Old Masters (15 page)

very
own, compulsive talk, mine is musicological. I have had this musicological compulsive talk all my musicological life, because my life undoubtedly is nothing but musicological, just as yours is philosophical, that much is obvious. Of course I could say today that everything I said to you about the
Tempest Sonata yesterday
is
nonsense
today,
since everything that is said is nonsense,
but we do utter that nonsense convincingly,
Reger said. Anything that is said sooner or later turns out to be nonsense, but if we utter it convincingly, with the most incredible vehemence we can muster, then it is no crime, he said. Anything we think we also wish to utter, Reger said, and basically we do not rest until we have uttered it, because if we keep silent about it we choke on it. Mankind would have choked long ago if it had kept silent about all the nonsense it thought throughout its history, any individual who keeps silent too long chokes, and mankind too cannot remain silent too long because it would otherwise choke, even though what the individual thinks or what mankind thinks and what every individual has ever thought and what mankind has ever thought is nothing but nonsense. Sometimes we are masters of speech and sometimes we are masters of silence and we perfect our mastery to the utmost, he said, our lives are interesting in exactly the measure to which we have succeeded in developing our mastery of speech and our mastery of silence.
The Tempest Sonata is not really a great work,
Reger said, on close consideration it is merely one of the many so-called secondary works, basically a piece of kitsch. The quality of the piece consists more in the fact that it lends itself to discussion than in itself. Beethoven was absolutely the monotonous cramped artist as a man of violence, not necessarily what I esteem most highly. To analyse the
Tempest Sonata
has always amused me, it is the most doom-laden piece by Beethoven, through the
Tempest Sonata
Beethoven can be clearly presented, his nature, his genius, his kitsch all emerge clearly, and his limitations are shown up. But I only spoke about the
Tempest Sonata
because yesterday I wanted to elucidate the Art of the Fugue to you more extensively and more intensively, and for that it was necessary to draw on the
Tempest Sonata,
Reger said. Incidentally, I hate such labels as
Tempest Sonata
or
Eroica
or
Unfinished
or
Surprise,
such labels are distasteful to me. Like saying
The Magus of the North,
that is utterly distasteful to me, Reger said. Just because you have really no
theoretical
interest whatever in music you are the ideal victim for my discussions on music, Reger said. You
listen attentively and do not contradict,
he said, you leave me to talk, that is what I need, never mind what it is worth, it smoothes my path through this dreadful musical existence, believe me, one that in fact very rarely provides happiness. What I think is enervating, destructive, he said, on the other hand it has been enervating me for so long and destroying me for so long that I need no longer fear it. I thought you would be punctual and you are punctual, he said, I do not expect you to be anything but punctual, and punctuality, as you know, is what I appreciate above all else, wherever there are human beings there must be punctuality and, making common cause with punctuality, reliability, he said. Half-past eleven and you stepped into the room, he said, I looked at my watch and it was half-past eleven and just then you stood before me. I have
no other person more useful than you,
he said. Probably survival has been possible for me only thanks to you. I should not have said this, Reger said, to say this is a piece of impertinence, he said, of unparalleled impertinence, but I have said it, you are the person who enables me to go on existing, I really have no one else. And did you know that my wife was very fond of you? She never told you but she told me, more than once. You have a clear head, Reger said, that is the most precious thing in the world. You are a loner and you have preserved your lonerdom, go on preserving it as long as you live, Reger said. I slipped into art to get away from life, that is how I might put it. I sneaked off into art, he said. I waited for the most favourable moment and I used that most favourable moment and sneaked off, out of the world into art, into music, he said. As others might sneak off into painting or sculpture or into acting. These people who, like myself, basically
really hate the world,
sneak off from one moment to the next from the world they hate, and into art which is totally apart from that hated world. I sneaked off into music, he said, all very surreptitiously. Because I had the opportunity, whereas most people do not have that opportunity. You sneaked off into philosophy and authorship, Reger said, but you are neither a philosopher nor an author, that is what is simultaneously so interesting and so unfortunate
about you and in you,
because you are not really a philosopher and not really an author either, because for a philosopher you lack everything that is characteristic of a philosopher, and for an author similarly everything, even though you are exactly what I call the philosophical writer, your philosophy is no real philosophy and your writing is no real writing, he repeated. And a writer who does not publish anything is, basically, not really a writer. You probably suffer from
publication phobia,
Reger said,
a publishing trauma has caused you not to want to publish.
