Overture of hope, p.20
Overture of Hope, page 20
It was Gerda who discovered her husband slumped in the chair hours later. “I turned off the gas of the gas cooker, opened the windows and called the doctor,” she told Hugh MacKay, the police constable who arrived at the flat soon after she found her husband.
An autopsy followed, and over the next few days the coroner conducted a formal inquiry, collecting statements from Gerda Maliniak and Jay Pomeroy, who could not appear at the coroner’s court in person because he claimed in a letter that he was suffering from “an attack of glandular fever.”
“There were two years in England during which time my husband was really happy, that was when he had the chance to conduct Italian opera,” wrote Gerda Maliniak. “Unfortunately, this enterprise had to come to an end and there again there was no prospect of getting similar work.”6
In the neatly typed Northern District County of London Coroner’s Officer’s Report Concerning Death, Maliniak’s cause of death was listed as asphyxiation by “coal gas poisoning.” The report noted that “he was a professional musician employed by the Jay Pomeroy Productions but for some time his engagements had been very few. Only the day before he was found dead he had had a great disappointment—he had been hoping for a chance to secure an engagement but it was a failure.”
And Thomas Day, the coroner’s officer, thought to add the following coda: “Deceased had never actually threatened his life. But in 1939, when things were not going very well, he did mention something to the effect that there was always the open window.”7
Ten days after Maliniak’s suicide, his friends Viorica Ursuleac and Clemens Krauss were the star attractions at a special, intimate concert at Wigmore Hall in London. Wigmore Hall was an ideal setting for such an event. It is a small concert venue with near-perfect acoustics usually reserved for chamber music or a selection of lieder, Romantic poems set to music. The Renaissance-inspired theater, with its marble and alabaster walls, features an unusual cupola above the small stage covered in an idealized painting depicting a young, nude man as the soul of music, gazing in a kind of rapture at the ball of fire that is meant to represent the “genius of harmony.” Crowned by the cupola, the lone singer on stage seems transported into a sacred, holy space.
Built in 1901 by the C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik next to its piano showroom on Wigmore Street, the hall was seized as enemy-alien property by the authorities during the First World War after the passage of the Trading with the Enemy Amendment Act of 1916 ended trade with Germany. The concert hall and the company’s showroom were shuttered. In the same year, the buildings were bought at auction by a local department store for a fraction of their worth and re-opened in 1917 as Wigmore Hall. The concert hall saw the London premieres of works by some of the world’s greatest artists, including Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók, and recitals by Enrico Caruso and the German-born soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, one of the greatest singers of lieder.
Ursuleac also sang a series of lieder at the concert, most of them somber poetry about lost love and death, while Krauss accompanied her on a grand piano. She sang in the original German, with English translations given in the program. As they listened to the couple perform “Liebestreu,” by Brahms, they—the Cooks and Gerda and Ingeborg Daisy Maliniak—must have surely felt the absence of Maliniak.
‘O sink deep, O sink deep the grief, my child
in the sea, in the deep dark sea!’
A stone must bide on the dark sea-floor
and grief comes back to me.8
They had all seen each other for the first time since the war two years before at a restaurant in Soho in the autumn of 1947. Ida and Louise had organized a dinner for the Maliniaks, the Mayer-Lismanns, and Krauss and Ursuleac, who had traveled to London with the Vienna Philharmonic. “We were all in tremendous spirits, though inwardly deeply moved to meet like this after so many years, and we were determined to drink a triumphant toast to ‘Reunion outside Vienna.’ ”9
It was the first time that the sisters had seen the conductor and his wife following the war, and they had rushed to Victoria Station for what Ida called “the rapture of reunion.”
