Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
In May 1928, the Nazi Party gains twelve seats in Germany's elections.
My parents fell in love when they were still students at the UniversitŠt fŸr Musik und darstellende Kunst. While women were unwelcome in the Vienna Philharmonic and in the music world at large, opera required them. For this reason, my mother trained her voice rather than her fingers, even though her fingers had always been rather good at piano.
On a rare warm spring day my father had stopped on the shores of the canal to play to the lilacs, the passing boats, and the birds. My mother, who recognized him as well as the song he played, had paused to add her voice. "I couldn't help it," she told me. "I love that song."
But they can never agree on what he had been playing. She says it was Handel's "Flammende Rose," while he says it was definitely Brahms's "Zwei GesŠnge."
"It can't have been," she argued. "I didn't even know 'Zwei GesŠnge' then."
"But 'Flammende Rose' wasn't written for viola," he pointed out.
Ultimately, the song didn't matter.
They were so young. They had Willi when my mother was still a girl of seventeen. After that, they figured out how to avoid having another child for a decade.
I was born on Friday, January 13, 1928, the same year Wolpe's satirical opera, Zeus and Elida, premiered, the same year the curtain rose on Weill and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper, and the same year Schoenberg composed Von heute auf morgen. Jewish musicians of Europe were busy creating.
It was a happy year for my parents. While their salaries were modest, they had the good fortune of relatives who had chosen more practical careers. My mother's parents were flourishing bakers in a village near Graz. My father's father, an ophthalmologist, owned our three-story apartment building on Seegasse. My grandparents spent the early years of their own marriage in what would become our apartment, but once their children were grown they moved a block away to a smaller apartment on Pramergasse, over my grandfather's practice. Anneliese's family lived directly above us on Seegasse, the rooms of their apartment mirroring ours. On the top floor were the Windens, an elderly couple with no children who often invited Anneliese and me in for cake or a strudel. It was a quiet building, except for us.
Anneliese and I were the laces that tied our two families together, though our parents had never been close. Her banker father's mind was occupied with figures and balance sheets while my father's preoccupations rarely ventured beyond the body of his viola, of the orchestra. My mother, whose concerns were with cavatina, recitative, and cabaletta, had no shared vocabulary with Ana's mother. Once in a while they happened upon a shared enthusiasm for a pastry recipe, but beyond that they regarded each other warily across the borders of our doorsills.
As children, neither of us thought much about money, the privilege of having enough not to have to think about it. A privilege, like so many others, that I failed to appreciate until it was lost.
My very first memory is a sound: the long shimmer of my fatherÕs bow across the strings, the upward flight of my motherÕs voice, filling the air of our apartment in 4 Seegasse as I lay on the living room floor, drawing.
My second memory is tactile. When I was old enough to stay silent and still, my father took me to the Musikverein before one of his rehearsals with the Vienna Philharmonic. My mother must have been there, too, or my nanny, Stefi, to whisk me away when the musicians finished tuning their instruments, but I don't remember anyone except my father, who hoisted me into the air, his hand over mine as he pressed my fingers against the belly of one of the golden women whose heads propped up the first balcony. The long sides of the rectangular room were lined with these figures growing out of pillars, their arms folded across their ribs, their cone-shaped breasts pointed toward the ceiling. A pianist and a cellist were warming up onstage, and under my fingers I could feel the women tremble along with the notes, the oscillations of the music. "Wood vibrates with sound," my father explained. "Almost everything here is wood, even the parts painted to look like stone."
"Or gold," I whispered, stroking the shuddering belly.
"Or gold," he agreed, lowering me to the ground.
I looked around me at all of the gold that was not gold, the stone that was not stone, the seemingly stable floor that hid a trap door. Even the organ was fake, my father had told me, created to disguise a series of changing organs installed behind its faade.
"Isn't there anything here that is real?"
My father laughed, but low, so only I could hear him. "Only one thing in this building is real, Liebling: the music. All else is deception."
