The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War
Page 18
The fourth composer on Paul's list, Sergei Bortkiewicz, wrote attractive music in the tuneful Romantic idiom of Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Rachmaninoff. He came from the landed gentry of Kharkov in the Ukraine and, after troubled times in Berlin, Russia and Turkey, settled in Vienna in the summer of 1922. Since his death in 1952, Bortkiewicz's music is all forgotten, except by a small claque of ardent campaigners.
As the four men set about composing their concertos, Paul, with equal energy, devoted himself to arranging their premieres. The Hindemith (Piano Music with Orchestra) was scheduled for the beginning of the new season in Weimar and Vienna, the Bortkiewicz would be premiered in Vienna in November 1923, Schmidt's piece (a set of variations on a theme taken from Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata) was booked for its first airing three months later in February 1924, and Korngold's concerto for September. The stage was set and Paul had much to look forward to, but first he had to concentrate on the world premiere of his blind mentor's Third Piano Concerto on November 10, 1923, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under Rudolf Nilius at Vienna's recently built Grosser Kon-zerthaussaal. It was Labor's last completed work, composed in his eighty-first year, and Paul thought very highly of it.
As each of the composers submitted his score, arguments broke out. Hindemith had anticipated problems even before sending his first draft. Writing on May 4, 1923, he warned Paul: "I think I should have everything ready by the end of next week. I would be sorry if you weren't pleased with the piece. It may perhaps sound a little strange to you at first, but I have composed it very lovingly and like it myself very much." In the same letter he asked if Paul could advance him at least half the money right away so that his builders could start work on the watch-tower. Paul replied that he was frightened that he might not understand the new work. Soon Hindemith was able to dispatch a first draft with a note attached:
I hope that your terror will have abated once you have looked through the score. It is a simple and thoroughly uncomplicated piece and I firmly believe that after a while it will give you pleasure-perhaps you might be a little horrified to start with but that does not matter--you will most definitely understand the piece.
As far as the money was concerned Paul behaved honorably, paying in full, on time, and receiving in exchange the manuscript, the orchestral parts and exclusive performance rights in the work for his lifetime, but he was horrified by Hindemith's music. After many hours of diligent practice he decided that the piece was simply incomprehensible and canceled the scheduled premiere. Hindemith's piece, Piano Music with Orchestra, remained undiscovered and unperformed until December 2004.
With the composers Korngold and Schmidt, Paul also had arguments. In both cases he felt that the composers had overscored their works and that the piano could not be heard above the sound of the orchestra. Although Josef Labor had been upset by cuts that Paul had made in his music, the question of balance never arose as he always wrote for a small chamber orchestra. Schmidt, eager to please, acquiesced in Paul's demands and accepted many changes. Korngold, however, was affronted. His concerto was scored for a massive band including four horns, three trumpets, contrabassoon, harp, celesta, glockenspiel and xylophone. Paul complained that "the contrast between the sound of the piano and the sound of the orchestra is so great that the piano sounds like a chirping cricket," and drew heavy red lines through the parts that he did not like. Korngold was indignant at these mutilations, but Paul wrote to assuage him.
Dear Herr Korngold,
Please find enclosed the second score of your concerto. As far as the brackets which I have written in are concerned, I would ask you, even if it goes very much against the grain, to have them copied out as well. If I play the piece with you conducting you can nonetheless, as you see fit, still have the bracketed sections played. But if I were to play the piece behind your back, then I would leave out the bracketed instruments. Don't take fright at the ravages and don't be angry with yours sincerely, Paul Wittgenstein
The premiere of Franz Schmidt's Beethoven Variations on February 2, 1924, was an elevating success. The critic of the Neues Wiener Tagbhtt praised the composer for his "supremely musical talent," adding that "Paul Wittgenstein, who achieved with one hand the polyphony of two, was encored together with the conductor in a storm of triumph which he had inspired."
