Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  “Oh, Alma!” Alex said, taking her hand, his old sarcasm completely blown away. “Please convey my deepest gratitude. To have him conduct my work! I feel touched and blessed by his greatness.”

  That same month also saw the premiere of Gustav’s Kindertotenlieder. While listening to the performance, Alma attempted to concentrate on the technical details of the production, her ears honed for any missed notes. Anything but think of their daughters when listening to her husband conduct his Songs of Dead Children. She was determined not to let the overwhelming tragedy and grief invade her heart. But she couldn’t avoid observing how deeply the audience was effected. Women sobbed into their handkerchiefs—how many babies had they lost? Who but her husband would dare set these songs to music, to allow Mildenburg’s shattering soprano to give voice to the unspeakable? The applause was staggering. Alma clapped and cheered with everyone else, but her heart seized in a foreboding that she couldn’t shake off. Watching her husband take bow after bow, she couldn’t help clenching her teeth. Gustav, how could you?

  Suite 3

  I Am Lost To The World

  27

  Alma stood on the terrace of their summerhouse at Maiernigg and gazed at the first stars winking from the clear June sky. Having just put her children to bed, she felt restless with the yearning for spiritual freedom. To be a somebody, not just somebody’s wife.

  Here she was, alone with her daughters, left to her own devices while Gustav remained in Vienna to conduct a concert in honor of the shah of Persia’s state visit. Yet even in this precious lacuna of solitude, she saw only her husband when she looked out over the lake with its darkling waves. She heard only his voice. His music. How had he come to dominate her entire existence, even in his absence, when he hadn’t written in days? I live only for him. It was as though she wasn’t even a person anymore.

  There was so much about him she still didn’t understand. Yet she could no longer envision her life without him. He had taken so much away from her that he alone remained her support—the monolith around which her life revolved. So what could she do but devote herself wholly to him? To being a good wife. Virtuous, useful, calm, self-sufficient during his long absences. But that strident voice inside her gave her no peace. I’m only twenty-five and my life is so dull! She loved her husband, loved her children. Yet there had to be something more, some spark. Closing her eyes, she allowed her mind to rove off into terra incognita. Into a place where Gustav was not. Where she could unfold, terrifying herself with her own waywardness. Lilith with her talons and wings.

  Alma tore into the music room and reached into the forbidden folder of her scores. Sitting at the piano, she began to soft pedal her music, mindful of her daughters sleeping in the next room. To write a new piece! A nocturne! A sarabande! But now that she had this solitude and peace to do something for herself rather than for her family, she only drew a blank. Her inner well had been left dry for so long that it refused to yield anything but a puff of dust.

  In despair, Alma turned to her diary. Maybe if she found the right words, a new melody might arise in their wake. If only I were still capable as I once was of putting thoughts to paper. Would her inner turmoil finally ease if she could give voice to it? Gripping her pencil, she bent over her journal. But no intelligible words emerged. She felt as empty as that page.

  Lest this evening be entirely wasted, Alma set to work transcribing a fair copy of Gustav’s Sixth Symphony. His bottomless creativity was as vast as an ocean. She was the jetsam bobbing on the waves. She seated herself at the secretary desk, lit the paraffin lamp, then reached to get some fresh paper from the bottom drawer. Unfortunately, the old wooden drawer was warped from the lakeside humidity, so she had to give it a forceful tug to pull it open. This upset the lamp, which toppled to the floor.

  With a shriek, Alma leapt back to see the lamp shatter, setting the rug and then the sofa ablaze.

  Yelling for Elise and Miss Turner to come down and help, Alma frantically attempted to smother the flames with cushions and blankets. Dear God, what if I’m to blame for burning my babies alive? It was as though her buried rage had set the house on fire. She was tempted to fling her own body down into the fire as a living sacrifice if that’s what it took to extinguish it—far preferable to living with the guilt of killing her children. Let me praise those living things that choose to die by fire. Unbidden, she recalled the verses from Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan that Gustav had read last summer.

