Legend of a Musical City

By Max Graf

Legend of a Musical City, first published in 1945, is a story of Vienna, musical center of the world.

The Nestor of Austrian music critics relates in a fascinating manner his own recollections of life with Bruckner, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and other immortals in the music world. Author, Max Graf, who enjoyed intimate friendships with many of the musical stars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, here gives a delightful as well as highly educational story of the development of Austrian music.

“Max Graf is not only an eminent historian and teacher, but a very adept writer; as a critic, he has shown keen judgment and objectivity.”—Richard Strauss

• Language: English
• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Release date: Jan 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789123524

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Text originally published in 1945 under the same title.

© Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

LEGEND OF A MUSICAL CITY

BY

MAX GRAF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ILLUSTRATIONS 5

1—The Musical Centre of the World 7

The March into Vienna. 7

Houses of Music 10

Landscape and People 19

The Viennese 25

Fame and Traditions 36

2—The Last Chapter of Great Music in Vienna 40

On The Ringstrasse 40

The New Vienna 47

Emperor Franz Josef 51

3—Meeting Great Composers 60

Recollections of Johannes Brahms 60

The Composer of the Queen of-Sheba 69

Hours with Hugo Wolf 78

Studies with Anton Bruckner 82

4—In the Opera House and Concert Halls—1891-1914 88

The Musical Capital of Nation 88

In the Opera House 96

New Concert Halls and Old traditions 101

Modern Music in Vienna 107

Popular Music-Johann Strauss 121

5—The Last Hours 1918-1938 128

Richard Strauss in Vienna—The Festivals in Salzburg—Toscanini in Salzburg— 128

6—Past and Future 145

An Outlook on History and New Life 145

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 160

DEDICATION

TO POLLY

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Saint Stephens Cathedral. In this Cathedral Haydn was Choirboy. Schubert sang on its choir too. At the south door of the Cathedral the funeral rites of Mozart were held. Anton Bruckner played often on the great organ.

Guest House of the Monastery Heiligenkreuz in the City of Vienna. The great monasteries in the environs of Vienna own in Vienna houses where the friars put up when coming to town. In some of these ecclesiastical buildings are restaurants where the wine of the monasteries is sold and the Viennese people are drinking under the auspices of the church. The guest house of the Benedictines of Heiligenkreuz is one of the most beautiful of such buildings. It was built at the beginning of the 18th century. One has only to turn around the corner to be in the noisiest street of the City of Vienna.

Beethoven’s House in Heiligenstadt. Here Beethoven spent the summer of 1817 from May till the end of June. (Now Pfarrplatz 2.) The house is quite unchanged, a peasant’s house with large courtyard. At the corner of the house is the statue of Saint Florian, who is believed by the people of Austria to be helpful in case of fire.

Park of the Imperial Castle, Schönbrunn. The Castle of Schönbrunn and its park are full of musical recollections. In the park Haydn played as a child. In the theatre of the castle, Gluck was conductor. In one of the splendid halls Mozart played as a child prodigy before the Empress Theresia and the archduchesses. In the 18th century many performances of the operas took place under the trees of the park of Schönbrunn at night. The young archdukes and archduchesses used to sing and dance at such open-air performances. In the Castle of Schönbrunn Emperor Franz Josef passed away.

Courtyard of an old Viennese Commoner House. Many of such old houses are still in the streets of Vienna. They all have courtyards with arcades. The house where Schubert was born is such a house with courtyard and garden. This house is where the Waltz composer Lanner was born, near the church Saint Ulrich.

Staircase in the Winter Palace of Prince Eugene. In the palace musical performances often took place. The last great composer who conducted performances here was Richard Strauss who conducted in the great hall the performance of his incidental music to Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme in the year 1924.

