Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (61 page)

As if this dense, almost suffocating array of associations, shocks and cross-fertilizations filling Konopiště were not enough, there is a final treasure: the gloomy little station of the local town of Benešov has somehow still kept the decorative door-frame that once led to the special waiting room reserved for guests en route to or from the heir’s home. This door-frame may not be much but it has survived an incredible number of tribulations, and what curious, ornate figures once walked through it! In the summer of 1914 Kaiser Wilhelm II and Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz arrived for a visit. This was one of the key meetings prior to the First World War and infuriatingly there is no clue at all as to what was discussed. Franz Ferdinand was against preventive war of any kind – well aware of Habsburg weakness, and impatient (by this time
more
than impatient) to carry out his internal reforms and regenerate the Empire as a great power on the modern German or American model. The three men, probably sitting in Franz Ferdinand’s ‘harem room’ with their cigars, would have had the most frank and interesting conversation imaginable, filled with random gusts of anti-British, anti-Russian and anti-French ranting with occasional polite pauses to allow Franz Ferdinand to be anti-Hungarian and anti-Serb. We would know so much more about the true parameters of the German–Habsburg relationship, which was to create the summer’s fatal dynamic, if there was only some kind of record. Both the Grand Admiral’s and the Kaiser’s bedrooms have been preserved. Tirpitz’s is decorated with a straight-talking albeit freakishly bearded militarist in mind – it is the room of a man’s man, no nonsense and with a portrait of Wallenstein. In a weird contrast, the Kaiser’s room is decorated with a rose-themed pink wallpaper and lots of fussy Bohemian glass and spindly furniture. It is hard to imagine that Franz Ferdinand gave orders for such an insulting chamber for the Nibelung Supreme Warlord, but someone lurking in the castle must have thought it funny.

Night music

This is probably as good a place as any to come clean about Béla Bartók. Through all the travels and all the reading behind this book a number of composers have provided the soundtrack, but none more important than Bartók. Shortly after beginning my first proper job I met up with a friend who had just discovered him and insisted I sit and listen to the opening bars of
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
. At last my life had the shadowed, mystical, darkling and morbid accompaniment that made sense. I may have been sleeping on a fold-away bed in the storeroom of a crowded rental semi on the edge of a Basingstoke industrial estate, microwaving chicken pie and sweetcorn, but in my mind colossal dramas were being played out.

As so often these completely accidental encounters at the right age can have a total impact. I can no more imagine my adult life without Bartók than I can imagine it without my family – and without Bartók I cannot see how I would have written this book. Several writers and artists spun me round to put me face to face with Central Europe, but it was Bartók who over some twenty-five years turned it into an enduring conundrum, his face in countless photos a sort of enigmatic father figure to me. However much I love to listen to Szymanowski, Janáček, Ligeti, Dvořák, Zemlinsky, Berg, Mahler, Wolf and Schoenberg, these are all composers who for me follow behind the trail he blazed through my head.

In a book not unfree of self-indulgence there is a huge temptation here to go on indefinitely about Bartók, but I will try to rein myself in. I was very lucky not to have seen
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
on stage until the entire opera was safely lodged in my imagination as it is, in the cold light of the opera house, a rather embarrassing oddity. The drama is set around the duke bringing his bride, Judith, back to his dark and gloomy castle. The couple love each other but Judith insists (reasonably enough) that the seven enormous doors of the castle’s interior be opened, both to brighten the place up a bit and because there can be no secrets between them. The duke grudgingly complies and the doors are unlocked one by one, to reveal a torture chamber, an armoury, a treasure house, a magic garden, a great vista of forests and meadows, a lake of tears and, finally, Judith’s own awful fate.