“Once more, the exclamations, the questions, the half-answers, more questions and the endless exchange of news. It seemed that we would never be able to say or hear enough of what had happened in the years in between.”10 The sisters took the couple to their flat and soon learned that their own home in Munich had been completely wrecked by a phosphorous bomb that destroyed everything they owned. “We started to say something sympathetic but Krauss dismissed our exclamations with a gesture of his hand,” said Ida. The sisters were so moved that at the end of their visit they presented the couple with a key to the Dolphin Square flat and told them to consider it their home when they found themselves in London. “There was a certain unspoken poetic justice about their being able to regard as home the place that sheltered so many people we might never have known or helped, if they had not first committed Mitia to our care.”11
Of course, it was a different reunion at Wigmore Hall. Not only did Maliniak’s death weigh heavily, but Krauss and Ursuleac were still deeply wounded over the ban imposed on Krauss’s career in Austria. Although he was now able to perform, the conductor remained unable to take on any leadership role in Austrian musical institutions. However, he remained a living legend. On May 10, 1947, the Allies had agreed, after a great deal of political obstruction from the Soviets who were against any performances by Krauss, to allow him to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic. It was his first appearance since the end of the war and the audience showed its wild appreciation even before Krauss started conducting. “His return today was a triumph,” said the New York Times. “He refused to recognize the heavy applause when he appeared on the stage, launching immediately into the program with no more than a quick bow to the audience. The applause continued and the first portion of his first number was drowned out.” Observers at the concert told the Times reporter that the round on round of applause “was not a political demonstration, but that the audience was made up of typical Vienna music enthusiasts.”12
Krauss had gradually eased back into the limelight, but he mostly took on jobs conducting orchestras outside Austria. Still deeply humiliated by his treatment after the war, Krauss and Ursuleac retreated to a traditional Alpine home in Ehrwald, a Tyrolean village under the shadow of the majestic Zugspitze Mountain, more than three thousand feet above sea level. Their two-story wood-and-stucco cottage was painted yellow, with dark-green shutters, and was a short drive from Richard Strauss’s estate in Garmisch, a market town on the German side of the Alps where the 1936 Winter Olympic Games had been held.
But just as Krauss and Ursuleac settled into their Austrian mountain retreat, Strauss—Krauss’s beloved mentor and collaborator—died of kidney failure, only a few months after his eighty-fifth birthday. More than two thousand mourners attended his funeral in war-ravaged Munich on September 12, 1949. In his will, Strauss had requested that music from Beethoven and his own opera Rosenkavalier be featured at the somber event, where his elderly wife, Pauline Maria de Ahna, a former soprano, appeared distraught in a black-lace mantilla. The couple had been married for fifty-five years, and although she had once been described by her husband as “very complex” and “a little perverse,” the union was a happy one. Strauss often credited his wife with providing him with a great deal of inspiration. Pauline Strauss never recovered after her husband’s death. She died eight months later.13
The death of one of Germany’s most important composers was a cause for national mourning, even though Strauss had been associated with the Nazis just a few years before. At the funeral, all seemed forgotten. The sopranos who sang the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier—Marianne Schech, Maud Cunitz, and Gerda Sommerschuh—broke down at different times during their performance. And the composer was praised by a Munich city official as “one of the last few creative composers of this century.”14 Following the service, Strauss was cremated, and the ashes were spread in the garden at Garmisch.
In a tribute to Strauss, the directors of the Salzburg Festival decided to include his final opera, Capriccio, as part of its summer lineup in 1950. Krauss had worked on the libretto for the opera after the composer’s original partner Stefan Zweig had gone into exile and then committed suicide. But Krauss was not appointed to conduct the opera, much to Ida and Louise’s annoyance. His name appeared nowhere on the advance prospectus, which had been mailed to patrons, including the Cook sisters, in February 1950. “I am astonished and dismayed to see that Clemens Krauss’s name does not appear in the list of conductors,” wrote Ida Cook in February 1950. “We find it hard to believe. In fact, had the composer been alive, he would certainly not have entrusted the Salzburg performance to anyone but Clemens Krauss.”15 Whether she wrote the angry letter at Krauss’s urging or whether it stemmed from her own initiative is unknown, although by then Ida had become an impassioned opera critic. She was also a fierce defender of Krauss and Ursuleac.
