A Night at the Opera

Vienna, the late 1980s.

In the box of memories I brought from Buenos Aires, there is a photo of my parents in their Sunday best taken in 1947 in front of the Colón Opera House. That is the year they got engaged. It looks like a cold afternoon in late June, at the beginning of the winter season. No one else is on the street and they are bundled in coats and gloves. Mom has a large crocodile handbag and an amazing, feathered hat topping her head, tilted ever so slightly toward Dad. It is the hat that I trashed that day in 1968 as I was cleaning up their closet.

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Early the day after I took the intimate tour of Vienna I told you about in my previous blog, a formal car and driver picked me up from the hotel. They drove me to the industrial suburbs to visit my Austrian client. As the limo pulled up to the circular driveway in front of the laboratories, I noticed that they had raised three flags side by side. One was Austrian and, to recognize the visiting directors from Frankfurt, another one was German. The third flag was the Stars and Stripes, in my honor.

The business meetings went well. The company was one of the first European producers of modern biopharmaceutical drugs such as interferons, and their scientists and executives were proud of their accomplishments. They eagerly walked me through labs filled with researchers in white, attending to blinking computers and purring instruments. The laboratories were from a new Vienna: from a Vienna scrubbed clean of all traces of past grime or glory. The labs could easily have been in Silicon Valley.

The CEO of the company was a heavy-set man with a short beard and jolly disposition. He seemed to make a point of talking about things that interested me. In between genetics and intellectual property, he also wanted to know about my family’s story, the Anschluss events, and Leopoldstadt in the 1920s. He listened earnestly as I spoke. He hosted a long lunch for all of us in an executive dining room decorated in light wood and oriental carpets. We had aperitifs, a four-course meal with two different Austrian wines, as well as cognac and cigars. He and the German directors asked me again and again for my opinion on this, or my opinion on that, and how did I think that the law would develop, and what strategy did I recommend for their company? The ghosts of my small family long gone from Leopoldstadt were in that room, all of us enjoying the payback.  

At the end of the lunch, the CEO came over, thanked me for coming to Vienna and told me that he had managed to obtain for me a much-prized seat for that evening’s gala opening of the Vienna Staatsoper season to see a performance of Puccini’s Turandot.  None other than Eva Marton would be singing the title role of Princess Turandot. Plácido Domingo would be Prince Calàf, who at the end of the opera guesses Turandot’s three questions and gains her favors.

“Marton is the best Turandot in the world!” exclaimed the CEO happily. “The ticket will be waiting at the hotel,” he added. “It was very hard to get, the opera house will be full, and how I wish I could come along but there was only one seat left, so enjoy it.”

Sure enough, the ticket was at the concierge’s desk. “Ah . . . Herr Dokter Goldstein,” said the obsequious middle-aged man, “I have something for you.” He handed me the ticket and I grabbed it, but he didn't let go. I pulled and he resisted, and we went at it for a few seconds like a Laurel and Hardy routine.

I stopped all motions and, while still holding the ticket, looked at the man and asked him, “What seems to be the problem?”

“No problem, Herr Dokter,” he said, smiling and holding on. “The ticket is 300 schillings.”

“Wow! I’m very lucky, no? It's an expensive orchestra seat.” I pulled at the ticket one more time, but it didn't come loose.

“Herr Dokter,” he said. “The total cost will be 330 schillings, including our service fee. Will you pay by check?”

Pay by check. . . ? Ohhh . . . When the CEO said that he had managed to obtain a seat to the opera, he didn't mean that his company had bought it for me as a gift. The seat was available to me, but it was for me to buy. I suddenly remembered Professor Berkley’s comment: the Viennese have a propensity to say one thing and do the opposite. Another quick memory flashed past, of Uncle Jack saying that the Austrians were damn cheap.

I thought of my love of opera, of going with Mom to the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires to see The Merry Widow when I was seven. I thought of being at a gala opening in Vienna, and of Marton and Domingo. I also thought of this coming out of my pocket, not something that I could properly charge to my law firm. In the end, I went for my personal credit card, took a deep breath and handed it to the radiant concierge, who then let go of the ticket.

