The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Habsburg Empire: The Pianist In The Dark by Michèle Halberstadt

 

The Pianist In The Dark, Michèle Halberstadt’s simple but elegant historical novella, captures the moment in time when the encounter of young music prodigy Maria Theresia (von) Paradis and animal-magnetism therapist Franz Anton Mesmer sent shockwaves through Viennese society and spun the course of both their lives in directions neither could have foreseen. Halberstadt gives a feather-light treatment of a controversial affair, her style as floaty as the music of the glass harmonica Mesmer plays on the day “the blind enchantress” is lured into his orbit. An innocent among corruption, Paradis is an almost otherworldly character, but in a story that treads the most predictable of paths her painful awakening nonetheless yields moments of poignancy.

 

1776. Inexplicably blinded shortly before the age of three and subjected to agonising and unsuccessful attempts to restore her sight ever since, on her seventeenth birthday Maria Theresia von Paradis extracts a promise from her father to release her from the doctors who compete to cure the Empress’s protegée. He agrees, comforted by the generous stipend awarded by the Empress to provide for his gifted but unmarriageable daughter’s needs. Yet when charismatic society phenomenon Mesmer hears Maria Theresia play and expresses confidence that his painless therapeutic techniques can help her, the temptation to be associated with so famous a name causes her father to engineer an introduction. Maria Theresia is smitten, and moves in with the Mesmers for the course of the therapy.

But as the treatment progresses, jealous rivalry in the medical community and the pecuniary interests of her parents begin to clash with Mesmer’s professional reputation. Trapped in the midst of scandal, Maria Theresia learns the price of seeing the world as others do – and plots escape.

 

The Pianist In The Dark is a story for tender souls. Gentle and slightly melancholy, its appeal lies is in the delicate sensibilities of the principal character as the plot traces the effects of strong emotion on a sensitive young artist. Madame Mesmer’s quiet reflection, “The reality of love matures young hearts. It can also destroy frail souls” sums up the mood and subject of the book.

 

Style is substance here: the prose flows with a musicality that creates a bruised, romantic atmosphere – the literary equivalent of pretty vignettes of fragrant, crushed flowers. It felt like reading a graceful prose poem. At the same time, the language that describes the relationship between Paradis and Mesmer is often indistinguishable from that of a commercial romance: refining a love story to its emotional essence does away with treasured literary demarcations most effectively. What one reader sighs contentedly over as luminous poetry, another deems clichéd and overwrought. I am afraid that one of my eyebrows rose questioningly on more than one occasion.

 

As a fictional introduction to two gossiped-about historical figures, The Pianist In The Dark manages, I think, the feat of making the ambiguous and ambitious character of Mesmer, accused of being a charlatan by enemies and satirists, unexpectedly sympathetic, while Maria Theresia’s relationship with her neurotic parents implies disturbing explanations for the mysterious behaviour of her vision. Even so, any depth to be found here owes rather more to the subject-matter itself than to the author’s exploration of it. At times, character sketches read like straight biographical accounts. I did find Maria Theresia’s painful journey between worlds genuinely affecting, however, and can imagine re-reading the novella for her thoughts.

 

As the story notes, Paradis studied piano and composition with, among others, Antonio Salieri (so (in)famously maligned in the play Amadeus); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (who belonged to the same Masonic lodge as Mesmer) wrote pieces for her; considered a virtuosa, she sang, played the piano, taught music, and composed works from sonatas to operas; and on her European concert tour she performed at Versailles for Queen Marie-Antoinette (the daughter of her benefactress, Empress Maria Theresia, for whom she had been named). It is quite a let-down, then, that music in The Pianist In The Dark is most conspicuous by its absence. Halberstadt’s Paradis worries over her ability to handle the piano keys, hopes to communicate with listeners through music, and goes on tour. But she is not otherwise a character who thinks or talks in terms of musical expression or who possesses the ability to make music come alive for the reader (with one beautiful exception, in the excerpt below). I received no sense at all of what her music sounds like or the characteristics that defined her playing and singing. By comparison, in Liszt’s Kiss Susanne Dunlap captured her heroine’s playing with such exquisite expressiveness that I felt and heard the music as I was reading. Never so here.

 

A romance of feelings above all else, The Pianist In The Dark yields a skimpy sense of place, one that is by and large dependent on the names of famous historical personages. Even then, Mesmer’s wife, Anna Maria von Posch, is promptly pushed away from the centre of the narrative, and several of the names that are paraded never make a personal appearance. As in so many fictional takes on historical women, exclusive focus is brought on Paradis's romantic/emotional life. Thus, in this novella it is only Mesmer who is seen interacting with his colleagues, mentors, and other professional acquaintances, not Paradis. It is a little sad to see this once famous musician, so recently rescued from historical oblivion, reduced to not much more than a tragic romantic heroine, pretty literature notwithstanding.

 

But Michèle Halberstadt's novella is not the first time Maria Theresia Paradis's life has been the subject of romantic adaptations. Most notably, perhaps, she figures in the 1994 motion picture Mesmer, where her role is played by Amanda Ooms and the title role by Alan Rickman (Sense And Sensibility fans, rejoice). In the course of writing this post I also came across a play, The Comfort Of Darkness. As for the real Maria Theresia, her concert tours, compositions, work as a pedagogue at the music school she founded, and involvement in the education of the blind made her a famous and inspiring figure throughout her life. She is buried in the same cemetery as Mozart, but, like his, the exact site of her grave is today unknown.