The Korngold piece, a tense fusion of rich noise and deliberately ugly eroticism, was even more successful. The premiere in the Golden Hall was conducted by the composer, and the program included other firsts of works by Karl Prohaska, Hugo Kauder and Alma Mahler, but it was the Korngold Concerto that stole the headlines. The critic of the Neue Freie Presse hailed it as an "astonishing, concisely crafted and truly inspired work," pointing out (as if he knew about Paul's quarrel with the composer over balance) that "Paul Wittgenstein ensured, with verve, that his solo instrument retained the predominance it deserved." The critic of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt filed an eccentric rave review that appeared in the newspaper eight days later:
Paul Wittgenstein, having been robbed of his right arm--one might even say robbed of more than his life--by an idiotic shot during the war, but overcoming fate by sheer artistic heroism, has become a virtuoso of the remaining left hand and has raised his one-sidedness to a state of completion, indeed of unattainability. And now the great brotherhood of the artistic heart has come to his aid: Korngold dedicated this concerto to him ... Paul Wittgenstein played "his" work with a technique to which joy had lent wings: with your eyes shut you would have guessed that two hands were needed. We were all replete with the joy of a great talent.
Paul had ensured that the scores and parts belonged to him and had negotiated exclusive performing rights to all these works. Concert promoters were eager to stage them and he soon found himself in demand at concert halls throughout Europe. This gave him the confidence to invite Richard Strauss, the world's most successful living composer, to attend the Korngold premiere, and to ask him whether he too might consider composing a left-hand piano concerto.
Paul knew Strauss slightly because he had stayed with his parents at the Alleegasse Palais on his occasional visits to Vienna before the war. This did not, however, entitle him to a cheap deal. "Strauss is very avaricious," Paul reported; "he certainly thinks of money-making, but he does that before and after composing, not while he composes. And that's the important point." In the end Strauss accepted the commission for a sensational advance of $25,000, and set to work composing an intense, brooding concerto, which he entitled Parergon zur Sinfonia Domestica, by which he meant an adjunct, or companion piece, to a symphony that he had composed twenty years earlier. Both the Sinfonia Domestica of 1903 and the new Parergon shared thematic material and in musical circles rumors quickly spread that Strauss had taken a fortune off Paul only to rework an old piece. Paul defended the composer, arguing that the criticism was "unjust" and that the concerto "has great beauties." This did not, however, prevent him from berating Strauss for perceived inadequacies in his score. Once again Paul insisted that the orchestra was too heavy and that the piano part was drowned out. After many painful discussions Strauss reluctantly agreed to transfer an important theme from the orchestral score to the piano part and to allow Paul to thin the texture himself by deleting lines from the score. The Parergon contains a breathless solo part of the utmost variety and technical difficulty, but Paul complained that it was not brilliant enough. He wanted something that would create a sensation, something far more dazzling, and pushed Strauss to rework it. In a typical trilingual explanation Paul later revealed that the Parergon "had to be changed de fond en comble as they say in French to make ein brauchbareres Kon-zert out of it" (changed from top to bottom to make a decent concerto of it).
Strauss seems to have taken Paul's criticisms in good heart, although some of the alterations that the pianist demanded were far too complicated to resolve in the short time before the Dresden premiere, scheduled for October 6, 1925. Instead he offered to compose a second left-hand concerto entitled Panathenaenzug (pan-Athenia
n procession), which might better suit Paul's needs. Whether the composer demanded a further $25,000 for it is not known, but it seems likely that he did, for shortly after the Berlin premiere Strauss started building himself a mansion on Vienna's Jacquingasse known as Richard Strauss Castle.
Panathenaenzug an enchanting, humorous, quasi-jazzy piece, suffered once again, in Paul's view, from clumsy orchestration. "How can I with my one poor hand hope to compete with a quadruple orchestra?" he asked. The premiere with Bruno Walter and the Berlin Philharmonic on January 15, 1928, was a critical flop. Paul was sneeringly referred to as "Dr. Strauss's left hand" and the Berlin critics asserted that the music at last proved what they had long suspected: that the sixty-four-year-old composer was suffering from premature dementia; and that the pianist was nothing but a rich dilettante. Adolf Weissmann, critic of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag was especially hostile: "It is easy to understand that this pianist who had the misfortune to lose his right arm in the war does everything to stay in the limelight. It is hard to understand however how Strauss could have produced such an absolute failure... this Panathendenzug goes beyond the limits of our endurance."