The Summer Palace of Prince Eugene. The construction of the summer palace of Prince Eugene on the highest point of Vienna with its famous park started in 1713. It was erected in the most radiant epoch of the Viennese Baroque style, when Emperor Charles the Sixth had the chancellory of the empire, the Library of the Court, the Redoutensaele the Charles Church and other luxurious edifices built, which impress the Baroque character still on modern Vienna. In the park of the palace, Max Reinhardt staged his Summer Night Dream.

The Horse Ballets La Contesa dell’Aria and della Acqua. The Horse Ballet, invented by Sbarra and directed by the most famous regisseur" of the Italian Horse Ballets (Carducci) was one of the great shows which glorified the wedding of Emperor Leopold the First and Princess Margaret Theresia of Spain. The staging of the Ballet cost $60,000. The Emperor and the aristocrats of Austria were the performers of the show which lasted from 1:00 till 5:00 P.M. 50 horses and 300 riders exhibited their skill. The temple of marble, bronze and lapis lazuli, in which the choir sang in the background of the picture) was built by Carlo Passetti. There were two dress rehearsals (on December 23 and January 3, 1667) and two performances (January 24 and 31, 1667). The staging of this ballet emptied the money-chests of Austria so completely there was no money left for the war against the Turks.

1—The Musical Centre of the World

The March into Vienna.

On March 13, 1938, the soldiers of the German Reich, in full panoply of war, marched into peaceful Vienna. Through its ancient streets pounded the tread of infantry and the heavy clanking of cannon, tanks and Panzer trucks. The eyes of the young soldiers, beneath their steel helmet brims, stared straight ahead. They turned neither right nor left; neither toward the palaces nor the old baroque churches, nor upward toward the golden spire of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Gazing into the distance, the eyes of these marching men were cold, unemotional and earnest, and in their depths lay war.

Aeroplanes cruised over houses, towers and church domes like grey birds of prey. Few Viennese were in the streets. Inside the houses, families were just sitting down to supper. Through closed windows, the unified sound of marching feet and clanging noise penetrated the rooms, chilling the hearts of all who heard with gloom and apprehension. Hours passed before the march of the German soldiers finally ceased, and the drone of aeroplanes persisted far into the night.

In the streets, no rejoicing greeted the victorious army. Vienna, which usually took such great delight in festive celebrations, was silent. There were no smiling strollers to be seen, no lovers embracing in shadowy doorways or sitting on the benches of the parks and promenades. This was no time for love. And from the taverns came no revelers, faces flushed with wine, singing songs of Vienna and its lovely women. The night seemed not only darker, but more oppressive.

In that hour, when a brutal hand grasped the city by the scruff of its neck, there was more involved than war. All European culture was threatened. In Vienna, which found itself transformed overnight into a typical German big town, all the independent spirit, the joy of living, the freedom, the natural intelligence, were harshly forced under the yoke; while a national fanaticism, imported from Germany, murderously stormed through this city which had never been fanatical, but always humane, gay and friendly. What could Vienna mean to the world without its famous joy of living, which had survived so many troublous times, without its culture, nourished from so many different sources, without its sensuality—Vienna, the Falstaff of German cities, as it was once termed by one of its ironic poets? A legendary city of pleasure, it was quickly being transformed into a prison like those erected throughout Europe in the wake of soldiers in field grey uniforms. What could it mean for the world which loved this city as one loves a beautiful, smiling woman?

For the world at large, Vienna was, above all, a city of music, or better, the city of music; in fact, the only city in the world which would have been unthinkable without music. One could no more imagine Vienna without it than Rome without St. Peter’s and the Vatican, Paris without its boulevards, or New York without Wall Street and skyscrapers. Vienna was the city where great composers had lived. It was the city of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert; of Brahms and Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg. From it had emanated the Strauss waltzes which flowed around the world, everywhere preaching the gospel of life’s enjoyment in three-quarter time. From Vienna, too, came the operettas of Lehar, Oscar Strauss and Fall. The city was as full of music as a vineyard with grapes. Not only concert halls and theatres vibrated with sound, but the air itself. As Paris was the city of the mind, Rome the center of the Catholic world, London the capital of the greatest empire of modern times, so was Vienna the acknowledged music capital of the world. Musicians from all corners of the globe came there to study. Virtuosi came, too, because success in Vienna was a prerequisite of being world-famous. The Vienna State Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Conservatory were internationally recognized. Every tourist visited the houses where the great classics had lived just as, in Rome, he would visit St. Peter’s and Michael Angelo’s statue of Moses. Every musician who came to Vienna visited the graves of the classic musicians in the same spirit as a pious Catholic makes a pilgrimage to the tombs of the saints in Rome. Everything of greatness and of value which had been accomplished in Vienna—the famous medical school, the Art Academy, the new living quarters for workers—was dwarfed beside its place in music.

