Authors: Florian Illies
1913 (24 page)
In May, Berlin is preparing itself for the greatest social event of the young century: the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia to Duke Ernst August of Hanover on 24 May. The bridal couple drive along Unter den Linden, where thousands of people are cheering. And then, as the
Berliner Tageblatt
reports, there is a special moment: an unequal coincidence of democracy and monarchy. Or: ‘It was truly a heart-rending sight to see the democratic bus having to wait as the aristocratic carriage passed, but then the carriage had to wait to let the bus pass.’ Both the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and the English King George V travel to Berlin and Potsdam for the wedding – as do countless crowned and uncrowned heads from all over Europe. The wedding was a diplomatic event above all. As the
Berliner Tageblatt
observed:
Of course, the visit was not political. But after the agitated political processes of the past winter, it had to be seen as a welcome example of a relaxation in the international situation, that the rulers of Russia and England, the crucial monarchs of the triple entente, were guests of the German
Kaiser. It is in the nature of things that personal contacts of this kind also make their mark on the political attitude of the cabinets, although only in the sense that on all sides the will to peace is being still more keenly accentuated.
So on 24 May the world’s monarchs gathered rather oddly at five o’clock for the wedding in the Palace Chapel, which was illuminated by hundreds of candles. Only Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the Austrian throne, was not invited – even in Vienna he had long been shunned because of his unsuitable bride, and even on occasion victimised, but this public humiliation on a European stage is a fresh blow for him. All the others celebrate until the small hours. But then, before breakfast, the kings and tsars are given the news from Vienna by their intelligence services: Colonel Redl has been convicted and shot. But the Tsar gives no sign that he has lost his most important informer. He cuts the top off his boiled egg and chats. Decorum is maintained.
It’s an exhausting spring for Rainer Maria Rilke in Paris. Again he can barely write. He must live. Or something of the kind. Friends and acquaintances want to see him, he goes out for breakfast, lunch, dinner, meets André Gide, Henry van de Velde, the Insel Verlag publisher Anton Kippenberg, Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig. Rilke complains: ‘People don’t get on with me.’ Above all, he has become unpleasantly entangled in a series of misunderstandings with his old friend and hero Auguste Rodin. Once he had elevated him in his book to the status of a god of sculpture, but now the awkward sculptor refuses to comply when Rilke begs him please please please to sit for a portrait bust by his wife, Clara Rilke-Westhoff. Clara, long since separated from Rilke, lives with their daughter, but he feels responsible and wants to help her make her artistic breakthrough. Rodin won’t budge, which puts Rilke’s nose out of joint. And when Rilke visits him with Kippenberg to discuss photographs for a new edition of his book with Insel Verlag, Rodin eventually takes the photographs back.
Clara is in Paris, in a state of despair. She has no money (she is kept financially afloat by Rilke’s close friend Eva Cassirer) and has staked everything on making her bust of Rodin. Then Rilke asks Sidonie Nádherný, the ex-lover and close friend that he has just put up at the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, to sit for his wife – Rilke alone seems quite comfortable with these arrangements; he is at his happiest when the rough edges of the past are smoothed by the bond of harmony. Sidonie proudly stretches her neck as her lovely features are chiselled into stone. But then, on 28 May, her beloved brother Johannes Nádherný shoots himself in Munich. Sidonie has a breakdown and sinks into a depression, and Rilke joins her. He has, he writes to his publisher Kippenberg, ‘had a small breakdown’ caused by the death of Johannes, whom he knew well from visits to the accursed castle of the Nádhernýs in Bohemia, ‘and just before that, had a new rift with Rodin, just as unexpected as the one eight years ago but, because it could even come to that, probably more final and irreparable’.
In a panic Sidonie leaves Paris; Clara, having nothing to do, escapes back to Munich, and Rilke, somehow relieved that he can love from a distance again, takes them both by the hand, with letters, with words, with consolations; he’s good at that. In Munich, Clara goes on working on a bust that is not yet acquainted with grief. By the autumn, when Sidonie sees the bust for the first time, she is visiting Clara with her new boyfriend. His name: Karl Kraus.
