by Tim Bonyhady
Elisabeth’s politics were particularly interesting as I looked to see whether Hermine’s progressive taste in art might be matched by similar politics, as was the case with Adele Bloch-Bauer in the 1920s. Elisabeth was one of Vienna’s most prominent feminists and socialists at the turn of the century. In 1902 she became a member of the governing committee of the new League of Austrian Women’s Associations, the top women’s group in Austria. A year later she helped to found a Women’s Discussion Club, which aspired to make women more politically active and effective. She was soon the club’s main financial supporter and its president, chairing meetings devoted to free education, the secret ballot, and female hygiene, and delivering lectures titled “Marriage,” “Value and Capital,” and “Socialism.” She also became a founding member and patron of the New Vienna Women’s Club, a female preserve boasting a dining room, salon, reading room, games room, and billiard room; it immediately became a venue for lectures, courses, exhibitions, and concerts and provided advice to women on careers and employment.
The Frauenstimmrecht, or women’s suffrage movement, also engaged her. When it became clear in 1905 that Franz Joseph would extend the franchise to all Austrian men while doing nothing for women, the Social Democratic Party instructed its female supporters not to campaign against this plan so as not to jeopardize the introduction of universal male suffrage, but a small group of women who were mostly liberals were more combative. The Austrian Women’s Suffrage Committee, founded in 1906, was the first Austrian organization devoted to securing the vote for women. Despite her socialism, Elisabeth was not only on the committee’s founding executive but also became one of its most active members and its biggest benefactor. When an International Women’s Congress devoted to the Frauenstimmrecht was held in Vienna in 1913, she was among the leading Austrian delegates.
Elisabeth’s politics became increasingly radical during these years. When she lectured at the Women’s Discussion Club in 1908, she not only praised Vienna’s “dear Lueger” for his investment in new publicly owned infrastructure in the city but also acclaimed the achievement of greater workers’ rights and protections such as the ten-hour day and looked forward to the triumph of socialism, which she cast as the natural, inevitable successor to liberalism. Two years later her most ambitious piece of writing—a 444-page history of socialism from the ancient Greeks to the revolutions of 1848—was published by the Social Democratic Party’s own publisher, a clear mark of her affiliation. As described by her son Richard, Elisabeth “dedicated her life-work to the redemption of the working classes.”
This political engagement is all the more striking because a key part of Carl Schorske’s interpretation of fin de siècle Vienna is that the city’s bourgeoisie turned to culture as a substitute for politics, so that Vienna’s extraordinary modernism at the turn of the century was a product of the apolitical. The patrons of the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte are usually taken as prime examples of this phenomenon. Elisabeth Luzzatto, who was both a patron of the Werkstätte and a member of its kindred organization, the Österreichischer Werkbund, exemplifies how there was no end to politics for some of the bourgeoisie, even among the supporters of the new culture.
Because of their closeness, it is easy to imagine Hermine attending one or more of Elisabeth’s lectures about marriage or socialism. When Elisabeth privately published her lecture on marriage in 1905, she would have given a copy to Hermine. She may have done the same after writing her history of socialism. When the two women went out together, Elisabeth would have discussed her activism and, as a committed proselytizer, tried to convert Hermine to her views. If the financial support of Adolf Gallia for the left-leaning newspaper Die Zeit is any guide to the politics of other members of the family, Hermine would have been sympathetic. Just as Moriz Gallia and Maximilian Luzzatto probably did business together, Hermine probably shared some of Elisabeth’s politics.
5
Galas
A tour of Europe’s great capitals saw Hermine and Moriz out every night. They started late in 1902 with five nights in London at the Empire, Hippodrome, Palace, Trocadero, and Gaiety theaters. They continued with three evenings in Paris at the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques, Opéra, and Comédie-Française. They finished in Berlin with five more performances in five nights, then spent their first evening back in Vienna at the Imperial Court Theater, the Hofburgtheater. The next night they attended a premiere at the Deutsches Volkstheater. Within a few days, they were at the Imperial Court Opera, the Hofoper.
