The Hermesvilla, with its Art nouveau ambiguities, set in a park full of deer and boar on the edge of Vienna, was much beloved of the Empress Elizabeth, the mythical, unhappy, and practically unbearable wife of Francis Joseph; that bashful, retiring Sissy dear to the popular imagination. In her bedroom Hans Makart, the official decorator and illustrator in the Vienna of the time (the villa was built in 1882–6), had been commissioned to paint scenes based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in fact sketched out designs which were executed by his successors.
The colours are soft and dark, the Empress’s bed is a genuine funeral couch watched over by an allegory of melancholy, while the scenes from Shakespeare are of a glacial yet ingratiating lasciviousness, present again in the mythological figures adorning the gymnasium; here Elizabeth subjected her androgynous body to physical exercises which she practised religiously, as if they had been spiritual exercises. The villa is a fit dwelling for the Empress’s frigid, enervated tenderness, which made her insensitive to sexuality in the raw and eager for disembodied raptures, to the point of cultivating the clean, slender lines of her body with ascetic narcissism, of taking pleasure in being wanted by men without feeling the need to reciprocate, and of becoming chastely infatuated with feminine beauty. She went so far as to ask the Hapsburg ambassadors to procure her portraits of the most beautiful women in the countries where they were posted. There is in Sissy a hermaphrodite purity, which abhors the physical side of sex and is capable of loving only in sublimation and absence.
As often happens, Sissy’s frustration sought to be transfigured in poetry, to experience her parching sterility as a sign of being one of the chosen. The Empress wrote lyric poems, and she was not entirely wrong when she thought of entrusting to them – jealously concealed as they were – the essence and the predictable secret of her soul. In the old Hapsburg Empire it was a tricky business even for a high-school student to write verses, so that Hofmannsthal, for example, was forced to publish his brilliant youthful poetry under a pseudonym. Even a sovereign as impatient of protocol as Elizabeth had to keep her poems to herself and a few trusted intimates, and in fact she hid them in a box and left careful instructions to her heirs.
Elizabeth’s poems, as stated in their overall title, comprise a poetic diary; that is, they record not daily events but their most recondite meanings, that flash which ought to illuminate them but which the dullness of every day snuffs out, or at least conceals. Sissy’s poems are poems of absence, of distress, of what life ought to be and isn’t; they are poems opposed to life as she actually lived it. Her story is well known: the Bavarian girl-princess, cousin of Ludwig of Bavaria, who married Francis Joseph; the marriage that at first was happy but then more and more of a grind as the atmosphere in the family and at court grew ever more oppressive; her growing intolerance of her own role as Empress, her inner detachment from her husband and children, her melancholy and restlessness, her increasingly frequent travels and absences; her alienation from everything, even from herself, and her absurd death in Geneva at the hands of the Italian anarchist Luccheni.
Her poems show her longing for a life of her own, her rebellion against that of the court, which reaches the point of actually criticizing the Hapsburg system and professing faith in republicanism. But they speak most of all of lack of fulfilment, of a nostalgia which cannot and does not wish to be defined, which surrenders to this remoteness, this absence of something: what this something is she cannot describe, but its absence is the real and constant stuff of her life, which plunges into this tremulous void and takes root there. The main background of these lyrics is the sea, its ineffable vastness, the murmur of its waves, as ceaseless and untranslatable as that of the soul. Sissy is the sea-gull, the sea-bird without rest or destination, just as Ludwig of Bavaria, the cousin who was so like her, is the eagle, kingly but foreign to the earth, unsuited to it. In the Hermesvilla there is also a portrait of Ludwig by Gräfle. The sovereign who loved beauty, the swan and the eagle, is plump and curly-haired, with a heavy, Levantine vulgarity about him.
In her elation the Empress thought that her verses, however banal and often lame, were dictated to her from “beyond”, through the offices of a medium, by Heine. Elizabeth does in fact write in the manner of Heine, using his typical melody and lyric repertoire which found so many imitators during the nineteenth century as to constitute a stereotyped poetic language of its own.
The hackneyed music does not obliterate the agonized individuality of the voice which sings it, just as the uniformity of life does not lessen the intensity with which one person lives it. It is to the impersonal melody of that idiom, which appears to her as a sort of song without words, an empty structure to be filled up at will, that Elizabeth entrusts her genuine, deeply-felt conflicts and passions. Even these passions, such as her maniacal cult of Achilles, were historically dated, part of the climate of the times; but Elizabeth, like Ludwig, experienced them directly as part of her sad, sterile existence, in the throes of a melancholy that bordered on mental disturbance. Eccentric to the point of cruel indifference, which Francis Joseph managed to tolerate with true affection and great style, Elizabeth could also be magnanimous, as on the occasion when she went to meet the Emperor at Vienna station on his return from the smarting defeats he had suffered at the hands of the Prussians, and kissed his hand in front of everyone.
In spite of her four children, she was not made for other kisses. Her restless personality lacked conviction, was ignorant of values and of relaxed sexuality, incapable of dwelling in life itself, in the moment or in the present. For this reason it was to her poems that Elizabeth confided her true nature, that of a wild, migratory bird. Those verses were sometimes melodious, at other times clumsy, and could have been written by anyone; they form a sort of public rhyming dictionary which many could have used, and did, and in which personal sufferings sank as in the sea. Lyrics of rather the same kind had been penned by another noble and unsuitable sovereign, Maximilian of Mexico, born for the sea rather than for the throne, though he, unlike her, was able to face up to his destiny with a sober sense of duty. The poetry in Sissy does not reside in the extremely mediocre writings themselves, but in the tension between her lonely sorrow and the completely superficial quality of its expression. The poems the Empress wrote are the “poetic diary” of anyone or no one, but this fate, which the Empress shares with many writers, some of whom have had success, makes her a small but real personality in the world of literature, in her constantly repeated dialogue between the voice of the heart and “words, words, words”.