I have spoken of my mother’s beautiful singing. This singing played a great and influential part in my childhood and later life. My mother always regarded it as a tragical missing of her vocation that she had not become an opera singer. In her early youth a famous Italian maestro had tested her voice and given her the assurance that no such soprano had been heard since Grisi, Pasta, and Malibran, and to this was to be added her dazzling presence; in short, the loftiest triumphs, the richest harvests of gold, would have lain open to the beautiful girl if she had adopted the theatrical career. Such was the opinion of the maestro, who also undertook to give her singing lessons after the old Italian method, and had, among other things, brought it to pass that she gave Norma’s entrance recitative with full-toned and tragic power, again putting to shame all the Grisis, Pastas, and Malibrans. But neither my grandparents nor “Aunt Claudius,” who had taken charge of my mother and brought her up, would hear a word of the theater, which in those days was still regarded as a sink of iniquity; and mamma’s Norma recitative never rang out on the boards, but very often thereafter in my nursery (where our piano stood), and imprinted itself on my soul as the ne plus ultra of womanly heroism and of operatic art. Druid priestess and mistletoe bough, passion, sublimity,—thus stood in my imagination the gleaming picture of Norma, enveloped in sweetest magic of melody, in unearthly potency of voice.
To her old age my mother felt it as an affront, as a deprivation of all the treasures that nature by her wonderous gifts had destined for her, that she had not been allowed to take a course of training for the theater. Indeed, if I should prove to have inherited this voice, she might perhaps then be able to experience in her daughter the same triumphs that she had missed; but of course the theatrical career would be still more out of place for a Countess Kinsky than it would have been for Fräulein von Körner, and it would not have done even to tell of such an idea to Fritzerl. Nor did any wish for it awake in me myself. I saw my future plainly before me, it was marked out for me in our daily games of puff: to be grown up and introduced into the world, to have hearts and offers of marriage flying to me, to meet the one, the only one, to whom my heart too would fly, because he was the most aristocratic, the most beautiful, the wisest, richest, and noblest of all. What he would offer to me, and I richly pay back to him, would be perfect and lifelong happiness.
It was soon manifest, too, that I had not a phenomenal voice; and only in such a case could my mother have contemplated the project of an artistic career for me, so there was no more talk of that possibility.
Whether my mother really possessed such a splendid voice as that maestro had persuaded her, and talent with it, of course I could not judge, but I took it on trust as a part of my creed; her singing pleased me very much, but what does a child understand? When I now go back to that time in thought, doubts come up in my mind, for her repertory was very dilettantish. Besides that Norma recitative and the immediately following adagio, Casta diva, she sang only the very easiest songs, making such a selection as—in my present judgment—does not itself give reason for inferring an artistic taste. To be sure, at that time there were no songs by Wolff and Brahms, not to say Richard Strauss; but even in those days pieces like Du hast Diamanten und Perlen, “Spanish Serenade,” Blau Äugelein, Gute Nacht du mein herziges Kind, “Oh, tell me, will she come to pray upon my grave,” and the like, belonged in the category of street songs and sentimental trash. She was not a pianist, so she could not accompany herself. Three times a week she sang for an hour accompanied by my piano teacher. If he brought a new song she had him play the voice part with the accompaniment, and the learning was a prolonged and toilsome task for her. From all this I now conclude that she was by no means a musical genius; and it takes that, aside from the strength, volume, and tunefulness of the voice, to be a Pasta, Grisi, Malibran, or a Henriette Sontag. My mother told many stories of the fortunes and victories of these celebrated stars; then with the story there sounded the undertone that she had been deprived of enjoying the like successes, and the feeling fastened itself upon me that a great singer was a marvelous sort of being at whose feet all contemporaries knelt in adoration.
My dear mother’s was altogether a rather enthusiastic, high-keyed temperament. Often she gave expression to her feelings in poems; but she had no ambition or vanity connected with this branch of her talents. She did not think herself a gifted poet; but she never lost the conviction that she could have been in music a star of the first magnitude.