The array of choices in Vienna, the possibilities nearly every night, were fantastic. While many accounts of “Vienna 1900” have adopted a parochial, even provincial approach, presenting the city as simply a site of local culture by fixing only on what was Viennese, the Hapsburg capital was also an imperial center and a global one, attracting most of the world’s greatest conductors, singers, dancers, circuses, and variety stars through the 1890s and into the early 1900s.
This culture was a novelty for Hermine and Moriz because of their provincial backgrounds. Hermine’s opera, theater, and concert book reveals how Moriz and she exploited their new opportunities. Hermine made thirty entries in the first season that she recorded, starting in November 1898 when she was already four months pregnant with Käthe and Lene, and stopping in April 1899, a fortnight before the twins were born. She generally listed about forty performances each season—or between one and two each week—from the start of October when she returned from her annual summer holiday, until late May, when she prepared to leave again to escape the heat. Yet Hermine went out much more often than she noted, as she made no entries for most of one season and failed to record some performances even when keeping her diary more regularly.
By the time Gretl began to accompany her, Hermine and Moriz were reserving very expensive seats. “We had a box very near the stage. It was an outstanding location,” Gretl wrote after her first theater evening in 1906 and was soon even more precise, although the variations were small. They were once in the front row, once in the fifth, once in the seventh, once in the ninth, but otherwise always in the front row of a box on the parterre. Gretl was so particular, reflecting her parents’ concerns, because the opera and theater were among the places to be seen in Vienna. While there was generally a profound gulf between members of Vienna’s “second society,” such as the Gallias, and its “first society” of old aristocratic families, the best boxes in the Hofburgtheater and the Hofoper brought the two unusually close together, placing the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy literally on the same level, so for once they appeared as a community of equals. At the end of each performance, the occupants of all the boxes bowed to each other.
Opening nights and gala performances were integral to this pursuit of the most expensive, exclusive occasions. Hermine’s concert book suggests that Moriz and she went to their first premiere in 1901 and were soon attending so many that Hermine did not always identify them. In 1903 Gustav Mahler and Theobald Pollak gave Moriz and Hermine entrée to a much grander event—a gala at the Hofoper in honor of Britain’s King Edward VII presided over by Emperor Franz Joseph. As Mahler recorded in a letter to Alma, he gave his tickets to Pollak, who in turn gave them to Hermine, allowing the Gallias to see this spectacle from the director’s box. A decade later, Hermine and Moriz introduced Erni and Gretl to a similarly prestigious occasion, the opening of the Konzertverein, Vienna’s second concert hall, where Franz Joseph again presided.
Hermine dressed for going out, wearing her best pearls. (Illustration Credits ill.17)
Hermine and Moriz’s choice of productions and performances reveals how two patrons of the most exciting Viennese art and design engaged with other parts of the culture. A common assumption is that there was a chasm between the taste of Vienna’s conservatives and avant-garde—between the audience for the old and the new, the popular and the serious, the entertaining and the challenging. Hermine’s diary suggests otherwise. For all her taste for the modern, her Vienna was a city of Gu
stav Mahler and Buffalo Bill, Oscar Wilde and somersaulting cyclists, Shakespeare and Arthur Schnitzler, The Merry Widow, Isadora Duncan, and Mata Hari.
Gustav Mahler is often paired with Gustav Klimt. Just as the one Gustav dominated the visual art of Vienna, so the other dominated its musical life. Yet for all the controversy engendered by Klimt, Mahler excited a different order of opposition, acclaim, and argument, as Vienna took its music much more seriously than its painting. While Klimt was a public identity within the city, Mahler was its greatest celebrity, an object of incessant scrutiny, commentary, caricatures, and gossip. Mahler’s international standing, especially as a conductor, also far eclipsed Klimt’s reputation as a painter. Whereas Italy and Germany were the only countries outside Austria where Klimt was lauded by critics and found a market, opera houses and concert halls across Europe and North America clamored for Mahler to conduct.
Mahler’s transformation of the Vienna Opera was profound as he turned its orchestra into the finest in Europe, recruited soloists for their acting ability as well as their voices, and worked with Alfred Roller, a member of the Secession, to create Europe’s most innovative, evocative sets and lighting. Hermine and Moriz, who went to the opera more than any other venue, were quick to see many of these new productions. They attended the second night of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Es war einmal in 1901. They were at the Viennese premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Pique Dame in 1903 and the opening night of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly—along with Puccini himself—in 1907. They often saw Mahler, who was the opera’s principal conductor as well as its director, though Hermine never noted his involvement, just as Mahler omitted himself from the opera’s posters and programs.
