The Habsburg Cafe (12 page)

Bayreuth may have been intended as a reproduction among the green Franconian hills of the virtues of the Attic world. It is, for all that, a setting for shamanistic rituals. The mature music dramas (even
Lohengrin
) deliberately and consciously set out to subject their audiences to trials calling upon all their physical (and also spiritual) resources. You have to give up your whole being to
The Ring
and
Parsifal
. You cannot squeeze in a performance between dinner and seduction:
Parsifal
keeps you captive in the theatre for six or six and a half hours; even
Rhine-gold
, the shortest of the tetralogy of music dramas comprising
The Ring
, requires almost three hours to perform, and there is no break for an interval in that score. Wagner demanded—and obtains from enthusiasts—the sacrifices of the devout.

Such sacrifices and discomfort (the seats at Bayreuth are not padded) are appropriate to acts of religious mystery and worship. The audience willingly subjects itself to these hardships because it is no longer composed of individuals, each with his own consciousness of the demands made upon him, but of a group, an entity, a Gestalt perhaps, totally absorbed by the revelation it is privileged to witness. The music dramas are static and statuesque. Very little ‘happens'; there are usually only one or two personages on the vast, cavernous stage. They are gods, mythological beings, above and beyond ordinary
emotions and preoccupations, obsessed and tormented by grand, abstract concepts—Fate, Godhead, Duty and Love. Their lengthy monologues and slow-moving vocal disputes deliberately shun movement and vivacity. The music itself achieves its greatest effects through lack of variety. The endlessly recurring thematic units (the notorious leitmotif) the deliberate rhythms, the emphasis not so much on melody as on massive blocks of sonority all contribute to this replacement of entertainment (the disgraceful frivolity of opera, according to Wagner) by ritual. The audience at Bayreuth (as in other theatres where the Wagner cult came to flourish) are too disciplined to sway and chant in shamanistic ecstasy; there is, nevertheless, something of the possessed in their demeanour as they sit immobile on their hard wooden seats for two-hour stretches at a time in a darkened theatre.

Wagner's sounds and the images he conjured, those transparent poetic and theatrical emblems, became the holy relics of that nationalist movement which emerged in the beer halls of Munich at the same time as his works discovered those enthusiastic audiences which had largely eluded him for most of his creative life. Its thumping rhythms were heard on the streets of Munich, Berlin and Vienna as full-throated youths yelled for the cleansing of decadent and foreign pollution from the holy German realm. The bombastic praise of German art as the citizens of Nuremberg gather in the festival meadow at the end of
The Mastersingers
was heard again at the vast rallies conducted in that most German of all cities. Wagner accompanied the march of intoxicated hordes, heeding the call of the race deep in their pulse, sweeping aside the bourgeois and therefore decadent virtues of compassion, tolerance and magnanimity to defend the realm of purity. He liberated ancient forces that had lain dormant in the blood of the German race, which had been shamefully subjected to the domination of decadence from the west—the frivolous French—and from the east: the Jews, gypsies, Slavs and other denizens of the Balkan peninsula, the threat Oswald Spengler had seen flooding over the great Central European site of civilisation.

Many answered that call to arms which spread from Bayreuth, the holiest of shrines in this new religion, to the other opera houses of this world. From those places intellectuals, pundits, the politically ambitious and dedicated spread the gospel to those millions of people who did not usually venture into theatres and opera houses. A cultural phenomenon became political; it accompanied, indeed it was probably instrumental in generating, that terrible cleansing of the German lands, the holy realm of the
Volk
half a century ago, the effects of which still echo in this world. For that reason many people—and not merely Jews—still refuse to attend performances of the Wagner operas. Until very recently not a note of his music was heard in Israel.

