I had to have a ticket for a seat at the concert.
“Had to have” – what does that mean? How deep was that necessity? Very. It went
into my blood. It made me tremble. Why? Was there a woman involved? No – or
rather, yes. It all depends.
Certainly not my wife. Oh, we had been to concerts
together when we were courting. She had thought it was the proper thing – or
maybe her mother had. Or my mother. Had either of them had any idea of the
passions that music unleashed in me, they would certainly never have permitted
it. But they had no notion. Nor did my wife-to-be, in fact. We went to the
opera, too, especially in the early days of our marriage, because my wife was
proud of me. She thought I was a good catch, and wanted to show me off. Or
perhaps herself. After a while, she realised that opera boxes were not the
scenes for impromptu sexual indulgence which she had believed them to be from
the lower class of fiction (which, I now discovered in the intimate contiguity
of marriage, she read – having formerly interleaved the thin brochures of these
flimsy serial publications between the pages of weighty tomes by Goethe,
Schiller and Klopstock, to impress me with her culture). Thés dansants and
other social gatherings gave her ample opportunity for self-display without the
inconvenience of listening to a set of socially unacceptable people exercising
their vocal chords.
She extended her aversion to music to our offspring.
I had insisted on our son having piano lessons, but no sooner had he reached
his tenth birthday, than my wife cancelled them in favour of tennis coaching.
She said it was a more sociable pastime. As if piano-playing was ever designed
to make the time pass! Music is there to stop time from running away, to
preserve the moment and make it eternal. Sport, on the other hand, has, as its
prime purpose, to fill the empty hours of empty people with further emptiness,
masquerading as plenitude. It quietens the mind by exhausting the body. When he
was fourteen, I suggested he might resume the piano if he wanted to, but my
wife pointed to his sinewy, bronzed forearms, said he would never have got
those from sitting like a consumptive at a keyboard, and refused to let him
throw away the considerable advantage he had already acquired in the fierce competition
for nubile young women.
As you may imagine, there were times when I
seriously considered taking a mistress for the sake of intellectual
companionship. (The physical side of our marriage was still eminently
satisfactory to both of us – probably because my wife is incapable of
distinguishing between the violence of passion and the roughness of
irritation.) However, attending concerts with the kind of woman who is prepared
to be a mistress would have been an absurd affectation, and would have made a public
statement that I was disinclined to make. The sort of women who become
mistresses may, indeed, have emancipated themselves from some bourgeois
preconceptions, but their notions of the artistic seldom extend any further
than those pretty (and pretty expensive) little clutch bags manufactured by the
Wiener Werkstätten.
So – was there a woman involved? Oh, yes. In that
document of despair and hope, the Heiligenstädter Testament, Beethoven (living
at the time, as it happened, just round the corner from where our own
Jugendstil house was to be built in the Cottageviertel of Vienna) clearly
stated that life would have held nothing for him (given his deafness) and that
he might have voluntarily departed from it, had it not been for her –
her who? “Wär’ nicht sie – die Kunst” – Art: that was the Other Woman. Even
more demanding than a real woman. And never satisfied. But always giving
herself completely, without the slightest reservation, never holding anything
back. (Other languages, I am aware, desexualise art – an “it” in English, a
“he” in French. Good luck to them! I know what I know. I feel what I feel.)
So. I needed a ticket for a seat for the
concert. Not just any concert, but the concert. The
concert where the superfluity that is art became even more superfluous. Where
decoration became substance, and ornament turned into essence. I am talking, of
course, about the works of the Strauss family, and the concert that falls on
the day between the years, belonging to neither, and therefore outside time.
Access to it is not guarded by anything except
desire. Tickets for the standing area are freely on sale, and the far-sighted
and strong-leggèd acquire them in good time. Tickets for seats have to be
inherited. For all I know, there may be families where the possession of such a
ticket could be offered as an inducement to overlook more tangible
disadvantages in the arrangement of a marriage. You must not, however, imagine
that the ownership of a ticket is linked in any way with social status.
Tradesmen, aristocrats and minor government officials, and their families, all
sit side by side and higgledy-piggledy – in their best clothes, of course, but
in no way distinguished from one another in their devotion to the music, which
is absolute.