That room was the Golden Hall, the jewel box where my father became part of a larger instrument, a larger organism: the Philharmonic itself.
My third memory was my brother Willi's fault. He was the one who taught me to whistle, neglecting to mention to me the prohibition of the practice within the hallowed Musikverein. I had thought I was making music, that my lips were an instrument I was learning to play, so I was shocked at the pressure of my father's fingers on my arm, the force with which he marched me to the closest exit and literally tossed me through the doors onto the street. "Nie! Never in here."
Willi claimed he hadn't known. "I thought it was just for theaters," he said of the superstition. Because backstage workers often used coded whistles to send messages to each other during scene changes, a whistling actor could cause the premature lowering of a set. "But concerts don't have sets."
When I was older, I learned that for many years there had been gaslights in the Musikverein and other concert halls. If a flame flickered out, leaving behind a lethal stream of gas, it made a whistling sound, signaling danger.
"Whistling causes evil things to happen," my father explained flatly. "It curses us."
There were times, even years later, I would wonder if it had been my whistling that caused it all.
Two
In 1933, Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany. The Dachau concentration camp is established near Munich.
December 21, 1933
When I was nearly six, my parents decided I was finally old enough to attend the opera. I wasn't yet old enough to begin school, but for my parents, music was more essential than words or numbers. Ever since I had learned how to speak, ever since I had first understood what it was my parents did for a living, I had wanted to see them onstage. Opera stories-tragic though most of them are-had been my bedtime reading, alongside stories from Greek mythology and the Brothers Grimm.
Why she chose Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots I will never know. It's not a very festive opera. Something light and funny-The Bartered Bride or The Abduction from the Seraglio, for example-might have better suited a child's sensibilities. Perhaps it was simply to hear Rose Merker singing Valentine or Marie Gerhart singing Marguerite, though neither was her favorite. Perhaps that is just what happened to be on the day she decided to take me.
Or perhaps it was intended as an early warning: the god you choose to worship could get you killed.
My opera dress, pale blue with white lace along the hem and at the edges of the sleeves, made me feel grown-up. My mother brushed my hair until its pale, coppery strands shone like a one-schilling coin and gathered it up on top of my head. Her hair was curlier and darker than mine, glossy like the horse chestnuts we found on the ground in early September. She twisted my hair like hers, and even dabbed a bit of her lilac perfume on my wrists. ÒThere,Ó she said, stepping back to admire her work. ÒPretty as a china doll.Ó
I twirled, watching my skirt catch the air. "As pretty as you?" My mother looked glamorous in her floor-length, cream-colored silk gown. Embroidered leaves and flowers in the same color spilled down the bodice and over the curve of her hips.
"Prettier!"
This was not possible. No one was as beautiful as my mother.
The opera house was even grander than the Musikverein. I was so busy staring around me that I tripped going up the stairs and my mother had to catch my arm. Above us, tucked into the corners near the ceiling, were statues of children clutching instruments or theater masks, gazing down on us as we ascended. Dozens of chandeliers dangled from the ceilings like upside-down fountains.
"There's Meyerbeer," my mother said, pointing to one of the busts carved into the top of one of the walls. "Who wrote this opera. And there's Mahler." She nudged me toward a black marble head perched on a pedestal in front of a mirror.
"Shouldn't he have combed his hair before he let someone carve him into a statue?" My question was sincere: Mahler's hair looked lumpy and long.
My mother laughed. "We don't love him for his hair," she chided.
"Do we love him because he's Jewish?"
"We love him for the same reason we love everyone in this building. We love him for his music."
Just as in the Musikverein, everything in the opera house was gilded. Music for me was always associated with elegance, gold, and crystal.
My mother had gotten us seats on the left side of the second balcony so that we could look down at our fellow operagoers filing into their seats. I leaned over the railing staring at the ladies' dresses and furs until my mother told me to look up. From the middle of the ceiling was suspended the largest chandelier I had ever seen. I wasn't struck so much by its beauty-it looked like a gigantic shiny pastry-as by its mass.