That is one account of the Wagner cult, a convenient historical fable, an easy division into ‘them' and ‘us', an occasion for expressing a sense of cultural superiority: why subject yourself to the bombast, vulgarity and tedium when there is Bach and Mozart? The other is more embarrassing, easily swept under the carpet, yet—especially in this theatre in Vienna—one that cannot be ignored. Wagner's followers were by no means exclusively racial and political ideologues, men and women devoted to their holy cleansing mission, whose belief and dedication were reasserted each time they participated in the rites of the Master. Such people were, in all probability, a small (though by no means uninfluential) minority. In all likelihood there were not enough of them to fill the theatre at Bayreuth for the four weeks of the festival. Wagner attracted, from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until almost the middle of the twentieth, a bourgeois public who could not in many cases deliver guarantees of Teutonic or Aryan purity. The French, still smarting from their recent defeat by the Prussians, began flocking to Bayreuth as soon as the theatre opened in 1876. During the following decades the urban middle classes of Central Europe, many of them Jews, or at least people who would find themselves Jewish by virtue of the Nuremberg Racial Laws, flocked to theatres in order to be embraced by the gorgeous sonorities and mythic abstractions of Wagner's music dramas.

They attended performances of these works—which were to become the psalms and anthems justifying their destruction—in their own jewelled, marble-encrusted theatres. Few if any made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth. My father—a more ardent Wagnerite than I am—made that journey, from Sydney, only in the last months of his life. When he returned he said that he much preferred the ‘old way' of performing his favourite operas. The ‘old way', as practised here in this theatre, in Budapest, and in the Leipzig and Dresden of his student days in the 1920s, was an uneasy but seductive marriage of the essential superficiality and frivolity of the opera house—its flounce, its display, its rigid social hierarchies—and the deeply subversive intent of those works to which that public flocked with such enthusiasm. The citizens of Budapest and Vienna willingly disrupted the normal patterns of their lives to arrive at the theatre in the afternoon (as I have done today), foregoing the ceremony of the visit to the café, the evening meal, all the rituals of their middle-class existence, to submit themselves to the enchantment of the composer many of them referred to as the Master. During the intervals they hurried to the elegant buffets to sustain themselves with delicate sandwiches of caviar, salami, and mayonnaise. They would have scorned the sausages consumed in the long intervals of Bayreuth by the true devotees as outward and visible signs of their membership of the tribe.

This afternoon, in this theatre where members of my family used to fall under the sway of these insinuating, infuriating and yet irresistible conjuring tricks, I am more aware than ever of the anomaly of their willing complicity. Even
Lohengrin
, perhaps the least ideological of Wagner's works, should have been sufficient to fill them with alarm and apprehension. They should have realised that their caste-ridden rituals of bourgeois life were directly challenged even by this ‘romantic opera', a heady world of magic and enchantment.

Lohengrin
begins in Brabant, on the banks of the Scheldt—Wagner's plot is drawn (remotely) from a medieval chivalric romance. Henry the Fowler, defender of the realm, is rallying
the warriors of Brabant to join him in opposing the Hungarians, that barbaric race from the east, who are threatening these lands, the centre and focus of Christendom. I wonder whether those people—my father, his relatives, the inhabitants of that world—ever listened to these words. Did they pay attention to King Henry's call-to-arms, or was this only a lot of noise to them, a preparation for the heart-rending romance that, for them at least, was the justification for their five hours of discomfort?

The well-dressed audience around me doesn't seem too interested either. They are sitting politely, attention fixed on the huge expanse of the stage where, in a curious steely-blue twilight, the ranks of warriors loudly proclaim their loyalty to King Henry, Christendom and virtue. I wonder too whether any erotic adventures in the darkened boxes accompany this rousing chorus. Now a menacing figure, accompanied by a woman of obviously evil intent, begins to level accusations at the heroine: she has murdered her brother, he says, in order to seize for herself the duchy of Brabant. At this moment there is a notable change in the attention of the people around me, of the whole audience it seems. They are much more alert, concentrating on the soprano who now comes forward, to the accompaniment of sweetly chaste sounds from the orchestra. Every breath in the house seems to be held as the singer begins her account of a dream in which a knight clad in silver came to rescue her from her predicament.

