The Vienna Melody

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1963 by Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Wien
First publication 2015 by Europa Editions
Translation by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood
Original Title:
Der Engel mit der Posaune
Translation copyright © 2015 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © LiliGraphie/Shutterstock
ISBN 9781609452827

Ernst Lothar

THE VIENNA MELODY

Translated from the German
by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood

To Adrienne, once more

T
urn in by the church
 
of the Teutonic Order and a short two minutes' walk will bring you to the house on the corner of Seilerstätte and Annagasse. It stands in the middle of the First District, and the First District is the heart of Vienna.

For nearly a hundred years, and up to the present moment of May 9, 1888, this house had consisted of three stories above the ground floor and mezzanine; no substantial burgess in Vienna had a house any higher. With its six windows on narrow Annagasse and seven on broader Seilerstätte, with its dull, yellowish-gray painted exterior and its façade in the pristine style of the Maria Theresa epoch, it made an impression of stateliness and well-being. Were it not for the stationery store prosily ensconced on the ground floor of Number 10 Seilerstätte (the main entrance was on Seilerstätte), one would have taken it for the town residence of an aristocrat.

This impression was strengthened by a coat of arms carved in stone over the Annagasse entrance. To be sure, it did not consist of crowns, banners, or gauntlets, as did those on the houses of various titled neighbors. It consisted of a naked, fat baroque angel. The angel, however, was blowing a trumpet, a rather remarkable instrument. With its long, thin shaft—which the stonecutter had made too long—supported by a naked arm—which he had made too short—it pointed upward like a spear, and the narrow bell at its end did little or nothing to make it look like a trumpet; it was more like a weapon.

To assert that this coat of arms was intended to cloak the middle-class character of the house and give it an aristocratic air would be absurd. It did no more than follow the style of the times, which found pleasure in ornamenting façades and revealing to passers-by the rank or occupation of the owners. The staff entwined with a serpent of Asclepius indicated the house of a physician or apothecary; the scales, a judicial personage; the wheel, a cart-wright; the long-bearded Gutenberg, a printer. As for the angel with the trumpet, the indication was more dubious. To judge by the length and strength of the trumpet, he might have been considered a summoner to doomsday were it not that any such suggestion of final accounting was most distasteful to the Viennese. On the other hand, if he were taken as a symbol of music it would be difficult to perceive why a manufacturer of pianos chose a trumpet as his emblem.

The house had stood for ninety-seven years when Franz Alt, a grandson of the original builder, began to have thoughts of marriage and of a fourth story. The idea was a bold one, since the inhabitants of Number 10 were good Viennese, which means that they were against change; and nothing more revolutionary than building an extra story on top of an old house could possibly have been imagined. The ground floor rose in opposition.

Intricate as it may seem, we shall have to concern ourselves for just a brief spell with the topography of the house and the genealogy of its tenants.

In Apartment 2 on the ground floor, which was occupied mostly by the stationery shop, Miss Sophie Alt, the only surviving daughter of the founder, lived. Her three-room flat was reached by the entrance from Annagasse. A low, square oak door led into a stone-paved entry. The air was always cool here, refreshing on a hot day, and it was so dark that it was lighted summer and winter by a gas lamp hanging from the high vaulted ceiling. Sophie had chosen the ground-floor apartment because she did not care to climb stairs and also because the walnut tree in the courtyard stretched its fragrant leaves into her bedroom windows.

The former Miss Kubelka, from a small Czech town, lived on the mezzanine, directly over Sophie's head, so that one could hear her eternal hacking cough, and when decent folk were in their beds she, God knows why, was still rambling around and stamping overhead. The former Miss Kubelka (that was what Sophie called the widow of her eldest brother) was an “inane creature.” As for Anna, the daughter of that Czechish woman, Sophie's uncompromising estimate was: “Anna? She inherited her stupidity from her mother. Other­wise she would never have married the owner of a racing stable!” For that was what Anna had done. At twenty-one she had fallen head over heels in love with Count Hegéssy, owner of a Hungarian stud farm. After he had won the Royal prize in Budapest he had immediately disposed of Anna. Since then she had lived with her mother in the mezzanine Apartment 3, neither married nor divorced—just deserted. The adjoining mezzanine apartments, 4 and 5, housed the Drauffers—father, mother, twin sons, and a dog.

Apartment 6, on the first floor, belonged to Sophie's eldest nephew, her favorite of all the inhabitants of the house. As far as the elderly spinster was concerned, Otto Eberhard was possessed of exclusively good characteristics. His upward career had been rapid and impressive; at forty-nine he was already the Public Prosecutor. Besides, his wife Elsa, the former Baroness Uiberacker, was a dear. Too bad that their ideal marriage had produced only one son, Peter, eight years old and perhaps a bit on the heavy side, but nevertheless a magnificent specimen. One had only to compare him with his cousins on the mezzanine floor, those eternally dirty, howling, unmannerly twins (just as unmannerly as their father, that rarely sober and always brazen painter, Drauffer), and the choice between them was easy to make. Moreover, those terrible mezzanine boys had an equally fearsome dog—Rex, a Doberman—who was Sophie's personal enemy because he barked whenever he saw her. By contrast the quiet little boy on the first floor played, as children in a fine house should, with an always immaculate white poodle on wheels.