The letter, which was sent to Josef Klaus, the governor of Salzburg, was oddly signed by Mary Burchell, Ida’s pen name, and sent from the Dolphin Square flat at Howard House. Ida always sent her letters from Morella Road, where she still worked in the attic and never signed them with her pseudonym. Perhaps in this case she sought to throw her weight around as one of the country’s best-selling novelists. A year earlier, Mills & Boon published ads in newspapers and magazines heralding Mary Burchell as one of their most important authors. She had already written forty-one books, and sold 406,473 copies, mostly to libraries, according to Mills & Boon. The company’s principals calculated that on average each book was lent a hundred times. From overall sales, her royalties topped £500,000.16
“Capriccio is as far as I know, actually the only case today where a current masterpiece could have the inestimable advantage of being presented by one, at least, of the men responsible for its existence,” she wrote, adding that “there is an unpleasant feeling abroad that something as mean and unsavory as operatic intrigue is keeping us from hearing the really great performances that we were used to hearing in the old days.”17
The sternly worded letter did nothing to help Krauss in Salzburg. It did, however, elicit a response from the governor of Salzburg who sent a polite reply a month later, saying that Austrian conductor Karl Böhm, who had also suffered a denazification ban after the war, would conduct Capriccio. “The decision was…made in favor of Böhm because he had conducted the premiere in Vienna at the time. I believe I have every right to say that no opera intrigues played a role in this election.”18
Clemens Krauss would continue to be labeled a Nazi by protesters who clamored outside concert halls wherever he went. “So much lying propaganda was put out about her [Ursuleac] and Krauss, partly by disgruntled professional rivals and partly by people who judged,” wrote Ida in a letter to her friend and fellow opera enthusiast Alfred Frankenstein. “I don’t claim that they were superbly better than anyone else, but they did the best they could—and sometimes took risks that were very hard to take. One hopes one would have done as much in like circumstances.”19
But the “lying propaganda” was difficult to take. As the important conducting jobs increasingly went to Krauss’s rivals, he grew embittered, and his health began to suffer. He continued to perform everywhere he could, taking jobs at Covent Garden in the 1950s. Krauss finally regained some of his old respect when he was asked to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival in 1953. He also made a handful of well-regarded recordings.
Following his Covent Garden appearances, Krauss and Ursuleac prepared for a long journey in the spring of 1954. They were off to Mexico City where Krauss was scheduled to appear as a guest conductor of the Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional in a kind of cultural exchange organized by the embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Mexico. Krauss was once again the subject of heated protests in the city where critics accused him of being a Nazi collaborator. However, the conductor, now sixty-one, tried not to let them interfere with preparations for performances of works by Franz Josef Haydn and Johannes Brahms at the opulent, neoclassical Palacio de Bellas Artes. Completed in 1934, the theater was the showplace of Mexican cultural life, featuring giant murals by Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo.
On the night of May 16, Krauss appeared at the conductor’s podium, glamorous and rather aloof in a smart tuxedo and wearing dark glasses to cut the glare from the giant television lights that had distracted him during the first few performances. Among the highlights of the evening was Mexican pianist Angelica Morales performing Brahms’s Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Austrian composer and conductor Haydn’s Symphony Number 88. Following rousing applause at the end of the performance, the conductor abruptly took his leave. He told his Mexican hosts that he wasn’t feeling well and needed to lie down. He would see them at rehearsals the next day, he said. Krauss returned to the Hotel Monte Cassino accompanied by Ursuleac.
“Then while he was undressing she just went to get him a drink of water, and when she came back he was unconscious,” continued Ida in her letter to Frankenstein. Krauss had suffered a cardiac arrest. “He never regained consciousness and died in less than an hour. One couldn’t ask a better end for anyone one loves—but for her it must have been terrible.”20
When they heard the details surrounding his death, Ida and Louise seized upon one of their favorite operas. They remembered how they had first encountered Krauss at his performance of Arabella at Covent Garden in 1934. In the opera, Mandryka tells Arabella shortly after he meets her that it is a village custom for a woman to offer a glass of water to the man she loves. Ursuleac had unwittingly repeated her famous role as Arabella on the couple’s last night together in Mexico City when she walked into the bedroom with that final glass of water.
