred Roller, he had been told to go to a particular office on the first floor. But then courage had failed him and he had muttered something about not needing the Professor today; another day. He merely wanted to know where the Professor’s office was, should he ever need it.

  His cowardice nagged at him, all through a concert that evening which Kubizek took him to – the everlastingly wonderful seventh symphony of Bruckner! This would not do, this fear. The next day he would go and confront Roller. But the next day, and the next, though he managed to make himself go to the Opera House, he could not bring himself to beard the great man in his den. And, coming away from the Opera House that third time, he had been visited by an outburst of despair that made him dance with anger, and he had taken Herr Treibel’s letter and torn it into confetti, hurling it into the air about him in the street.

  For weeks afterwards he thought of writing to Treibel to get another letter of introduction to Roller, but it was no use. He did not have the nerve. Worse than this, he could not summon up enough energy to do it. For days on end he did nothing, simply did not know how the time passed. At other times he could do some work and he felt the quality of his draughtsmanship, especially of his architectural draughtsmanship, improving. Months, years passed. At some point he had applied to the Academy again and once again the bastards had turned him down, even though he seriously believed that some of the drawings in his portfolio stood comparison with Michelangelo. The money began to run out. What money there was he spent on going to the opera, and he saw all the Mahler–Roller productions, some of them many times over. Legends in the history of Wagner production and he was there! One letter, one measly letter might have allowed him to cross the bridge and enter the legend, become part of that world. He too could, like Roller, have translated what he had drawn in a notebook into a world of enchantment, a setting for the greatest music ever composed, which would transport the collective consciousness of one audience after the next in that packed opera house into the world of their true selves – not their world of petty debt or tedious work or party politics, but the true world of the spirit and the imagination. But it was not to be. He struggled on, trying to sell his paintings while living in a large hostel for indigents, little better than a dosshouse, and finally, defeated by the system, he had decided to try his fortune elsewhere and crossed the border into Germany.

  Oh, it was good to be back. The German of his childhood had been the accent of Lower Bavaria and he had never got his tongue round the so-called sophisticated Viennese lingo. Surely he’d get a place at the Munich Academy if Vienna had rejected him? That, too, was not to be his destiny. By then the sombre orchestral mutations that follow the war cry of the Valkyries had already been played, and Wotan the Warfather was waiting for his daughters to sweep over the battlefields of Europe and fill the Hall of the Slain with heroes.

  * * *

  Wolf led me into his library, another room of colossal proportions where a battleship would have seemed as small as a waste-paper basket.

  ‘Ah, Winnie!’

  She came towards him – two hands outstretched, both of which he took. They stared into one another’s faces with pure pleasure. Then he took the hands and kissed each in turn.

  ‘My Leader,’ she said. And meant it.

  The children were there too. Wieland was now a lanky seventeen-year-old in a pale double-breasted suit. Wolfgang, two years younger, was similarly clad like a grown-up. They called him ‘Uncle’ still. The overweight of Friedelind, just sixteen, gave her an ageless, womanly appearance. Only Verena in her plaits had, at fourteen, a touch of the child about her. The KEH was here too. This might surprise you, but of course the others couldn’t see her; she was inside my head; I now felt myself observing the whole scene through her quizzical, hostile yet satirical eyes.

  ‘Before we go any further, My Leade
r, I really must tell you about some of the excesses of the SA. And the HJ in Bayreuth. You can’t know what is happening at the local level but…’

  ‘Later, Winnie.’

  ‘I want to tell you about Gauleiter Schemm, who has really made himself objectionable…’

  Whenever Winnie met him in these days she had a shopping list of grievances, which she expected him to solve instantly; of Jews in the orchestra or the chorus whose life had been made difficult; of her own children’s intense dislike of the Youth Movement, which all good children in Germany were now expected to join; of the over-exercise of petty bureaucracy by party officials. She seemed to believe, and nothing in subsequent history, so far as I know, has ever made her alter the belief, that the manifest ghastliness of National Socialism and its adherents had nothing, or next to nothing, to do with its Leader. ‘If the Leader knew of this, he would put a stop to it at once,’ she would often say. Usually, H listened to her when she produced these complaints and quite often he heeded her requests.

  But today he had something else on his mind. ‘I want you to see these,’ he said. And he led us to a large library table on which were propped up a number of drawings. One was labelled – ‘Grail Hall’, another ‘Klingsor’s Garden’ and another ‘Monsalvat’. ‘They are, I think you will agree, a considerable improvement on what you have at the moment at Bayreuth.’