Good Living Street

by Tim Bonyhady

  Vienna’s Jubiläumstheater, which was established under the patronage of Karl Lueger in 1898 with the explicitly racist mission of promoting “Aryan” authors and composers through a company “untainted by Jewish influence,” is one test of how Moriz and Hermine responded to anti-Semitism onstage. Although Moriz and Hermine patronized every other significant Viennese theater, they did not go to the Jubiläumstheater while it pursued this agenda, almost certainly a boycott triggered by its politics. Wagner was different both for Jews and for Jewish converts to Christianity. The Viennese musicologist Guido Adler was one of the founders of the city’s Wagner Society. The creator of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, first formulated his ideas for a Jewish state after being exalted by a performance of Tannhäuser. Mahler turned Vienna into the best city to experience Wagner’s work: he staged Wagner’s established operas with unprecedented frequency and performed them at their full length rather than with cuts, as was common. While most critics thought Wagner’s early opera, Rienzi, was of no interest, Mahler declared it the “greatest musical drama ever composed” and added it to the Hofoper’s repertoire. He also worked with Alfred Roller on innovative productions, starting with a Tristan und Isolde that was immediately extolled for creating a new operatic style because of its remarkable mix of music, color, and light. Just as Moriz and Hermine went to the premiere of Mahler’s Rienzi in 1901, so they were at the premiere of his Tristan in 1903.

  Hermine typically recorded nothing of her response to these operas. But when Alma Schindler had supper with Hermine and Moriz after they saw Die Walküre for the third time in 1901, she noted something of what Moriz thought. While Alma had gone from being overwhelmed by all of Die Walküre to finding parts of it tedious, she continued to be inspired by the finales of its first and third acts. She also was typically sure of her judgment—a confidence that came with thinking she had the potential to be the first great female composer. As part of her larger disdain for the Gallias, she recorded contemptuously that Moriz found the third act “charming.”

  The one opera that Moriz and Hermine could not see in Vienna was Parsifal, which Wagner decided would be performed only in the small Bavarian town of Bayreuth where he established the first modern musical festival in 1876. This monopoly, which lasted as long as Parsifal remained in copyright, helped to make the festival a success, as did Bayreuth’s status as the spiritual home of Wagnerism, the place to commune with the Master. The Wagnerites who went there also gained a great opportunity to lord it over those who did not, as George Bernard Shaw observed. “Ah, you should see it at Bayreuth,” they would say. Moriz and Hermine joined these devotees in 1908, attending two performances, like many other visitors. They started with Parsifal, which was still the original production from 1882, then saw Lohengrin, which was the first new production of Wagner’s son, Siegfried, who had just become the festival’s director. Hermine was thrilled by these productions, which both excited critical acclaim. She described the Parisfal as the “most wonderful performance,” the Lohengrin as “the most magnificent.”

  Hermine and Moriz were soon introducing their children to Wagner, and Gretl was characteristically receptive. When she saw Das Rheingold as an eleven-year-old in 1909, she much preferred it to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which was the only other opera she had seen, while her first Lohengrin, in 1911, left her crazy with excitement. “I am so easily enthused,” Gretl observed, “but this time with good reason,” since Moriz and Hermine thought the production could not have been bettered in Bayreuth. She was even more impressed a few weeks later when the family celebrated Hermine’s forty-first birthday by seeing Die Walküre. When Gretl went to bed, she had to cry; she did not know why.

  The family’s biggest Wagner year was 1912, which Moriz, Hermine, Erni, and Gretl started in Vienna on New Year’s Day with Die Meistersinger. A week later they saw another Lohengrin, which also made Gretl weep. They continued with Gotterdämmerung, which left Gretl so overwrought that she struggled to write about it afterward. The highlight was in July, when the entire family went to Bayreuth. Although Moriz and Hermine probably bought their tickets weeks, if not months, before, because demand for seats far exceeded supply, Gretl linked this trip to her matriculation just ten days earlier. She described it as her “Maturreise,” a reward for completing school with honors above and beyond the diamond and pearl pendant on a platinum chain that Moriz and Hermine gave her when she got her results.

