1913 (9 page)
Authors: Florian Illies
It’s 1913, but disaster has yet to strike for Arnold Schönberg. On Sunday 23 February, at around half-past seven in the evening, his
Gurrelieder
are premiered at the Great Music Hall in Vienna – and the public are expecting a new scandal. His recent appearances and compositions have already unsettled Vienna, causing great commotion, and the former Romantic has emphatically transformed himself into a
Neutöner
, an exponent of the new music. The previous year
he caused uproar with his
Pierrot Lunaire
(
opus
21). But now this. All of a sudden, they’re no longer hearing modern radicalism from Schönberg, but pure late Romanticism. Five vocalists, three four-part male choirs and a huge orchestra with every kind of flute and drum and stringed instrument. Eighty strings were used in the first performance alone: the gigantism of the new century is forging ahead. Schönberg declares that the oratorio cannot be performed without a 150-piece orchestra. The piece itself is a great, bombastic, murmuring and pulsating spectacle of nature, about storms and the summer winds. Vast choirs sing about the beauty of the sun – a spectacular wonder of nature, just as Schönberg once experienced it after a night of drinking led him to the Anninger, one of Vienna’s city mountains.
‘Schadenfreude
lurks already in a hundred pairs of eyes: today will show once again whether he can really afford to compose as he chooses rather than how others before him have composed’, writes Richard Specht for his review in the Berlin journal
März
. But the scandal never comes: instead, it’s a triumph.
The resounding cheers that broke out even after the first section rose to a commotion after the third […] And when the choir’s powerfully surging dawn greeting was over, […] the cheering knew no bounds; with tear-stained faces, the audience called out their gratitude to the composer, sounding more warm and insistent than is usually the case with such a ‘success’: instead, it sounded like an apology. A few young people, unknown to me, came over, their cheeks aglow with shame, and admitted they had brought their house keys with them to add their – in their view appropriate – music to Schönberg’s, but now he had won them over so completely that nothing could turn them against him.
The
Gurrelieder
, with their hymnal, magnificent melodic arcs, were the greatest success that Schönberg would ever experience. But never again did he come as close to his audience as here – and this was clearly to do with his terror about the disaster looming over the year 1913. The
Gurrelieder
is a sumptuous and lavish piece of late
Romanticism, melodic even though its composer had long since crossed the border of tonality. Bewitching beauty, bordering on kitsch. It had taken ten years for Schönberg to find the right orchestration, but the composition itself originated at the turn of the century – and thirteen years later was perfectly in tune with the taste of the Viennese public. The house keys with which they had planned to drown out Schönberg’s music stayed in their pockets.
But not for long.
It’s just one thing after another in Vienna in 1913.
On that very same evening the performance ban on Arthur Schnitzler’s new play
Professor Bernhardi
is breached in the form of a ‘reading’ of the play in the Koflerpark club house, right by the stop for the number 8 tram, ‘at precisely seven in the evening’. This contravened the ruling of the Viennese police department that
Even if such reservations as exist regarding the performance of the work – from the perspective of safeguarding the religious sentiments of the people – could be overcome by editing or altering certain sections of the text, the entire construction of the play, through its combination of episodes relating to Austrian state establishments and exploring public life, grossly distorts conditions here in such a disparaging way that its performance on a domestic stage cannot be permitted with a view to the necessity of safeguarding public interest.
After the
Gurrelieder
evening an illustrious circle meets in Arthur Schnitzler’s drawing room at a quarter to six on Monday. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had accepted the invitation on 21 February: ‘Because I consider the opportunity to hear you read one of your new works to be one of the greatest and purest pleasures – and also because I am
continually saddened by the fact that I so seldom see you. Heartfelt wishes, your Hugo.’ Schnitzler himself struggles through the reading, coughing and sweating; he has a bad fever, which kept him from attending the
Gurrelieder
. It is well known that doctors rarely make good patients, so on Monday evening he bravely reads from
Frau Beate and her Son
, his latest novella, an Oedipus story which Freud very much enjoyed. It’s a long text, but Schnitzler manages to read it to the end. A woman sleeps with the friend of her teenage son. The friend boasts about it to others, the son is mortified with shame, the mother is mortified with shame, mother and son row out onto a lake, make love and then their shame really does become mortal when they drown themselves. Schnitzler was regarded by everyone, even his critics, as knowledgeable in matters of sensuality. Even more so today, now that his diaries have been discovered.
While his wife, Olga, with whom he spends 1913 immersed in subversive positional warfare, eats and drinks with the guests, he retreats to his room and writes in his diary: ‘Reading aloud from
Beate
while struck down with the flu from six to almost nine in the evening. Richard, Hugo, Arthur Kaufmann, Leo, Salten, Wasserman, Gustav, Olga.’ Salten, by the way, was Felix Salten, the wonderfully enigmatic Viennese double talent of the early twentieth century, who published the story ‘Bambi’ and – under his pseudonym –
The Memoirs of Josefine Mutzenbacher
, a pornographic work in Viennese dialect that was challenging even for Vienna, advanced as the city was in sexual matters. From porn to Bambi – this was precisely the Janus-faced character that made up the particular enchantment and the particularly subversive force of Vienna at that time. Adolf Loos came up with a unique description for all the figures from Sigmund Freud’s analysis, Arthur Schnitzler’s stories and Gustav Klimt’s pictures:
Ornament and Crime
.
The day after the reading at the Schnitzler residence, on Tuesday 25 February, Thomas Mann buys a plot of land at 1 Poschingerstrasse in
Munich. That very same day he commissions the architects Gustav and Alois Ludwig to build a villa worthy of him: tranquil, supercilious, somewhat stiff. Together with the architect, he waits right next to the plot of land for the number 30 tram into the city centre. His red-handled walking-stick hangs, as ever, from his left arm. Noticing a speck of dust on his overcoat, he brushes it away. Then he hears the tram coming down from the Bogenhausener Höhe.
Picasso owns three Siamese cats, Marcel Duchamp only two. And that remains the score, even today, between the two great revolutionaries: 3–2.
Franz Kafka’s letters to Felice are the most important work he will produce in 1913.
It is a work full of earnestness, full of despair, full of comedy. On 1 February he writes: ‘My stomach, like my whole being, has been out of sorts for days, and I am trying to deal with it by fasting.’ Then he tells her, in the most wonderful words, about a reading by Franz Werfel the previous day: ‘How a poem like that rises up – its inherent ending within its beginning – with an uninterrupted, inner, flowing development – how I widened my eyes, perched there on the couch!’ He has even asked Werfel to dedicate a copy of his new volume of poetry ‘to an unknown woman’; but ‘oh dear’: ‘I will send you the book soon … if only the necessity of preparing the package and the task etc. didn’t vex me so.’ So Franz Kafka sits there in his room in Prague, despairing over how to pack a book. Luckily for him, the proofs of
The Judgement
turn up at that very moment.
But what must be going through the mind of Felice, that sociable, modern, tango-dancing young working woman in her prime, when she reads lines like these from her Franz: ‘My dearest, tell me why, of all people, you choose to love such an unhappy boy, one
whose unhappiness is so contagious. I’m always compelled to carry an atmosphere of unhappiness around with me. But don’t be afraid, my dearest, stay by my side! Close by my side!’
After that, he complains of discomfort in his shoulder, of constant colds and digestive problems. Then, on 17 February, come perhaps the most sincere and certainly the most beautiful words that he wrote to his beloved enchantress in faraway Berlin: ‘Sometimes I wonder, Felice, given that you have such an intense power over me, why you don’t just turn me into someone who’s capable of ordinary, everyday things.’
In this she will not succeed.
