Overture of Hope, page 17
Except for the Blitz, London offered relative safety. Maliniak’s life was no longer in grave danger. He could walk the streets without fear of being followed by shadowy Gestapo agents. His daughter could go to school and play in a park without being mocked by other children because one of her parents was a Jew. Money was tight, but the family had true friends in the Cook sisters whom they could call on in case of an emergency. But, according to his wife, Maliniak’s struggles with “terrible depression” began to overwhelm him.
* * *
The year 1942 had started out on a somber note for Clemens Krauss and Richard Strauss when they heard the news that Stefan Zweig and his second wife Lotte had been found dead in their bedroom in Petrópolis, Brazil. The suicide of one of the world’s most popular writers made front page news in the New York Times, next to a story about Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressing U.S. troops. America had declared war on the Axis powers two months before, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
Zweig had fled Vienna for London and then New York, eventually ending up outside Rio de Janeiro, where the fascist and anti-Semitic government of Getúlio Vargas had welcomed him as a famous European writer, somehow overlooking the fact that he was a Jew. Despite being able to live without the fear of persecution, Zweig had never been comfortable with exile. “My own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless,” he wrote before mixing barbiturates in two water glasses for himself and his wife. “I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom—the most precious possessions on this earth.” Zweig and his wife were found lying on their bed, completely dressed, their arms wrapped around each other on February 23, 1942, a day after they died.26
For Krauss and Strauss, Zweig’s death was a huge blow. Not only was he a close friend of the ageing composer, but he was the librettist on Capriccio, the opera that was to have its premiere that autumn at the National Theater in Munich. The opera, subtitled, A Conversation Piece for Music, was a treatise on the art form itself. When Zweig died, Strauss immediately called in Krauss to help him with the libretto. The conductor made frequent trips to the seventy-seven-year-old composer’s estate in Garmisch, sixty miles from Krauss’s home base in Munich, the seat of his most important work—at least as far as the Reich was concerned. Despite the war, Hitler was still obsessed with making the Bavarian capital the center of cultural life in the Third Reich. The Führer continued to have great faith in his ambitious Generalintendent of the Munich Opera, so much so that he called upon Krauss to lead the Berlin Philharmonic’s tour of Europe—a public relations move to show off the mastery of German music, even as the country was enmeshed in a brutal war. Weeks after Zweig’s death, Krauss embarked on the tour, leading performances in fascist Spain, Portugal, and Vichy France.
Hitler’s backing notwithstanding, the conductor still found himself fighting for increased salaries for his singers and musicians, costumes, and stage sets. And after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the war began to hollow out the business of culture, as members of Krauss’s staff were increasingly called up for military service.
As soldiers were being dispatched to the Eastern Front, Hitler was preparing his machinery of murder. The systematic slaughter of Jews began without any formal declaration in occupied Poland in May 1940 at the largest of the Nazi death camps—Auschwitz—where more than 1.1 million Jews from across Germany, Austria, and Nazi-occupied countries started to meet their end. The so-called “killing factory,” which was expanded in 1942, boasted more than forty sub-concentration camps and was located at the crossroads of various railway routes in an isolated part of the country, surrounded by marshland, making prisoner escapes nearly impossible.
The roundup and murder of millions was organized in secret under Operation Reinhard—named in honor of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. On January 20, 1942, Nazi leaders at the Wannsee Conference pledged the destruction of every Jew in occupied Europe. They launched the so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which would put existing concentration camps to an even deadlier use and require the construction of new killing centers. The plan called for the mass deportation of European Jews to death camps in Poland.
At the same time as the Nazis were planning their final offensive against the Jews, Krauss was fighting for their apartments, many of them sitting empty as thousands were forced to flee Munich or were rounded up by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps. On March 24, 1942, he wrote a terse letter to Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann demanding the use of the abandoned Jewish apartments for his musicians and singers, who were living in temporary lodgings in the city. The letter, which included the subject heading: “Procurement of new housing for the management board and members of the Bavarian State Opera,” was critical of city officials in Munich, namely the mayor and the “Gauleiter in Charge of Aryanization”: “I would like to remind you that the order granted me a year ago by the Führer and Chancellor for the artistic development of the Bavarian State Opera, also endowed me with the responsibility of dealing with the necessities of opera personnel.” The letter went on to enumerate the “urgent need’ for apartments for a host of employees of the Bavarian State Opera. Many staff members had arrived from other parts of Germany and were living in shared accommodation or hotels throughout Munich.27
By April 1, Bormann himself had written to the mayor of Munich on behalf of Hitler: “According to an order of the Führer, General Director Clemens Krauss is to address me if he has any wishes concerning the Opera…I have today reported to the Führer on the letter of the venerable director Krauss. He wishes you to consider again, whether a number of other Jewish apartments could not be vacated for the newly engaged members of the Bavarian State Opera.”28 The speed with which Bormann was deployed to do Krauss’s bidding at the height of the war in Munich was a marker of the importance of the Bavarian State Opera to the Führer and to Krauss’s own special relationship with members of the Nazi hierarchy. Bormann was so close to Hitler that he oversaw the renovations at the Berghof, Hitler’s holiday chalet in the Bavarian Alps, and managed the Führer’s personal finances.
