A Song for Summer

Herr K@oenig blanched. Twelve curtain calls, yes--but for her alone? The soprano from Hamburg was said to be very good. On the other hand, Seefeld was not singing again till her Rosenkavalier at the gala in four weeks' time. For the ordinary Viennese who could not afford gala prices, tonight was effectively her last appearance of the season. Looking into the diva's appealing blue eyes, he was driven to rashness.

"You shall have them," he declared grandly--and could be seen, as he reached the street, striking his forehead

and cursing his stupidity.

At five-thirty, Ufra prepared the dog. Combing the long, silky hair of the little Tibetan terrier, binding his topknot up in scarlet ribbon, took almost as long as dressing Brigitta's golden curls, but the public expected Puppchen on his red lead, as they expected the sable stoles, the jewels, the famous smile.

"In Armenia we would have eaten you," said Ufra as he wriggled and moaned.

At six-thirty the procession set off down the Augustinerstrasse watched by the shopkeepers, the man in the tobacco kiosk and those fortunate tourists who had been tipped off that Seefeld was en route to the evening's performance.

Arriving at the stage door, Brigitta was extremely gracious to the doorman, considerably less gracious to the tenor who was singing Rodolfo, and not gracious at all to the beanpole from Hamburg who should have stayed where she was even if she did happen to be married to a Jew.

But the performance went well. The voice--that capricious Gestalt almost as external to herself as the tiresome little dog that Marcus had given her-- had behaved itself, and Herr K@oenig had kept his word.

There were twelve curtain calls, and the other singers, relieved that Brigitta would be absent now for nearly a month, allowed her to take a substantial number of these alone.

Afterwards there was another smattering of applause as she crossed from the opera house to Sacher's, the hotel where she was accustomed to dine after a performance. There were roses on the table especially kept for her, and more hand-kissing, more bowing as she was greeted by the ma@itre d'h@otel and her dinner companions rose to their feet.

"You were superb, Liebchen," said Count Stallenbach, her current "protector", a man sufficiently stricken in years to make few demands on her person.

Julius Staub, extinguishing his cigarette, added his congratulations. A pale playwright with an enormous forehead, who wandered about in a pall of cigarette ash like an extinct volcano, he had written the libretto of an opera about Helen of Troy which only lacked a composer to be a perfect vehicle for Seefeld.

But the man she most wanted to see had not yet

arrived: Benny Feldmann, her agent and business manager, who had just returned from the United States.

"He phoned to say he'd be along in half an hour. The train was delayed and he's just gone home to change."

Brigitta nodded, but as she chose her dishes and sipped her champagne, she could hardly conceal her impatience.

It had begun over a year ago, her desire to find Marcus von Altenburg again. She had been furious with him when he withdrew his violin concerto in that melodramatic way. To lose the chance of a Berlin premiere for a little Jew like Meierwitz was absurd, and she had written to tell him so. Music was above politics.

But if Marcus had been labelled as a person not welcome in the Third Reich, there were other countries, seemingly, which did want him. The French had just performed his First Symphony, the Songs for Summer had been recorded in London, and the Americans had invited him back on generous terms to conduct. He was rumoured to be over there now, negotiating.

"He hasn't been so stupid," Benny Feldmann had told her before he left for the States. "The future is over there, Brigitta. More and more people are going."

Brigitta had no intention of leaving Vienna; she was Viennese through and through. But the news from Germany was bad: more and more Wagner operas staged for the F@uhrer, more and more influence exerted by the Bayreuth clique. She was a lyric soprano: Wagner did not suit her voice.

If Hitler's hand of friendship to Austria became a takeover, might it be wise to consider alternatives?

"Why don't you get Altenburg to write an opera for you? You'd be welcome anywhere in the world then,"

Feldmann had said, as he was leaving. He was half joking. Men like Altenburg did not write operas for people--they wrote them or not.

But Brigitta had leapt at the idea. Altenburg understood her as no one had ever done. He had a devilish temper and had never quite lost his air of emerging from a forest in a bearskin, but the time she had spent with him had been like no other. It was he who had persuaded her to take on the role that had become her most famous one: that of the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier--the lovely, worldly aristocrat who gives up her young lover to an ingenue of his own age.

"I'm too young," she'd said--and so she had been then: thirty-two to his twenty.