The young baroness Maria Vetsera did not like Wagner’s music, and in fact stated that she couldn’t stomach it. When on December 11th 1888 the Vienna Opera opened a cycle of Wagner’s Ring with a performance of Rheingold, her aversion gave her an excuse not to go to the theatre with her mother and sister but instead, while they were listening to the dwarf Alberich cursing love in his greed for gold, to have a secret meeting with Rudolph of Hapsburg, the heir apparent to the Empire whom she had met a few weeks before. She left the house and at this very corner of the Marokkanergasse, got into the carriage waiting for her on the Archduke’s orders, was driven to the imperial Burg, where a servant arranged for her to pass the guards and led her to the apartments of the heir to the throne. By nine o’clock she was back home, ready to welcome her mother and sister on their return from the theatre.
The tragedy of Mayerling, the mysterious death of Rudolph of Hapsburg and of Maria Vetsera in the hunting lodge on January 30th 1889, is a sad little tale which for a century has struck the popular imagination, arousing genuine compassion and adding fuel to the heroic-sentimental cult of suicide pacts, suggesting highly coloured novels and hypotheses of dark intrigues guided by Reasons of State. That tragedy is the poor, touching story of one of those misunderstandings which, on account of some banal but ruinous hitch, send life off the rails and hurl it into the melodrama of destruction.
At the time of her death Maria Vetsera was not yet eighteen. The previous summer, before she had met the Archduke in person, she had fallen in love with him from afar, with all the elation of a defenceless spirit in need of some absolute to bow down and sacrifice itself to without reserve; adoring in order to persuade itself that it is living poetically, giving meaning to its still unformed character, which would otherwise wear away in a kind of empty, indefinable melancholy. The Archduke was just over thirty, and was known for his liberal ideas, his arrogantly flaunted loose living, and an imperious impulsiveness which urged him to fits of generosity, tiresome bragging and suspicious irascibility of which the victim was usually his wife, the Archduchess Stephanie.
According to what her mother, Baroness Helene, wrote in her biographical essay Mayerling, Maria Vetsera used to go to see the Archduke at the races and at the Prater. She confided in her maid that Rudolph had noticed her, and a short while later that he had greeted her with particular effusion and sworn that he would never love another. In that brief bitter-sweet season between adolescence and young adulthood she was living through the grands manoeuvres of the heart and senses, making those first apprentice steps in feeling in which one gropes one’s way through the play and enchantment of the first encounters on the road to love.
Those glances exchanged in the avenues of the Prater, and a little later those furtive meetings and subterfuges, ought to have been, for Maria as well, the first, uncertain chords, the orchestral rehearsal of feelings preparing, amidst a still confused hum of instruments, for the grand, united melody of love. A few weeks later, as it turned out, everything had ended in that death at Mayerling, in the outrage which that pistol shot in the temple and rigor mortis had inflicted on that tender body, and in the details of the autopsy recorded in documents with a precision that serves only to deepen the so-called mystery of Mayerling. Looking at portraits of the little baroness, with her delicate but rather inexpressive face, which reveals only the impersonal, superficial grace of her eighteen years, we are led to think of those school tragedies of young lives broken by the first bad mark or mild reproach, crushed by a similar interweaving of absoluteness and chance, brought low by an obstacle that the rest of us, the survivors, simply take in our stride, and which for them was insurmountable.
In her account Helene Vetsera records the most painful details of this story and its ending – or at least her version of its ending, which is destined to remain one of many, contradicted by others even more questionable, such as the reveries of the Empress Zita. The pamphlet, printed in 1891 and confiscated by the Austrian police, is a dry, touching little book, in which the rather slipshod prose is eloquent of motherly love, certainly, but also of another feeling almost as strong: respectability. Baroness Vetsera is eager to free her daughter from the charge of having been actively responsible for that tragedy, and above all she wishes to confute the gossip which accused her of having been in the know about that illicit relationship and of having encouraged it.
