The Play of the Eyes, page 5
What distinguished him from other conductors and gave him his special sort of freedom was that his power was always exerted for the sake of something new. He did not confine himself to any one friend, but took up any that offered him a difficult task. Then he would be first to introduce a totally unfamiliar brand of music to the public, its discoverer, so to speak. He was intent on accumulating discoveries, he wanted to see more and more of them, and since his appetite grew with their number and variety, he could not always content himself with music. He was drawn to extend the sphere of his power, to include the theater, for example. Thus he resolved to organize festivals devoted to new theater as well as new music. It was in such a moment of his career that I met him.
* * *
Hermann Scherchen was always in quest of novelty. When he arrived in a city where he was going to conduct for the first time, he made it his business to find out who was being spoken of. When a name seemed to be associated with the shocking and unexpected, he did his best to make contact with its bearer. He invited the man to a rehearsal and made sure that his new “discovery” would find him in such a welter of activity that there was barely time to shake hands. Conversations with his new “friend”—in whom, as he had let him know, he was “interested”—would have to wait until next time, though it was not certain that he would have more time then. Nevertheless, the new “friend” felt honored, because the go-between had told him how extremely eager the conductor had been to meet him. The first reception had been cold, but that may have been due to lack of time, anyone could see how exacting a task the conductor had set himself, especially in a city like Vienna, well known for its resolutely conservative taste in music. One couldn’t possibly take it amiss that a pioneer should concentrate on his work; one could only be grateful to him for suggesting a second meeting at a more favorable time. Amid all the fuss and bustle, the new recruit could see that the conductor expected something of him, and since he was interested only in new things, it was clear that he expected something new. Thus, even before one had a chance to open one’s mouth one felt included among those entitled to regard themselves as new men. Several more occasions might go by without a conversation developing; and the more often it was postponed, the more importance one attached to it.
But when a woman who interested Scherchen was among the intermediaries, the process was not so long-drawn-out. Then he and his retinue would come straight to the Café Museum after a rehearsal and listen to the candidate in silence. He would force the candidate to talk about what was dearest to his heart, usually a composition, in my case a play, always taking care not to say a single word about it himself. What one first noticed on such an occasion was his thin, compressed lips. He seemed so unresponsive one could doubt that he was listening; his face was smooth and self-possessed; not the slightest sign of approval or disapproval. He carried his head erect on a rather thick neck and rigid shoulders. The more effectively he kept silent, the more his interlocutor talked; before he knew it, he was forced into the role of a petitioner pleading with a potentate, who reserved his decision as long as possible, perhaps forever.
Yet Hermann was not really a silent man. When you got to know him better, you were amazed at how volubly he could talk. Mostly in self-praise. Hymns of triumph, one might say, if it didn’t sound so dull and colorless. Then there were times when he would suddenly blurt out anything that entered his head, stating the most fanciful ideas with an air of absolute authority. For instance: “The year 1100 B.C. witnessed an explosion in the history of mankind.” He meant an explosion of artistic inspiration, he had a weakness for the word “explosion.” We had been to a museum together; as was his wont, he had made his way rather quickly past objects of widely divergent origin, Cretan, Hittite, Syrian, Babylonian. In reading the notices he had been struck by the recurrence of the date 1100 B.C., and with his usual self-assurance he was quick to conclude: “The year 1100 B.C. witnessed an explosion in the history of mankind.”
He was silent, however, relentlessly silent, in the company of anyone whom he thought of discovering or helping. He would sooner have bitten his tongue off than let any word of praise escape him. At such times his determination to waste no words and bestow no praise gave him a very special facial expression.
It was H. who sent me to Anna Mahler with a letter. He left no stone unturned. He had known her in her early days, when she was married to Ernst Krenek. At that time he hadn’t progressed far enough in his career to expect much attention from her. Besides, he thought she was wasting herself by submitting to Krenek, whom she helped in his work. Krenek composed quickly, he was always composing, and she sat huddled beside him copying what he composed. That was her purely musical period. She had learned to play seven or eight instruments and she still practiced them by turns. She was impressed by productivity—to her mind prolific, incessant, uninterrupted composition was a proof of genius. This cult of superabundant inspiration stayed with her all her life. All her admiration was reserved for those she regarded as creative artists. When she turned from music to literature, it was long novels that aroused her enthusiasm; no sooner had she finished one than she began another. In her Krenek years her fertility cult was confined to music, and she seemed content to serve the young creative genius.
Krenek was one of the first in H.’s gallery of discoveries. He must have noticed Anna then, but in her role as Krenek’s handmaiden she was of no interest to him. Later he turned up in Vienna with high-flown plans, and as usual he renewed his old connections. He was invited to the mansion on Maxingstrasse, which belonged to the publisher Paul Zsolnay, and there he found the golden-haired Anna, now the lady of an opulent household. She had blossomed out as a sculptress in her own right. He may also have visited her in her studio, but that is unlikely. He undoubtedly saw her at a reception at the Zsolnays’. Her mother, whose power in the musical life of Vienna he was well aware of, had a poor opinion of him, but that didn’t deter him from cultivating the daughter. He put out feelers, wrote Anna a letter of courtship, and asked me to bring it to her in her studio.
