Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (42 page)

So Archduke Karl had to solemnly stand at the altar with his niece, in the same spot where so many Habsburgs had been married, and act as proxy for the man who had sprung from events that had murdered his aunt, who had deposed various Habsburgs in Italy, who had spent ten years killing many thousands of Austrian soldiers and humiliating the entire Empire, and had recently taken for himself blocks of territory which Karl’s family had owned for over four centuries, the ceremony taking place in the presence of his adoptive mother’s memorial. However blackened and desiccated they may have been, the hearts of the former Emperors must surely have convulsed a little in their caskets.

As it happened Maria Ludovica did not have to share the head-on-a-stick setbacks of her great-aunt, instead getting to look sensational in a series of French Imperial gowns, cloaks and tiaras. Napoleon had married her (having divorced Josephine) because she was posh and because he was anxious to have an heir. The Empress Marie Louise, as she now became, had a son with Napoleon who was proclaimed, in a mockery (by Habsburg criteria) of ancient procedure, as the King of Rome. In a sense it was helpful that Franz I was such a bore as anyone more imaginative would have been driven mad by the idea that a peculiar Corsican who nobody had even heard of until recently could make himself Emperor and threaten to reroute the entire system of succession away from the Habsburg family. Marie Louise had a strange life, partly very enjoyable and partly a pawn of wider forces, with two further husbands after Napoleon (including a fun-sounding equerry) and ruling the Duchy of Parma. It cannot have been easy to be pulled between two families, with every move betraying one or the other. Her much-loved son (very briefly known as Napoleon II) became a sad footnote in royal history – a source of embarrassment but also potential danger to the Habsburgs until his death aged twenty-one from tuberculosis. His extraordinary gold crib in the Habsburg Treasury is a strange reminder of a future that never happened: Napoleon as the founder of a dynasty that ruled a united European super-state. In a peculiar piece of tidying up after the defeat of France, Hitler had Napoleon II’s body transferred from Vienna to Les Invalides to be buried near his father. No attempt was made to get hold of his heart, which still sits – in a permanent affront to all the other hearts – in the Augustinian church.

Maria Ludovica’s sacrifice on the altar of political expediency came from Franz and his advisers’ pathological anxiety, in the wake of the Treaty of Schönbrunn, to save what remained of the Empire from total dismemberment. No humiliation was too great and all flashes of hatred for Napoleon were banned. This worked very well. Nothing the British could do seemed to threaten an end to Napoleon’s rule, and so an indefinite future of circumscribed Habsburg watchfulness seemed the only course. It is a fascinating and in some ways plausible counterfactual to think of a permanent Napoleonic Europe, but however many genuine allies the French might have had across the continent, there was something about Napoleon’s default fighting mode which made the whole structure deeply unstable. His ruinous decision in 1812 to invade Russia was entirely logical, as was his inability to come to terms with Britain. Paris, London and St Petersburg all shared nigh-on Mongol superiority complexes, each of which was incompatible with the others and much of world history was to stem from this (with Berlin added in later) until the 1940s. It is very hard for the panoply of ideas associated with being head of an Empire to coexist with others who, by their very existence, mock and undermine your own absolute claims.