  By the time Elise and Miss Turner came dashing to the scene, Alma had managed to put out the flames. Leaving them to sweep up the broken lamp, Alma raced in to her children. After opening the windows to let in the fresh air and release the smoke, she swooped over Gucki’s cradle. By some miracle, the baby had managed to sleep through the entire fiasco. But Putzi tumbled out of bed and ran to Alma, lifting her frightened, tear-stained face.

  “Mama, it smells bad. Where’s Papa? I want my papa!” Putzi’s voice broke off into a frightened wail.

  “Hush, my darling.” Alma seized the girl and hugged her closely, burying her face in her sweet brown curls. “Papa will join us very soon.”

  Gustav was ablaze with inspiration, immured in his composing hut from early morning to dusk with only a short midday break. One July evening, Alma met her husband wandering down the forest path. He didn’t seem to even recognize her—his face was transfixed with visions of that glorious otherworld he lived inside when he was writing a new symphony. But when his eyes finally focused on her, he bounded toward her with all the glee of an infatuated twenty-year-old coming to kiss his sweetheart.

  “Almschi!” he cried. “Surely this is our best summer yet! To think I’ve been here only four weeks and I’ve already finished three movements of my new symphony.”

  “Your Seventh,” she said, in hushed reverence.

  Alma had heard strains of the music floating down from the woods. This symphony is fortunate and blessed, she thought. Boldly modern, yet full of optimism as well as depth and mystery. Not seething with nihilism like the Sixth.

  “Gustav, you’re unstoppable,” she murmured, her voice catching as adoration and envy twined in her throat, wrapping around each other like twin serpents. What a mirror his freely flowing inspiration raised to her stymied compositions, her well of loss.

  That night Alma crept upstairs to Gustav’s room. The night was so hot and humid, she could almost imagine they were in the tropics.

  “My tigress,” he said, as she pounced on his bed.

  In one rippling rush, her silk dressing gown fell to the floor, leaving her completely nude. In the heat, Gustav was likewise naked, not even a sheet draping his lean, muscled body. Sweat dampened her thighs as she straddled him, her hair whipping over his chest, his hands holding her breasts. Despite the stickiness and torpor and the mosquitoes whining in her ear, she longed for him. Longed to feel truly one with him, his essence plunging into hers, making her complete. Holy and pure. Eve, not Lilith with her burning resentment.

  But Gustav could not rise to the occasion. He laughed remorsefully while cradling her face to his pounding heart. “Forgive me, Almscherl. It’s just the heat and my sluggish digestion.”

  Alma sat with her children on the shady lawn. While Gucki slept on a blanket and Putzi colored pictures, Alma opened her journal. Her sweat-soaked dress sagged against her skin as she forced the pencil across the page. Pencil, not ink, so as to better erase her forbidden words. I long for a husband. For I havenone. Owing to Gustav’s loss of libido, they had not made love the entire summer. It was as though Gustav was channeling his entire virility into his music, leaving nothing for her. How long could this go on?

  Putting her journal aside, Alma helped Putzi with her drawing. How clever her eldest daughter was with her crayons, and she wasn’t even three. Already she was trying to draw their house. So Alma helped her fill in the details. Their happy, fortunate home.

  28

  “Putzi’s drawing is simply incredible,” Gustav said the following Mar
ch, while Alma packed his suitcase for his trip to Amsterdam.

  She made sure to include family photographs and Putzi’s artwork, for Gustav had declared he couldn’t bear to travel without these mementoes. Putzi, meanwhile, hugged her father’s legs as though she would never let him go.

  “My little treasure, what an eye you have!” Lifting the girl in his arms, Gustav addressed her with possessive pride, as if he took it for granted that his eldest daughter was heir to his genius.

  Putzi’s latest picture, which she had accomplished without assistance, was a clearly recognizable portrait of her father at the piano. At the age of three and a half, Putzi seemed to have an understanding of lines, patterns, and representation. Alma had helped her write the word PAPA in proud capitals above the image.

