Overture of Hope, page 5
While he may have been a talented conductor, Krauss was also arrogant and a showman. In 1929 he made guest appearances conducting orchestras in Philadelphia and New York, where “Mr. Krauss postured and cavorted on the stand” in what one music critic called “a singularly uneven” concert at Carnegie Hall. “He crouched low or bent sideways, tossed his hair, threatened the skies.”47
That regal bearing, by turns supremely confident and brusque, both fascinated and frightened Ida and Louise. Impatient and intense, he seemed particularly contemptuous of autograph seekers. “I was unaware then that Krauss did not take very kindly to these frivolous trimmings of his job,” recalled Ida. “Indeed, it is recorded that, on one occasion when he was pestered by autograph-hunters after a performance of Carmen, he gravely wrote ‘Georges Bizet!’ on several programs, and then passed on, leaving astounded speculation in his wake.”48 In order not to waste her own precious camera film, the ever practical Ida dispatched one of the regulars from the queue to ask the handsome stranger for his autograph—just to make sure he was indeed Krauss. Looking over the conductor’s shoulder, Ida watched as he signed “Clemens Krauss” with “a variety of turns and twists.” “Oh, it is Clemens Krauss!” she exclaimed, “rather too audibly.”49
By the time she photographed Krauss and his wife, Ida had already amassed an impressive collection of what she called her opera “snaps” that she took with her trusty Brownie. Sometimes, she would make extra prints and bestow them on the delighted tenors and sopranos of whom she was particularly enamored. Her friendship with Pinza began after she handed him the snap of him and his daughter. She would give her opera stars a copy of the photo and then ask them to sign others for her and Louise.
But this brooding, handsome man seemed to cast his own spell over her.
She was “so overcome by his somewhat impatient manner that, for the first time in my snapping career, I fumbled and jerked the camera as I clicked the shutter.” Although she got his companion, whom the sisters knew immediately as the soprano Viorica Ursuleac, in a jaunty hat and two-toned shoes, Krauss, his hands in the pocket of his trench coat, was captured out of focus. “I had blurred Krauss badly, to my great chagrin,” recalled Ida.50
Undaunted, she decided to try again, and waited outside the stage door at another lunchtime for her opportunity to snap the great man: “Even now, I can’t imagine how I dared to hang on. But—I lay claim to only one premonition in all this story—as I sat there, fuming, on my camp stool, I knew suddenly that I would be sorry all my life if I went away now.”
When she finally saw the couple passing by the queue, Ida rushed up to Ursuleac to show her the picture and asked them if she could snap them again. Puffing on a cigar, and amused by this curious English turn of phrase, Krauss encouraged her to snap away. “Snap me again, snap me again,” he ordered goodhumoredly.51 And gratefully she did. The best of these photos would become the most important in their collection of opera snaps, and one of Ida’s most treasured possessions. Years later, Ida wrote in pencil on the back: “Krauss and Ursuleac outside Covent Garden.”52
It would be the photograph that would change many lives.
CHAPTER 3 The Romance Writer
In the summer of 1934, Ida and Louise excitedly packed for their first trip to Austria. They were off to the Salzburg Festival, thrilled at the prospect of meeting up with Pinza, and especially Krauss and Ursuleac, who would be among the star attractions at the month-long summer musical event. Emboldened by their growing familiarity with opera and its biggest stars, they planned to track down the famous couple to present them with the new photographs that Ida had taken—this time in sharp focus.
But on July 25, three days before performers in the grand “Salt City” were preparing to receive hundreds of opera fanatics from around the world, a group of Nazis stormed the federal chancellery 150 miles away in central Vienna. They fired two shots at Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss that hit him at close range—the first bullet paralyzed him below the waist while the second caused bleeding around the throat. The coup leaders refused to allow a doctor to attend to the wounds or a priest to administer last rites, and the dictator, who had previously angered Hitler by cracking down on the Nazi Party, died a very slow, agonizing death. As Dollfuss lay bleeding on the floor of his office, Austrian forces mobilized to put down the attempted coup, which was communicated in bold, black, capital letters across newspaper front pages around the world as many worried that Europe could again be on the brink of war. After all, the First World War had begun with the assassination of an Austrian leader in 1914.