"It weighs eleven tons," my mother said. "Fifteen cows. Or twenty grand pianos."
Gazing at it, I was glad we were not sitting underneath. "How come it doesn't pull down the roof?"
"Well, the roof is even heavier."
All of this was making my chest tight.
"Orly," said my mother, sensing my discomfort, "this building has been standing for a very long time. And it will be standing for a long time more. I promise you, Schatz.
"Now, do you remember the story of Die Zauberflšte?" While we waited for the curtain to rise, my mother entertained me with opera stories and bits of gossip about the composer and singers. When she got to Lohengrin, I made her tell me the story three times. I loved to hear how the knight turned into a swan, how the lady married a man whose name she didn't know. It all seemed very romantic and mysterious, except for the end. Insatiably curious, I found it maddening that the women of opera, of legend, of myth, were so often forbidden to ask questions of their men, and punished when they did. Psyche, not allowed to see the face of her beloved. Elsa, not allowed to know even the name of her husband, Lohengrin. How terrifying it must have been to marry someone you didn't know. "I'm going to marry Anneliese," I announced to my mother. "She lets me ask her questions. And I already know who she is."
My mother laughed and squeezed my hand. "What a silly duckling you are." The lights dimmed, and I pulled my spine up as straight as I could and firmly crossed my ankles, locking my feet together to keep them from mischief.
There was no chance of me squirming during Les Huguenots. Stunned by the heady mixture of music and violence, I sat like a stone. I didn't cough, I didn't swallow, I didn't change the crossing of my ankles. (Later, when I undressed for bed, I would notice an indentation remained on the top of my right foot, so hard had I pressed it into the buckle of my left shoe.) I imprisoned my mother's hand in mine.
I had thought, somehow, that music was meant to tell only beautiful stories, love stories. But here was a story in which every single character was murdered, in which a father murdered his own daughter. I felt sorry for both the Catholics and Protestants-even though it was mostly the Protestants who got killed-because they were not allowed to fall in love with each other.
During the interval, I shook out my stiff legs as we walked to the lobby bar. My mother ordered me an apfelspritz and herself a glass of champagne, which she explained was a grown-up version of the same drink. I looked longingly at the cakes, but my mother said we could go to a caf afterward. As she was paying, a woman with long, glittering earrings and a spiraling tower of fair hair touched her elbow. "Julia? I thought it was you!"
My mother turned to greet the woman, introducing her as a singer she knew from work, but I failed to catch her name. I was distracted by another woman-was it a woman?-just behind her. Dressed in what looked like a man's tuxedo, she had combed her short, dark hair straight back. Instead of tipping her weight into one hip or wobbling on heels, she stood with her legs a foot apart, comfortable like a man. When she saw me staring, she smiled.
"I'm Odiane," she said, her voice warm and low as she offered me her hand.
I took her dry fingers in my damp ones. "Are you a girl?"
Odiane laughed, but my mother reached for my elbow and pinched it. "Orly! That's not polite. Odiane, please forgive my daughter." She turned back to me. "Odiane is a pianist. And a composer."
"Pleased to meet you." I curtsied, hoping it might make up for my rudeness. I didn't know that girls could dress like that. I didn't know that women could stand that way.
The bell chimed while we were still drinking, and we had to finish quickly before the lights went down. I wanted to follow Odiane back to her seat, but she and the blond woman quickly disappeared in the throng.
"Mutti, how do you know her?"
"I told you. From work. She's a mezzo."
"No, Odiane."
"Ah." My mother glanced down at the program in her lap. "She lives with Ilse."
"They're sisters?"
"More like roommates, I think."
I thought about this. I wondered if Anneliese and I could be roommates. "Why does she dress like that? Odiane, I mean?"
"Some women like to wear trousers. Even the First Lady in the United States sometimes wears trousers. And Marlene Dietrich, the film star. Though I don't recommend that you start. Frau Fessler would not approve."