I had no ticket for a seat. I could have stood, of
course, but I was fifty. No, no, no – it’s not an issue of stamina – it’s an
issue of respectability. There were seventy-year-olds, eighty-year-olds
standing – but they were people who had clearly not succeeded. Succeeded in what?
Why – in getting a ticket for a seat, of course! And also, no doubt, in life,
or love, or society or whatever – otherwise, through some connection or other,
they would surely have acquired a ticket in their long lives. I told you – this
is not a matter of social class.
Let me put it another way: even in Vienna, music is
for outsiders. For people with strong emotions and strong tastes in emotional
stimulation. These should be balanced by a certain external stability. Music
leads one beyond this world, that is clear. That is its virtue. That is its
danger. Those not sufficiently well-anchored can drift into insanity. The young
are safe, because they are three-quarters insane anyway – it’s a hormonal
thing. And had I been accompanying my son or daughter I would not have felt in
the least embarrassed. But my wife had insisted on taking them away with her,
to some gathering in the mountains. As a solitary fifty-year-old in the
standing area, I would look as though I was one of those for whom music was a
substitute for life, and not its crowning experience. It was not an impression
I cared to give.
So, I tried as hard as I could to acquire one. I
called in favours, resorted to genteel blackmail, scoured obituary notices,
searching for the names of people I knew to be regular attenders of the
concert. In vain. I considered consulting a clairvoyant, or a medium, but felt
that the occult sat ill with these ultimate products of light. I had, in fact,
resigned myself to the public disgrace of a standing place, sooner than be
absent.
Once attended, it could not be missed. It was – as
is the case with music, though few of her adherents are honest enough to admit
it – an addiction. All the signs and symptoms are there: the fever, the
sweating, the sense of ill-defined malaise in the absence of the addictive
substance, and a euphoric sense of well-being and heightened existence that
sweeps over one at the first chord! Fly agaric, a poisonous mushroom, is
alleged to give those who consume it (or simply consume the urine of someone
who has consumed it) the illusion that they can fly, or leap over tall
buildings in a single bound. What else does a symphony by Mahler or Bruckner do
to one?! (The phenomenon is much more readily acknowledged, and indeed
proclaimed, by Wagnerites – but their statements are dismissed as hyperbole by
those who are differently constituted, and immune to that particular brand of
narcotic poison.)
Everyone who can, attends. Austrian explorers,
posted missing for months in Arctic or Antarctic wastes, pop up mysteriously on
specially chartered freighters or commandeered whaling ships, and complete
their journey by transcontinental expresses. Zoologists hunting Przewalski’s
horses in Mongolia, from whom no news has been received since the summer, flag
down a stray train in the middle of Siberia, and need only change once, in
Moscow, to be brought by racing Fiaker from the Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof to the
ample doors of the Musikverein. Those who have retired to distant Graz, the
city known as “Pensionopolis”, brave the snowfalls on the Semmering and the
disgraceful safety record of the Südbahn to be there. One even wonders that the
Viennese transport undertakings do not extend selected tramlines to serve all
the city’s cemeteries, as they do for family-wreath-layers on November 2nd,
All Souls’ Day, so that the dead can attend with greater ease...
I haunted the box office daily for returns. And
then, the day before the concert, when they had just opened, and an
inexperienced clerk was in charge, so inexperienced he must have been fresh
from Mistelbach, that little provincial hole in Lower Austria from which, as
legend has it, the members of the Viennese police force are exclusively
recruited, I was able to catch a glimpse of the original book of tickets, and
to spot that there was one left! A single, lonely-looking piece of beige paper
with a number on it. I drew the clerk’s attention to it. I drew his attention
even more forcibly to the note in my hand, of a denomination higher than he
could ever have seen. Naive he must, indeed, have been, for he gave me all the
change he had, and then went to get more, because his float was insufficient by
many orders of magnitude.
The more experienced official, with whom he
returned, tried to dissuade me from my purchase, saying that there were certain
– difficulties – associated with that seat, which was why it was not ordinarily
offered for sale. I reassured him that, as the purchaser, I would beware, and
since I had the ticket actually in my hand it would have required the exercise
of physical force to reverse the transaction. I closed my fist protectively around it, crumpling it
severely in the process, while the remainder of my money was counted out. I
pushed a number of the notes towards the pair of officials, despite their
protests (whether genuine or feigned), and took my leave with unseemly haste.
