Marek booked in at the Imperial, feeling in the mood for luxury after his week in the forest, telephoned Herr Jaeger, and went to have his hair cut in the Graben, where the barber was displeased with the way his client’s thick, springy hair formed itself into unexpected whorls.
‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing to it, sir,’ he grumbled. ‘It looks as though you’ve been sleeping in a hedge.’
Marek did not enlighten him and the conversation turned inevitably to the gala. ‘You’ll have seen the paper,’ said the barber. ‘She’s threatening to cancel.’
‘She?’ asked Marek, but already he knew.
‘Seefeld,’ said the barber. ‘She’s fallen out with the conductor: chap called Feuerbach. He’s a stopgap because Weingartner’s abroad.’
‘She’s got no business to carry on like that,’ said a burly man in working clothes, the driver of a petrol tanker, having a trim in the neighbouring chair. ‘Tantrums the whole time. They ought to give the role to Baumberger.’
‘No, they oughtn’t,’ said a fat man with a shiny red face, waiting his turn. He spoke in the thickest of dialects and wore the blue overalls of a meat porter. ‘Tantrums or not, she’s the best. My mother’s seen every Rosenkavalier they’ve done since 1911 and she swears there’s no one to touch Seefeld.’
‘I didn’t say she wasn’t good,’ said the lorry driver. ‘I didn’t say she wasn’t great. But she’s got the whole cast at sixes and sevens, and once you get on the wrong side of the Vienna Philharmonic, God help you.’
‘It’s not the orchestra she’s got the wrong side of; it’s Feuerbach, and she’s quite right. I heard him conduct Bruckner’s Seventh in Linz and he was crap,’ said the meat porter, wiping his face with a spotted handkerchief.
Marek took the newspaper the barber handed him. That day there had been a massacre in Peking, the city of Bilbao fell to Franco and Moscow had executed another thirty intellectuals on the grounds of ‘spying’, but the headline of the Wiener Tageblatt said ‘Seefeld Threatens Cancellation. Gala in Jeopardy.’
Coming out into the street, Marek thought with exasperation of the Viennese, to whom nothing mattered except what was going on at their opera house. And yet . . . perhaps it was because he knew this was goodbye, because he foresaw much suffering for this absurd city, that he felt himself able to surrender to the sheer beauty of the Biedermeier houses, the compact and companionable streets, the domes of green and gold. If the Viennese fiddled while Rome burnt perhaps there were worse occupations, and when it was over – the catastrophe he saw so clearly – they would still quarrel at the barbers about the high C of some soprano not yet born, or argue over the tessitura of a newly imported tenor.
Herr Jaeger was waiting in his dark little office.
‘Herr Altenburg!’ he said, rising to shake hands. ‘This is a pleasure. It was good of you to come in person.’
‘Not at all,’ said Marek, dropping his hat and gloves on to a bust of Mahler. ‘I see you share my view of what is to come.’
‘I’m afraid I do. We’re transferring our business to London as I told you. We’re hoping to be able to forge some transatlantic links too from there. It was a hard decision – as you know, our traditions go back three hundred years.’
Marek nodded. He had dealt with Universal Editions since his student days; they had proved competent and fair, but it was more than that: under glass in a corner of the office was the facsimile of the Schubert Quartetsatz. The first edition of Berg’s Wozzeck, heavily annotated, lay in another case.
‘We were hoping of course that you would stay with us, but –’
‘I have decided to do so. I’m leaving for America very soon, but if you’re setting up links with the United States, London could be a convenient halfway house.’
‘I’m very pleased to hear it and my partner will be too. He’s going ahead; he’s Jewish and we feel . . .’
‘Yes, you may feel that.’
‘You don’t have anything ready now? To arrive in London with a piece by Altenburg would be a certain triumph.’
‘Soon,’ said Marek. ‘I’ve been doing other things.’
‘But you’ll be staying for the gala?’
‘I doubt it. I gather there have been ructions.’
Herr Jaeger smiled. ‘Yes, you could say that. You could certainly say that. Now, as to the contracts; I wonder if you could glance at these . . .’