Paul shrugged off the Berlin reviews as "uninteresting opinions of uninteresting persons, written with the presumption and arrogance of an infallible pope," and Strauss wrote to console him: "I am so sorry that the Berlin press tore you and my piece so to shreds. I know that the Panathendenzug is not bad, but I didn't think it was so good that it would be accorded the honour of unanimous rejection." Two months later in Vienna Panathendenzug was a critical and public success. Paul was lauded in the pages of the Neues Wiener Tagbhtt for his "astonishing bravura" and by an ecstatic Julius Korngold in the Neue Freie Presse:
Paul Wittgenstein finds here a wealth of activity for his fabulous left hand. It dominates the keys, dominates the orchestra. Astonishing the energy and skill of the artist who, if we close our eyes, deceives us into imagining a two-handed pianist: indeed sometimes in the power of his attack, into imagining two two-handed pianists. He was a roaring success with the audience.
The price of these commissions may have been exorbitant but the effect was exactly as Paul had planned. Within five years he was being acclaimed as a serious, major artist on the international concert scene. News of the Strauss commissions was reported in newspapers all around the world and by the end of the decade he had appeared on concert platforms with conductors Erich Kleiber, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwangler in Berlin, with Fritz Busch in Dresden, with Pierre Monteux in Amsterdam, with Sir Henry Wood in London, with Adrian Boult in Birmingham, with Felix Weingartner in Basel, with Rhene-Baton in Paris and with Richard Strauss as a conductor in Trieste, Turin and Prague. A United States concert tour was set for October 1928. The New York Times reported that "Paul Wittgenstein has been much sought here for his American debut." Audiences adored him. His presence on stage was commanding. When he played softly he melted the hearts of everyone who heard him, while his wiry, leaping, percussive fortissimi--which so irritated his family when they heard him practicing at home--provided a thrilling, anarchic spectacle in the formal setting of a large concert hall. The sheer speed at which he was able to move his fingers across the keyboard was breathtaking. Paul may have bought his way to fame but, with dedication, skill and artistry that were a match for any living pianist, he had earned his right to it. By 1928 he had climbed with his single hand to the top of the tree; he was living his dream, and for the time being at least appeared to be happy. "Having to work," he wrote in September 1927, "and moreover to earn money--so much the more if it be for a good purpose--is the best thing on earth."
THE DEATH OF MRS. WITTGENSTEIN
In the years following the First World War the Wittgensteins suffered a number of blows. Karl's brother-in-law, the cognac-nosed General von Siebert, died in 1920. Soon afterward his wife, Aunt Lydia, put her head in a gas oven because she could no longer cope with caring on her own for their deaf-and-dumb daughter. The following year, in July 1921, Helene's twenty-year-old son, Fritz Salzer, died of polio, which had developed in the days before his death into acute flaccid paralysis of all four extremities, lungs and heart. On April 26, 1924--Ludwig's birthday of all days--the old and beloved Josef Labor died after a week's fever at his home on the Kirchengasse. Hermine sketched him on his deathbed with tears filling her eyes. A septet that he was halfway through composing for Paul lay unfinished on his desk. Less than a year later Karl's brother, Uncle Louis, drew his last breath and one of Mrs. Wittgenstein's nephews died in a mountaineering accident. All these incidents, especially the death of Labor, affected her adversely; but, in truth, she had never recovered from the shock of Kurt's suicide in 1918.
To have three sons commit suicide must strain the nerves of even the steeliest mother. The deaths of Hans and Rudi had tainted her soul with ineradicable sorrow, shame and guilt, but in the case of Kurt her burden was far worsened by the fact of her having actively encouraged him to return to Austria to fight, like his brothers, for the honor of a now-vanished empire. News of Kurt's death seems to have broken her heart; from that moment her health and spirits slumped along a trajectory of slow and irreversible decline. Within four years her legs were crippled, her eyes almost blind and her mind decrepit and senile. All interest in life had deserted her. Her family tried to rekindle the old spark by fostering a closer friendship with a grumpy, slightly insane but once distinguished soprano called Marie Fillunger. To this end they rented her a flat on the Landstrasse-Hauptstrasse from which she could visit their mother every morning and enliven her with talk of Brahms and Joachim and the good old days. Mrs. Wittgenstein had met Miss Fillunger apparently for the first time only after Karl's death, though it is possible that Ludwig knew her from his student days in Manchester, where she was a singing teacher at the Royal Manchester College of Music and where she lived with her lesbian lover, Eugenie Schumann (the composer's daughter), a few streets from Ludwig's lodgings on the Wilmslow Road. Grumpy Miss Fillunger's companionship briefly enlivened Mrs. Wittgenstein, whose deadened eyes apparently lit up as she accompanied her in songs by Schumann and Brahms. Mrs. Wittgenstein's piano playing was no longer accurate and Miss Fillunger's robust voice had lost the luster that had once inspired Brahms to entrust her with the premieres of many of his greatest works, but the relationship between the two old ladies was, according to Her-mine, delightful. "My mother tried to smooth the surface of this very rough diamond with friendliness and humour and she was rewarded for this with Miss Fillunger's most unsentimental love."