The sisters were beyond grief. As Ida noted in her letter to Frankenstein: “After our immediate family, he and Viorica were much the closest people to us, and we feel it badly.”21
It took more than a month for Viorica Ursuleac to clear the bureaucratic hurdles of transporting her husband’s body back to Austria, even though she had a great deal of help from the Austrian Legation in Mexico City, where Ida and Louise sent her a telegram as soon as they heard the sad news: “Thinking of you both my darling with all our love and sympathy your heartbroken Louise and Ida.”22 Ida followed up with a letter to Ursuleac on May 19, 1954, three days after Krauss’s death, noting that it was the first time in the sisters’ lives that they had “lost anyone inexpressibly dear to us.”
I will try not to write a sad letter, because you already have enough sadness.
We want you to know how touching and wonderful we find it that, after all, you two—our beautiful darlings—were alone together at the end. Perhaps it was sad to be far from home. But it was right that you, who were all his world, should be there, without friends or enemies to suggest or decide anything. Whatever you want to arrange for him will be right.23
Ida described how lucky she and Louise were to live “within the radiance of the love between you two,” calling it “the greatest inspiration of our lives. Because it was—indeed is—so beautiful, so complete and eternal, it is to us the strongest and simplest proof of something after this life.”
Telegrams and letters poured in from all over the world from fellow musicians and opera singers Krauss had worked with during the war. There were heartfelt letters from Strauss’s son in Germany, Adele Kern, and even rivals such as Karl Böhm. Mitia Mayer-Lismann, who had returned to live at the Dolphin Square flat after losing her job at the finishing school, was among the last to send her condolences, so overwhelmed was she by the death of the conductor who had helped to save her life. “What we feel is deeply rooted in the heartfelt connection we have had with him—with you,” wrote Mayer-Lismann to Ursuleac. “As in happier days, we are full of admiration for the wonderful romantic love between you two.”24
Before Ursuleac could return to Austria with the body, the Mexicans insisted upon paying tribute to the conductor in their own way. “Mexico has the privilege of being the first to pay homage,” said Andrés Iduarte, the director of the National Institute of Fine Arts, who offered the theater’s stage so that the conductor could lie in state. “The physical and spiritual place where Clemens Krauss’s passing occurred is not so alien nor distant from his artistic greatness. After all, this artist died in a country dedicated to art.”25 The Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional played the Haydn symphony that they had performed the night Krauss died—a symbolic tribute from one of Austria’s greatest composers to one of its greatest conductors.
At Ursuleac’s request, Ida and Louise traveled to meet her and Krauss’s remains for the trip to Ehrwald, where Ursuleac decided he would be buried. They were joined on that final journey by Else Mayer-Lismann; her mother Mitia was too ill and heartbroken to make the sad trip. “In Vienna they want to give him a great state funeral and bury him beside Schubert and Beethoven,” wrote Ida to Ponselle. “But as the way they treated him contributed to his death, I think Viorica will refuse, and have him buried in Ehrwald, the little village in the Tyrol where they were so happy together. The Viennese are extraordinary towards their great men. They break their hearts, but they bury them splendidly.”26
* * *
Months after their “sad summer,” the sisters made plans to travel back to the United States and introduce their new friend, a certain American-born Greek soprano named Maria Callas, to Ponselle: “I think she’s a great overall artist and much the most exciting thing since the War—but people do really forget the standards we had other days sometimes! It would be ungenerous of me to start listing faults at the moment of her triumph.” But Ida couldn’t help herself, and she went on to tell Ponselle—“just for the sake of artistic truth”—that in the months before Krauss died he would not allow the sisters to play a Callas record on their new record player when they were all at the Dolphin Square flat.