Even writing this stuff out it is impossible not to feel a bit uneasy about the leaden nature of its grinding symbolism, cod psychiatry and so on. The blame for this lies with Béla Balázs, who wrote the libretto and also did a similarly awful job for the scenario of Bartók’s ballet
The Wooden Prince
, although he was himself a fascinating figure – a classic example of Magyarization, having been born to German-Jewish parents as Herbert Bauer. Whatever his failings on the stage his fake Chinese stories
The Cloak of Dreams
could not be more perfectly enjoyable. But clearly Bartók found it sympathetic and the Budapest of the time was a mass of such stuff:
Bluebeard
should probably be seen as cut from the same wonderful material as the Zoo or Ignác Alpár’s Vajdahunyad Castle or sculptures of the
Turul
.
¹
Unfortunately for Bartók these objects do not depend for their success on being displayed on a proscenium stage to well-heeled people sitting in rows. Balázs and Bartók created something which looks ridiculous on stage (two people warbling away surrounded by doors), but which quite inadvertently turned out to work brilliantly on headphones or through massive speakers. No set-designer can hope to get near the music itself, which conjures up visions of disembodied horror and ecstasy in a mentally infinite regression of Piranesi’s
Imaginary Prisons
. As with so much of Bartók’s music it makes me wistful that I have never had much to do with mind-altering drugs.

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
was my introduction to the baffling joys of Magyar. When Bluebeard becomes Kékszakállú (much better!) and things are said like

Aranypénz és drága gyémánt,

Bélagyönggyel fényes ékszer,

Koronák és dús palástok!

then you know you are lost.
I have spent so much time trying to pronounce Magyar properly and it is the language that now sits at the heart of my personal rage and sadness about my language impotence – the certainty of dying with still no access to such strange, mellifluous sounds.

Bluebeard
(or, ahem,
A
Kékszakállú Herceg Vára
) was the beginning of a long journey I should not threaten you with. But for me Bartók has offered the permanent promise of an aural book of endless interest and with an infinite number of pages to turn. Most of Bartók’s orchestral showpieces, apart from
Bluebeard
, the piano concertos
and the
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste
, have never struck me as having much value. It is in the works where he is most completely unfolding his innermost strangeness – the chamber music, the pieces for piano – that he becomes so hypnotic. With aching self-consciousness I once read Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities
while listening over and over to
Mikrokosmos
and these two gripping and heroically ambitious works are welded together for me even if to a colder eye or ear they would have nothing in common.
Mikrokosmos
is a vast set of over a hundred and fifty piano pieces initially setting out as simple little teaching pieces for Bartók’s son (‘Dotted Notes’, ‘Syncopation’) but by the final ‘Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm’ capering off to the Lunatic Asylum of Virtuosity. I have never dared find out after how many pieces into the sequence poor little Péter Bartók blubbed and ran off. The first of the exercises, which even I could play, already sound absolutely Bartókian and have made it possible to speculate that his music is so odd because he just heard or imagined things differently (or ‘wrongly’) – but this is, of course, unverifiable. Patches of
Mikrokosmos
are merely proficient and colourless, but extraordinary things like ‘Subject and Reflection’ and ‘From the Diary of a Fly’ are, for me, the articulation for thinking about Hungary and race back and forth in my head, enlivening even sitting on a bus in Transdanubia.

Bartók’s existence (as with so many Austro-Hungarian artists) is terrifyingly at odds with later political and racial convulsions. Almost nowhere associated with either his upbringing or interests now lies inside the Hungarian state. He was born in Nagyszentmiklós, now the Romanian town of Sânnicolau Mare, then moved to Nagyszőllős (where he tinkled away as a child prodigy), now the Ukrainian town of Vynohradiv, then Nagyvárad, now the Romanian city of Oradea, and then Pozsony, the Slovakian capital of Bratislava. Only in his late teens did he get to Budapest. The peasant-song research which was so critical to Bartók’s music was carried out mainly in what is now Slovakia and Romania, with the composer dressed up in a painfully earnest walking costume. It is almost as though he was born just in time to exist as a composer, fed from sources which would soon be stopped up.

He lived the entire historical sequence, beginning with the anti-Habsburg contempt of his early tone-poem
Kossuth
, which has a derisive snatch from ‘The Emperor’s Hymn’ that caused anxiety to the authorities – a needless anxiety given the work’s dreary stiffness. He then lived through the nightmares of the Great War, was associated with the post-War Communist republic, but eventually rebuilt some bridges with the traumatized, grey Horthy regency while never dropping his own commitment to what he happily called ‘the brotherhood of man’. The mutual hatreds that drove Central Europe to destruction could not be split apart from music, however private much of Bartók’s music became. An initiative as simple as a plaque on his birthplace in Romania collapsed into recriminations over what languages it should use. Equally gloomily one of his greatest works,
Cantana Profana: The Nine Splendid Stags
, was based on a Romanian
colind
ă (a form of Christmas carol) but had to be translated into Magyar to make it acceptable for performance in Hungary. His bristling hatred of Fascism eventually drove him to emigrate to New York, where he was ill, miserable and lived just long enough to see his country destroyed. Ten people attended his funeral.