I did not regret it one minute. The night was as magical and as close to Imperial Vienna as I will ever get to experience. Upon advice of the concierge, I arrived an hour ahead of the performance and stood inside the main hall watching the crowd. The foyer was a two-story affair in pink and white marble with balconies surrounding and looking down at the ground floor, connected to it by a magnificent staircase. Beautiful women in formal gowns and diamond tiaras were stepping out of shiny black limousines with gentlemen in tuxedoes helping them along.

Men in medal-bedecked red uniforms with full Franz Josephs—the Old Emperor’s famous walrus mustaches—were walking up and down the marble staircase in pairs. One or two of them even had sheathed swords dangling from their side. Every now and then they would encounter a lady and bow deeply while air-kissing her hand. I couldn’t hear what the kissers were saying, but I am pretty sure it was a variation of Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau, or its shorthand . . . gnä Frau. The German phrase means, I kiss your hand, graceful lady. It is an over-the-top mushy compliment given by a man upon greeting a woman. I hadn’t heard or even thought about gnä Frau in years, ever since Mom, upon her death, took her Viennese slang from my life. I heard her whisper it again that evening at the Opera, her ghost wandering along with me. I remember learning it when, as a boy of six,  Mom took me to see Sissi, the 1955 movie with Romy Schneider, about the life of Elizabeth I, Empress of Austro-Hungary. It was Mom’s favorite movie of all time, as it showed the splendor of her beloved Vienna Gloriosa.

Everyone in that marble hall was nodding and smiling at everyone else. Liveried waiters were handing out champagne flutes from silver trays. Only Romy Schneider was missing. The scene was repeated after the first act, in what I can only describe as the longest opera intermission I have ever been to. It may well have gone on for an hour or more before the lights dimmed for the second act. At the end, Domingo and Marton received a standing ovation. But for me the talent was not as much with them as with my fellow audience members.

I had one more thing to do before leaving. I got up early the next day, walked over to the Sacher Café, bought a large Sacher Torte packed in a wooden box ready for export, and took it with me back to the US. I wanted to surprise Uncle Jack and to celebrate with him his seventy fourth birthday. As I arrived at his house bearing a freshly made Torte from Vienna, we both sat and teared up over losses from long ago. Then, setting aside his hatred of the city to which he had never returned, he sliced off a piece of cake, put a dollop of sweetened Schlag on it, and took a bite. In a brief moment of pure pleasure, he closed his eyes and smiled. I savored it as well, imagining myself the British consul in Vienna ca. late 1938 who, while indulging his sweet tooth, had saved my late grandmother's life.

Many years later, my daughter Sasha, who has inherited her great-grandmother’s love of baking, studied up and made me a perfect Sacher Torte as a birthday gift. Before tasting it, I told her about all those characters from mid-Century Vienna who were sitting with us at the table, eating along.

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Being at the Vienna State Opera that magical night took me back to the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires in the fifties. The Colón is one of the grand opera houses of the world, built in the mid-19th century in Italianate style. It evokes La Scala in Milano or the Old Met in New York: scarlet seats and golden décor. It has six or seven horseshoe tiers with a large standing room at the top; el gallinero, the “chicken coop,” as it was known. The Italians of BA would go to the Colón with their librettos and follow the singing while sitting on the floor of the chicken coop, without even looking down at the stage. Mom loved the Colón and introduced me to my lifelong love of opera.

Here are Mom and Dad, in front of the Colón, she with that amazing hat:

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I have reached the end of my tales of looking for my parents. Of talking to people who knew them, or of traveling to corners of the earth where they had lived or with which they had connections: Trieste, Rome, Milano, Istanbul, Izmir, Samos, Vienna, and a few returns to Buenos Aires.

  Yet I also undertook a very different set of journeys. These were not far into the world but deep into my psyche. They were attempts to understand what my parents’ premature deaths had left in me. To overcome my denial and stoicism. To heal.

I did not have to travel far: my psychoanalyst, Gene Gordon, had his office on Connecticut Avenue, in Washington DC. He was twenty minutes from my home. Yet the time travels I made on his couch were more profound than most of my geographic ones.  Those stories will come next.