Leaving the office, making his way towards the Hofburg, Marek saw a group of tourists outside the Stallburg waiting for the Lipizzaners to be led from the Spanish Riding School back to their princely stable. This was how they had waited – and probably waited still – for Brigitta to come out of her apartment and make her way to the Opera, and that was reasonable enough. She was after all a kind of human Lipizzaner, richly caparisoned, adored and nobly housed, and knowing perhaps at some level that he had meant to do this all along, he made his way past the Augustiner Kirche and the Albertina, and found himself by the small unobtrusive door which said simply: ‘Zur Bühne.’
Outside, on an upright chair sat an old man, still wearing the uniform of the stage doorkeeper though he had been retired for many years. His son was the doorkeeper now but Josef was an institution, allowed to watch the great and the good come through that small entrance into the opera.
‘Good afternoon, Josef.’
The old man looked up, blinked – and recognised him. ‘Herr Altenburg,’ he said. ‘You’re back in Vienna. Well, well – wait till I tell my son.’
Nothing could stop him getting to his feet and leading Marek into the cluttered office. ‘Here’s Herr Altenburg, Wenzel; you’ll remember him.’
His son nodded. ‘There’s a bit of a to-do in there, sir. It’s the gala – they’re doing Act One and well . . . I expect you’ve heard. No one’s to be admitted, but as it’s you . . .’
Both father and son could remember the time when Herr Altenburg had accompanied the diva to rehearsals. A golden age, he’d heard it referred to, when she’d behaved herself and sung like an angel.
‘They’re in the auditorium, sir. It’s the first rehearsal with the full orchestra.’
Marek nodded, made his way down the familiar corridors, pushed open the heavy door – and stood quietly at the back.
‘I shall cancel!’ cried Brigitta. ‘I tell you, I shall cancel. You can go now, you can tell the papers, you can tell anyone! I cannot sing at this tempo, it is an insult to me and an impossibility for my voice. Either you fetch Weingartner or I cancel.’
‘Now Brigitta, please . . .’ The voice coach came out of the wings and tried to mollify her. The music director, sitting in the front row, groaned. Nothing but tantrums and tempers from the wretched woman. There was a week to go to the gala and he was sick of it. He didn’t just want her to cancel, he wanted her to be run over by a tram or eaten by rats or both. But who could they get at the last minute? The gala had been set up with her in mind.
‘Perhaps we could try again, Herr Feuerbach,’ said the director. He detested Brigitta, but it had to be admitted that Feuerbach was a disappointment: an arrogant little man who had got on the wrong side of the orchestra. Once that venerable body of men despised a conductor they were implacable. If the Vienna Philharmonic could ever be said to play badly they were doing it now.
‘I gather you want it played like a funeral march,’ sneered Feuerbach.
‘No. Just a little more andante. It is after all a lament for the passing of time,’ said the director, wondering why it was necessary to explain the score of Richard Strauss’s most famous opera to the man who was conducting it.
Feuerbach curled his lip and raised his baton. Brigitta moved forward.
They were rehearsing the first of the famous monologues on the mystery of time and its inexplicable passing. The Marschallin is alone on the stage; so far she has been presented as a grande dame voluptuously loved, or as the centre of a melee of courtiers. Now the mood changes: the orchestra is reduced to solo strings and clarinets a
s she goes to the mirror and evokes the young girl she has once been, coming fresh from the convent – and then, in a moment of terror, the old woman she will one day be, mocked and pointed out, her beauty gone. Yet it has to be endured, she muses – and the oboe (now coming in magnificently in spite of Feuerbach) echoes her bewildered question: ‘Only how? Wie? . . . How does one endure it?’
And as he listened to her, Marek was suddenly overwhelmed. He was back in the fourth gallery, shaken by the sheer beauty of the voice that God had placed so capriciously inside the body of this tiresome woman. Brigitta was trying, in spite of Feuerbach’s dragging beat. She did not want to cancel; this was her role.
And all at once there came into Marek’s head with the force of an explosion, a vision of the whole glorious masterpiece that was Rosenkavalier, with its riotous waltzes, its soaring invocation of young love and the sense of sublimity and honour that was at its heart. Rosenkavalier as it should sound and could sound even now.
