they probably wouldn’t have gone very far anywhere, I thought. But when I reflect that they’ve got nowhere in Vienna, nowhere at all, I thought, I also realize that they’re unaware of this, for they don’t act as though they were aware of having got nowhere: on the contrary they behave as though they’d gone far in Vienna, as though every one of them had become something worthwhile; they think that all the hopes they placed in Vienna have been fulfilled, I thought, or at least most of the time they believe they’ve gone far — most of the time they believe fervently that they’ve become something worthwhile, although from my point of view they haven’t become anything. Because they’ve made a name for themselves, won a lotof prizes,published a lot of books, and sold their pictures to a lot of museums, because they’ve had their books issued by the best publishing houses and their pictures hung in the best museums, because they’ve been awarded every possible prize that this appalling state has to offer and had every possible decoration pinned to their breasts, they believe they’ve become something, though in fact they’ve become nothing, I thought. They’re all what are termed well-knownartists,celebrated artists,who sit as senators in the so-called ArtSenate;they call themselves professors and have chairs at our academies; they are invited by this or that college or university to speak at this or that symposium; they travel to Brussels or Paris or Rome, to the United States and Japan and the Soviet Union and China, where sooner or later they’re invited to give lectures about themselves and open exhibitions of their pictures, and yet as I see it they haven’t become anything. They’ve all quite simply failed to achieve the highest,and as I see it only the highest can bring real satisfaction,I thought. Auersberger’s compositions don’t go unperformed, I thought, sitting in the wing chair; Auersberger,the successorof Webern,hasn’t failed to gainrecognition, I thought. On the contrary, not a moment passes without something of his being sung, without one of his compositions being performed by brass, woodwind, strings or percussion (he makes sure of that!) — now in Basel, now in Zürich, now in London, now in Klagenfurt — here a duet, there a trio, here a four-minute chorus, there a twelve-minute opera, here a three-minute cantata, there a one-second opera, a one-minute song, a two-minute or four-minute aria; sometimes he engages English performers, sometimes French or Italian; sometimes his work is performed by a Polish or Portuguese violinist, sometimes by a Chilean or Italian lady on the clarinet. Hardly has he arrived in one town than he’s thinking about the next, our restless successor of Webern, it seems, our mincing, globe-trotting imitator of Webern and Grafen, our snobbish, musical dandy from the Styrian sticks. Just as Bruckner is unendurably monumental, so Webern is unendurably meager, yet the meagerness of Anton Webern is as nothing compared with the meagerness of Auersberger, whom I am bound to describe as the almost noteless composer, just as the mindless literary experts have dubbed Paul Celan the almost wordless poet. This Styrian imitator doesn’t go unperformed, but thirty years ago, in the mid-fifties, he was already stuck in the Webern tradition; he’s never written so much as three notes without making some composition or other out of them. What is missing in Auersberger’s compositions, it seems to me, is Auersberger himself; his aphoristic music (which was how I described his derivative compositions in the fifties!) is nothing but an unendurable copy of Webern, who was himself, as I now realize, not the genius he was taken to be, but only a sudden — if brilliant — access of debility in the history of music. In fact I feel heartily ashamed of myself as I sit in the Auersbergers’ wing chair and reflect that Auersberger was never a genius, even though back in the fifties I was utterly convinced that he was: he was simply a pathetic little bourgeois with a certain talent, who gambled away his talent in his first few weeks in Vienna. Vienna is a terrible machine for the destruction of genius, I thought, sitting in the wing chair, an appalling recycling plant for the demolition of talent. All these people whom I was now observing through their sickening cigarette smoke came to Vienna thirty or thirty-five years ago, hoping to go far, only to have whatever genius or talent they possessed annihilated and killed off by the city, which kills off all the hundreds and thousands of geniuses or talents that are born in Austria every year. They may think they’ve gone far, but in reality they haven’t gone anywhere, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, and the reason is that they were content to stay in Vienna: they didn’t leave at the decisive moment and go abroad, like all those who did achieve something; those who stayed behind in Vienna became nonentities, whereas I can say without hesitation that all those who went abroad made something of themselves. Because they were satisfied with Vienna, they ended up as nonentities, unlike those who left Vienna at the decisive moment and went abroad, I thought, sitting in the wing chair. I will not speculate about what might have become of all these people in the music room, all these people who were waiting around for the artist to make his entrance and for the artistic dinner to begin, if they had left Vienna at the crucial moment in their lives. It took no more than a minor success, a favorable press review of her first novel, to make Jeannie Billroth stay in Vienna, no more than the sale of a couple of pictures to national museums to make Rehmden the painter stay in Vienna, no more than a few fulsome notices in the Kurier or the Presse to persuade some promising actress to stay in Vienna. The music room is full of people who stayed on in Vienna, I thought as I sat in the wing chair. And at the cemetery in Kilb those who followed Joana’s coffin were almost exclusively people who had stayed on in Vienna, almost suffocating in the comfort of their petit bourgeois world. What a depressing effect the funeral at Kilb had on me, for this reason more than any other! I thought, watching these people from the wing chair. What depressed me was not so much the fact that Joana was being buried as that the only people who followed her coffin were artistic corpses, failures, Viennese failures, the living dead of the artistic world — writers, painters, dancers and hangers-on, artistic cadavers not yet quite dead, who looked utterly grotesque in the pelting rain. The sight was not so much sad as unappetizing, I thought. All through the ceremony I was obsessed by the spectacle of these repellent artistic nonentities trudging behind the coffin through the cemetery mud in their distasteful attitudes of mourning, I told myself as I sat in the wing chair. It was not so much the funeral that aroused my indignation as the demeanor of the mourners who had turned up from Vienna in their flashy cars. I became so agitated that I had to take several heart tablets, yet my agitation was brought on not by the dead Joana, but by the behavior of these arty people, these artistic shams, I thought, and it occurred to me that my own behavior at Kilb had probably been equally distasteful. The very fact that I had put on a black suit was distasteful, I now told myself; so was the way I had eaten my goulash in the Iron Hand and the way I had talked to Joana’s companion, as though I were the only person who had really been close to Joana, the only one who had any claim on her. The more I thought about the funeral, the more I became aware of the distasteful aspects of my own behavior: no matter what circumstances came to mind, they were all equally distasteful. Finding the others distasteful, I naturally could not help finding myself distasteful too, I thought, and the more I thought about everything connected with the funeral, the more reprehensible my own conduct seemed to me. It had been distasteful to go to Kilb