The invasion of Russia had all the signs of being the triumph that would seal Napoleon’s greatness and potentially bring the entire generation-long war to an end, with a defeated Russia giving France the ability to destroy British India at leisure and thereby force Britain to sue for peace. The Habsburgs managed to limit their engagement with the Grande Armée to providing thirty thousand men to threaten Russia in the south. Once it was clear the invasion had gone absolutely and catastrophically wrong a new coalition became possible and the Austrians cautiously linked up with the Prussians and Russians. This extraordinary change in fortunes resulted in Austria dominating the Sixth Coalition. With Prussia important but relatively small and Russia operating a huge distance from its home base – and with the British as usual following a different agenda – Franz and his chief minister Metternich found themselves much to their surprise, and not entirely through their own efforts, in a position to dictate the future of Europe. The years of peace had been spent by Austria steadily building up an enormous if not very good army of well over half a million men and it had easily the largest contingent in the Coalition. All these soldiers now simply swamped the French – however brilliantly Napoleon manoeuvred he could not deal with this fundamental reversal in the maths. The Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 saw some six hundred thousand troops crashing into each other, the largest encounter in European history before 1914. In a series of truly horrible battles over the following months both sides suffered grotesque losses, but the French could no longer afford these. The strange interlude of Napoleon’s banishment to Elba (a tiny island, once part of the Tuscan Habsburgs’ patrimony) and his frantic ‘Hundred Days’ attempt to re-establish himself in France may have ended with the Battle of Waterloo, but even if Napoleon had won that battle he was faced with an infinity of Austrian, Prussian and Russian troops all marching west and making this final bid for power utterly futile.

I apologize for having written so much about warfare and diplomacy and I will try to offer a break from this for a while. The Habsburg Empire that came out of this process was very different from its predecessor, larger but more compact, with a formidable group of allies with a shared conservative agenda, and also a shared wish to forget all the terrible things that had recently gone wrong. As so much of the fighting was so humiliating, the Napoleonic Wars had an uncertain place in the regime’s sense of itself. There are a scattering of big monuments to the major figures, but the main business of Franz I seems to have been to proceed with the remainder of his reign pretending none of this stuff had happened. A permanent monument was Haydn’s ‘Emperor’s Hymn’, written in 1797 and adopted during what turned out to be only one of many crises, as a peculiarly beautiful and uplifting song of hope:

God save Franz the Emperor, our good Emperor Franz!

Long live Franz the Emperor in the brightest splendour of bliss!

May laurel branches bloom for him, wherever he goes, as a wreath of honour.

God save Franz the Emperor, our good Emperor Franz!

If ever someone deserved this less it was the gloomy policeman Franz, but the tune (reused magically by Haydn in his ‘Emperor’ Quartet) took on a life of its own. It became the great English hymn ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, and following what one can only imagine were a number of nervous breakdowns, it was successfully and scanningly translated it into every language of the Habsburg Empire. And finally, as the German national anthem, it was rewritten first to start with what would come to be seen as the chilling assertion:

Germany, Germany above everything,

Above everything in the world

and then reconditioned after the world wars so it starts with the much nicer:

Unity and justice and freedom

For the German fatherland!

Back to nature

On 24 May 1801, during a welcome break from being beaten up by Napoleon, the Habsburgs enjoyed one of the great cultural events of the new century, the first full performance of Haydn’s oratorio
The Seasons
at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. The soprano role was taken by the Empress herself, not terribly well, but nobody was in a position to suggest she should be replaced by someone else.
The Seasons
became a pan-European sensation with countless performances in every conceivable type of venue, sometimes with that early nineteenth-century equivalent of wide-screen or 3D for movies: the pointless doubling up or tripling up of vocal or musical parts, making the closing ecstatic hymn to God’s grace perhaps the loudest human sound yet invented outside the battlefield.

The hysteria around this event was stoked by its being, in the dumbest way, a sequel. Haydn’s
Creation
had been a vast success, pushed for by a group of visionaries in Vienna who wished to revive the public religious works of ‘old music’, meaning Bach but above all Händel. Together with his late symphonies these pieces made Haydn a universal celebrity of a new kind, anticipating Beethoven and deliriously crowning a career which had so largely been spent in the restricted and private world of the Esterházy family. The chief genius behind
The Creation
was Gottfried van Swieten, a multi-talented sometime civil servant, composer and librarian and one of those facilitative figures who make all cultural life possible and yet who tend to fall away from any lasting public recognition.