  Hermine and Moriz intensified this experience by stopping in Nürnberg, the setting of Die Meistersinger, Wagner’s one major opera located in a specific time and place. Their immediate destination—the prime reason for their visit—was the house of the sixteenth-century poet and playwright Hans Sachs, one of Die Meistersinger’s main characters. Then they went to Bayreuth, where they paid more homage to Wagner by visiting his house, Wahnfried, where he was buried. Just as Gretl picked a piece of ivy from Mahler’s tomb, so she took a sprig of cypress from Wagner’s grave. The first performance that the family saw was a production by Siegfried Wagner of Die Meistersinger that, more than ever, was discussed and lauded in Germanic and anti-Semitic terms. The second was the production of Parsifal that Moriz and Hermine had already seen but was new to their children.

  The program for the Parsifal seen by the Gallias in Bayreuth, 1912—signed for Gretl by conductor Karl Muck. (Illustration Credits ill.19)

  This experience stayed with Gretl when she returned to Vienna and continued to accompany her parents to Wagner’s operas more often than those of any other composer. She was, she wrote after seeing Verdi’s Rigoletto, too great a “Wagneriana” to have much liking for Italian opera. Although the performance of Parsifal that she saw in Bayreuth was widely dismissed as tired and lifeless, it remained her benchmark when Parsifal came out of copyright in 1913 and companies across Europe immediately began performing it. When Hermine and Moriz took Gretl to two of these productions at Vienna’s Volksoper and Hofoper, Gretl was appalled by the first and unimpressed by the second. Nothing compared with Bayreuth.

  Isadora Duncan brought modern dance to Vienna in 1902, appearing barefoot and free of corsets and tights in the briefest of translucent tunics. Her three performances before small, invited audiences shocked and excited those who saw the twenty-four-year-old American because she appeared “nude or nearly so.” Had Hermine and Moriz wished, they could have been among the 150 men and women who saw Duncan at the Secession, where she was introduced by the writer Hermann Bahr. Their patronage of the Secession would have given Hermine and Moriz access to this event, which started at ten o’clock one Friday evening and finished well after midnight. Their next opportunity was in 1903, when Duncan performed for a week at Vienna’s Carl Theater and they bought tickets for her last night.

  They went to the theater almost as often as the opera, but had little interest in classics. While Schiller’s emphasis on freedom is often said to have made his work particularly important to Jews, Hermine and Moriz went to just three of his plays when they had only themselves to please. They saw even less of Shakespeare, who occupied almost as central a place in Austrian as in British culture. All that changed when Erni and Gretl began high school because Hermine and Moriz wanted to enhance their education. Over the next few years, they all went to most of Schiller’s plays and saw a slate of Shakespeare, while Moriz and Hermine bought their collected works, a card game that tested knowledge of Schiller, and a children’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays for Gretl, whose response was often critical. “I find our classical dramas more beautiful than the English ones,” she observed after As You Like It. “Too many ghosts, too many battles,” she complained after Richard III.

  The best contemporary playwrights from across Europe, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Schnitzler, appealed much more to Hermine and Moriz. The work of these playwrights often addressed the “woman question,” especially the domination of women by men within marriage and the double standard that applied to men and women when it came to sex outside i
t. Their work also occasionally featured the “new woman,” who looked for equality in her relations with men, often chose to remain single and pursue a career, and was not ashamed of her interest in sex. The result was censorship in many European countries. Because Vienna’s Hofoper and Hofburgtheater were both funded by the emperor, they were subject to particular controls. But foreign companies playing in private theaters enjoyed greater latitude and so became the prime medium through which Vienna saw controversial plays and operas.