 

Excerpt

(Pegasus Books hardcover, 2011, p. 27-8. Translated from the 2008 French original, L'Incroyable Histoire De Mademoiselle Paradis; I have not found the name of the translator.)

 

“Maria Theresia was unaware of Franz Anton Mesmer’s medical ambitions. All she knew about him was his reputation as a patron of the arts. She had heard him play with orchestras and remembered him as being a mediocre pianist.

But that evening, sitting between her parents on the bandstand near the gazebo at the left side of the garden, she could only admire the quality of his improvisations on the glass-harmonica.

Was the instrument responsible for the trembling sonority, or was it his way of playing it? A sense of peace emanated from that assembly of air, glass, and water.

Maria Theresia lifted her head, offering her senses a well-deserved pause. She lost the panicky stiffness she felt when surrounded by strangers whose gazes seemed to pierce through her. She no longer felt weighted down by the baubles that encumbered her neck and earlobes. She felt dizzy, as if a wind had risen and blown right through her. Her hands were quivering as they did sometimes at church when prayers overlapped, as if they were taking a shortcut to heaven.

The concert was over, but she was shaking too much to applaud.

She asked her parents to bring her some cold water.

Her temples were moist. She was shivering.

‘I was hoping you might take comfort in the music.’

She sensed a figure leaning over.”

 

 

This is my seventh entry in Historical Tapestry's Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Austria: Airs Above The Ground by Mary Stewart

The central question for an armchair traveller is whether a novel's setting is inextricable from the story. As a romantic armchair traveller I'm partial to books where love is the bond that ties all the elements together.

Mary Stewart’s gothics or romantic suspense novels are classics of the romance genre. Among their many charms is a strong sense of place. As Lenemaja Friedman writes in the last chapter of Mary Stewart (Twayne's English Author series, Northeastern University, 1990), "[...] she is comfortable in the out-of-doors, and so are her characters. She knows about the trees and the flowers, the birds and the rocks; she also has a painter's eye and a poet's ear and as a result creates passages of excellent description". Airs Above The Ground (originally published in 1965) is a solid example of these strengths.

 

Not only does Vanessa March's husband cancel their long-planned holiday to disappear on a sudden business trip to Sweden: a newsreel shot of a fire reveals him to actually be in Austria - and holding a young woman. Determined to discover what is going on Vanessa boards a plane to Vienna and hunts down the travelling circus at which Lewis was last spotted.

 

The title of Airs Above The Ground comes from dressage and the artful maneuvers famously performed by The Spanish Riding School's Lipizzans. These provide the inspiration for a story that moves from Vienna to the rural province of Styria, and from a music-filled circus tent to the night-dark roofs of a crenellated castle. We are introduced to an intrepid heroine whose wifely concern and professional background as a veterinarian drive her headlong into a plot involving spies, international crime, and animals variously dignified and foul-mouthed.

Airs Above The Ground used to be one of the two Stewarts that I was lukewarm about (The Ivy Tree is the other). It does not have the gothic fairytale enchantment of Nine Coaches Waiting, the wit or scenic drama of This Rough Magic, or the emotional depth of My Brother Michael. What it does have is a teenage sidekick, a circus, and horses. The pacing in the book's first two thirds feels as leisurely as the atmosphere of the sleepy, sunny villages in which much of the story takes place, and the love interest, in this case the heroine’s husband, is absent for large chunks of the story.

Each rereading of the book has improved its previous standing in my estimation. Perhaps my expectations of a higher romance quotient got in the way early on; perhaps my tastes have a acquired bit more sophistication. While the romantic protagonists in Airs Above The Ground are already married and the bubbly anticipation from experiencing two characters fall in love is therefore missing, the sexual tension and banter between the pair is allowed freer play than in any other of the author's contemporary stories, including Touch not The Cat (the only one which includes a love scene). A slight datedness to the male/female interactions does not detract from the intelligence or likeability of the protagonists; indeed, the whole cast of characters is vintage Mary Stewart, colourful and well-rounded. The details that build the mystery are complex, and once the action switches into high gear the suspense at one point culminates in one of Stewart’s most pulse-pounding chase scenes.

Airs Above the Ground may not be Mary Stewart's most dazzling offering, but its touching epilogue completes a story as rich and satisfying as a generous slice of Sachertorte. With whipped cream on the side.

 

Excerpt (Hodder and Stoughton paperback edition, 1967, p.50)

“Beyond Wiener Neustadt we found ourselves in a rolling landscape of forested slopes, green pastures, and romantic crags girdled by silver streams and crowned with castles.

It was a scene from the idylls rather than from romance, pastoral rather than gothic. The valley bottoms were rich with crops, and the hayfields stretched golden right up to the spurs of the hills. Even when the road – magnificently engineered – began its twisting climb to the Semmering Pass, there was still nothing in the grand manner about the scenery; the great slopes of pine forest were only a shelter and a frame for the peaceful human picture below.

We ate at Semmering – a resort which, at four thousand feet, is sunny all winter and which now, in the height of summer, had air so dizzyingly clear as to make Timothy [the teenage sidekick] extra ravenous even by his standards, and to restore to me something of the appetite which had been taken away by the nervous tension that I hadn’t yet admitted, but which increased steadily as we neared the end of the journey.”