A Song for Summer

It was an unexpected marriage--that of Captain von Altenburg who lived for his hunting and his trees, and the intellectual girl whose spare, honed poems celebrated a unique and inner vision--but it became a byword for happiness.

No wonder then that the son who was born to them should regard the world as created for his personal delight. There were no divisions at Pettelsdorf between the manor and the farm, the farm and the forest.

Geese patrolled his mother's hammock as she worked at her translations; his father's hunting dogs tumbled with Milenka's popeyed Tibetan terrier and the mongrels he rescued from the village. As soon as he could sit on a horse, Marek rode with his father on the neverending work of the land, sometimes staying away for days.

He was a person much addicted to abundance. "I don't like either, I like and," said the five-year-old Marek when the cook asked which kind of filling he wanted baked into his birthday beigli. "Apricots and poppy seed and walnuts," he demanded--and got them.

But if the house servants spoilt him, the men in the fields did not. The woodcutters and charcoal burners and draymen who were his heroes knew better than to indulge the boy who would one day be the master, and thus the servant of their demesne. When he was overcome by one of his rare but devastating attacks of temper, it was in the hay barn or paddock that Marek took refuge, kicking and raging till old Stepan, the head forester, brought him back, tear-stained and purged.

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 clichè 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 Fre@iherr 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.