  One example was Franz Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, or Spring Awakening, the first German play about adolescent sexuality, in which the fourteen-year-old Wendla falls pregnant (without understanding how conception happens), has an abortion at her mother’s insistence, and dies as a result of a botched operation. While Wedekind completed Spring Awakening in 1891, it was not performed until 1906, when Germany’s leading director, Max Reinhardt, secured permission to stage it in Berlin by emphasizing that he practiced “a discreet performance style, free of every coarse or too drastic an effect” and by omitting all uses of the word “intercourse.” When Spring Awakening ran for over three hundred nights in Berlin, other theaters became eager to stage it. The first Viennese production was by Reinhardt’s company in 1907, when Moriz and Hermine were away from the city. The next was in 1908, when Reinhardt staged it at Vienna’s most radical theater, the Deutsches Volkstheater, and Hermine and Moriz went to the third night.

  Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s play of the same name, was even more notorious. Had Gustav Mahler gotten his way, its premiere would have been at the Hofoper in 1905, but the imperial censor rejected it as obscene and blasphemous. The censor thought Salome’s desire to possess the head of John the Baptist and her rapture over his dead eyes, hair, and lips were “morally repugnant,” exemplifying her “perverted sensuality.” When Mahler questioned this decision, the censor required that the Hebrew name of John the Baptist and all allusions to Christ be removed or rewritten. The censor also reiterated that Salome was unsuited for the imperial stage because it belonged to “the domain of sexual pathology.”

  The obvious alternative venue was the Deutsches Volkstheater. By the time the Breslau Opera finally brought Salome there in 1907, it had played in many cities, attracting critical acclaim and vast crowds in some, while failing to secure an audience in others and being canceled at New York’s Metropolitan Opera at the insistence of one of the daughters of the banker John Pierpont Morgan. Interest in Salome in Vienna was consequently intense. Tickets for the “sensationspremiere,” as one critic characterized the opening night, sold out almost immediately. The audience was thick with aristocrats and musicians, the rich and famous, the men in frock coats or smoking jackets, the women in their most glamorous gowns. As the curtain rose, another critic sensed “a slightly unhealthy excitement” in the packed auditorium, which again included Moriz and Hermine.

  Mata Hari was another sensation. She was a Dutchwoman, originally known as Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, who created an exotic identity for herself after spending three years in Java and Sumatra while married to a Dutch army captain. As she kept changing her story about whether she was a child of European parents born in the East Indies, part Indian and part Dutch, or the daughter of an Indian or Javanese temple dancer, critics occasionally branded her a fraud. But on the whole she was accepted as an Oriental who revealed the mysteries of the Brahmin cult as she played the part of a servant of God who spent her entire life inside a temple and through her dance grew nearer to the divine. This invocation of religion helped Mata Hari to avoid being charged with indecency when she first set Paris talking in 1905 with a performance that saw her strip off her multicolored veils until she was naked, except for bejeweled brass plates over her breasts and bracelets on her wrists, arms, and ankles.

  Her first performance in Vienna was in 1906 when she was already among the most highly paid dancers in Europe. Like Isadora Duncan, she appeared at the Secession before invitees who, this time, included Hermine and Moriz and their friends, the Luzzattos. The centerpiece of the stage was a Buddha placed between tall vases and cherry trees covered with white blossoms, while a blue-white light reminiscent of a shimmering moon illuminated the floor. As Mata Hari removed her clothing, her performance grew wilder and wilder until she was naked except for her breast plates and bracelets. While the critic Ludwig Hevesi had no doubt that this performance was high art—an example of the “new dance” that Duncan had done most to create—he knew the audience did not care. “To what extent this rhythmic activity was dance, and to what extent it was Hindu hardly worried the spectators. They were indulging their eyes to the full.”

  Operetta occupied a very different place in Viennese culture. It was the most popular musical genre, the mainstay of several theaters, and vital to the city’s identity. But it was dismissed by many of Vienna’s cultural elite as pap for the masses. The one exception was Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss Jr., the only Viennese composer of popular music in the second half of the nineteenth century whose work was regarded as serious art. When Mahler introduced Die Fledermaus into the Hofoper’s repertoire following the Waltz King’s death in 1899, he underwrote its place in the canon. Hermine, who discovered Die Fledermaus as a girl in Freudenthal, saw it with Moriz during its first week at the Hofoper. At the start of 1900 they saw it again. At the end of the year they saw it there on New Year’s Eve.