Hermine’s first experience of the Vienna Philharmonic—a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1900—was different. When Mahler chose to rework Beethoven’s score in order to exploit the expansion of the orchestra and to “clarify” Beethoven’s intentions, many members of the Philharmonic protested these changes as well as Mahler’s impassioned interpretation. Several critics accused Mahler of perverting Beethoven’s work. The crowd that filled Vienna’s Musikverein was thrilled. Hermine’s initial record of the concert revealed nothing of her own response. Her assumption, commonplace in Vienna, was that a diary should simply record what happened, not what it felt like or why it mattered. “Mahler dirigiert,” “Mahler conducted,” was all she noted in pencil. But then, as an afterthought, she continued in ink, “fabelhaft,” “fabulous”—a description she otherwise used only after hearing Sergey Rachmaninoff perform his Piano Concerto no. 3.
She soon was attending more of the Philharmonic’s concerts where Mahler conducted Beethoven. But the opportunities to hear Mahler’s own symphonies in Vienna were much rarer as he was anxious to avoid accusations of exploiting his position to promote himself. The extent of public interest in his work was also small as he stretched the symphony to unprecedented proportions, moved from the romantic toward the expressionist, and engaged in the creeping chromaticism that led to twelve-tone music. Mahler’s usual practice on completing a new work was simply to conduct its Viennese premiere and give a repeat performance a few days later if there was sufficient demand. Still Hermine and Moriz were slow to attend, given their association with him and appetite for the controversial. They began late in 1905 with the Viennese premiere of his Fifth, which local critics characteristically dismissed as vulgar, superficial, sentimental, decadent, overheated, and retrograde, while the audience was ecstatic. Then Hermine and Moriz returned early in 1907 for the Viennese premiere of his Sixth.
Mahler was on his way to New York by the end of the year. He was lured by what the Metropolitan Opera claimed was the highest fee ever paid to a conductor, $15,000, or 75,000 crowns, for a three-month stint, twice his annual salary at the Hofoper. His repeated vilification in Vienna, as anti-Semitism intensified in the city, also spurred him to go. Like Klimt and Hoffmann, who signed a public letter defending him, Hermine and Moriz were probably outraged at Mahler’s treatment in the Hapsburg capital and dismayed at his decision to leave. When he gave a farewell performance of his Second Symphony at the Musikverein, they were there for one of his most affecting concerts. As the symphony ended with its great choral outburst, the auditorium erupted, compelling Mahler to return again and again to his podium. “Herrlich!” Hermine wrote, “Magnificent!”
Hermine and Moriz never saw Mahler perform again because his imperial pension was conditional on his neither directing nor conducting in Vienna, but Hermine and Moriz experienced more of Mahler’s music through other conductors, led by Bruno Walter. When Mahler died, at age fifty, of heart failure in 1911, Hermine and Moriz attended the first memorial concert together with Theobald Pollak, Erni, and Gretl, who was overwhelmed by her first encounter with Mahler’s music. When the concert ended with his Second, she started to cry.
A page from Gretl’s third diary with the leaf of ivy she took from Mahler’s grave in Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery, March 30, 1916. (Illustration Credits ill.18)
The Mahler concert that excited Gretl most was one she attended in 1915 when, for the second time in Vienna, Bruno Walter conducted Das Lied von der Erde, which was both a symphony and a song cycle, a new form of composition, soon to be Mahler’s most famous work. Gretl was thrilled to see Walter, whom she had come to idolize as a “God-given artist.” The presence of Mahler’s widow, Alma, and his only surviving daughter, Gucki, who shared a box with Mahler’s sister, Justine, and her violinist husband, Alfred Rosé, heightened Gretl’s sense of occasion. She was shaken by the music, which was especially important to her because of her connection to it through Theobald Pollak. In 1914 the critic Richard Specht revealed that Pollak gave Mahler Die chinesische Flöte, an anthololgy containing the Tang dynasty verses that Mahler set to music in Das Lied von der Erde. Gretl knew that Pollak had done more. Much as Alban Berg reported to Arnold Schönberg that Pollak was “the one who persuaded Mahler to do the Chinese poems,” so Gretl wrote, “The composition was created at the suggestion of Uncle Baldi.”