  The little girl was precocious and self-possessed enough to insist that she accompany her mother to the Hauptbahnhof to see off her father. Putzi was such a handful that Alma was obliged to leave Gucki home with the maid. Gucki, a fussy feeder, was far quieter than her exuberant sister, but her huge blue eyes seemed to take in everything as though she were born to be a silent witness to this turbulent world.

  “I’ll write every day,” Gustav told Alma from the open doorway of the railway car. “You write, too, Almschi! No shirking this time.”

  His last departing kiss was offered not to Alma but Putzi, who clung to his neck with such ferocity that Alma struggled to peel her off him.

  Gustav laughed. “Be sure to draw many new pictures for me, my darling girl.”

  Was it normal to feel this jealous of one’s own daughter, Alma wondered, as the train drew out of the station. Surely she should be happy that her husband was such a devoted father. How she had adored her own papa when he was alive! To the point of rejecting Mama, of thinking her second-rate, a poor substitute. For the first time in her life, Alma felt ashamed of the way she had treated her mother—now she understood how much it hurt. Her spirits sank as she struggled to console Putzi, who was lost in the depths of a tantrum. When Putzi was like this, no one but Gustav could comfort her.

  Gustav’s letters home were filled with cheerful allusions to his sensitive bowels.

  This morning I managed to make a sacrifice to the gods without the aid of aeronautic instruments.

  The Dutch adored him and made much of him, lauding him as the greatest luminary to set foot inside the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, its astonishing acoustics the perfect showcase for the lush swell of his symphonies.

  The Germans proved a much more difficult audience. Their critics seemed to delight in tearing Gustav down, not least because he was a Jew. He was so nervous about the premiere of his Sixth Symphony in Essen, he began to suffer panic attacks and insisted that Alma accompany him to the rehearsals and performance. He made constant alterations to the score, reversing the second and third movements at the last minute.

  On the night of the premiere, Alma sat in the guest balcony, her mouth as dry as sand. How slight and vulnerable Gustav appeared on the podium, a wiry bundle of nerves. Gone was his absolute control and assurance that had so dazzled her when she was a starstruck girl of nineteen watching him at the opera. But directing one’s own new symphony before a hostile foreign audience was a universe away from conducting someone else’s work. Gustav’s entire soul was laid bare.

  Already thin, he had lost even more weight. How this taxed him—he looked as though he might collapse before his audience of potato-eating industrialists. Alma narrowed her eyes at a woman in a diamond collier who yawned extravagantly while her husband snored beside her. When the final movement ended and Gustav turned to take his bows, Alma endeavored to clap loudly enough to drown out the catcalls. Her husband seemed to sway on his feet. His face was etched in deep lines, making him look like an old man. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes to see him like this. She struggled to push away the foreboding that Gustav had already reached his zenith. That the premiere of this malevolent symphony marked the onset of her family’s decline.

  Back in the privacy of their hotel room, Alma was struggling to calm Gustav when she noticed an envelope from Alex on the mail tray, addressed to them both. Thinking to distract her husband from his misery, she tore the letter open and found a clipping from Die Musik—an article on the American premiere of Gustav’s Fifth Symphony in Boston.

  “Gustav!” she cried. “Listen to what the American critics have to say! ‘How everything sings and glows and blooms, as if Schubert had been reborn.’ Remember how the Germans scorned your Fifth? The Americans love it! Just imagine! Your fame has crossed the ocean.”

  After the debacle in Essen, their summer exodus to Maiernigg couldn’t come quickly enough. Dizzy spells and digestive complaints plagued Gustav, and it was not just his cold reception in Germany that gnawed at him. His critics in Vienna were turning on him, too. The Viennese papers satirized Herr Direktor Mahler as a difficult personality, neurotically obsessed with opera reform and yet even more interested in composing symphonies that nobody wanted to hear.

  When Alma and Gustav arrived at their summerhouse, he looked defeated, worn down to bone and sinew. She felt tempted to sweep him into her arms and carry him up the stairs as though he were one of her children. If I don’t look after him, he could quite literally work himself to death.

