Eva Ibbotson - A Song For Summer

“I gather you want it played like a funeral march,” sneered Feuerbach.

“No. Just a little more andante. It is after all a lament for the passing of time,” said the director, wondering why it was necessary to explain the score of Richard Strauss’s most famous opera to the man who was conducting it.

Feuerbach curled his lip and raised his baton. Brigitta moved forward.

They were rehearsing the first of the famous monologues on the mystery of time and its inexplicable passing. The Marschallin is alone on the stage; so far she has been presented as a grande dame voluptuously loved, or as the centre of a melee of courtiers. Now the mood changes: the orchestra is reduced to solo strings and clarinets as she goes to the mirror and evokes the young girl she has once been, coming fresh from the convent-and then, in a moment of terror, the old woman she will one day be, mocked and pointed out, her beauty gone. Yet it has to be endured, she muses-and the oboe (now coming in magnificently in spite of Feuerbach) echoes her bewildered question: “Only how? Wie?… How does one endure it?”’

And as he listened to her, Marek was suddenly overwhelmed. He was back in the fourth gallery, shaken by the sheer beauty of the voice that God had placed so capriciously inside the body of this tiresome woman. Brigitta was trying, in spite of Feuerbach’s dragging beat. She did not want to cancel; this was her role.

And all at once there came into Marek’s head with the force of an explosion, a vision of the whole glorious masterpiece that was Rosenkavalier, with its riotous waltzes, its soaring invocation of young love and the sense of sublimity and honour that was at its heart. Rosenkavalier as it should sound and could sound even now.

For it could still be done. Brigitta would have to be coaxed and bullied, forbidden to scoop and sentimentalise. Feuerbach, though one longed to throttle him, would have to be appeased, the orchestra schooled to heed him. It would take every moment of the day and night, every ounce of energy, but it could still be done.

Only not by me, thought Marek. Absolutely not by me. I’m sailing on the Risorgimento. This is goodbye.

“Very well,” said the director. “We’ll break there.”

The conductor left the rostrum but the musicians did not follow him. Marek, without realising it, had moved closer as Brigitta sang. Now one of the double bass players leant forward and whispered something to a cellist, who passed on the word and spread it back to the woodwind, the brass, and forward to the violas, till it reached the violins…

The leader turned his head.

“Are you sure?”’ he said quietly. “Positive,” said his neighbour. “I played for him in Berlin.”

The leader nodded. Then he rose to his feet and as he did so the orchestra, to a man, rose with him. And as the violins tapped their bows against the music stands, he said: “Welcome back to Vienna, Herr Altenburg.”

The homage was not for his political stance, Marek knew that. It was not for him personally at all: it was for what he and these men shared and served. It was for music.

But now Brigitta had moved towards the footlights, shading her eyes. Then she gave a theatrical shriek, disappeared into the wings, and reappeared again in the stalls to hurl herself into his arms.

“Marcus!” she cried. “I knew you would come! I knew you would help me. Now everything’s going to be all right.”

“If you want me to help you, you can start by not sentimentalising “Where are the Snows of Yesteryear”. You held that B flat far too long. I’ve told you, you must not be maudlin. Pity and self-pity are mutually exclusive.”

“It’s not my fault. It’s Feuerbach’s.

I have no help from—”’

“I take it you’re not complaining about the way the oboe followed you?”’ said Marek icily.

“No, but—”’

“Good. I suggest you look to your own performance and the rest will sort itself out. I’ll be back in an hour. We’ll start with Baron Ochs’ exit and go on to the rest of the act.”

“You’re limping, Kendrick,” said Ellen. “Would you like to sit down for a while? We could have a cup of coffee over there.” She pointed to a beguiling café with pavement tables across the square, but Kendrick shook his head.

“I’ll be all right. We’ve still got the Hofburg to see, and the cathedral. We can’t afford to waste a minute.”

But actually his foot was hurting quite badly. He had a big blister on the heel and a corn developing on the left toe and this was because he had already spent three days in Vienna sightseeing before Ellen arrived. Kendrick had visited the Central Cemetery to see the graves of Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, paying particular attention to Beethoven’s grave because it was said to contain the pince-nez of Anton Bruckner, who had dropped them into the open coffin by mistake when the composer’s relics were transferred from the cemetery in Wahring. He had taken a tram to St Marc’s, which turned out to be a long way away, to look at the place where Mozart had possibly been interred, and another to another suburb to pay homage to the tomb of Gustav Mahler.

And that was only the graves: there were still all the places where composers had been born or died or simply done things: hammered pianos to death or quarrelled with their landladies or thrown chamber pots out of the windows, often in houses which were surprisingly far apart.

All this had made his feet very sore, and then there had been the Art: the Secessionist building which was near a rather messy food market and the Kunsthistorisches Museum which was deeply inspiring, but the marble floors were surprisingly hard and the lavatories difficult to find.

But he had kept the best-known sights for Ellen, who had arrived that morning and was standing patiently beside him, looking cool in her cream linen dress, as they waited to go into the crypt of the Capuchin church where the Hapsburg Emperors were buried. Or rather their bodies were buried-their hearts and organs were elsewhere, as he had explained to Ellen, and fitting them in was going to be a problem. Peering at his Baedeker, worrying, Kendrick felt Ellen’s cool touch on his arm and realised that the guide had come and they were moving down into the vaults with their heavy, ornate marble sarcophagi.

The Emperor Franz Joseph… his unfortunate wife, the lovely Sissi, assassinated by an anarchist on Lake Geneva… their son, the Crown Prince Rudoll, dead by his own hand at Mayerling…

Moving past the gloomy opulence of the tombs, Ellen found one she liked.

“Look, Kendrick! This one isn’t an emperor or an empress! It’s a governess- Maria Theresa’s governess. The Empress loved her so much she was allowed to be buried here even though she wasn’t royal. So if a governess, why not a cook? Perhaps I shall end up in the vaults at Windsor!”

Ellen had not wanted to come to Vienna, but now she was here she was determined to enjoy herself. The weather was glorious, the city was beautiful-there could be no better place to forget Marek, who would be sailing away now to a new life. She had been foolish, attaching so much importance to a flirtation and the courtesy of a kiss, but she did not intend to become a victim. “One has a choice,” she had told herself-and she had chosen healing and happiness, if not immediately, then soon.

Their next tour, that of the Private Apartments in the Hofburg, revealed the Royal Treasure Chest containing a number of priceless objects of surprising ugliness and a suite of claustrophobic apartments characterised by a total lack of bathrooms. As they came out into the Michaeler Platz, Kendrick, peering at his guide book, said that they just had time to make their way to the house where Hugo Wolf had written the M`orike Lieder.