In the course of centuries, Vienna had become a kind of fairy-tale city. And, as in all fairy-tales, life there was easier, more brilliant and more exciting than anywhere else. Everywhere there was song and sound. The fairy-tale omits to say, of course, that there, as in all modern metropolises, poverty and misery stalked through the streets, in its outskirts, and that, despite the fabled gaiety, hard and earnest work was done. The tale does not speak of the political battles which took place there, nor of the colossal rise of the workingman to political rights, to education, culture, and finally, to political might. According to the saga of Vienna, there was only loving, dancing, singing, drinking and music-making. This legend has been propagated primarily by the motion picture which, for the masses of our time, is the biggest story-teller of them all. Everyone has seen films whose scenes were laid in Vienna. In such pictures, certain connoisseurs of mass taste depicted the fairy-tale Vienna. There were always poor but decent girls who fell in love with dashing officers, nobles and grand dukes. Lovers sat in Prater inns under chestnut trees, and everywhere there was music. Orchestras played waltzes, peasants sang Viennese songs. There were kisses and embraces during the music. Although this type of Viennese film belongs to the most mendacious products of fabrication, it is none the less characteristic that in every case Vienna and music are inseparable.

On that sad March day which was the beginning of a great world catastrophe, the city of music was struck dumb. As in Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, the musicians packed up their music and their instruments, and the candles burned down in the music stands. A great epoch of music came to an end on this day.

Ten generations had labored at the development of Vienna into a great music capital. The long process had begun at the end of the 17th century, when Vienna had achieved the rank of a European city noted for music. From that time on, the graph of its development rose higher and higher in an unbroken ascent. Its peak was reached at the time when the classic musicians lived in Vienna, and on this marvelous construction, the powerful towers of the Haydn symphony, the Mozart Opera, the Beethoven Music of Humanity, and the Schubert song stood in all their glory. Then the graph descends to points which are, nevertheless, still high and strong—Brahms and Bruckner. Finally came the great demolisher of the architecture of classic music, Arnold Schönberg. There ended a unique and great development such as the world had seen only twice before: first, when Greek art rose to the brilliance of the Periclean Age, to Phidias, to the tragic poets, to Plato, Aristotle, to the divine laughter of Aristophanes, and to the mighty marble pillars which looked down from the Acropolis to the blue sea. And a second time, when the painting of the Renaissance had risen to Raphael, Michael Angelo and Titian. Vienna’s development was a similar one, showing a steady growth of artistic fantasy, an increasingly large creative scope, the work of generations, a continuously richer unfolding of the powers of intellect. It was like a symphony, which flowed on to more and more powerful crescendos, to magnificent climaxes, and then, in 1938, died away with a dreary and mournful sound.