Normally I am resistant to visiting the museum homes of famous writers or composers as there seems such a limited link between what they contain and what we value – desks or pianos or knick-knacks seem very low on the list of reasons for being interested in someone, particularly once a cafe, shop and ticket desk have been hacked into place. But I felt I had to make an exception for Bartók’s house in the Buda Hills, where he lived for much of the 1930s. I also made an exception for Szymanowski’s house in Zakopane, which was fascinating – and which showed that in fact I had been entirely
wrong
for years about writers’ and composers’ houses and had left a now irreparable and silly hole in much of my writing.

Bartók’s house could not be more remodelled, but this is still the street he walked up, the garden he looked at, the spaces he moved through. It was a suitably dark, bare-treed and wintry day and everything seemed to call for
Bluebeard
’s ‘Lake of Tears’ music. The house holds a miscellany of Bartók things which almost accidentally emphasize his proto-hippyness. In most photos he dresses like a gloomy bank clerk, but here is a photo of him in a colourful chemise and sandals sitting devoutly in front of a
folklorique
painted wardrobe, and the wardrobe itself now stands next to the photo. Most wonderful are the little objects he liked to collect – trays of beetles, flowers, coins, minerals, sea-shells, cigar boxes filled with odds and ends, a chess set, a pocket maze, an edelweiss. The museum’s major treasures were what you would expect (diplomas, scores, paintings), but these tiny objects were nearly unbearable – here was the man who had written
Mikrokosmos,
inventor of the churring ‘night music’ that is scattered throughout his work, whose sensibility seemed as perfectly expressed by a folding chess set or a pressed flower as by his actual music.

Transylvanian rocketry

For some years I have had an underdeveloped fantasy about the museum directors of western Romania and how at their annual Christmas lunch the impatiently awaited highlight – between gulps of gum-burning brandy – is always the announcement of the winner of the dullest exhibition-case award. As one of the handful of individuals who has ambled around pretty much all the museums in Transylvania, Partium and the north-eastern Banat, I could certainly be a plausible guest and make helpful suggestions. In a crowded field the winner most years must be the incomparable display case at the Sighişoara Museum that simply features two late-nineteenth-century books open to show illustrations of a man demonstrating a back-strengthening device. Others might have their displays of callipers, decorated bellows or drinking vessels – but there is no escaping the low whistle of admiration provoked by this doozy. And so yet again the director of the Sighişoara Museum – polishing his glasses with his napkin in quiet pride – almost disappears under the hearty back-pats of his colleagues.

Even typing this I feel a total heel. How can museums which have been hit by every imaginable ideological wave be anything other than timorous? How could a world where several generations of looting soldiers, corrupt mayors and acquisitive politicians from the capital cities hold sway
not
have exhausted, drained-out museums? Post-1989 – with the rejection of the last twinges of the nationalist–Communist narrative – what
is
the story that a museum is meant to tell? Lack of funding, but perhaps more importantly lack of interest, has meant that many museums are shut completely or have huge areas closed off (including, sadly, the reputedly fascinating sections on the grim end of the Hungarian War of 1848–49 in the Arad Museum).

Control of museums, like control of teaching, was always a key nationalist aim throughout the Empire, with the exhibits bent to demonstrate specific ancient claims to the land, to enshrine terrible deeds of the past and to celebrate current achievements. This is still the case in places such as the National Museums of Prague and Budapest, with the former currently showing two exhibitions, one of proud Hussite remnants and the other simply called Great Czechs. In the parts of the Empire now ruled by Romania there is a sense of ideological exhaustion which generally makes this unacceptable. Everyone who has survived has been through the mill in a way that makes the past simply too awful to be worth enshrining. So in that sense old pictures of patented back-straightening devices celebrate the exorcising of that past. Perhaps this too is why some of the truly exceptional Transylvanian museums, such as the Ethnographic Museum in Cluj or the ASTRA park outside Sibiu, work so well. By restricting themselves to the nineteenth-century obsession with folk costume or architecture they skirt more difficult questions and, with all passion spent, allow an entirely aesthetic rather than political response.