  Alma found herself fussing over him like a nursemaid. “You need at least two weeks of rest to restore your vitality. No work, Gustl. Just gentle exercise and time with the children. Sit in the sunshine every day.”

  Her preaching fell upon deaf ears.

  Early that next morning, Gustav tore up the path to his composing hut. When he failed to come down for the midday meal, Alma and Elise tiptoed to his hut and left a basket of bread, cheese, butter, jam, fruit, and milk outside his door.

  “If he gets any thinner, he’ll blow away,” Elise whispered, shaking her head.

  If Gustav heard their footsteps, they didn’t seem to penetrate his creative trance. Alma heard him playing the piano and chanting medieval plainsong.

  When he finally stumbled down to join Alma and the children at the dinner table, his hair was sticking out at all angles and his glasses were askew. Fire shone in his eyes. His smile was brighter than a thousand suns.

  “I thought you were going to take a few days of leisure,” Alma said. “Recuperation.”

  “Almschi, how can I idle away my precious summer like a lazy tourist when the creator spiritus itself has laid hold of me? It won’t let me go until I’ve done its bidding.”

  Putzi burst out of her chair in her joy to see him. She began to prattle on about the new picture Alma had helped her paint that day, but Gustav silenced her with a single reproving glance. Though he insisted the children eat at the table with them, he required that they remain silent in order to allow their parents to converse properly. Two-year-old Gucki simply stared at her father from her high chair, not making a noise, hardly eating either. Alma bent over her in an anxious attempt to coax down another spoonful of semolina.

  “Almschi, this will be my most monumental work to date,” Gustav said, gesticulating wildly, the candlelight bouncing off his glasses. “Everything I’ve done up until now is just a prelude to this. Imagine a chorale, but there are no longer human voices, just the sound of the revolving planets and stars. Imagine the universe itself beginning to resound!”

  His happiness proved infectious, drawing Putzi out of her sulk. Even Gucki grinned, showing off her milk teeth, and, to Alma’s relief, began to eat with a bit more enthusiasm. How rejuvenated Gustav seemed as the sun set in splendor over the placid lake.

  While Alma played with the children and supervised Putzi’s artwork, Gustav composed like a holy man possessed by a divine vision. His music came drifting down the hill, more glorious by the day, as though it were his soul’s anthem taking flight on soft white wings. Veni Creator Spiritus. His voice and piano chords wrapped around her and the children like a golden wreath, encircling them in benediction.

  Gustav completed his
Eighth Symphony in eight weeks. Never before had he been able to compose an entire symphony during a single summer. This was a chorale work on the grandest scale, utterly unconventional in form. The Eighth was divided into two parts. The first was a setting of the ninth-century Pentecost hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”; the second a cantata drawn from the Chorus Mysticus in the final scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two.

  Hearing Gustav sing and play this for her left Alma breathless with joy. Faust, her beloved Faust, which Papa had given her to read as a child! Her husband’s new symphony was a work of colossal majesty.

  “Alfred Roller once suggested I write a Mass.” Gustav lifted his hands from the piano keys to take hers. “I said, ‘No, there’s the Nicene Creed.’ I just couldn’t do it,” he told her, her Jewish husband who had ostensibly converted to Catholicism but who rejected its dogma to embrace his own ecstatic mysticism. “But this, Almschi, is my Credo.”

  The two parts of his Eighth were united by the theme of redemption through love—transcendent spiritual love wedded to the embodied eros and ecstasy of the Eternal Feminine.

  “The Eternal Feminine carries us,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “We have arrived. We are at rest. At last we possess that which we could only strive for. Christians speak of heaven’s eternal bliss. But this bliss is unfolding right here on earth.”

  He stared at her ardently, as if she were the goddess he had spent a lifetime seeking only to find her right in front of him. His wife and the mother of his children. His adoration washed through her like blessed, blessed rain after a long drought.

  Alma twined her arms around him and pulled him to the floor, where they embraced amid the scattered pages of sheet music. For days afterward, she felt as though she were walking on air. As though her skin were covered in gold.