12 ❧ chapter one
Moravia, Mimi Pecci-Blunt, Francis Poulenc, Leon Barzin, John McCullough,
Eugene Ormandy, Yella Pessl, Greta Kraus, François Mauriac, Jay Laughlin,
Stephen Spender, Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Ely, Lili Kraus, Szymon Goldberg,
John Ritter, the brothers Rück, and many others.
I lived in something called the Schloss Arenberg, a vast eighteenth-century
affair that looked over an overgrown English garden to an eminence known
as the Bürglstein, once the site of the Roman camp, up which wound a damp
overgrown garden path decorated with decaying sculpture and a little obelisk
to the memory of the Empress Maria Theresa that led at the summit to a crum-
bling little rococo garden house. It was always raining, and on my way back and
forth from the Mozarteum I seemed always to be sloshing through puddles
with heavy volumes of music stuffed under my tattered raincoat.
In the course of the summer I played a few times, fi rst the Goldberg
Variations, then a two-harpsichord program with Yella Pessl, and fi nally a
performance of the Bach D-minor Concerto with strings from the Vienna
Philharmonic in a delightful little oval room in Schloss Aigen, where the
orchestra and harpsichord occupied the ground fl oor and the audience a
balcony that ran all the way around above. Most of the concert was conducted
by an Englishman with more money than talent, but fortunately my concerto
was entrusted to a young assistant in the conducting class at the Mozarteum,
Herbert von Karajan. My next performance with him took place in Berlin in
1967, thirty-four years later!
In September I spent several days in Vienna, but my reiterated postwar visits
to Vienna have obliterated most of my memories of this fi rst visit. But I think I
caught some of the feel of what Vienna was like before an important segment
of its population was exterminated or driven into exile. I had soon learned that
there were as many Nazis in Austria as in Germany and that in the apparent
hopelessness of the period between the two wars, all too many people were
ready to seize upon anything that purported to offer a chance of relief. My
landlady in Salzburg, as good and kind a woman as could be imagined, once
told me that she thought Hitler had a spotless character! But thanks to the
Anschluss and to the fact that Austrians do not talk as aggressively about moral
standards as do the Germans, Austria has succeeded in passing before the eyes
of the world as Germany’s victim.
On the way back to my embarkation in Bremen, I played harpsichord and
clavichord in an ecstatically received concert in Jena which, like some subse-
quent concerts, gave an idea of the dangerously facile success that much too
soon I could have achieved in the Germanic world. As Isabel Wilder once
said of her brother Thornton, I too am “catnip to the Germans.” Fortunately,
the spectacle of Hitler’s takeover and of the behavior of many Germans that
followed closely thereupon had removed most of my early illusions about
Germanic moral stability and sincerity. A characteristic and dangerous
KKirkpatrick.indd 12irkpatrick.indd 12 2/8/2017 9:56:19 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 56 : 19 AM
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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