By the spring of 1926, as Ludwig was disgracing himself with knockout blows to the students of Trattenbach, Mrs. Wittgenstein was too far gone to feel the dishonor. Her eyes stared disconcertingly through and beyond the faces of the doctors, family and the friends who came to visit her. To calm her frequent fits of agitation they played her records. Short bursts of soft music had a calming effect, but in her final crankiness she could no longer distinguish between a phonograph and a live performance. Suspecting that musicians were present in the room, she would interrupt in order to thank them and, when she had had enough, would turn to the phonograph and ask it in her most gracious tones: "Gentlemen, I am old and sick and easily tired, so for heaven's sake, please do not hold it against me if I ask you to stop."
In mid-May she was staying at the white, bright and airy Wittgenstein palace at Neuwaldegg when her health took a further turn for the worse. On the 22nd she was needy and frightened and Hermine had to hold her hand for the whole afternoon; on the 26th things were bad again all day--she kept screaming that someone was trying to kill her, alternately grumbling, whimpering and begging for mercy. Her family gathered around. Two days later in the afternoon she fell asleep only to awake next morning with a fever. For three days thereafter she lay in a coma. Those days "were very good to me," Gretl explained in a letter to her elder son. "It was weird. Mama slept very deeply. Her soul seemed very far away. We sat on her bed and her quasi-death seemed beautiful to me because it brought good t
houghts to mind." After a surge in her pulse on June 2, Mrs. Wittgenstein's children decided to stay all night by her bed and at seven the following morning she stopped breathing and they all crawled exhausted to their rooms. Paul, at the moment of his mother's death, resolved that he would never visit Hochreit again for as long as he lived--and he honored his vow. Ludwig wrote to a friend, "It was a gentle death," and Gretl told her son, "It was a very beautiful night!"
Yes [Hermine wrote in her memoir], it can be said that my mother had been, in many respects, almost something of a saint, and she was loved as such, honoured and mourned by an infinite number of people. This picture, however, would not be complete if I failed to mention some eccentricities that made life difficult for my mother and often made it difficult for us children just being with her.
FROM BOOM TO BUST
Mrs. Wittgenstein was seventy-six years old when she died and two days later, on the warm afternoon of June 5, 1926, her boxed-up corpse was placed next to the remains of her husband and her old servant Rosalie Hermann in the family grave at Group 32b, no. 24, in Vienna's Zentralfriedhof. Close and opposite (Group 15e, no. 7) lay the mortal remains of Josef Labor, the inspiration of her days.
In September, Paul played Franz Schmidt's Beethoven Variations with the Vienna Philharmonic, with the composer conducting. The pianist Marie Baumayer wrote to Hermine: "Paul played so splendidly today; more beautifully than ever. It was magnificent and the Philharmonic players were terrific as well. How Mama would have been delighted." But in truth Mama's mind in its last years was too far gone to enjoy any of Paul's successes in the concert hall or to feel any tinge of regret at Ludwig's ignominy. A letter from Dr. Hansel to Ludwig two months after her death suggests that court proceedings were still continuing against him for concussing his pupil at Otterthal in April. After that the trial on his case goes dead. Either it was abandoned or records were artfully removed from the slate. In either case it is probable that Paul, Gretl, Hermine, Helene and the Wittgenstein fortune had a hand in covering it up. The chief witness, Josef Haidbauer, the boy who was knocked unconscious, died shortly afterward of hemophilia. Even if Ludwig had wished to return to teaching, it is unlikely that he would have been offered another job.