Soon we had still more leisure to carry on our games of puff, Elvira and I. Our two mothers took a trip to the baths in the summer of the year 1855, and we two stayed at home under the charge of a governess. Their destination was Wiesbaden. The two ladies liked it so well there that in the early summer of the next year they went there again, and this time,—oh indescribable ecstasy—they took us with them. The first considerable journey in my life! Up to that time I had only been taken a few times to Vienna for two or three days, and that had been to me each time a festal occasion; but now a real journey to foreign parts, a prospective stay of weeks or perhaps months in a famous resort—it was too heavenly!
Besides, utility was to be combined with pleasure there. For nothing less was intended than to carry off one or two millions from the gaming-table. Aunt Lotti regarded herself as a clairvoyant. She was always having to do with presentiments, dreams, magnetic sleep, and such things. During the epidemic of table-tipping she had also been an extraordinary medium. Under her fingers the tables danced and leaped, and then even cupboards that weighed hundreds of pounds, etc. I often saw it myself; and when I helped form the chain there was such a coruscating “fluid” coming into my finger-tips too, that everything that I touched—the tables, the piano teacher’s tall hat, and the piano itself—began to run around. I remember it clearly, and could therefore come out as a palmary witness for table-tipping if I were not distrustful of the testimony of a child’s perception. It may have been imagination. But Aunt Lotti would not let any doubts be raised as to the whole sphere of the occult in general. Nothing could offend her more than not to acknowledge her gift of second sight.
In other respects she was a very sensible woman, and, as the widow of a scholar who had made her a participant in his intellectual concerns, she was many-sided in her culture and free-thinking in her tendencies; so her vein of occultism could not be taken as childish superstition. There was something else too. She often suffered from convulsions, and readily fell into hypnotic sleep, which in those days was not yet called by that name but by that of magnetic sleep, and the visions of which were rated as clairvoyance. The result was that she regarded these phenomena, which lay beyond the range of her normal waking life, as an especially mysterious power of her own, a power of vision reaching into the future.
During her stay at Wiesbaden the preceding year she had learned that when she went into the roulette room a number came into her mind, and then this number won. She did not play, she only noticed this in silence. My mother preferred to look on at the playing in the trente-et-quarante room, and she thought she perceived in herself too the gift of foreseeing when black won. She too did not play; but when they were back from the journey neither of the two sisters could get rid of the idea that it would really be an easy thing for them to get a colossal fortune out of the German banks.
But such a thing was not to be lightly undertaken; it was essential to test the phenomenon. So Aunt Lotti got a little bag with thirty-six numbers and a zero, my mother six packs of cards, and now a systematic test was carried out. Aunt Lotti threw herself into a sort of trance by fixed staring and concentrated thinking, till a number flashed through her brain; then Elvira put her hand in the bag and drew out a number. To be sure, it was not invariably the foreseen one, but very often an adjoining or similar one. For instance, the seer’s number was 5 and the drawn one was 6 (adjoining) or 25 (similar); so the method was determined to be that the transversals of the number thought of should be bet on. Only those who know roulette will understand me; I consider it superfluous to make myself clearer to others, as I have not the least intention of starting a propaganda for Aunt Lotti’s system of play. Regular accounts were kept of the losses and winnings, and the result was uniformly a large amount of net winnings. Was there self-deception about it? I do not know; but the imaginary ledger always showed immense accumulations of profit. For the start was made with small stakes, and as the capital grew the stake was increased till it reached the maximum, and in this way there was no limit to the gains. Poor gambling-houses! Would we content ourselves with relieving them of one or two millions, or would we ruin them entirely? That was left for further consideration. The latter would certainly be a moral deed, for gaming is an evil passion by which so many are seduced and ruined or at least injured, for it is a vice which—Aunt Lotti despised gaming; it was hateful to her; but when one was furnished with such a miraculous gift would it not have been a downright sin not to lift the treasures to which one needed only to put out a hand?