Madame Foerster spoke most feelingly of Cosima Wagner and deplored the rupture of their intimate relations. "A marvellous woman! a fascinating woman!" she said several times. What with her correspondence in every land, the publication of the bulky biography and the constant editing of unpublished essays, letters and memorabilia, this rare sister of a great man is, so it seems to me, overtaxing her energies. The Nietzsche bibliography has assumed formidable proportions, yet she is conversant with all of it. A second Henrietta Renan, I thought, as I took a regretful leave of this very remarkable woman, not daring to ask her when Nietzsche's unpublished autobiography, Ecce Homo, would be given to the world. (This was written in 1904; Ecce Homo has appeared in the meantime.)
Later, down in the low-ceilinged café of the Hotel zum Elephant, I overheard a group of citizens, officers, merchants—all cronies—discussing Weimar. Nietzsche's name was mentioned, and one knight of this round table—a gigantic officer with a button head—contemptuously exclaimed:—"Nietzsche Rauch!" (smoke). Yes, but what a world-compelling vapour is his that now winds in fantastic spirals over the romantic hills and valleys of the new Weimar and thence about the entire civilised globe! Friedrich Nietzsche, because of his fiery poetic spirit and ecstatic pantheism, might be called the Percy Bysshe Shelley of philosophers.
II
BUDAPEST
My first evening in Budapest was a cascade of surprises. The ride down from Vienna is not cheery until the cathedral and palace of the primate is reached, at Gran, a superb edifice, challenging the valley of the Danube. Interminable prairies, recalling the traits of our Western country, swam around the busy little train until this residence of the spiritual lord of Hungary was passed. After that the scenery as far as Orsova, Belgrade, and the Iron Gates is legendary in its beauty.
To hear the real Hungarian gipsy on his own heath has been long my ambition. In New York he is often a domesticated fowl, with aliens in his company. But in Budapest! My hopes were high. The combination of that peppery food, paprika gulyas, was also an item not to be overlooked. I soon found an establishment where the music is the best in Hungary, the cooking of the hottest. After the usual distracting tuning the band splashed into a fierce prelude.
Fancy coming thousands of miles to hear the original of all the cakewalks and eat a preparation that might have been turned out from a Mexican restaurant! It was too much. It took exactly four Czardas and the Rakoczy march to convince me that I was not dreaming of Manhattan Beach.
But this particular band was excellent. Finding that some of the listeners only wished for gipsy music, the leader played the most frantically bacchanalian in his repertory. Not more than eight men made up the ensemble! And such an ensemble. It seemed to be the ideal definition of anarchy—unity in variety. Not even a Richard Strauss score gives the idea of vertical and horizontal music—heard at every point of the compass, issuing from the bowels of the earth, pouring down upon one's head like a Tyrolean thunderstorm. Every voice was independent, and syncopated as were the rhythms. There was no raggedness in attack or cessation.
Like a streak of jagged, blistering lightning, a tone would dart from the double bass to the very scroll of the fiddles. In mad pursuit, over a country black as Servian politics went the cymbalom, closely followed by two clarinets—in B and E flat. The treble pipe was played by a jeweller in disguise—he must have been a jeweller, so fond was he of ornamentation and cataracts of pearly tones. He made a trelliswork behind which he attacked his foes, the string players. In the midst of all this melodic chaos the leader, cradling his fiddle like something alive, swayed as sways a tall tree in the gale. Then he left the podium and hat in hand collected white pieces and kronen. It was disenchanting.
The tone of the band was more resilient, more brilliant than the bands we hear in America. And there were more heart, fire, swing and dash in their playing. The sapping melancholy of the Lassan and the diabolic vigour of the Friska are things that I shall never forget. These gipsies have an instinctive sense of tempo. Their allegretto is a genuine allegretto. They play rag-time music with true rhythmic appreciation for the reason that its metrical structure is grateful to them.
In Paris the cakewalk is a thing of misunderstood, misapplied accents. The Budapest version of the Rakoczy march is a revelation. No wonder Berlioz borrowed it. The tempo is a wild quickstep; there is no majestic breadth, so suggestive of military pomp or the grandeur of a warlike race. Instead, the music defiled by in crazy squads, men breathlessly clinging to the saddles of their maddened steeds; above them hung the haze of battle, and the hoarse shouting of the warriors was heard. Five minutes more of this excitement and heart disease might have supervened. Five minutes later I saw the band grinning over their tips, drinking and looking absolutely incapable of ever playing such stirring and hyperbolical music.