Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [93]
In any case, his famous cousin soon found herself the object of a nerve-shredding public hysteria. The pan-Germans continued their threats to disrupt the concert, citing as justification the “occult” fits and seizures which the Fantasy had induced seventy years before. The Secessionist and Young Vienna movements appropriated the young pianist as their champion, while a congeries of beards from the Conservatory accused Anna and her managers of sensationalism, fomenting needless conflict for publicity purposes. An obsessed fan worked out a dizzying mathematical correlation between the date of Visser’s death and Anna’s birthday, which the Abendpost featured in a front-page story. Professors of neurology and musicology were invited to propose theories explaining the Fantasy’s violent effect on listeners, while Sigmund Freud—obscure, struggling, no longer young, shunned by the medical establishment and passed over for professorship—followed the controversy from his office on the Berggasse, where he read the newspapers and wrote the Interpretation of Dreams in the long stretches between patient appointments.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Hugo told Anna on January 11. “Nobody would blame you for backing out.” “Nor you,” is the curt answer that he recorded—apropos of Flora? Mayor Lueger of the Christian Social Party said that he could not guarantee security outside the Royal Opera on the evening of the twentieth, citing “forces beyond all but the Almighty’s control.” But the young vir tuoso was nevertheless resolved. Those with access to the Kuhl household at this time reported that Anna was the very essence of composure. Though it seems that a phase was widely feared, and perhaps secretly desired, among her inner circle, she practiced unstintingly each day, the Beethoven, the Liszt, her beloved Chopin, and the Fantasy over which her fingers were gradually gaining control. Pianists will tell you that they practice in order to reduce the risk of catastrophe, but they know that to play with complete safety is an insult to their art. Music demands risk, a condition that Anna seems to have embraced with near-manic devotion, as if by engaging the demons inherent in her art she might destroy all claims they might have on her.
Overwrought fans, and on several occasions journalists, were caught infiltrating the Kuhls’ apartment house in hopes of overhearing Anna practice. An old man, one Zolmar Magg of Lvov, a tanner, was discovered to have heard Visser perform the Fantasy in 1831, and the local music society appealed for funds to send him to Vienna for the revival. And on January 16 Hugo makes this entry:
To Uncle’s in the p.m. I can hardly bear to listen to the thing now, this “Fantasy,” this nightmare—it’s like a dream in which you’re trying to flee some hideous creature, yet for all your terror your legs refuse to move.
The following day the Ministry of Culture announced that it was unilaterally canceling Anna’s engagement at the Royal Opera House, citing security concerns and the previous autumn’s Wagner debacle, for which, the Ministry’s communiqué suggested, Fraulein Kuhl was in part responsible. Even as shock resolved into shrill outcry, a second announcement was made, this time issuing from the Theater an der Wien, one of Vienna’s oldest theaters and its leading operetta house. The impresario Alexandrine von Schonerer, owner and director of the theater and, incidentally, estranged sister of the notorious anti-Semite George von Schonerer, had offered to suspend her current production of Die Fledermaus so that Anna might perform the Fantasy as scheduled. Kornblau publicly conveyed the Kuhls’ acceptance of the offer, noting that the Theater an der Wien had generously chosen to honor all tickets for the