At the Ambassador yesterday you were wearing such a well-cut sheepskin coat which surely came from Poland, he suddenly said, and I said, yes, you are right, I was wearing a Polish sheepskin coat, as you know I have been to Poland a number of times, Poland is one of my two favourite countries, I love Poland and I love Portugal, I said, but Poland probably more than Portugal, and on my last visit to Cracow, but it must be eight or nine years since I was in Cracow, I bought that sheepskin coat, I specially travelled to the Russian frontier in order to buy it, because only on the Polish-Russian frontier do these sheepskin coats have that cut. Yes, Reger said, it is indeed a pleasure to see a well-dressed person now and again, a well-dressed good-looking person, especially when the weather is so gloomy and one's head more or less in gloom and one's mood altogether at rock-bottom. Occasionally you can now see well-dressed and good-looking people even in this down-atheel Vienna, for many years you saw in Vienna nothing hut people in tasteless clothes, those depressing mass-produced goods. Now a touch of colour seems to have come into clothes again, he said, but there are
so
few
well-built
people
, you walk for hours through this down-at-heel Vienna and see
nothing but depressing faces and tasteless clothes,
as if
only crippled people
were passing you all the time. The lack of taste and the monotony of the Viennese depressed me for decades. I used to think that only in Germany were they so monotonous and lacking in taste, but the Viennese are just as monotonous and lacking in taste. Only quite recently has the picture changed, people are generally looking better, they are again wearing individual clothes, he said, when you are wearing that sheepskin coat you cut an impressive figure, Reger said. One sees so few well-dressed
and
intelligent people, he said. For many years I only walked through this down-at-heel Vienna with my head sunk between my shoulders because I could not bear to see so much mass ugliness in the streets, those masses of tasteless people walking towards one were simply unbearable. Those hundreds of thousands of the industrially clothed who stifled me during my very first steps in the streets, he said. And not only in the so-called proletarian districts, also in the so-called Inner City, the city centre, those grey industrially clothed human masses stifled me, especially in the Inner City, he said. Young people nowadays, though still tasteless, go out into the streets in very cheerful colours, as if all these people had only just, forty years after its conclusion, overcome the war, the war trauma, Reger said, which had made people appear so grey and insignificant for nearly forty years. But of course you see a well-dressed person only, as the phrase goes, once in a blue moon in this down-at-heel Vienna. That of course makes you feel good, he said, and then:
Only
Gould
ever played the Tempest Sonata really well and made it tolerable, no one else.
Anyone else made it intolerable to me.
It is, of course, very ponderous, the Tempest Sonata,
Reger said, like a lot of Beethoven's work. But even Mozart did not escape kitsch, especially in the operas there is so much kitsch, the coy and the frisky often turn somersaults in the most unbearable way in those superficial operas. A turtle-dove here, a turtle-dove there, a raised forefinger here, a raised forefinger there, Reger said, that
too
is
Mozart. Mozart's music is also full of petticoat and frilly undies kitsch, he said. And the state composer Beethoven, as the
Tempest Sonata
above all demonstrates, is
positively ridiculously serious.