Her pride in Pollak’s role was familial. When he died of tuberculosis soon after the Mahler memorial concert, Gretl declared, “After parents, siblings, and grandparents, I loved him most,” putting Pollak before all her actual uncles and aunts. She was infuriated when her parents would not let her go to Pollak’s funeral because they expected she would become overexcited. “And if I did, so what?” she exclaimed, recognizing that funerals were occasions for such grief. She was even more incensed that another of her honorary uncles, her godfather Carl Moll, failed to return from Bologna for the funeral even though Pollak and he were old friends and Moll’s daughter, Maria, was a major beneficiary of Pollak’s will. “I hate Moll,” Gretl wrote.
The Orlik portrait that Mahler inscribed to Pollak was a tangible reminder of their friendship. It was the kind of object that Pollak would never have parted with while he was alive because Mahler was too important to him. Like other devotees of Mahler, Pollak probably preserved everything he received from Mahler, however trivial. But when Pollak drew up his last will shortly before his death in 1912, he specified that four of his closest friends, led by Moriz, should receive mementos from his estate and, typically, entrusted Moll with their selection. Most likely, Moll asked Moriz what he would like and he chose the portrait because it was both personal to Pollak and expressed the Gallias’ awe of Mahler.
Gretl first saw Mahler’s grave the following year, when Hermine took her to Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery to visit the grave of Hermine’s sister-in-law, Henny Hamburger. While Mahler’s memorial was designed by Josef Hoffmann so that it was as prestigious as contemporary Vienna could create, Gretl was appalled to find it overgrown with ivy. As she was accustomed to pressing plants into her diary, Gretl took a piece of ivy home and placed it across the page recording that day. Her birthday presents from her parents that July included the score of Das Lied von der Erde. Five years later she acquired a special issue of the Viennese magazine Moderne Welt devoted
to Mahler that reproduced an etching of his ivy-covered tomb and had the Orlik portrait on its cover.
The family’s favorite was almost everyone else’s favorite, Richard Wagner, whose appeal in Vienna extended across class, religious, and political lines. His work was still regarded as modern when Hermine and Moriz moved to the city in the early 1890s, forty years after Wagner emerged as a significant composer and ten years after his death. Another decade later, Wagner’s operas had become classics, the stuff of musical history. But the national, even racial characterization of Wagner’s operas as uniquely German did not change. By the turn of the century, Hermine and Moriz had seen at least six and were beginning to return to them. While they never attended a complete performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, they once saw four of his operas in eight days. Moriz loved Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner’s most accessible composition, which Hermine and he saw at least ten times.
This passion required Moriz and Hermine to ignore Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism, which he not only expressed in private conversations and letters but also made public in some of his most widely read essays, such as “Judaism in Music” and “What Is German?” As part of blaming Jews for everything wrong with the modern world, Wagner identified them as the antithesis of what was German, describing them as an “utterly alien element” that had “invaded” the “German essence,” accused them of “debasing German art,” and dwelled on the “involuntary repellence” that Germans felt for Jews. He also declared that Jews had to “cease to be Jews” and could be redeemed only by their “Untergang,” or “going under.”
Wagner’s operas were widely identified as expressing the same politics although they were not explicitly anti-Semitic. When Die Meistersinger was first performed in Vienna, members of the city’s Jewish community protested that Wagner had created the opera’s villain, the music critic Beckmesser, to deride them. The theater director Franz Bittong thought this anti-Semitism ran even deeper in the Meistersinger, prompting him to dub it “Music and the Jews.” Gustav Mahler had “no doubt” that Wagner “intended to ridicule the Jews” when he created the dwarf Mime in Siegfried and did so both “textually and musically.” Meanwhile, racist political groups embraced Wagner’s operas, and the magazine issued by the German Wagner Society became a leading anti-Semitic journal.