Having a ticket, I saw no reason to arrive
especially early for the concert itself. In fact, I was one of the last, and
the hall looked completely full – but I knew there would be an empty space for
me. Only there wasn’t. In seat 161 there sat a squat, almost dwarfish man with
a beard and a vaguely Jewish air about him. He smiled understandingly when I
appeared, and showed me his ticket, which bore exactly the same number as his
seat. With admirable and wholly unpatronising courtesy, he took my ticket and
turned it upside down, thus making it clear to me that I was sitting in seat
191 – perhaps the crumpling the ticket had received at its purchase had made me
miss the tell-tale serifs on the ones, or obscured the small print of the
borders, which would otherwise have told me that I had got things the wrong way
round.
Seat 191 was hard to find, especially in the limited
time left to me. Indeed, it hardly existed, being squashed behind a pillar, and
only there at all because the seats in that row all seemed to be slightly
smaller. Other rows simply had a space where the pillar came. But my limbs were
still flexible, and I squeezed into the space allotted me a second before the
conductor raised his baton.
Normally, I am absorbed into the music, I flow, I
melt, I become part of it. I am like the message carried by the radio wave. But
sometimes, although released from the here and now (I am not like those people
obsessed with the fat lady’s hat or the pimple on the percussionist’s nose) I
find my mind invaded by all kinds of other notions. And so it was this evening.
Memories came flooding over me – but they were none of them mine.
There are those who find greater originality of
invention in Joseph than in Johann the Son, though Johann generally commanded
the wider melodic sweep, and his greater productivity had to mean less depth in
individual pieces – so that the operettas, where superficiality is part of the
characterisation, would have been beyond Joseph’s compass. But this had nothing
to do with the fact that, as I listened to Joseph’s Village Swallows from
Austria, I had a very clear vision of a big barn, in which wine was being
sold to people at broad deal tables, with swallows – no, actually house-martins
– flying around among the beams. I had never been in such a place in my life.
Nor had I been on an excursion boat that chugged down the Danube to Hainburg
and back – and yet that was the image that presented itself to me most forcibly
as the Blue Danube began...
I met the rightful occupant of seat 161 again at the interval, and noticed a nasty yellowish tinge to his face, which I had not observed before, likewise a hacking cough, mercifully suppressed during the music. He commiserated with me on the cramped nature of my seat. I replied that given the circumstances, I had little choice. He smiled wryly at that, coughed a little, and said that I would find my circumstances gave me a great deal more choice than some people. We exchanged cards, in a civilised fashion, and I went back to another succession of reveries (what else can I call them?) which, since they did at least relate to the compositions I was hearing, heightened, if anything, the sensation I always have, of only being really alive when listening to music.
My “opposite number”, if I may so call him, disappeared into the crowd by the cloakroom with a wave of the hand, and I thought no more of him, nor indeed of the question of my ticket for the following year, until the autumn brought its double delight: Sturm, that fruity drink which will be sour and immature wine tomorrow, and need to wait six months before it can be drunk, but which today incarnates the frothing and temporary perfection of youth – and, just as intoxicating, though its effects are deeper and longer lasting, the opening of the concert and opera season.
At the end of September, a small parcel arrived. It contained opera glasses – small, elegant, mother of pearl – and a ticket for the concert. Seat 161. Also, the black-bordered announcement of a funeral, dated a fortnight previously. I had flowers placed on the grave.
Seated in number 161, trembling with anticipation (and as the result of enforced abstinence from music for the previous week, when family duties had kept me in the mountains), I glanced idly along the row, to where seat 191, in the absence of anyone as forceful or fortunate as myself, was bound to be empty – and saw that it was occupied. Squat, Jewish, bearded – but looking much healthier than the last time I had seen him – I raised the opera glasses – his opera glasses, which I had brought as a gesture of remembrance – and saw – someone else, someone entirely different, a large, florid lady, and behind her, through her, occupying exactly the same space, a pasty and consumptive-looking boy, and another, and another, and another – only the first bars of the music made me look away.
Was I frightened? Was I worried? Was I in the least disturbed? No. Not at all. As I said, it is only when I am listening to music that I am fully alive. That had always been a solitary conviction. Now, I knew that I was not, am not, will not be, the only one.
11 am-11.15 pm,
August 28th 2002