But where would it get us if we subjected everything to this deadly kind of examination, Reger said. Fussiness and kitsch, after all, are the two principal characteristics of so-called civilized man, highly stylized as he has become into a single human grotesque over hundreds and thousands of years, he said. Anything human is kitschy, he said, there can be no doubt about that. And so is high art and the highest art. Returning from London to Vienna, when in fact he had felt more at home in London than in Vienna, had been a real shock to him. But I could not have remained in London under any circumstances, if only because of my unstable health, which has always been close to flipping over into a dangerous disease, a fatal disease, Reger said. In London I had lived, in Vienna I have never truly lived, in London my head felt well, in Vienna my head never really felt well, in London I had my best ideas, he said. My time in London was my best time, he said. In London I always had all the opportunities I never had in Vienna, he said. After the death of my parents it was a matter of course for me to return to Vienna, to this grey wardepressed, spiritless city in which initially I existed for several years but only in a state of shock. But at the moment when I did no longer know which way to turn I met my wife, he said. My wife saved me; I had always been afraid of the female sex and
in fact
in a manner of speaking
hated women body and soul
and yet, he said, his wife had saved him. And do you know where I met my wife? he asked; have I ever told you? he asked, and I thought that he had often told me but did not say so and he said,
I met my wife at the
Kunsthistorisches
Museum. And do you know where in the
Kunsthistorisches
Museum?
he asked, and I thought of course I know where in the Kunsthistorisches Museum and he said,
here in the
Bordone
Room, on this settee,
he said this as if he really did not know that he had told me a hundred times that he had met his wife on the Bordone Room settee and I pretended, as he told me again, that I had
never before
heard it.
It was a gloomy day,
he said,
I was in despair
,
I was studying
Schopenhauer
very thoroughly at the time, having lost all interest in Descartes, as indeed, then, in
French thought generally, and I was sitting here on this settee, meditating over a particular sentence of
Schopenhauer's,
I cannot now tell you which sentence,
he said. Suddenly some headstrong woman sat down on the settee next to me and remained there. I had made a signal to Irrsigler, but Irrsigler at first did not understand what my signal was intended to mean and subsequently proved unable to induce the woman sitting next to me to get up and leave, the woman was sitting there, staring at the
White-Bearded
Man,
Reger said, and I believe she stared at the
White-Bearded
Man
for an hour. Do you really like Tintoretto's
White-Bearded
Man
that much? I asked the woman sitting next to me, Reger said,
and at first I received no answer to my question.
Only after a long while did the woman utter a
No
which truly fascinated me,
a No such as I had never heard before this No,
Reger said. So you do not like Tintoretto's
White-Bearded
Man
at all? I asked the woman. No, I do not like him, the woman replied. A conversation, as I have said, then developed about art, in particular painting, about the old masters, Reger said, and suddenly I had no wish to cut the conversation short for a long time yet, throughout that conversation I was interested not in its content but
in the way it was conducted.
In the end, after prolonged reflection one way and another, I proposed to the woman that I take her to lunch at the
Astoria
and she accepted, and not very much later we were married. Then it turned out that she was also very wealthy, being the owner of several shops in the Inner City, also of blocks of flats on the Singerstrasse and on the Spiegelgasse, and indeed of one on the Kohlmarkt, he said. In addition to everything else.
Suddenly I had a wife who was an intelligent, wealthy cosmopolitan,
Reger said, who saved me with her intelligence and with her wealth, because my wife did save me, I was, as the saying goes,
down and out
when I met my wife, he said. As you see, I owe a lot to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, he said. Maybe it is actually gratitude that makes me go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum every other day, he said with a laugh, but of course it is not that. Do you know that in my wife's so-called Himmelstrasse house in Grinzing there was a safe large enough for several people to walk into without difficulty? he said. In this safe she kept the most valuable Stradivarius, Guarneri and Maggini, he said. In addition to everything else. Like me, my wife had spent the war in London and it is most astonishing that I did not make her acquaintance in London, because my wife was then, that is at the same time, moving in the same London circles as I was. For years we had passed one another in London, Reger said. Incidentally, before we were married, my wife donated several paintings to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Reger said, including a very valuable and not at all unsuccessful Furini, which by the way you will find right next to the Cigoli and the Empoli, which incidentally I do not care for at all. After our marriage my wife donated no more pictures, he said, I made her see that there was no point in making presents, making presents is altogether distasteful, he said. Just imagine, before we were married my wife made a present of a Biedermeier town panorama of Vienna, I think by Gauermann, to one of her nieces. A year later, when, more by accident than out of interest, merely, as it were, to kill time between two meals, she walked round the