Van Swieten and his wealthy associates had racked their brains as to how Haydn could cap
The Creation
, a difficult act to follow by all sorts of criteria. They eventually settled on James Thomson’s pantheistic long poem
The Seasons
, which van Swieten hacked to bits to provide a suitable array of incidents for Haydn to set. The two hours of elaborate and varied music of
The Seasons
turned out to be Haydn’s last major effort and he finished it in a blur of fatigue and mental decay. After an enormously long, varied and marvellous career, the man who would have a fair claim to win any Best Habsburg Subject contest was at last collapsing.

The Creation
and
The Seasons
became for the Empire a sort of extension of the normal religious experience (just as Händel’s oratorios did in Britain), ritualistic elements in the calendar comparable to major feast days.
The Seasons
is, like all sequels, less good than the original. Haydn himself complained that some of it was just ‘Frenchified rubbish’, particularly hating the music he was obliged to write imitating frogs on a pond (which is, of course, charming). The score has many wonders – a thunderstorm, a riotous hunting party – but it is perhaps too schematic to have any real forward movement (is it autumn yet?), although it could be said that
The Creation
has the most schematic subject of all and nobody complains.

There may well be later examples, but
The Seasons
is a sort of nostalgic summary of centuries of Habsburg nature-worship. Its concerns are relentlessly old-fashioned and conservative, as carefully vetted representatives of the rural community sing about their place and function – sowing and reaping, picking fruit, spinning flax. Like scenes in medieval miniatures, the people of the countryside are caught beneath a monstrous zodiacal wheel, with the eternal shift from season to season germinating yet further tasks. Indeed one of the threats of
The Seasons
is that once performance has begun it may go on indefinitely, with spring swinging back into view (‘Behold, harsh Winter flees’) at two-hour intervals with no escape. The tone is almost unchanged from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s great paintings of the seasons (most famously
Hunters in the Snow
), which came into the collection of Rudolf II’s younger brother Ernst when he was ruler of the Spanish Netherlands in the 1590s and which now make visiting Vienna worthwhile just in themselves. Rudolf himself, as one would expect, festooned himself in related seasons-based drawings, paintings and engravings by figures such as Savery, Sadeler, Bril and the wonderful Pieter Stevens. If Scorpio is in the sky and the pigs are rooting in the woods, then you know it is October. As one of the earliest forms of non-religious and non-court art, these images have a peculiar quality of asking their viewer almost to step into them – with even the simplest elements of a few trees and a stream taking on an air of wizardry.

To see portrayal of the seasons as an instrument of social control would be a bit reductive – as with the ancient gods, there is a strong element of relief that they simply provide amusing decorative challenges for artists – and the seasons decorate everything from dinner services to summer-houses in a dopily apolitical way all over the Habsburg lands, as elsewhere. One way of looking at them is as representing a world in which people are relentlessly
at work
and the interlocking demands of each season are all necessary to basic survival, with neglect or failure leading almost at once to disaster. The appearance of a band of soldiers, plague, or flood, or of March’s weather in June would sweep the entire sequence away, with selections from
The Seasons
being sung with some sarcasm by any haggard survivors. So even in the decorative context of an oratorio for an urban audience there is an implacable message about life in the country, particularly with so many of the Habsburg lands under a constant and dramatic threat of disaster. Much of the Viennese audience, of course, lived a large part of the year on their country estates and indeed received a large part of their income from them, so
The Seasons
would have spoken very directly to their neuroses.

The oratorio wobbles around a bit in
Winter
as there is not much to do except spin or fend off the advances of a nobleman (in a notably limp sequence) or complain about the cold, but this clears space for the final, immense hymn of praise (‘May Thy hand, O Lord, give guidance! Give us strength and courage; then we shall sing, then we shall enter in the glory of Thy realm’), which keeps everyone warm. Although there are pantheistic elements to
The Seasons
which make its sensibilities late eighteenth century, it is also an enormous, specifically Catholic experience – a countryside peopled by hard-working, rooted, God-fearing men and women united in their loyalty to the One Church. It is not surprising that a member of the Imperial family sang in the premiere and everything in the music conforms to Franz I’s icy enthusiasm for everyone just doing as they are told.