For the Cooks, the Dollfuss assassination would prove a jolt of sorts to their happy lives, “the first international event whose repercussions deeply affected our private affairs,” recalled Ida. “I blush now to think how ignorant we were of the significance of this event.”1
They weren’t the only ones to downplay the importance of the attempted coup. British war secretary Viscount Hailsham dismissed concerns that Europe could soon find itself again at war, although he condemned the assassination: “Today, the whole civilized world is united in condemning the dastardly outrage of the Nazis and no nation would have the temerity to challenge the opinion of the civilized world.”2 But just in case the Nazis did have the temerity, and were planning to invade Austria after all, Italy—then an enemy of the Nazis—sent warplanes and ships as hundreds of Italian soldiers massed at the Austrian border. Dozens of suspected Nazi coup plotters were rounded up in Austria. In Vienna, authorities declared martial law and closed the country’s borders.
In London, Ida and Louise fretted—not so much about geopolitics as about how they could make their way to the festival if the Austrian border were closed. Krauss was conducting six operas at the summer festival—most of them starring Ursuleac in leading roles—including Der Rosenkavalier and the gala opening night’s Fidelio, while Ezio Pinza was going to be playing the lead role in a much-anticipated Don Giovanni in the original Italian. The thought of missing the festival, which was scheduled to open on July 28, filled Ida and Louise with dread. “Apart from being vaguely shocked by the way foreigners behaved toward each other, we were concerned with only one aspect of the [Dollfuss] murder: Would it put a stop to our holiday in Salzburg?”3
Despite the political turmoil—sporadic fighting even spilled over into the Salzburg suburbs—the music festival was only postponed by a day to accommodate Dollfuss’s state funeral, although, sadly, the first night’s performance of Fidelio had to be canceled.
Austria’s borders, which had closed for a few frantic days after the assassination, reopened. Nonetheless, the turmoil kept many foreign visitors away from the festival. But it never occurred to the Cooks to cancel their journey. They traveled to Salzburg third class, by overnight train, “sitting upright,” ignoring the advice of a German family in their compartment who warned that there was no possibility that the sisters would be able to cross the border into Austria after so much political unrest.
“Only in Germany, where the National Socialists are putting everything on a good orderly footing, is it safe,” they said.
“But I thought this Hitler was a National Socialist,” said Ida.
“Yes, yes indeed! The man who will save the country, the greatest man of the age!”4
As Ida later noted about this exchange, the sisters thought it “a bit steep to nominate anyone but a Britisher of this title, but… foreigners must have their own illusions.”5
As for not being able to cross the border into Austria, Ida and Louise were nonplussed. They had booked their trip as they always did—through Thomas Cook, the venerable British travel agency. “We were completely unmoved, merely reiterating that ‘the man at Cooks’ had said it would be all right, so it would be all right,” insisted Ida. “For this was how we thought in those days.… The British knew best and that was that.”6 In this case, the British knew little, but the show did indeed go on. The sisters completed their journey in peace and found Salzburg “looking divine and apparently peaceful.”7
The Salzburg Festival opened on Sunday, July 29, the same day that Kurt Schuschnigg, a former minister of justice and education in the Dollfuss regime, was installed as the new chancellor in Vienna. Krauss began the festival on a somber note, conducting Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, in an 11:00 a.m. performance. In a nod to the assassination, Krauss preceded the opera, in which a Spanish noblewoman disguises herself as an errand boy in order to free her husband from prison, with the funeral march from Beethoven’s Third Symphony Eroica. It was a memorable and eerie performance, especially as armed Austrian police patrolled the theater and were stationed at the upper galleries, according to Ida who reported on the “extraordinary and significant scene.” In most stagings of the opera, singers acting as guards in period costume patrol the prison yard, but “on this occasion…the line of guards (this time in modern uniform) continued round the arc of the auditorium.” The symbolism wasn’t lost on Ida, who recalled the chilling scene years later—a moment when “the melodrama of the operatic world was duplicated in the modern world.”8
While the Nazis could do little more for now to disrupt the country under another dictator, Hitler turned his attention to the Salzburg Festival. Despite German assurances that relations were back to normal between the two countries after the Dollfuss assassination, behind the scenes Hitler engaged in his own music-world sabotage. Germans caught traveling to Austria suffered heavy fines of up to one thousand Reichsmarks, and at the last minute the German tenor Hans Grahl was yanked from the festival’s production of Tristan und Isolde because he was “peremptorily barred” by Germany from crossing the border. Grahl lingered near the frontier for weeks in hopes of obtaining a visa to Austria that was never granted.