  No new operettas gained such acceptance, but the most successful works attracted almost everyone in the city. The Geisha by the British composer Sidney Jones was one example. As Jones exploited the contemporary European fascination with the East, The Geisha became the most popular British operetta of the 1890s, far eclipsing The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. The Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler saw The Geisha in London in 1896, and then went again in 1897, when the Carl Theater staged it in Vienna. Hermine and Moriz, who in some seasons went to no operettas but in others went to one or two, saw The Geisha in 1898, as did Alma Schindler, who was impressed enough to return.

  An array of new Viennese operettas also attracted Hermine and Moriz, including the first Viennese song-and-dance show, Heinrich Reinhardt’s The Sweet Girl, and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow, the greatest international musical success of the new century, which redefined operetta through both its musical inventiveness and its naturalistic characters. Hermine and Moriz first saw The Merry Widow in 1906, three months after its premiere, when it was still struggling after receiving mixed reviews, but its audience was starting to grow through word of mouth. Hermine and Moriz returned with the Luzzattos in 1907 for its gala four-hundredth performance, featuring a new overture by Lehár conducted by Lehár himself.

  Circuses also attracted Hermine and Moriz, both with and without their children, suggesting Hermine and Moriz’s own enjoyment of these entertainments. The most spectacular was the Wild West show of William F. Cody, a.k.a. Buffalo Bill, which began touring Europe in the late 1880s and required a special train to move its eight hundred performers. When the entire family saw Cody’s troupe at the Prater in 1906, on its final European tour, its most famous female star, Annie Oakley, was long gone. But the sixty-year-old Cody was still starting each show by donning his buckskins and galloping into the arena on his white horse to announce his “Congress of Rough Riders of the World.”

  Vienna’s music halls combined the exotic, erotic, and extraordinary. When Hermine and Moriz first went to Vienna’s oldest music hall, the Ronacher, in 1900, the evening started with “the French eccentric,” Elise de Vere, in fact a Cockney actress and singer whom the British impresario Charles Cochran reckoned had the shapeliest legs he ever saw. The evening concluded with “the phenomenal contortionist,” Juno Saimo. Its star was the Spanish dancer La Belle Chavita, whose performances, a Parisian critic observed, “would have made Saint Anthony himself swear.” The failure of Hermine and Moriz to return suggests they did not enjoy it, but within a few years they were regulars at the Ronacher and its main rival, the Apoll
o.

  The German essayist George Simmel looked on these theaters as proof of the debilitating consequences of modern urban life. While their audiences included men and women of all classes, Simmel wrote as if they simply attracted working-class men. He proclaimed: “Because life uses up his strength completely, all that may be offered him as relaxation is something that requires absolutely no effort,” namely “gleaming colors, light music, and finally—and principally—sexual feelings.” For all that sex was integral to these theaters, some of their stars were also at the forefront of the modern, led by Mata Hari, who, after performing at the Secession, began appearing before a general audience at the Apollo where she continued her elaborate removal of her clothes but wore a body stocking to keep within the law. As this legal stricture provoked a fierce debate over art and obscenity, nakedness and nudity, Hermine and Moriz went on another of their theater outings with the feminist and socialist Elisabeth Luzzatto and her industrialist husband, Maximilian, putting them among the few who could talk from experience about both of Mata Hari’s acts.

  6

  Pictures

  The fin de siècle was the first great era of the poster. The French artist Jules Chéret was largely responsible when he turned color lithographs into a powerful form of advertising in the late 1860s, relying on bold drawing, few colors, a simple text, and a beautiful young woman as the dominant figure. By the 1890s, many artists across Europe and the United States were following Chéret’s example while others were more innovative. Their posters were largely used on billboards, but were also recognized immediately as worth collecting. As many were devoted to products that were the stuff of keen competition and strong demand, one of their prime subjects was new forms of lighting. The Gallias’ involvement with modern art started when Moriz commissioned one of these posters for Auer von Welsbach’s Gas Glowing Light Company. This poster by Heinrich Lefler, promoting the gas mantle, was the first significant poster by an Austrian artist. By commissioning it, Moriz was responsible for Austria’s joining the international movement.