Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

That he would follow in his father’s footsteps was something so obvious that Marek never consciously questioned it, so when a fuss was made about his music, he simply ignored it.

It had shown itself early, his talent, as it so often does. When he was three he had requested the bandmaster in the local town to make way for him so that he could conduct the band himself. Two years later he wrote a song in six-eight time for the birthday of a neighbouring landowner’s daughter whom he passionately loved. He played the piano of course, and the violin, and had taught himself most of the instruments he found in the village band which played for funerals and weddings.

But what was so strange about that? Everybody in Bohemia was musical; half the horn players in the Vienna Philharmonic were Czech; their singers swarmed in the opera. Even when that cliché happened and the local music teacher said he could teach the boy no more, Marek refused to be deflected.

“I’m certainly not going to start roaming the world with little bits of my native earth in a pouch like poor Chopin,” he said.

Efforts to send him away to be educated had never been successful. He had discharged himself without fuss from an Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen in Brno, and from the British public school recommended by his grandmother, the redoubtable Nora Coutts, who lived in a wing of the house drinking Earl Grey tea from Harrods and bullying him about the syntax of the English language.

Even when at last he consented to go to the University of Vienna it was to read Forestry and Land Management. But Vienna is not a good place for a man fleeing from music. By the time he met Brigitta Seefeld, Marek’s course in life was set.

He was twenty years old sitting with his friends in the fourth gallery of the Opera, when the curtain went up on Figaro.

Seefeld was not singing Susanna, that life-affirming fixer; she sang the Countess, to whom in “Dove Sono” Mozart has given perhaps the most heart-rending lament for lost love in all opera.

Marek was overwhelmed. He heard her again as Violetta in Traviata and Pamina in The Magic Flute. The voice was ravishing; ethereal, silvery yet full and strong. That she was beautiful-fair-haired, blue-eyed, in the best tradition of the Viennese-was not a disadvantage.

Arriving at the door of her dressing room carrying a rather large arbutus in a pot, Marek had intended only to pay homage, but within a month the diva had led him firmly up the three steps that ascended to her bed: an absurd bed decorated with gilt swans-a present from an admirer after her first Elsa in Lohengrin.

It was not only the bed that was absurd: she herself was vain, self-regarding and extravagant, but when he held her in his arms (and there was plenty to hold) he felt as though he was embracing the great and glorious traditions of Viennese music. He wrote the Songs for Summer for her, and years afterwards his songs still came to him in Brigitta’s voice.

It was a public liaison, much approved of by the gossipy Viennese. Brigitta lost no opportunity to parade her new admirer (now known as Marcus, the German version of his Christian name, for his descent as a Freiherr was very much to her taste). Marek would not have broken it up: Brigitta was more than ten years his senior and he had all the chivalry of the young. It was she who sent him away, “just for a little while.” She had dramatically overspent her salary and needed to audition a rich protector.

“If I go now I won’t come back,” Marek had said.

She didn’t believe him but he spoke the truth.

It was now, in the spring of 1929, that he went to Berlin, with its pompous architecture, its vile climate-and its superlative cultural life.

In Vienna he had been absorbed in his affair with Brigitta-now he made friends, and one friend in particular.

Isaac Meierwitz was a violinist, well known as a virtuoso soloist-but known too as something more: a true musician who continued to play chamber music, sat at the first desk of the Berlin Akademia and taught needy students without charge. Marek had met him at Professor Steiner’s house. Outwardly he looked like everybody’s idea of a Russian Jew: small, pop-eyed and splendidly neurotic. Meierwitz was allergic to egg white and sopranos, saw ghosts, and kept his grandmother’s pigtail in the case which held his Stradivarius, but he had the heart of a lion. He drank vodka like mother’s milk, needed almost no sleep, was a first-class swimmer and a repository of unbelievably awful jokes.

Isaac was only a few years older than Marek but he know everybody. He introduced Marek to Schönberg and Stravinsky, took him to Wozzeck at the Kroll, and to hear Schnabel play Beethoven sonatas at the Volksbuhne, wearing a lounge suit so that the workers would feel at home. He found cellars where the gypsies were not graduates of the Budapest Conservatoire but true Zigeuners, and cabarets where the chicanery of politicians was blisteringly exposed.

One day as they were walking through the Tiergarten after an all-night party, Isaac said he thought it was time he had his concerto.

“I have my immortality to think of, you know.” “Good God, Isaac, surely your immortality doesn’t depend on a violin concerto by somebody like me!”

But Meierwitz was serious. “You’re almost ready. And remember, if anyone but me gets to play the premiere, I’ll haunt you to my dying day!”

Soon after this Marek was offered a two-year contract at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the Mecca of all musicians and a true honour for a man still in his early twenties.

He had loved America, become completely absorbed in the music making there. At the end of his stint he took six months off and went to live in a hut on the Hudson River. One day, walking by the water, he heard the theme for the slow movement.

Violin concertos have a distinguished provenance. Beethoven, Sibelius, Brahms, all wrote only one but they were written in blood. When he had finished it, Marek sent the score to Berlin.

Meierwitz cabled at once, full of superlatives. A premiere was arranged with the Berlin Akademia for the following spring, with Marek himself conducting. The year was 1933. Marek now took off for the Mato Grosso in Brazil to study the native music there. He was out of touch with civilisation for the whole winter-even so, later, he was amazed at how naive he had been.

He sailed for Europe in the spring of 1934: the South American papers had made light of Hitler’s doings and Meierwitz had written to say that he’d been promised permission to give the premiere and was staying on in Germany to do so. The Bremen ran into a storm. Marek arrived a day late and went straight to the concert hall to start rehearsals. He found the new music director waiting, full of smiles and affability. The premiere was attracting much attention, he said; to have Herr von Altenburg back in Germany was an honour.

Marek took little notice. He was waiting for the soloist. He had phoned Meierwitz’s flat when the ship docked and left a message.

Then a young man, blond, friendly with innocent blue eyes walked on to the platform with his violin.

“I’m Anton Kessler, Herr von Altenburg,” he said, bowing. “I have the honour to play your concerto. Believe me, this is a great day in my life.”

There was a dead silence in the concert hall. Then: “No, Herr Kessler, you do not have that honour. This concerto is dedicated to Isaac Meierwitz and he and he alone will play the premiere.”

The members of the orchestra shuffled their music; Anton Kessler flushed.

“Surely they told you… Meierwitz has been… Meierwitz is a Jew; there is no possibility that he should appear as a soloist.”

Marek turned to the director. “I was told that Meierwitz would be playing. I had a letter to that effect before I sailed.”