For it could still be done. Brigitta would have to be coaxed and bullied, forbidden to scoop and sentimentalise. Feuerbach, though one longed to throttle him, would have to be appeased, the orchestra schooled to heed him. It would take every moment of the day and night, every ounce of energy, but it could still be done.
Only not by me, thought Marek. Absolutely not by me. I’m sailing on the Risorgimento. This is goodbye.
‘Very well,’ said the director. ‘We’ll break there.’
The conductor left the rostrum but the musicians did not follow him. Marek, without realising it, had moved closer as Brigitta sang. Now one of the double bass players leant forward and whispered something to a cellist, who passed on the word and spread it back to the woodwind, the brass, and forward to the violas, till it reached the violins . . .
The leader turned his head.
‘Are you sure?’ he said quietly.
‘Positive,’ said his neighbour. ‘I played for him in Berlin.’
The leader nodded. Then he rose to his feet and as he did so the orchestra, to a man, rose with him. And as the violins tapped their bows against the music stands, he said: ‘Welcome back to Vienna, Herr Altenburg.’
The homage was not for his political stance, Marek knew that. It was not for him personally at all: it was for what he and these men shared and served. It was for music.
But now Brigitta had moved towards the footlights, shading her eyes. Then she gave a theatrical shriek, disappeared into the wings, and reappeared again in the stalls to hurl herself into his arms.
‘Marcus!’ she cried. ‘I knew you would come! I knew you would help me. Now everything’s going to be all right.’
‘If you want me to help you, you can start by not sentimentalising “Where are the Snows of Yesteryear”. You held that B flat far too long. I’ve told you, you must not be maudlin. Pity and self-pity are mutually exclusive.’
‘It’s not my fault. It’s Feuerbach’s. I have no help from –’
‘I take it you’re not complaining about the way the oboe followed you?’ said Marek icily.
‘No, but –’
‘Good. I suggest you look to your own performance and the rest will sort itself out. I’ll be back in an hour. We’ll start with Baron Ochs’ exit and go on to the rest of the act.’
‘You’re limping, Kendrick,’ said Ellen. ‘Would you like to sit down for a while? We could have a cup of coffee over there.’ She pointed to a beguiling cafe with pavement tables across the square, but Kendrick shook his head.
‘I’ll be all right. We’ve still got the Hofburg to see, and the cathedral. We can’t afford to waste a minute.’
But actually his foot was hurting quite badly. He had a big blister on the heel and a corn developing on the left toe and this was because he had already spent three days in Vienna sightseeing before Ellen arrived. Kendrick had visited the Central Cemetery to see the graves of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, paying particular attention to Beethoven’s grave because it was said to contain the pince-nez of Anton Bruckner, who had dropped them into the open coffin by mistake when the composer’s relics were transferred from the cemetery in Wahring. He had taken a tram to St Marc’s, which turned out to be a long way away, to look at the place where Mozart had possibly been interred, and another to another suburb to pay homage to the tomb of Gustav Mahler.
And that was only the graves: there were still all the places where composers had been born or died or simply done things: hammered pianos to death or quarrelled with their landladies or thrown chamber pots out of the windows, often in houses which were surprisingly far apart.
All this had made his feet very sore, and then there had been the Art: the Secessionist building, which was near a rather messy food market and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which was deeply inspiring, but the marble floors were surprisingly hard and the lavatories difficult to find.
But he had kept the best-known sights for Ellen, who had arrived that morning and was standing patiently beside him, looking cool in her cream linen dress, as they waited to go into the crypt of the Capuchin church where the Hapsburg Emperors were buried. Or rather their bodies were buried – their hearts and organs were elsewhere, as he had explained to Ellen, and fitting them in was going to be a problem. Peering at his Baedeker, worrying, Kendrick felt Ellen’s cool touch on his arm and realised that the guide had come and they were moving down into the vaults with their heavy, ornate marble sarcophagi.
The Emperor Franz Joseph . . . his unfortunate wife, the lovely Sissi, assassinated by an anarchist on Lake Geneva . . . their son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, dead by his own hand at Mayerling . . .
