Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [91]
Lunch at Sacher Garden w/Anna, Hermine, Mother.
When I brought up the Fantasy, the weirdness of it, A simply smiled. “Visser was enjoying himself when he wrote that,” she said. “He was being himself, perhaps for the first time in his life. I suppose it felt like taking a deep breath after holding it in for all those years.”
“But do you like it?” I asked her. “The sound of the thing, I mean.”
Answer: “I like him. I like him in that particular piece, though he scares me.”
“Scares you?”
She laughed. “Yes, because he’s flaunting it. The thing that made him different. Which seems dangerous, in a way.”
Engagements throughout Europe were scheduled for the fall, among them a series in London in which she would play twenty-two Beethoven sonatas. In the midst of her preparations, Anna was approached by officials from the Ministry of Culture, requesting her, as the child prodigy and pride of Vienna, to take part in a special Wagner program. In an attempt to defuse rising political tensions, the government was promoting those aspects of culture that all of the Empire’s competing factions shared. Thus it was no coincidence that Anna, a Jew, was being asked to perform Wagner, the champion of pagan vigor and Teutonic mysticism so beloved by the pan-German zealots.
And beloved, incidentally, by Anna as well; she agreed. The evening approached with much fanfare; even the emperor Franz-Josef would attend, emerging from high mourning for the late empress, stabbed to death in Geneva the previous year by the anarchist Luccheni. The program began well enough. Winkelmann roused the audience with “Der Augen leuchtendes Paar”; Schmedes and Lehman lifted them further with the “Heil dir, Sonne!” from Siegfried. Anna took the stage and was fairly into the Prelude from Tristan when jeers of “Hep! Hep!” rang out from the audience. Within moments everyone understood: a contingent of pan-Germans had taken a block of seats near the stage, and on prearranged signal they began braying the classic anti-Semitic insult. Others in the audience tried to shout them down while a phalanx of policemen came scurrying down the aisle; in the meantime Anna set her jaw and played on, furnishing heady background music for the impending riot. At the last moment, just as the police were poised to wade into the seats, the pan-Germans rose and marched out in ranks, singing “Deutschland über Alles” at the tops of their lungs.
Until now the pan-German press had, however thinly, veiled its attacks in the rhetoric of musical criticism, but now they savaged Anna with unrestrained glee. “No Jew,” declared one reviewer, “can ever hope to understand Wagner,” and to the list of Jew bankers, Northern Railway Jews, Jew peddlers, Jew thieves, and subversive press Jews, they now added “this Jew-girl, this performing metronome with her witch’s hand and freakish improvising.” And when word leaked of her intention to perform the Fantasy the following January, her enemies were livid. “A perversion,” the Kyff-hauser shrieked of the Fantasy, seizing at once on Visser’s putative Jewish origins, “an immoral composition born of the ghetto’s foetid mewlings and melancholies,” while the Deutsches Volksblatt called it “degenerate, antisocial music, full of contempt for all great ideals and aspirations.” The liberal press counterattacked with accusations of revanchism and demagoguery, the pan-Germans fired back in shrill paranoid-racist style, and the battle was joined.
Herr Kornblau, of course, could not have been more pleased. The contract had already been signed for Anna’s performance at the Royal Opera House on the twentieth of January; she would present the Fantasy in a program that, calculated for balancing effect, would include such standards as Liszt’s Love Dreams and Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, along with works by Mozart, Schumann, and Chopin. Meanwhile Anna continued her rigorous schedule of practice and performance. She played in Berlin’s Kroll Hall, battling the poor acoustics, then Leipzig, Paris, and London,