Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [90]
When one is sickened by ugliness, tedium, stupidity, false feeling—by daily life, in other words—one must construct rigorous barriers of tact and taste in order to survive.
They walked in all weathers, at all times of day, sometimes covering the entire four kilometers of the Ringstrasse. After one such outing Hugo made this terse entry:
Walking with A today on the Ring.
Insolent thugs holding a meeting in the park opposite the Reichsrat, chanting, singing vile Reform Union songs.
Cries of Ostjuden—they actually threatened us!
I have never been so furious in my life. Still trembling six hours later, as I write this.
A in a state of collapse.
Witnesses gave a decidedly sharper account of the incident, which arose not in connection with a Reform Union “meeting,” but rather with a demonstration by some Christian Social toughs over the language rights bill currently paralyzing Parliament. These witnesses—including a Dienstmann on break and the note-bearer to the emperor’s First Lord Chamberlain—said that perhaps thirty demonstrators strutted out of the park and approached the young couple, chanting “Jew, where is your patch? Jew, where is your patch?”—an obvious reference to the triangular yellow patch that Jews were required to wear before emancipation. It was unknown whether the mob specifically recognized the Kuhls, or simply assumed they were Jewish on the basis of looks; in any event, they continued chanting as they surrounded the couple, crowding in so closely that there was, as a nearby coachman put it, “a good deal of mushing about, not blows exactly.” With one arm around Anna, the other fending off the mob, Hugo maintained a slow but determined progress past the park. Eventually the mob broke into laughter and fell away, manifesting a mood that was, on that day at least, more sportive than resolutely bloody.
Months later Hugo was still brooding in his diary, his humiliation evident; as for the young virtuoso, if the incident put her in a state of collapse, she recovered quickly. Within the week she traveled to Budapest and performed a program of Beethoven’s C minor Concerto and Brahms’s Paganini Variations. Her novel handling of Brahms’s octave glissandos was especially stunning, the way she took them prestissimo, staccato, and pianissimo all in one, producing a feverish, nearly unbearable nervous effect which electrified the critics no less than the crowd.
“The child,” Heuberger wrote in the Neue Freie Presse, “does not play like a child, but with the mastery of genius powered by long and serious study.” The pan-German press reviewed the performance in typically viperish tones. “Like glass shattering,” the Deutsche Zeitung said of the sounds she produced. “Her hair is almost as beautiful as Paderewski’s,” the Deutsches Volksblatt sarcastically remarked, adding, “the position of her fingers on the keys reminded one of spiders.” Her fingers: though Puchel’s technical exercises ensured that all fingers developed equally, the teacher had not, to this point, chosen to emphasize her sixth finger in performance, though it could be heard, or perhaps more accurately, felt, in the cascades of her arpeggios and brass-tinged double notes, the dizzying helium lift of her accelerando. But at some point during the spring or summer of 1899, Herr Puchel sat Anna before the Fantasy. Even from the beginning, practice sessions devoted to that work took place in the privacy of the Kuhls’ comfortable Salesianergasse apartment, rather than in Puchel’s more accessible Rathaus studio. In the interest of maximizing box-office receipts, Kornblau had decreed to Anna’s inner circle that the dormant and presumed-lost Fantasy would be presented to the public with all the drama and mystery of a Strauss debut.
“Such an odd piece,” Hugo recorded after hearing it for the first time. “And needlessly difficult; Visser’s rolled chords seem impossible