Despite his standing with Hitler, Krauss found himself increasingly locked in a power struggle with Goebbels, who was his senior as the head of the Reich Culture Chamber. When Krauss jockeyed for more control of opera theaters throughout Germany and Austria, Goebbels, probably feeling threatened, put obstacles in his path, canceling Krauss’s productions at will. In July 1944 Krauss refused to sign an extension to his Munich contract after Goebbels canceled the premiere of Strauss’s new opera Die Liebe der Danae at that summer’s Salzburg Festival even though his annual salary—80,000 marks—was double what he started with in 1937.
With daily life a challenge in Munich, Krauss and Ursuleac sought more permanent quarters in Salzburg, where Krauss had been put in charge of the summer festival in 1942. Here, Krauss landed an enormous prize for himself and Ursuleac: an apartment at the Leopoldskron Castle. The massive property had belonged to Austrian theater director and producer Max Reinhardt, who bought it in 1918 and spent twenty years restoring the grand rococo mansion to its eighteenth-century glory. Reinhardt, a Jew, clearly wanted to be close to the festival he had cofounded. But after the Anschluss, the Nazis Aryanized all Reinhardt’s theaters throughout the Third Reich and seized the castle. Reinhardt, who was already working in Hollywood, managed to stay in the United States, where he died in 1943.
Goering himself had made big plans for Leopoldskron, intending to turn it into temporary housing for the Reich’s greatest artists. While the sumptuous palace functioned as a guest house for important performers including Krauss and Ursuleac, it continued to serve as a glittering reception hall for Hitler whenever he found himself in Salzburg. As the industrial heartlands of Germany suffered bombing raid after bombing raid by the Allies, Krauss and Ursuleac passed the summer of 1943 in an unreal world of luxury, in company, occasionally, with the Führer’s entourage, even as bombs ripped apart the Munich Opera House.
Nearly a year after the glittering premiere of Capriccio, which would be Strauss’s final opera, Allied bombs pounded Hitler’s beloved National Theater on Max-Joseph-Platz, reducing the home of the Bavarian State Opera to a pile of rubble. Only some of the outer walls survived.
A year later, Krauss wrote to Hitler directly to ask for permission for a permanent move to Salzburg after his Munich flat was bombed: “During a terrorist attack at the end of April my Munich apartment was completely destroyed. I would now like to take the liberty of asking you, my Führer, to allow me to make the apartment in Salzburg my permanent home during the winter months.”29 However, months after obtaining approval to live year-round in Salzburg, the arrangements proved untenable for the increasingly harried conductor whose nearly two-hour commutes between his jobs in Salzburg and Munich, sometimes under Allied bombardment, were now putting his life at risk. In a letter to Martin Bormann, Krauss sought permission “to buy myself somewhere in as quiet and secluded an area as possible, as I absolutely need real peace and relaxation for a few days between the extremely strenuous concert tours that are taking place under the present circumstances.”30
By September 1944, Krauss knew he would never fulfil Hitler’s grand scheme to turn Munich into the center of culture in the Reich. As Allied troops massed at the German borders, and Krauss lost more and more staff to compulsory military service, he wrote to Bormann: “As far as I myself am concerned I have to face the fact that any artistic work in Munich will be quite impossible. To inform you of this is merely my duty.”31 And as the war raged, and Krauss found himself on the wrong side of history, “peace and relaxation” continued to elude him.
Shaken, but undaunted, Clemens Krauss was still determined to carry out his mission to produce great opera, although he could hardly have failed to notice that he himself was enmeshed in the real-life drama that had become the beginning of the end of Hitler’s Reich. Krauss increasingly resembled a character in one of his operas. Like the Cooks before the war, he was living in a state of tragedy and farce.
As the Nazis continued to round up millions of Jews for extermination at Auschwitz and other death camps throughout the Reich and their much-vaunted war machine began to sputter with devastating losses for German troops in the Soviet Union, ordinary Germans found themselves fighting to survive. In major cities throughout Germany and Austria, food was severely rationed, and Allied bombs fell with increasing frequency.
But Krauss surely had the private solace of the work he had done with Ida and Louise, helping dear friends, artistic collaborators, and even total strangers to escape before the chaos. What were their lives like now away from Germany and Austria? Cut off from the outside world, Krauss’s only news came from Nazi newsreels. Returning to Munich to search for theaters that could still accommodate his opera productions, the bombed-out and desolate city now resembled the propaganda clips of Luftwaffe raids over London. Had those two mad Englishwomen, Ida and Louise, and the others he and Ursuleac had helped escape the concentration camps survived the Blitz and flying bomb raids over London? Had any?
Krauss himself was now deep into what his friend Zweig had described in his suicide letter as the “long night,” and the dawn was nowhere on the horizon.