To get a sense of the cultural networks in Paris in 1913, and of the life of the German
bon vivant
, aesthete, dandy, cultural commentator and legendary diary author Harry Graf Kessler, you only need to take a look at his entry for 14 May 1913: he sleeps late, then meets André Gide and Igor Stravinsky at the Ritz in the early afternoon, after which they go together to the rehearsal of the new ballet by the legendary Russian dancer and choreographer Nijinsky and Diaghilev – the music is by Claude Debussy. He talks to Debussy and to Jean Cocteau during the interval. Tempers suddenly flare in the
middle of the rehearsal: Stravinsky shouts, Debussy shouts, Diaghilev shouts. Then they all make up and have champagne next door. Kessler, as he confides to his diary that night, finds Debussy’s music too ‘thin’. But he finds the costume of the great Nijinsky even worse: short white trousers with a black velvet border and green braces, which is too ‘unmanly and comical’ even for Harry Graf Kessler. A good thing, then, that Nijinsky, the Russian with the unreliable taste, had cultured French and German style advisers: ‘Cocteau and I persuaded him, before the première tomorrow, to get hold of some sport trousers and a sport shirt from Willixx.’ And so he did.
Exactly two weeks later, the next general rehearsal in that very special May in Paris – Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This time Harry Graf Kessler doesn’t even go to the rehearsal, heading instead straight to the post-rehearsal party at the Larue restaurant – with Nijinsky, with Maurice Ravel, with André Gide, with Diaghilev, with Stravinsky, ‘where the general view was that the première tomorrow evening would cause a scandal’. And so it did. The première of
The Rite of Spring
was an event that electrified Paris and sent shock waves as far as New York and Moscow. What happens on the evening of 29 May between 8 and 10 p.m. is one of those rare moments when eye-witnesses sense they’re part of a historical event. Even Harry Graf Kessler is ecstatic: ‘A new form of choreography and music. An entirely new vision, something never seen before, something gripping and convincing, has suddenly come into existence. Savagery in un-art and also in art: old form is ravaged, new form suddenly arising out of chaos.’ What Kessler confides in his diary at three o’clock in the morning is one of the most concise and workable formulations for the thrust of modernity that grips the world in 1913.
The audience on 29 May in Paris is the noblest and most cultivated in Old Europe: sitting in one of the boxes is Gabriele d’Annunzio, who has fled to Paris to get away from his disciples in Italy. In another
is Claude Debussy. Coco Chanel is in the auditorium, and so is Marcel Duchamp. For the rest of his life, he will say later, he would never forget the ‘shouting and screeching’ of that evening. Stravinsky’s music brought the primal violence of archaic powers back on the stage – the primordial nature of people from Africa and Oceania, who had served as a model for the art of Expressionism, were now at the centre of civilisation, brought to pulsating life in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
From the first note of the extremely high solo bassoon, roars of laughter can be heard – is that music, or a spring storm, or the noise of hell the outraged audience wants to know. Drumming everywhere, up on stage the dancers are in ecstatic motion – there’s laughter, then, when the Parisians realise it is meant seriously, shouting. The devotees of the Modern, on the other hand, applaud from the cheap seats, the music rages on and the dancers get tangled up; they can no longer hear the music for all the noise. From somewhere or other Maurice Ravel is shouting ‘Genius!’ into the auditorium. Nijinsky, who wrote the choreography for the ballet, hammers out the rhythm with his fingers – against the furious whistling of the audience.
The dancers seem to be intoxicated, and the theatre manager turns off the lights in the middle of the performance to avoid an escalation of the chaos, but the dancers at the front keep going, and when the lights come back on the people in the auditorium have the unsettling feeling that they’re the stage and the dancers are the audience. It is only thanks to the stoical calm of the conductor, Pierre Monteux, who keeps going just as the dancers do, that they manage to carry the performance to the final bar.
Le Figaro
writes the next morning:
The stage represented humanity. On the right, strong young people are picking flowers, while a 300-year-old woman dances around like mad. On the left-hand edge of the stage an old man studies the stars, where here and there sacrifices are being made to the god of light. The audience couldn’t swallow it. They roundly hissed the piece. A few days previously they might have applauded. The Russians, who aren’t entirely familiar with the manners and customs of
the countries they visit, didn’t know that the French start protesting at the drop of a hat once stupidity has reached its nadir.
Stravinsky is horrified by these words. He is deeply disturbed by the events of the evening. And yet he guesses he has written a work that will define an era. And he may have been reinforced in this view by Coco Chanel, whose little millinery salon in Paris has been attracting a great deal of attention, and who sees the great Russian composer for the first time this evening. And then becomes his lover.