Moreover, Hitler pressured Richard Strauss not to travel to Salzburg even though festival officials had planned a birthday tribute to the German composer—a cycle of Strauss operas to be conducted by the maestro himself. Strauss had celebrated his seventieth birthday a month earlier in June 1934 and was to have conducted two performances of Fidelio, a role that was hastily passed on to his Austrian protégé Clemens Krauss. Strauss was also to have conducted his own operas, Rosenkavalier and Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow) but was also replaced at the last minute by Krauss. Die Frau Ohne Schatten was canceled due “to technical reasons,” according to the festival program.
In retaliation, the Vienna State Opera, which had been in negotiations to produce Strauss’s The Taciturn Woman for its upcoming season, decided to scrap the production altogether, threatening a total ban on works by the German composer. Strauss feared a sudden and perhaps massive loss of income and royalties because of the political crisis in which he was now a minor player. He was under a great deal of pressure both from the Nazis and the Austrian government even as he tried to remain as far away from politics as possible. Strauss never joined the Nazi Party, although he was in a privileged position with Hitler, who admired his work (even as Nazi Joseph Goebbels considered him rather tiresome).
Strauss probably thought the Nazis were a fleeting phenomenon. In any event, he was determined not to allow them to interfere with what he considered a higher calling, and at the beginning of the Nazi regime Strauss believed he could use his prestige to institute reforms for musicians. And, in open defiance of growing anti-Semitism, he continued to work with his longtime collaborator the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig until Zweig was forced to flee Vienna. Strauss also fiercely protected his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and his two grandchildren from the Nazis. “I made music under the Kaiser, and under Ebert,” Strauss said to his family, referring to former German leaders. “I’ll survive this lot, as well.”9
Shocked by Strauss’s sudden cancelation, Krauss and Ursuleac tried to figure out what was really going on behind the scenes. They called Hermann Goering from the switchboard at the Bristol Hotel—a call that was wiretapped by Austrian authorities.10 Before the Reichstag president confirmed the ban, Krauss had already sent a telegram to Strauss, urging him to come to Salzburg for the August performance of his Elektra that Krauss himself was conducting, and on August 17 Krauss brought his mentor on stage to deafening applause following the performance. “Even though Herr Strauss was noisily acclaimed this evening by an audience consisting principally of foreign tourists who had only a superficial knowledge of or interest in the political aspects of his recent behavior, there was considerable outspoken indignation among Austrian musicians today at his sudden about face,” noted the New York Times.11
Ida and Louise were among those foreign tourists who had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. On the banks of the Salzach River, the Cooks and the King and Queen of Siam were among a large international crowd of music lovers rapturously enjoying the festival where Toscanini would also make his Salzburg debut—even as around them the politics grew ominous.
A paper bomb exploded at the festival on July 30 but did little damage: it was “used merely as a reminder that there still are Nazis in Salzburg and that they are not going to be satisfied unless they get their way,” wrote Frederick Birchall, an American correspondent who attended the festival. “Herr Hitler could end all this without any special Ambassador if he would. That he does not do so is regarded here as ample proof that German intentions toward Austria have not changed in the least, despite public protestations.”12 But, largely, the dangers of the situation were secondary. Even the public show trials and hangings of the coup plotters miles away in Vienna couldn’t dampen the festivities.