These people obviously know
Lohengrin
very well, and they know too that this is the moment at which the singer—whoever she is—is to embark on the great trial of her career, having stepped in to fill the role vacated by the world-famous exponent of the part. For them, it occurs to me, this is just another opera, an absurd fantasy, an occasion for fine singing. I can sense their attention waxing and waning throughout the long performance. When the hero arrives in his swan-drawn boat—indeed to rescue the maiden—they are obviously impressed by the skill of this celebrated tenor who is not (thank goodness) indisposed. They are less attentive at the beginning
of the second act, where the sinister baritone and his full-voiced wife plot the maiden's downfall by persuading her to break her rescuer's prohibition that she must never ask him his name. Everyone seems to enjoy the wedding march (
that
wedding march) in the last act, and by the time of the final scene, when the people of Brabant are once more gathered on the banks of the Scheldt so that the grieving Lohengrin might bid farewell to his errant wife—she had, after all, asked him his name—many seem to be looking forward to the end of the performance. No-one appears to be much interested in King Henry's lament that the knight will not be joining him in the crusade against the Hungarian barbarians.

The people gathered here this evening, remnants of Kakania, might just be redeemed by their frivolity. As this long performance draws to its close it occurs to me that no-one—either on stage or in the audience—is taking any of this very seriously. The production is, to say the least, bland. The design and the costumes are atmospheric and picturesque. The director seems to have been content with marshalling his large forces—principals, supporting cast, chorus and extras—on and off the stage with as little fuss as possible. There is no interpretation evident, not much emphasis on the text except to sustain the fairly thin narrative strand. It is all faintly old-fashioned, justifying itself by the gorgeous sound emerging from the stage and the pit, as may well be inevitable in a theatre where you have practically no view of the stage from many of the seats.

This blandness, the refusal to take
Lohengrin
as anything but a romantic fable with some marvellous music, may imply that the old ghosts, the fire in the blood, are things of the past. Perhaps we are lucky enough to be living in a time that has gone beyond those outrages to which the citizens of this city assented as enthusiastically as their German brothers and sisters. This
Lohengrin
is a pretty, decorative affair, as befits a theatrical performance in a theme park. It may therefore be that the irritating and in many ways risible life of that theme park, which has been increasingly grating on me during my days here, is a way of neutering its inhabitants, ensuring that
they will never again rise to the call of the demons of the tribe.

That proves to be a cheering thought. Yet no sooner has this possibility occurred to me than I realise how mistaken it is. It may be very comforting to think of Vienna, and of those parts of Kakania that came under its spell, as the reservoir of the old aristocratic values which tried—vainly as it turned out—to stem the tide of demagoguery. It has been said often enough that Austrian antisemitism was fundamentally social, not political or malevolent. The princes of the blood might have scorned an eminent family like the Wittgensteins because Jewish blood coursed through their veins, but they would never, the legend insists, have sought their destruction. That may have been true of the rulers of this realm—though an innate scepticism makes me doubt that assertion. It was patently untrue of those urban mobs who howled for the final solution propounded by the Führer, who was nurtured in the pleasant city of Linz. The ugliness of the twentieth century emerged as much out of this Austrian world as it did out of the German soul and blood—and there was, moreover, the spring of 1938 when the citizens of this country eagerly embraced unification with the Reich.

Thinking harder about my family's seemingly innocent infatuation with Wagner's music (especially
The Ring
, my father's favourite) than I ever have in my life, the possibility seems inescapable that these people were to a large extent accomplices to their own destruction. Their blood may have also been stirred by these heady images of a primitive life, one far removed from the stuffy proprieties of their well-upholstered world. They too may have yearned for the cleansing and the new beginning, and for the twilight of their own gods. Perhaps they imagined that they had become so assimilated into the ‘Aryan' world of Central Europe that they did not recognise themselves as the enemy—those threatening forces swarming in the east. I am ashamed to remember, at this time of preparation, of transitions, when I am preoccupied by the prospect of travelling to Hungary in a day or two, that my family regarded with utter contempt those barbaric people, especially
Orthodox Jews with their long sidelocks, who lived to the east of their tight little world.