Zweigvanshchina
The microcosms that mirror the macrocosms in Salzburg
In his 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig describes the Burgtheater in fin-de-siècle Vienna as “the microcosm that mirrored the macrocosm, the brightly colored reflection in which the city saw itself, the only true cortigiano of good taste.” More than a mirror, it was the stage where Imperial Vienna could reinforce the narrative of its own civility, performing stability in an empire that had already begun to fracture underneath its brocade.
Zweig moved to Salzburg shortly after the end of World War I, finding a refuge in the quiet Alpine town from the pressures of life in post-empire and post-exile Vienna, while also taking a keen interest in the city’s growing festival culture (the summertime Salzburg Festival would launch one year after Zweig moved there).
I was reminded of that line from The World of Yesterday last month at the Salzburg Easter Festival’s premiere of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, which I reviewed for the London Review of Books. Zweig was born eight months after Mussorgsky drank himself to death in 1881, and I wondered if he had ever heard the opera and what he would have made of it. He does namecheck Mussorgsky in The World of Yesterday as one of the many modern artists shaping the brave new world into which the young writer was born. Writing in hindsight of that era (one of several worlds of yesterday he describes), Zweig may have also noticed the parallels between their respective lives and works. Both worked at moments of national instability, Zweig eulogizing his past lives as they slipped under the rubble of World War II, and Mussorgsky calling out the past to illustrate how far gone his country was in the present. As many historical characters make cameos in Khovanshchina as they do in The World of Yesterday, albeit less anecdotally — Mussorgsky’s religious zealots, political opportunists, and members of the nobility will all be equally bulldozed by the creep of modernization.
Indeed, one thing that struck me in this staging of Khovanshchina was the relatively marginal role of the Clerk, who is tasked by Shaklovity with drafting a flyer in the first act that will implicate the Streltsy. He returns in the third act to inform those same Streltsy that their numbers are all up. In previous performances, I’ve seen the Clerk swallowed up in this scene; his personhood is meaningless in this context and he serves only to deliver this key bit of plot-advancing information.
In the Großes Festspielhaus, Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (the same Richard Kind figure I saw and loved in Helsinki last year) seemed more significant. In his first scene, he was bullied by everyone else onstage; too smart (in different ways) for both the scheming Shaklovity and the illiterate Streltsy. In his second scene, he broke the fourth wall, flinging his laptop bag over his arm and exiting through the audience while singing: “I’m out of here while I can save myself!”
Zweig got out of Salzburg in 1934, a year after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and a concurrent turn towards fascism in Austria (amid rising antisemitic attacks and threats that hit close to home). “With whom hadn’t we spent heartfelt hours there,” he wrote of his house on Salzburg’s Kapuzinerberg in The World of Yesterday, “looking out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful scenery without any notion that directly across on the Berchtesgaden mountain sat a man who would destroy all of this?”
The morning of Khovanshchina’s opening, I took the short hike up the Kapuzinberg to visit what remains of the Zweig Villa, perennially under construction. On a bench across the way, I reread those lines in my copy of The World of Yesterday, squinting towards Berchtesgaden. I was reminded of the oft-quoted line from Mussorgsky to Stasov at the time of Khovanshchina’s conception, one that foregrounded this Easter Festival production: “‘We’ve gone forward,’ they say. I say: ‘We haven’t moved!’”
Zweig got out of Salzburg, but he didn’t exactly save himself. From Salzburg, he went to England, settling for a time in Bath (his “Ersatz-Salzburg”). But the rise of National Socialism still hit too close to his home in exile. He and his second wife, Lotte Altmann, left for the United States in 1940, living briefly in the Yale town of New Haven and the nearby New York hamlet of Ossining. That summer, they moved again to Brazil, making their home in a town colonized by Germans about an hour north of Rio de Janeiro. Eighteen months later, seeing no end in sight to the war, the couple ended their lives by overdosing on barbiturates. “I was simply too weak to sustain all this suffering,” Zweig wrote to his first wife, Friderike, by way of an explanation.
To write about Khovanshchina in even the most anodyne setting is to already set oneself up for a litany of references. It’s one of the reasons I love this holy mess of an opera. But it also presents a challenge for me, a writer who is proof positive of Postmodern Joan of Arc’s assertion that “the most fun a girl can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, making connections, contemplating.” You can only get so many references in a review and, sadly, Stefan Zweig has to take a backseat to a murderers’ row of historical figures with patronymics and outdated titles.
Still, as riveted as I was by Simon McBurney’s production and all that it entailed, my mind kept darting back to Zweig throughout last month’s performance. Just as the Imperial Theater in Austria’s capital staged the illusion of coherence in Zweig’s youth, here in Salzburg, the Großes Festspielhaus was staging that same coherence’s very real disintegration. Wittingly or not, the Salzburg Easter Festival (formed by a conductor who, as I pointed out in my LRB review, joined the Nazi party not once but twice) was engaging in a transhistorical dialogue about the end of the world. Both Zweig’s Austria and Mussorgsky’s Russia were societies unraveling beneath the weight of their own mythologies, and in this one opera I saw one of Zweig’s other lifelong preoccupations become manifest: how culture both conceals and reveals the collapse of civilization.
I’d like to think that McBurney was also aware of this. Amid the glittering society audience for the Festival’s opening (the new, traveling cortigiani of good taste), he took his bow wearing a checkered keffiyeh. I heard a few boos behind me and couldn’t tell if they were for the directorial or sartorial choices, but in either way the statement remained the same: There are (always?) ruins beneath the gold.
Today, Mussorgsky is held up as one of the ultimates of Russian cultural supremacy. Meanwhile, in 2020, Zweig’s villa was bought by Wolfgang Porsche, a scion of the automobile dynasty. Wolfgang’s grandfather co-founded the company, kicked out his Jewish business partner, was personal friends with Hitler as well as an honorary Oberführer of the SS. The weekend I was in Salzburg, people were still talking about the scandal reported several weeks earlier: a secret deal Porsche had struck with the former mayor of Salzburg to drill a private tunnel into the mountain on which his new villa sits.
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having never heard/seen Khovanshchina (all I knew of Mussorgsky was Night on Bald Mountain!), your essay inspired me to take a long listen (via Spotify - how easily we can do this now… find and hear most anything, immediately… not so helpful to artists, given the shamefully meagre renumeration for each stream, but so helpful for the rest of us) - really enjoyed it, the whole ‘mess’!