“I rather gather that the English newspapers are still being very alarming, but it’s all my eye really,” wrote Ida in a letter home to her parents. “Occasionally about twenty-five soldiers stroll along in the sun grinning a bit sheepishly and not keeping very good time, but that is the sum total of the military manoeuvres here!”13 Beyond that, they gave the Germans little thought. When they weren’t attending opera, the sisters prowled the streets of the old fortress-city hoping to catch a glimpse of Krauss. “He’s the most perfect poseur I’ve ever seen and gets away with it so marvellously that you can only gasp with amused admiration.”14
* * *
In spite of their best intentions to find the conductor with the movie-star good looks, the sisters were ultimately unsuccessful. Disappointed, they lingered at Café Tomaselli, the oldest café in Salzburg where fierce-looking kuchendamen (cake ladies) patrolled the restaurant with platters groaning with slabs of Linzer torte and apple and plum strudels dusted with icing sugar. It was at a table at the coffee house, founded in 1700, that theater director Max Reinhardt and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal came up with the idea of holding a summer festival in the city and drew up plans to stage von Hofmannsthal’s play Jedermann, which was performed in the square in front of Salzburg Cathedral, launching the festival in 1920.
Despite the Nazi threats and the prospect of bombs, Salzburg felt relatively peaceful, with families strolling along the promenade by the Salzach River and the coffee houses filled with opera aficionados. Occasionally, the Cooks came across “angry-looking people at street corners distributing leaflets and then suddenly fading away as police came on the scene.”15 The sisters innocently accepted one of the leaflets which they used to wrap up one of their hairbrushes and unwittingly transported it through German territory, blithely unaware that the possession of such dangerous propaganda could have landed them in a great deal of trouble—it accused the Germans of inspiring the murder of Dollfuss.
It was during one of their long evening walks along the river promenade near the Festspielhaus that the Cooks happened upon Krauss’s wife. Viorica Ursuleac, then forty, was Richard Strauss’s favorite soprano—an artist he called “the most faithful of all faithful” for whom he would create several operatic roles. For Ida and Louise, she would come to be “one of the finest artists who ever walked the operatic stage.” When the Cooks had met her two months earlier in London, she was a rising star and had already appeared in the lead of Strauss’s Arabella at its premiere in Dresden in 1933. Known as “the Balkan tigress” in music circles in Germany, “she had the bluest eyes I ever saw and the most wonderful smile,” said Ida. “We fell for her, hook, line and sinker, the first time we heard her. And in an awe-stricken way, we carried a torch for Krauss, too. Theirs was probably the most romantic love-story of the operatic world.”16
Born into a Romanian musical family in Czernowitz in the Ukraine, where her father was a Greek Orthodox archdeacon, Ursuleac studied opera in Vienna, although her debut was in Zagreb in 1922, where she sang mostly in the Serbo-Croatian language. Later, when her first marriage fell apart, she returned to her home in Czernowitz with a young daughter in tow. By 1924 she had moved back to Vienna to sing at the Volksoper. When she heard that Clemens Krauss was to become the director at the Frankfurt Opera and was searching for a lead soprano, she tried to set up an audition. But the conductor initially refused to hear her sing due to a long-held prejudice against Balkan singers. Undaunted, she auditioned under a fictitious name. Krauss hired her even as he became aware of her duplicity, and the two began a historic collaboration and a torrid affair. In 1930, when Ursuleac moved to Vienna to accompany Krauss at the State Opera, a fierce rivalry developed between her and the German soprano Lotte Lehmann, who also made her mark singing the roles of Strauss heroines. As her career advanced, Ursuleac became a favorite of opera-mad Goering, who had recently conferred upon her—a Romanian—the title of “Prussian Kammersänger.”
