AND ANOTHER THING
A message from Vienna: Europe should stop whining and start bonking
PAUL JOHNSON
e assembled in the Palais Ferstel to discuss whether European civilisation was being overwhelmed by Yankee cultural imperialism. This new Congress of Vienna was notable for large contingents of intel- lectuals from former Soviet colonies. The best speech was made by a Pole. Victims of realised Marxism gave moving testimony, I found myself being interviewed by newspa- pers from the grimmer redoubts of eastern Europe. 'Professor Johnson, what in your view is the biggest problem facing Latvia today?' What are the principal assets of Belarus in the world confrontation?' Give us your opinion of the cultural leadership in the Ukraine.' These gatherings have the salutary effect on me of drawing attention to my colossal ignorance, which does not seem to diminish with the years — it expands, rather, as more 'problems' arise to demand informed 'solutions'. My difficul- ties are compounded by growing deafness. `Herr Doktor, with which Slovakian novel- ists are you most familiar?' I have four children and six grandchildren.' Pardon?'
In the intervals between the outpourings of rhetoric, I revived memories of this old, beautiful, bruised, irresponsible (`utterly frivolous', as Beethoven said) and deli- ciously greedy city. I wandered through the Minoritenplatz, where, during the real Congress of Vienna, the citizens were amazed to hear, on a Sunday morning, weird musical sounds issuing from No. 30. There, gathered in the drawing-room, were Castlereagh and his entire family, staff, col- leagues and servants, bawling out stern Ulster Protestant hymns. By contrast, at the Palais Palm, Tsar Alexander I and a pretty Austrian countess had an argument about who could undress faster, a lady or a gen- tleman. They went up to a bedroom to put it to the test, and she won. It brought a snort from the papal nuncio, Cardinal Con- salvi: 'This is the kind of man by whom the world is governed — turning the palace of the emperors into a brothel!' The Palm also housed both of Metternich's mistresses: Madame Bagration, whom he shared with the Tsar; and the enchanting Duchess of Sagan, who gave the Father of Holy Russia, with his enormous feet and sloping shoul- ders, the brush-off; preferring the tall, blue- eyed Austrian, with his blond curls and impressive record of conquests, including one of the Bonaparte's sisters and the pret- ty wives of two of his marshals. Meanwhile, at the Palais Kaunitz in the Johannesgasse, Talleyrand spent an hour each morning with his chefs, while one of Haydn's best pupils, Sigismond Neukomm, softly played the piano.
Those were the days! I peeped inside the Karlskirche, where, on 16 October 1814, as the Congress was assembling, the choir gave the premiere of the first mass written by Vienna's new 17-year-old genius, Franz Schubert. Up the road at the Opera, two days before the Congress opened, Beethoven was present at a performance of Fidelio for the delegates and their wives, and a month later this 'short and stout fig- ure, fairly deaf, conducted a concert at the Hofburg which included his new Seventh Symphony. He took out an advert in all the main newspapers, written by himself with- out any help from the Saatchis of those days. It was headed 'A Word to His Admir- ers' and read: 'How often, in your chagrin that his depths were not sufficiently appre- ciated, have you said that Beethoven com- poses only for posterity! You have no doubt now been convinced of your error, even if only since the General Enthusiasm aroused by his immortal opera Fidelio!' At the countless palaces, dance-halls and open-air balls, new waltzes by Weber, Spohr and Hummel (Mozart's pupil) were danced to. At the largest ballroom, the Moonlight Hall in the Apollosaal, the feat was to make a complete circuit, waltzing at top speed, eight times. Metternich did it with his duchess. (I would like to see Robin Cook and the lady he has now made an honest woman have a try.) Most of these places are still there, for Vienna was hardly touched in both world wars. Indeed, during the second, Austria was officially classified by the Allies as a victim of Nazism and an occupied country, which meant that the Austrians got out of having to pay a penny in compensation to families of the countless Jews they mur- dered. But Vienna is not the city it was in Metternich's day. On 20 December 1857 the Emperor Franz Josef decreed that its circular 17th-century fortifications were to Hence our pee green boat.' be demolished, and the immense grassed- over glacis which surrounded the compact mediaeval city and separated it from the suburbs and the countryside was to be built over. The result was the Ringstrasse, opened in 1865, and a building programme of private and public works which went on until 1890. It is a deprivation, of course, not to be able to circumnavigate the city on the old walls, as the energetic Castlereagh loved to do, or to walk in the green belt beyond them. But this exercise in town- planning, larger even than Haussmann's grand scheme in Paris under Napoleon III, must be accounted the finest ever accom- plished, and it makes Vienna, despite its comparatively small size, one of the grand- est cities in the world. To attend high mass at St Stephen's Cathedral and watch the children make their first communions, as I did on Sunday, to lunch afterwards at Sacher's in traditional style, or to sit and watch the world go by at the Café Central or the Cafe Mozart, is indeed to be at the heart of European civilisation, with all its glitter and all its dark shadows of memory.
To those Europeans who grumble about the way American music, movies and speech are taking over, and who demand that most despairing of devices, cultural protectionism, I reply that the right answer is to find a few geniuses. A new 17-year-old Schubert, or even a deaf and boastful Beethoven, would be the best defence against the Yankee threat. Protection, subsidies, have been tried and have failed. No one has done more than the French, in the last half-century, to guard their culture from invasion, and they have spent more per capita on the arts than any other country on earth; but can anyone name an outstanding French novelist, poet, painter, composer, playwright or architect of today? There is another, demographic point. America has now passed the 280-million mark, not only by welcoming the world's immigrants but by maintaining a high birth- rate. Americans believe in their future and they breed for it. Europe, including tradi- tionally fertile countries like Germany and Italy, now has the world's lowest birth-rates. If their culture is dying it is because Euro- peans are not producing — they are failing to nurture either great artists or ordinary boys and girls to hand the legacy on to.
So I say to the Europeans: 'Throw away your contraceptives! Stop whining and get honking!' What Europe needs is a recovery of its old philoprogenitive spirit.
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