For almost three centuries there was great music in Vienna. While Venice, Rome, Naples, Paris, Dresden, Munich, Leipzig and Berlin existed simultaneously as musical centers, they could offer no comparison in the extent and length of their development. In their cases, the superb picture of a clear-cut epoch of history to be seen in Vienna, was lacking, as well as the close bond between music and life which characterized the city. Music had traversed its length and breadth; the Emperor’s castle, the nobles’ palaces, the townspeople’s houses, the city proper and the suburbs, the squares and gardens, the churches, and the winehouses on the fringe of the Vienna woods. Each new generation which sprang up in Vienna wished to outdo the old one which had just been lowered into the grave, in the cultivation of music. Children were brought up as musicians and music lovers. Thus it was possible that even the rather foolish and superficial aristocrats of the 18th century comprised a most sensitive musical public who understood and loved Haydn, Mozart, and even Beethoven. One of the most stupid rulers of Austria, Francis I, used to sit, on summer evenings, in his castle on the Danube, playing violin in a string quartet. In the period of the most narrow-minded reaction after the Napoleonic Wars, during which the intellectual life of Vienna was suppressed and the greatest Austrian poet, Grillparzer, locked his finest works in his desk because he did not wish them to undergo police censoring, the elderly Beethoven, Schubert, Lanner and Strauss the Father, uninhibited by censor or police, kept on writing, and the city was full of music. Here music was not taken as occasional entertainment. It belonged to the people, like the homes in which they lived and died, like the clothes they wore, like the people whom they loved, and like the happy and unhappy hours they experienced.

Upon the German occupation, all this came to a dead end, just as did the chatter at the cafés on the Parisian boulevards, the gossip in the Brussels restaurants, the pilgrimages to Rome, the sensuous gypsy music in Budapest, the elegant frivolity in Warsaw, a short time later. Europe was becoming a battleground, a police barracks and a dreary prison. Disturbances raged everywhere. Death rained out of the air. A new age, a new social order, a new world history were being born amid a thousand pains, cries of anguish and streams of blood. The artistic construction of Viennese musical life was shattered like the other priceless treasures which belonged to the greatness of European culture. An old and noble epoch of Vienna’s music became a pile of débris.

As a world music capital, Vienna was an artistic masterpiece. How many elements had to be assembled before such a city stood, and had grown into music! The people who lived in Vienna, the landscape surrounding it, the history which unrolled there, the social order of its society—all these factors combined to make it what it was. The city’s geographical position and the temperament of its population had their part in this development, from the baroque period of pompous clothes, wavy perruques and luxurious display until the modern times of electric street-lighting and the automobile, which brought this combination of nature and history to a completion. The inherent force which guided Vienna to its unique musical destiny was that which we call talent or genius. And during three hundred years this talent was equally original, equally strong and equally creative. When one considers the comparative brevity of the Elizabethan Age in England, one comprehends the extent of Vienna’s creative talent which produced great music of all kinds for such a long time without becoming exhausted.

It required three centuries to make Vienna a musical city. One single day sufficed to destroy this historical edifice.

Houses of Music

As from the pages of an old chronicle, from its buildings one can read the history which shaped Vienna into a great musical city. Although it was since the beginning of the second half of the 19th century that Vienna developed into a modern city, there are still parts of it which either have not changed at all, or changed only unessentially. Right next to fashionable streets with modern houses and the noisy traffic of the new era, there are silent old streets which are so narrow that they are dark and shadowy. Many of these streets, where houses dating from the middle ages still stand, are very crooked. The old houses have low doors, and small, lightless courtyards. There are palaces whose pillars support balconies and mythological figures carved out of sandstone, over the heavy cornices. Through these same dim alleys went Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and at night when all is still, one imagines he can still hear their echoing steps.

Thus the past is vividly alive in Vienna. Its musical history is bound to the present and does not lie dead in books. Walking through these streets, one realizes that here dwell contemporary musicians who are grandsons of the classical musicians of old.

Starting a musical stroll at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, from whose open Giant Door comes the sound of the old organ, one remembers, perhaps that in its choir Haydn and Schubert sang as boys; and that on a stormy winter’s day, at the south door, Mozart’s shabby coffin was blessed. I saw Anton Bruckner seated at the organ there, his short legs treading the pedal. On the manual, his bony fingers improvised variations on the Austrian national hymn, and his clear-cut, patriarchal face shone when the sound of the organ streamed forth, growing in strength, finally rising to a brilliant Gloria. Ever since the 16th century, when the famous Paul Hoffheymer played his Te Deum on the organ while Emperor Maximilian knelt praying, great musicians were at home in St. Stephen’s.