The book is a deeply-felt and angry account of those detective-story details which punctuate the story of a forbidden passion, and which the least nuance of tone or style can change from a grand adventure or from a mischievous game into something humiliatingly shabby: the cigarette-case given by the lover and discovered by chance, the elaborate inventions needed to explain its presence, the letters delivered in secret, the little lies, the complicity of the complaisant Countess Larisch. The book grows more tense when it tells of the squalor of the death and its concealment, intended to avoid scandal: Maria’s body left for thirty-eight hours without a hand to compose it with proper decency, the body loaded into the carriage in such a way as to hide the fact that it was a corpse, the negotiations between the authorities and the family regarding the disposal of that embarrassing deceased person, the rough coffin, the hurried burial, the grave that for a number of months was unmarked and anonymous, until the remains were transferred elsewhere.
The concern was respectability, which presides over this baroque finale and this allegory of disintegration, is also a passion, and one having all the absoluteness and irrationality of a one-sided passion, in the sense that it does not embrace the whole of a person and of his life but partitions off and over-inflates one single part. The story of Rudolph and Maria, as it is revealed in this book, is that of an abstract, impetuous passion which cannot be identified with love, just as we cannot mistake a psychological or imaginative frenzy for a poetic inspiration.
This amour-passion is late Romantic, and Romanticism (writes Broch) is in one respect the substitution of an absolute, which is felt to be lost, by a partial surrogate, whatever it may be, which is supposed to take the place of all values. When this surrogate is sought in love, this becomes a truly-suffered but exaggerated rhetoric, an over-blown sentimental pathos, however genuine the suffering. It is a fantasy-yearning, in which one participant does not love the other, but his or her own yearning. The romantic allurement of love-death hints also at the sterility of this ardour which neither creates nor procreates, either in the flesh or in the spirit.
This passion too is capable of greatness, and so is the poetry which depicts it. Flaubert, in fact, showed once and for all that passion can be true and false at the same time: the unsatisfied cravings and evasions of Emma Bovary are the very opposite of love, but the intensity with which Emma lives out both her unpoetic destiny and the sham poetry with which she herself attempts to disguise it is genuine evidence of the lack of love.
The worldly, libertine eighteenth century had, at least in appearance, broken love down by chemical analysis of the passions and of the behaviour of lovers. It seemed, in the words of a famous phrase, to have put the brain in the place of the heart. But in fact, as in Les liaisons dangereuses, it was that dry mathematics which made it possible to sound the depths and the totality of love, its conflicts but also its tenderness, the heart’s perdition which appears as all the more overwhelming the more it is filtered through the meshes of proof. It is the esprit de géométrie that makes esprit de finesse possible. That secularizing, disillusioned culture demystified a great number of over-inflated raptures; the sentimental culture which came later was afraid of that rigour and frequently returned to preaching virtue and candour, though sometimes it deceived itself into finding these values in an innocent, spontaneous effusion of the heartbeats of desire, thus mistaking the state of mind for the truth, subjective psychology for moral inquiry and emotional excitement for the poetry of life.
If the heroes of the libertine novels are Machiavellian intelligences, and swear eternal love while lying and knowing that they are lying, the hero of the romanticizing school lies even to himself, dragging the object of his desire into ruin in the name of his own pleasure and caring nothing about his partner and her needs, convinced as he is of obeying a divine voice. The Archduke Rudolph, with his good looks and the slightly turbid expression of the prevaricator – he confuses his own sensuality with a liberating mission – makes Maria the heroine of his drama, with all the impudence of someone who elects himself to be director of other people’s lives.
Photographs of Mayerling show a neat, peaceful landscape, the sort of Austrian countryside perfect for family holidays, more suited to the fatherly image of Francis Joseph in shooting costume than to that tempestuous tragedy. The Emperor learnt the fatal news from Kath-erine Schratt, the lady in whose discreet, tranquil affection he found comfort from the continual agitation of the Empress Elizabeth. There is no saying, of course, that the hours the Emperor spent with Frau Schratt, who made him coffee, were less intense than the passions of the Archduke. It is difficult to know what goes on in someone else’s head or heart. Not even scientists today are more ingenuous than Prof. von Hoffmann, a luminary of the Vienna medical faculty, who explained away the Mayerling tragedy to his students as “the premature synostosis of the cranial sutures” brought to light by the autopsy on His Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduke Rudolph.