Moving past the gloomy opulence of the tombs, Ellen found one she liked.
‘Look, Kendrick! This one isn’t an emperor or an empress! It’s a governess – Maria Theresa’s governess. The Empress loved her so much she was allowed to be buried here even though she wasn’t royal. So if a governess, why not a cook? Perhaps I shall end up in the vaults at Windsor!’
Ellen had not wanted to come to Vienna, but now she was here she was determined to enjoy herself. The weather was glorious, the city was beautiful – there could be no better place to forget Marek, who would be sailing away now to a new life. She had been foolish, attaching so much importance to a flirtation and the courtesy of a kiss, but she did not intend to become a victim. ‘One has a choice,’ she had told herself – and she had chosen healing and happiness, if not immediately, then soon.
Their next tour, that of the Private Apartments in the Hofburg, revealed the Royal Treasure Chest containing a number of priceless objects of surprising ugliness and a suite of claustrophobic apartments characterised by a total lack of bathrooms. As they came out into the Michaeler Platz, Kendrick, peering at his guide book, said that they just had time to make their way to the house where Hugo Wolf had written the Mörike Lieder.
‘Look – it’s in this little street here – we take the first left and then the first right –’
‘Kendrick, you go and see the house where Hugo Wolf wrote the Mörike Lieder, but I’m going to Demels to have a large coffee and eat Indianerkrapfen and study their patisserie.’
A terrible conflict raged in Kendrick’s breast. To leave Ellen whom he loved so much even for half an hour was hard – but to miss Hugo Wolf’s house, which the guide book particularly recommended was hard too.
‘Remember you’ve got a whole day after I’ve gone. I have to go back tomorrow.’
‘Very well, I’ll come with you,’ said Kendrick and limped with her towards Demels, where he was rewarded by Ellen’s face as she gazed at the counter, her eyes moving from the intricate lattice of the Linzertorte, to the baroque magnificence of the layered chocolate cakes, and back to the Schaumrollen, fat and soft as puppies. And even Kendrick took pleasure in seeing the eclairs they had chosen wheeled away by attendents, as if to a select nursing home, to be injected with fresh whipped cream.
It was as she poured a second cup of the marvellous coffee that Ellen said: ‘Don’t
you think we ought to call at a chemist’s and see if we can get a proper dressing for your foot? It’s going to be really painful for you trying to dance with that blister.’
She was looking forward to the ball – the orchestra was sure to be good and even if she and Kendrick danced very little she would enjoy watching the other people.
But to her surprise, Kendrick coloured up and put down his cup. He had not meant to reveal his delightful surprise till they were back in the hotel, but this was as good a moment as any.
‘Ellen, we’re not going to a ball,’ he said, leaning across to her. ‘We’re going somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere absolutely special.’
‘And where is that?’ A slight foreboding touched Ellen.
‘The opera!’ said Kendrick happily. ‘The Vienna State Opera! We’re going to see Rosenkavalier – and guess who is singing the leading role.’
‘Who?’ asked Ellen obediently – but the foreboding had, so to speak, settled in.
‘Brigitta Seefeld! Her interpretation is absolutely legendary. She’s marvellous; remember I wrote to you about her, about the songs Altenburg wrote for her. I can’t tell you what a miracle it was getting the tickets. Everyone in Vienna will be there.’ And suddenly seeing something in her face: ‘You’re pleased, aren’t you? You wouldn’t rather have gone to a ball?’
She lifted her head. ‘No, no, Kendrick. Of course I’m pleased. It’ll be lovely.’ There was no point in spoiling his pleasure, and if she wanted to watch that overweight cow sing about as much as she wanted to spend the night in a sewage farm, she would keep it to herself. With Marek on the ocean and Isaac safely out of the country, Seefeld posed no threat. All the same she felt entitled to some consolation, and: ‘I’m going to have another Indianerkrapfen,’ she said.
‘Another one?’ asked Kendrick, shocked.
‘Yes.’ I need cheering up, she could have said, but didn’t because of the wet house and the camel and the fact that Kendrick looked so very pleased.