A few steps from the cathedral, at the head of a narrow, dark street stands a house from the time of Charles VI, where Mozart composed the music for The Marriage of Figaro, and not far away is the Deutsches Haus where he lived when he came to Vienna as a member of the suite of the Archbishop of Salzburg. In this massive building, Mozart sat at the servants’ table with the Archbishop’s lackeys, cook and baker. Here he came for orders from his strict master as to in what noble’s palace he was to play piano. Here, too, the Archbishop’s chamberlain, Count Arco, showed him the door with a kick, when madly in love and furious, he requested his release from service. Through the narrow Wollzeile (Wool Row), which runs eastward from St. Stephen’s, Mozart’s coffin was carried to St. Mark’s cemetery. Neither his ailing wife nor his friends followed his coffin which was hurriedly borne to the cemetery and, during a snowstorm, lowered into a mass grave, where it disappeared. Also, the house where, with the pallid hand of a dying man, Mozart wrote the score of his Requiem and died, still stands in a street which time has scarcely changed. A Haydn House is in the neighborhood. Here Haydn, already old, composed the pious prayer of the Austrian National Hymn.

Not far from the cathedral is a little square where the bustle of the city traffic never penetrates. Here all is as still and peaceful as on an isolated island. Here is old Vienna, the Vienna of the 18th century, preserved as if through enchantment. Three buildings enclose the square. One is a baroque church from the time of the Thirty Years’ War, in magnificent Jesuit style. From the roof, colored frescoes gleam. High red porphyry pillars frame the chapels, and marble statues of the saints adorn the altars. The second house is a low, broad one which, at one time, was a Jesuit cloister. The silent corridors are vaulted, and one’s step echoes on the stair. In this building, Franz Schubert spent four years as a young student in the City School. Here the boy with the round Viennese face and blond hair played violin in the student orchestra. Here, too, he wrote down his first compositions. At that time, the clear laughter of boys rang out in the dusky halls, and on the stairs, Schubert and his friends used to play hide-and-seek. The third house was built during the reign of Empress Maria Theresia as a university. In it is a state-room with frescoes by an Italian painter, illuminated by concealed lights, and there, on the 27th of March, 1808, occurred the performance of Haydn’s Creation at which the old composer made his last public appearance. The carriage of Prince Esterhazy brought him to the building. The Rector of the University and several musicians, Beethoven among them, assisted the old gentleman from the carriage. Trumpets and trombones sounded a fanfare as Haydn was escorted to the concert hall, and the ladies of the aristocracy wrapped him in their shawls so that he would not feel cold. After the first half of the concert, the composer, who was deeply moved by his work and the premonition of his death, was again taken to the carriage. Only a few years after, in the same hall, a no less famous Beethoven concert took place, when his Seventh Symphony and his musical battle picture, Wellington’s Victory, were played for the first time. The most prominent musicians in Vienna played in the orchestra. Court Conductor Salieri beat the time for the cannonade, Hummel played the timpani, young Meyerbeer, Spohr, Mayseder, Dragonetti, Moscheles, Romberg sat at the music stands. At the piano was the deaf composer, shouting without being able to hear, springing up at the fortissimi, bending low during the soft passages, and shaking his leonine grey head. That was on the 8th and 12th of December, 1813. Thirty-five years later in the same room, fiery students made freedom speeches, harbingers of the Vienna Revolution of 1848. Across the University Square stormed the Viennese youth, wearing black, red and gold bands across their chest, crying Hoch! for freedom. Then for another hundred years all was quiet in the old square where time seemed to stand still.

If one returns again to the noisy, traffic-cluttered neighborhood of St. Stephen’s, and follows the stream of promenaders who chatter, laugh and flirt along the Graben, one passes