CHAPTER 9 The Aria
Ida knew that she would get her old life back when she found the photograph, sifting through the ruins of a friend’s bombed-out home in London. “Ankle-deep in rubble,” she discovered just about the only item that was still intact—a framed enlargement of the snap she had taken of Clemens Krauss and Viorica Ursuleac standing gamely in front of the fold-out canvas stools of the queue at Covent Garden on that distant spring day on the eve of the British premiere of Arabella in 1934. “The snap that was to draw us into the dark melodrama that had enveloped Europe,” was also an image of more innocent times. Brushing aside the dirt, Ida gazed once again on Ursuleac’s shy smile, the curls hidden under her white hat, and Krauss’s handsome smirk, his hands planted firmly in the pockets of his trench coat. “It was dirty, of course, and the cardboard backing had been torn. But it was there, virtually intact, a symbol of the days that had been, but I believed, in that moment, would surely come again.”1
Though so much had changed in their lives since the photo was taken, the Cooks remained very much the same. They still had the pluck and determination of the Northumberland schoolgirls about them—the ones who saved their pennies, walking to work every day and going without their lunches so that they could sail to the other side of the world to hear Amelita Galli-Curci sing.
How far away that seemed now. Galli-Curci had given up performing after damage to a laryngeal nerve made it impossible for her to hit high notes. The end of her career became painfully clear during a final performance as Mimi in La Bohème in Chicago in 1936. One critic called her “pathetic,” and another stated the obvious when he wrote: “She lost her voice.”2
The war made it impossible for the sisters to communicate with Galli-Curci or their other beloved opera stars. The only respite from Ida’s bleak existence in those years seemed to be the lunch-hour concerts organized by Myra Hess. Louise continued to work on and off in Wales, and Ida often thought of her as she wandered through the bombed-out ruins of central London after her shifts at the air-raid shelter. She was also deeply worried about paying the interest on hundreds of pounds in loans that she had taken out to help bring refugees to the country. She was paying out half her earnings from her writing to the cases she had personally guaranteed. Many of those refugees were old and sick, and it was unlikely that Ida would ever see her debts repaid. Not that she was expecting the money back: “Either one took the risk and people lived, or one played safe and they died,” was the Cooks’ motto when it came to their relief work.3 And despite their flight to freedom, some of the sisters’ refugees died soon after arriving in the United Kingdom. Ferdinand Stiefel, aged sixty-three, died in the north of England in 1941, a year after leaving Frankfurt, while Mayer-Lismann’s husband, Paul Mayer, died in London in the same year.
During the worst of the rationing and the bombing, Ida dared not plan for the future. Instead she lived in the past, reminiscing over the smallest details of the magnificent performances she had attended with Louise, and the larger-than-life characters they had already met.
But it was hard to escape reality. The war had changed everything. In addition to Galli-Curci’s virtual retirement from the stage, Ida and Louise were surely aware of Ezio Pinza’s bad luck in America. Not only had his first wife threatened to sue him and Rethberg over their affair, but in the early 1940s, after Pinza had married Doris Leak, an American ballet dancer, and was firmly ensconced as a star at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with a house in the Westchester suburbs and an infant daughter, the FBI had hauled him off to an internment camp on Ellis Island, accusing him of being a supporter of Mussolini in Italy. A month before his arrest, in February 1942, the federal government had declared all Germans, Italians, and Japanese living in the United States “enemy aliens.”
On March 13, 1942, two FBI agents barged into Pinza’s home in Mamaroneck through an open door and arrested him “in the name of the president of the United States.” The news of the internment of New York City’s biggest opera star was front page news in the New York Times the following day. Decades later, his granddaughter wrote that Pinza was never told what the charges against him were and was not allowed to have an attorney present at his hearings. Pinza was finally released after eleven weeks in prison and returned to his wife and baby daughter. He was only allowed to leave his Ellis Island prison on the condition that he report weekly to “a reliable U.S. citizen,” in his case, his doctor. Although he resumed his work at the Metropolitan Opera, the incarceration ruined his health and led to severe bouts of depression.4
When would the madness end? mused Ida and Louise whenever they found themselves together. When would they all emerge from this misery and recapture the glory of the opera?
Part of the answer seemed to emerge with the discovery of Ida’s timid snap of Krauss and Ursuleac—the first real glimmer of hope. For Ida’s alter ego Mary Burchell, who had become so adept at crafting the happy ending, it was surely a sign that all was not lost. If they survived the war, they were determined to return to America. Ida wanted to travel to California to visit their old friends Galli-Curci and Samuels as soon as the war was over.
Perhaps they could look up Pinza and his new American wife. More importantly, they would seek out Rosa Ponselle who had moved them to ecstasy and tears during that one magical performance at Covent Garden in 1929 and had set their lives on this course.
But the war was not yet over, even as 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In retaliation, the Nazis launched their deadliest attacks on London since the Blitz. A week after the D-Day landings, the infamous Vergeltungswaffen or V-weapons—the so-called flying bombs—made their deadly debut in London. The “doodlebugs,” or buzz bombs, looked like small, pilotless planes that made a distinctive buzzing sound before they fell to the ground over random targets. The bombs caused crippling damage, leveling hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings and leaving thirty thousand civilian casualties throughout Britain in their wake.
