Stefan Zweig has his say, as does the then prominent salon lady Berta Zuckerkandl and her actor friend Alexander Girardi. Arthur Schnitzler and Gustav Mahler are rising from the dead, and you can’t get past Sigmund Freud on an evening about Vienna around 1900. The most catchy quotes that the Graz-born actress Aglaia Szyszkowitz, known for her role in the movie “Klimt” (2006), reads out with her sonorous voice on stage, come from Karl Kraus, who somehow seems to have known them all : “Vienna has a lot of landmarks, and everyone feels like one,” Szyszkowitz quotes the writer as saying. And at this point at the latest, it is clear to everyone in the packed Oberhachinger Bürgersaal that a city can only be as good or bad, as beautiful or ugly, sad or happy as the people who live in it.
“The Happy Apocalypse” is the title of the musical reading, which was a highlight of the 15th Festival for Chamber Music, Literature and World Music. The event based on the text concept by Eva Hofmann has established itself as a fixture in the community. In 2019, the last festival before the pandemic, it was about the American exiles in Paris in the 1920s. This time it’s turn-of-the-century Vienna, the place of longing for many nostalgics, and Hofmann has once again compiled a lively collection of texts which, in addition to observations by contemporaries, also incorporate irony and humor. Festival director Isabel Lhotzky, who herself is sitting at the piano this evening, has carefully selected the music for the passages from letters, poems and books. Peter Clemente on the violin and Jiří Bárta on the cello play pieces by Fritz Kreisler, Karl Goldmark and a waltz by Shostakovich – and of course a piece by Gustav Mahler should not be missing (“Ging heut Morgen übers Feld”). Nothing kitschy, but worn enough to allow enough sentimentality to emerge.
Responsible for the musical part of the evening: Peter Clemente, festival director Isabel Lhotzky and Jiří Bárta (from left).
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
Mahler said goodbye to Vienna twice. Once in late 1907, when he left for New York to take up a post as conductor at the Metropolitan Opera. A second time when he left this world forever. United in “collective mourning”, salon lady Zuckerkandl noted at the time, thousands of Viennese surrounded the sanatorium where Mahler spent his last days with an inflammation of the inner lining of the heart. If you believe Karl Kraus, nowhere did it die as stately as in Vienna. “Austrian life has compensation: the beautiful corpse,” he once wrote, meaning “a representative funeral with a large mourner.”
When Mahler was buried in May 1911, a veritable shower of flowers is said to have fallen on his coffin. His widow, Alma Mahler, then flourished in her own way: there are said to have been affairs, for example with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, who in turn was a friend of the architect Adolf Loos, a bitter opponent of Ringstrasse architecture and also Kraus’s godfather. Basically, this Vienna around 1900 was nothing more than a city-spanning network of coffee houses in which newspapers were available in umpteen languages. And so, with every city dweller whom Szyszkowitz lets rise to life in front of the softly lit stage curtain, a little more of what was originally Viennese at the time unfolds. A kind of surrender to fate, a gallows-humoured view of oneself, garnished with a penchant for cultural enjoyment and debate, although the latter was never carried out as joyfully as in the Café Central. A certain Peter Altenberg was particularly fond of sitting there. “If he’s not in the coffee house, he’s on his way there,” the audience in Oberhaching learns. A statue in the Central still commemorates him today.
Compared to the Viennese suburbs, where prostitution exploded and almost every house had an inn license, things must have been relatively good in the coffee houses – the public in Oberhaching also takes this insight with them. When Crown Princess Stephanie once accompanied her husband Rudolf, the son of Franz Josef I and Empress Sisi, on a trip to the suburbs, she scoffed at dirty tables, cart drivers playing cards and girls who “repeatedly played the same sentimental, ordinary hits ” would have sung. She really doesn’t know what the crown prince thinks about it.