from The Adorations
Tristan always attracted a crowd, even at the matinee
performance, and the conductor, young Bruno Walter, the late great Mahler’s
understudy and second-in-command, was himself a powerful attraction,
ramrod-straight, lithe and—paradoxically, in a mostly cloudy climate—deeply
tanned. In a city given to ranking its artists as another city might categorize
sports figures or military heroes, Walter was nearing the top of the list for
sheer enigma value, but the Klimt brothers and Oskar Kokoschka had the
advantage, for the time being. Indeed, on that Saturday the eminent (or
insignificant, depending on the degree of your modernism) Kokoschka was in the
Mahler family box—”Look, isn’t that Alma?” whispered Helmuth, and of course it
was indeed the Maestro’s widow—and a rumor made its way around the parterre to
the effect that a Royal and Imperial personage would be, might be, WAS in
attendance...yes! There he was, once again! His Imperial Highness Franz
Ferdinand, in full Habsburg splendor, with his dutiful Sophie sitting a
suitably morganatic distance behind him. Applause greeted their appearance. He
bowed, she inclined her head. Stefanie looked away. She cared less for such
personages than she had once.
“The
Archduke,” murmured Helmuth. “Never has he been seen at a performance of a
Wagner opera. Why is he here? It’s well known the man has no culture. Did you
hear what he said about Kokoschka? ‘I’d like to break every bone in his body.’
Well, here’s his chance, eh? Imagine the headlines!”
“Oh,
forget him,” said Stefanie, impatient at her own past awe, as well as irritated
by Helmuth’s moist, darting eyes and overuse of the word culture...then, with a truly fine congruity of sentiment and event,
she saw Adolf Hitler, watching her, and at that moment the lights dimmed and
Tristan’s musical foreplay began. It was, of course, glorious. In the
intervening three years Stefanie had evolved, in her all-or-nothing way, into a
devotee of Wagner. Oh, she revered Mozart, as befit a Salzburger; Mahler, too,
of the modernists, she adored (oh see!
how like a silver ship above his widow sails, on the blue Kokoschka-sea!);
and Bruckner, and, yes, stodgy old Brahms, photographs of whom reminded her of
her Pappi; but as she said to Cousin Fritzl a while back, a propos of nothing
(in her spontaneous, girlish way) “You can have all the other music in the
world if I could just keep the Good Friday Music from Parsifal!” Hearty Fritzl obligingly said she was welcome to it, but
Fritzl was a philistine, and knew nothing of art. And now she was in the
company of another philistine, Helmuth, whose real interest in the opera, as
became apparent after his third or fourth cavernous yawn, was primarily social
(did she not see, in response to a slight hand gesture, a flirtatious twinkle
of opera glasses, from a silk-brocaded feminine blur on the mezzanine?), not
that he differed in this from the majority of his fellow Viennese. After all,
no city can be as genuinely interested in culture as Vienna pretends to be, but
any city can be as interested in dalliance and sex as Vienna really is. Yet
there were exceptions: Stefanie, although enraptured by the overture and the
stark Cornish blue-and-silver decor of the first act (So frisch der Wind/ Der Heimat zu), stole a glance toward Adolf
Hitler, sitting two rows forward to her right. Yes, unlike most of his
side-glancing, flirting neighbors, he sat open-mouthed, staring, enraptured, a true
and genuine worshipper in the act of worshipping. This decided Stefanie. At the
first interval...!