The tenant of Apartment 7 on the first floor was another person who did not stand very high in Sophie's favor. This flat belonged to Otto Eberhard's younger sister, Gretl. Her choice of a life companion had fallen on a colonel of Dragoons by the name of Paskiewicz. He was dashingly handsome, yet he had not only humiliated her repeatedly but had also squandered her dowry and her patrimony to the last penny. Since he was a Pole, Sophie found it easy to put him on her list of those—like the Czechish Kubelka woman and Hungarian Count Hegéssy—on whom she freely poured out the bile generated by her rooted nationalistic prejudices.

On the second floor (Apartments 8 and 9) the founder of the house, Christopher Alt, had lived. It remained uninhabited after his death and that of his widow, due to the terms of his will, in which he also stipulated that only members of the family were allowed to live in the house and renting to outsiders was strictly forbidden. Out of his twelve rooms, partitions were removed to make a total of seven: the yellow drawing-room, the large and small sitting rooms, the large and small dining rooms, the conservatory, and the music room. They were available to all members of the family and were used on festive occasions, although much more rarely than old Christopher, with his strong family sense, intended. The reason for this was simple. These unused rooms were freezing cold in winter and could have been made comfortable only through the installation of a new heating system—an expense which no one was willing to undertake.

Franz lived on the third floor, in Apartment 10; he was thirteen years younger than his brother, Otto, the lawyer. The contrast between them, which Sophie often remarked on to the detriment of the younger brother, was striking. Otto Eberhard was tall and lithe and dressed with care and marked elegance. Because of the streaks of gray in his moustache and short pointed beard, at forty-nine he looked older. Whereas Franz, just turned thirty-six, looked twenty-eight; he was a less refined type than his brother, ruddier and almost as tall. “Looks like a peasant,” said Sophie, for he spent a great deal less care on his clothes; one would have found it difficult to believe that his roomy trousers had ever boasted a crease. He had followed his father and grandfather in the piano factory, and there was only one thing Sophie gave him credit for: “When it comes to business he has a good head on his shoulders.”

Whatever else reached her ears about the third floor (in addition to Franz, that Drauffer man had his studio up there) filled her with disgust. Presumably it was part of a painter's profession, especially when he paraded the title of professor, to have a lot of women coming to his studio, but what she could not understand was why he did not at last take his work seriously and paint the portraits of some men! His Eminence the Cardinal and Archbishop, she read in her Catholic daily, had sat for his portrait to a painter named Koch, and our esteemed Lord Mayor had done as much for Pausinger. That kind of painting was worth the name, but not the frivolous mess that this man smeared on canvas and then was brazen enough to exhibit! She had, to be sure, gone to only one of his exhibitions, in the Künstlerhaus, but that was enough to last her a lifetime. Coquettish, empty faces, bare arms, yes, and bare backs too—it was enough to make one blush for the models and for the painter. Be that as it may, Drauffer had at least the excuse of his profession. But what pretext could Franz offer for having women climb up to his third floor to see him, always different ones, and at night too? That they did come Sophie knew, because they preferred to use the side entrance from Annagasse rather than the main entrance on Seilerstätte. With rage she listened to their light, quick, and guilty-sounding steps. Franz was really not so young any more that it was still necessary for him to get such things out of his system; or at least that is what she thought. At his age other men had long since given up their wild ways, settled down, and founded proper families. Besides, Franz did not look in the least like that sort of person.

 

“Good morning, sir,” was old Poldi's greeting to this frowned-upon nephew as he rang at Apartment 2 on the ground floor that morning of May 9. “Please wait a moment; the mistress is just dressing her hair.”

Franz waited in the vestibule. As usual it was black as night there and smelled of moth balls. Beyond the door Cora, the parrot, was making her high-pitched noises.

“The mistress says please come in,” announced the elderly maid, and Franz entered.

“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.

“You can see very well that you are,” answered Sophie. She had hastily covered her bed with a dark blue velvet spread which screened it from public view during the daytime. Not that she had just got up. She left her bed every morning on the stroke of seven. Consequently she had already said her rosary on the prayer stool before her private altar and had finished the greater part of her toilet. She had been on the point of arranging her coiffure when her nephew was announced.

“Don't stand. Sit down!” she said firmly.

“How wonderful! How wonderful! Thank you!” croaked the parrot from the dining room—once, twice, and then over again.

“Shut up, Cora!” ordered the old lady. Then to her nephew: “Have some coffee? Or a glass of cherry brandy?”

She was sitting at her absurdly narrow dressing table, which was littered to such an extent with tiny pincushions, glass and porcelain jars that not another thing could possibly be crowded on to it. Beside her, on an even smaller table, lay a copy of the Catholic daily newspaper, her reticule, and a box of thin green peppermint pastilles, which she, with her taste for all sweets, adored. From time to time she slipped one into her mouth, after first coughing slightly and thereby giving herself a medicinal excuse for its enjoyment. It was rather cold in the room. One of the windows, framed in a blue velvet curtain, stood half open, letting in the sunless air. The walnut tree in the courtyard had not yet begun to bloom.