He was well disposed to me in his way. He had been impressed by a reading of The Wedding at the home of Bella Band, an ideal setting, upper rather than lower middle class, but otherwise the same sort of people as in the play. Not that he said a single word; after two hours of drunken wedding celebration and the final catastrophe, he was as silent as the tomb. As usual, his features remained cold and inexpressive, his lips tightly sealed. Still, I saw a change in him. It seemed to me that he had almost imperceptibly shrunk. When the reading was over, he did not utter a single domineering word. He took no refreshment and soon left the house.
It was his way to leave abruptly. He stood up and went, saying no more than was indispensable under the circumstances. He extended his hand, but not very far, even in that he did not choose to be accommodating. He not only kept his hand close to his body, he also held it high; you had to raise yours to get at it. In giving you his hand he was bestowing a favor, and with it went a brief command, an order to call on him at such and such a time. Since there were always people around him, you felt this to be a distinction and at the same time a humiliation. In these leave-takings, all trace of a smile vanished from his face. He seemed lifeless and grave; an act of state was being performed by a jerkily but powerfully moving statue. Then he would abruptly turn around and a moment after his final command, his order to call on him at such and such a time, you were looking at his broad back, which set itself resolutely but not too quickly in motion. Though as a conductor he was used to expressing himself with his back, the movements of his back lacked variety. It was no more expressive than his face; determination, arrogance, judgment, coldness were all he wished to reveal of himself.
Silence was his surest instrument of domination. He soon realized that where music was concerned I had little to offer. A teacher-pupil relationship such as he excelled in was out of the question, I played no instrument, I was not a member of any orchestra, and I was not a composer. So he would have to subjugate me in some other way. He thought of including theater in some of the modern music festivals he was interested in organizing. As I’ve said, he listened to my Wedding, and turned to ice. He would have been silent in any case. But what deepened his silence in this case was that he left immediately, a little more quickly than usual. If I had known him better at the time, I would have inferred that he didn’t quite know what to think.
I assumed that the atmosphere of the house repelled him, the hostess with her dark, Oriental bulk spread out on a sofa barely long enough to hold her, but overflowing at the sides. I didn’t feel at all comfortable while reading the part of Johanna Segenreich in her presence. Though Bella Band came of an entirely different, upper-middle-class background and wouldn’t have honored Segenreich with so much as a glance if she had found herself in a room with her, every one of Segenreich’s words told me they were birds of a feather. Still, I don’t think she felt they had anything to do with her; she listened because she was the hostess; the reading had been arranged by her son, who was a friend of mine. Insofar as any notice was taken of modern music in Vienna, its only representative to be honored with an invitation was H., who was known as a pioneer, but nothing more. The female bulk on the couch behaved exactly the same way, she didn’t run away, she lay there to the end, but she smiled no more than H. himself, she favored him with no glance of any kind, it would have been impossible to say what went on in that flesh during the catastrophe scenes; I am certain that she experienced no fear, but I also doubt that H. was frightened by the earthquake.
Some other young people were present. They too probably felt protected by H.’s coldness and Bella Band’s unswerving readiness for love. Thus during the reading I was probably the only one to feel afraid. I have never been able to read The Wedding aloud without feeling afraid. As soon as the chandelier begins to sway, I feel the end approaching and it is beyond me how I manage to maintain my composure through all the Dance of Death scenes—which amount, after all, to a third of the play.
* * *
At the end of June 1933 I received a letter from H., who was then in Riva. In it he informed me that he had read The Wedding again and been horrified by the atmosphere of hopeless, icy abstraction in which all this happened. He was overwhelmed, he said, by the power the writer had at his command and the use this power made of him. “Come and see me soon, preferably after July 23, in Strasbourg and we will fight our way through it together.”
He said he believed the writer to be capable of great things, but that never had he seen so much depend so utterly on the man himself as in my case. To be capable of something so new, to master so somnambulistically sure a technique, to be driven by the powers of the resonant, as well as the cogitated, word was a great challenge. I must, he said, live up to it.
He asked me to deliver a letter to “Anni,” as he called her, and be sure to put it into her own hands. “Can you do anything with the enclosed prospectus? Give it publicity. Cordially, H. Sch.”
It costs me an inner struggle to cite the approximate content of this letter. But I cannot pass it over in silence, because it played a crucial role in my life. That letter took me to Strasbourg, and if it were not for the people I met there, my novel would not have been published. It also provides a succinct characterization of H., of his way of winning people over, of binding them, usurping them and making use of them.
There was more than calculation in his approach to me and more than a command. His horror at helpless, icy abstraction was not feigned. He said more about it than I have quoted and meant it. But he could never content himself with meaning it. Having exalted me, he orders me to Strasbourg, to his modern-music festival, where I really have no business, to which he has ordered countless others, who, however, are musicians, whose works he is going to perform for the first time. “Come and see me soon,” he says. But exactly what for? “So we can fight our way through it together.” What monstrous presumption! What can he fight through with a writer? He wants to have me in Strasbourg, someone he can represent as promising, a sideshow for his circus of promising musicians. What sort of fight has he in mind? To justify his summons—though he knows that even if this joint fight of ours made sense he wouldn’t have a moment’s time—he issues a pretentious judgment, which he instantly revokes with his reference to the supposed danger facing me. In the end, after all this buffeting this way and that, one thing at least becomes clear to me: how much I need H. A secret letter is being sent to “Anni.” She too is being ordered somewhere, for other purposes. Not to mention the enclosed prospectus for the festival and the order to “give it publicity.”
I’d give a good deal to see some of his letters to other people who were ordered to that festival. The musicians came, they had good reason to. The five widows of famous composers, whom H. wanted to corral for the festival, were a special inspiration. I can remember only three of the five who were invited: the widows of Mahler, Busoni and Reger. None came. Instead came one who didn’t belong in those surroundings at all, Gundolf’s freshly baked widow, all in black, as cheerful and communicative as could be.
Trophies
I had been several times at the house on Hohe Warte;1 Anna had received me privately through the back door before she decided to introduce me to her mother. We were both curious, but for different reasons: she because she had never heard of me, thought poorly of her daughter’s judgment of people and wanted to assure herself that I was not dangerous; I because all Vienna was talking about Alma Mahler.
I was led across an open courtyard—between the flagstones of which grass was allowed to grow with deliberate naturalness—to a kind of sanctum where Mama received me. A large woman, overflowing in all directions, with a sickly-sweet smile and bright, wide-open, glassy eyes. Her first words sounded as if she had heard so much about me and had long been waiting for this meeting. “Annerl has told me,” she said at once, so diminishing2 her daughter from the start; not for a moment did she leave it in doubt who was important here and in general.
She seated herself; a look of complicity gave me to understand that I was to sit beside her. I obeyed hesitantly; after one look at her I was aghast; everyone talked of her beauty; the story was that she had been the most beautiful girl in Vienna and had so impressed Mahler, much older than herself, that he had courted her and taken her for his wife. The legend of her beauty had endured for over thirty years. And now she stood there, now she sat heavily down, a slightly tipsy woman, looking much older than her age. She had gathered all her trophies around her.
The small room in which she received me was so arranged that the most important items of her career were within reach. She herself was the guide in this private museum, and she allowed nothing to be overlooked. Less than six feet from her stood the vitrine in which the score of Mahler’s unfinished tenth symphony lay open. My attention was called to it, I stood up, went over and read the dying man’s cries of distress—it was his last work—to his wife, his “Almshi, beloved Almshi,” and more such intimate, desperate cries; it was to these most intimate pages that the score had been opened. This was no doubt a standard means of impressing visitors. I read these words in the handwriting of a dying man and looked at the woman to whom they had been addressed. Twenty-three years later, she took them as if they were meant for her now. From all who looked at this showpiece she expected the look of admiration due to her for this dying man’s homage, and she was so sure of the effect of his writing in the score that the vapid smile on her face expanded into a grin. She had no suspicion of the horror and disgust I felt. I did not smile, but she misinterpreted my gravity as the piety due to a dying genius, and since all this was happening in the memorial chapel she had erected to her happiness, she took my piety as one more homage to herself.
Then it was time for the picture that hung on the wall directly across from her, a portrait of her, painted a few years after the composer had spoken his last words. I had noticed it immediately; it held me fast from the first moment, it had a dangerous, murderous quality. In my consternation over the open music score, my vision grew blurred and I saw the picture as a portrait of the composer’s murderess. I had no time to reject this thought, for she stood up, took three steps toward the wall, stationed herself beside me and pointed at the picture, saying: “And this is me as Lucrezia Borgia, painted by Kokoschka.” It was a painting from his great period. From Kokoschka himself, who was still living, she distanced herself at once by adding in a tone of commiseration: “Too bad he never got anywhere!” He had turned his back on Germany, he was a “degenerate painter,” he had gone to Prague, where he was painting the portrait of President Masaryk. Giving way to my surprise at her contemptuous remark, I asked: “What do you mean he never got anywhere?” She replied: “Because there he is in Prague, a poor refugee. He hasn’t painted anything decent since.” And with a glance at Lucrezia Borgia: “He had real ability then. That picture really frightens people.” I had indeed been frightened, and now on learning that Kokoschka had never got anywhere, I was even more so. He had served his purpose by painting several pictures of “Lucrezia Borgia,” and now, what a pity, he was a failure, because the new masters of Germany were not pleased with him and there was no future in doing the portrait of President Masaryk.
