The Book of Fathers (37 page)

“You take after old Bálint Sternovszky!” his father would say.

At his parents’ urging the boy would entertain with this trick the social gatherings at their house, hesitantly at first, but quickly getting into his stride. The audience mostly asked for songs and folk tunes, and the ladies would reward him with banknotes tucked into his pockets, while the more intoxicated men would plaster them on his forehead, as if he were leader of a Gypsy band.

From the age of twelve he also sang in the choir of the Catholic church, which some looked at askance, considering
that however Hungarian Sándor Csillag declared himself to be, he was after all Israelite, as were the family of his wife, the Goldbaums. The wedding of the two Goldbaum girls, too, was held in the synagogue and not the Catholic church. Sándor Csillag did not give the whisperers behind his back the time of day and was triumphantly installed below whenever his little Nándor sang a solo at the base of the organ. “That’s my Nándi!” he would inform those sitting in front, behind, or to the side, despite repeated hushing noises all around. Nándor Csillag found his father’s singing of his praises deeply embarrassing and asked him many times to control himself. Sándor Csillag solemnly promised to do so, many times, but he could never keep his promise when he heard his son’s gentle, mellow tones—the flush of pride carried him away. “At this rate, he could be a second Caruso!”

He could not forbear to note that he, together with his wife and sister-in-law, had seen and, what is more, heard with their own eyes and ears the divine Caruso in Budapest, where he proved an ignominious flop. He only ever made one appearance in the Hungarian Royal Opera House, a benefit for the Prince József sanatorium. “He was Radames and I was fifty crowns poorer for each ticket; even so I had trouble getting them,
and
I ordered by telegraph. The crowds were vast, people had gone mad, many bought shares in a single ticket, say a foursome, and passed it round to the next for the following act. The divine Caruso was not entirely well and only after the scene by the bank of the Nile did he manage to pull himself together somewhat. He was about forty, a well-built man … at that time. Twelve thousand crowns he got for that appearance, twelve thousand!”

Nándor Csillag was still in diapers when he first heard his father’s Victor vinyl recordings, which he was never allowed to place on the deck himself. On the cardboard covers of the records he could soon make out: “Enrico Caruso, the greatest tenor singer of all time, is under the
exclusive contract of the Victor Company.”
La donna e mobile!
sang Caruso, to a piano accompaniment and with him little Nándor Csillag, in his piping little voice, to the great joy of his father. Soon he knew it inside out, just as he did the song of Nemorino, and above all the sobbing aria,
Ridi, Pagliaccio!
—he understood not a word of the Italian text, but still gleaned from the music what it was about.

His first teacher of singing was the Italian-born organist of the cathedral. He had some time ago abandoned a promising career in opera in Italy because of a false little Italian maiden. He had eloped to Trieste with her and thence came to Pécs alone. The man was brash, had a moustache and a goatee, and was universally known as Signor Supercilio, because he was a man of few words but many cigarettes and made friends with hardly a soul. They did not know that the reasons for his introspection were quite prosaic: in ten years of residence he had failed to master the Hungarian tongue, of which fact he was deeply ashamed and thus tried to conceal it. He taught Nándor Csillag with unremitting harshness, but rewarded good work at the end of the class with a piece of chocolate. On one occasion he let slip that he had himself been a student of Guglielmo Vergine, the Neapolitan maestro who had taught, among others, Missiano, the acclaimed baritone, and Caruso, the famed tenor. When Nándor Csillag passed this nugget on at home, the standing of his singing teacher rose vertiginously in the eyes of the parents.

Quite soon Signor Supercilio was urging his parents to let him take Nándor Csillag to audition for the Budapest Academy of Music. There he caused a considerable stir—he was proclaimed a Wunderkind. From then on they went up to the capital once a month to work with a
répétiteur
. The proud father doubled the monthly amount allotted for the musical training of his son.

Nándor Csillag was in fact having a singing lesson when the heir to the throne was assassinated in Sarajevo. For days
the name on everyone’s lips was that of the Schiller grocery, the scene of the fatal shots, at the intersection of Franz Joseph Street and the quayside. A horrified Sándor Csillag was exercised chiefly by the latter detail: “What a dagger in the heart it must have been for the Kaiser und König that the heir to the throne should have been killed on the corner of a street that bore his name!”

Only a month later the sky turned completely dark and there was a hurricane such that even the oldest locals could not recall its like. There was no rain, but flashes of lightning sizzled to and fro. Even trees with massive trunks were uprooted and seemingly solid roofs went crashing onto the road. The papers reported seven seriously injured. In Budapest a whirlwind resembling an American tornado caused the deaths of several people, ripping the belfries off three churches, and also caused some structural damage to the Chain Bridge.

“Is appen soon, sumsinna bigue,” said Signor Supercilio.

The Monarchy severed diplomatic relations with Serbia. In Pécs there was no end of patriotic marching up and down the city streets. A military band played the rousing Rákóczi March and other popular recruitment songs, enthusiastic gentlemen of a certain age raised their walking canes gunlike to their shoulders and marched to and fro as the ladies and children waved lanterns and pennants.

“Where will all this end?” asked Ilona of her husband several times a day.

“Storm in a Serbian teacup,” he would reply.

At first Nándor Csillag sang at weddings and family celebrations. His fame spread far and wide. Soon he was being invited to perform at musical soirées, together with professional singers. The posters proclaimed: Nándor Csillag, the golden-throated boy wonder from Pécs. When he performed he was chaperoned by his father or Aunt Tonchi.

The front pages of the newspapers were plastered with military reports when the postman brought a rust-brown envelope. It was from Milan. Signor Supercilio translated it for them: “You are asked performance, for charity, in Milano.”

It turned out that the concert was to raise money for Italian workers stranded in Germany: these unfortunates had already lost their jobs and were anxious to return home. Nándor Csillag’s mother was opposed to the trip. “Have you quite lost your senses? There’s a war on!”

Convinced that Italy would remain neutral, Sándor Csillag took his son to Milan. From the evening papers in Italy he managed to deduce that the following day Caruso would also be performing for charity in Rome, so they took the train to see him perform. Many years later, that evening was to be recalled by Nándor Csillag in The Book of Fathers.

On October 19, 1914, I had the good fortune to be among the select few to hear Caruso on the stage of the Teatro Costanzi. The audience gave an ecstatic welcome to all the performers. But nothing could compare with the whistling and torrential clapping that greeted the performance of Enrico Caruso. When Caruso sang the aria he made his own, “Ridi, Pagliaccio!,” his compatriots stood up to shout their endless Bravos and the display of joy seemed as though it would never end. The conductor, Maestro Toscanini, spent at least fifteen minutes tapping the rostrum, asking to be allowed to continue the program and unwilling to permit an encore. The theater manager hurried over to him and with much wringing of hands prevailed upon him to make an exception just this once. Caruso was then able to reprise the song, to the enormous satisfaction of all. This was for me the most important experience of my life. It is only since then that I have had some conception of how to perform in public
.

There was no stage or role in the course of his career that was not blighted by the oppressive presence of the great Caruso. His efforts hardly amounted to more than a striving to shake off the harrowing burden of the Italian tenor, and he was unable to resist imitating even the least remarkable aspects of his technique. Ede Karsay, his manager in Budapest, was blunt: “Please to abandon this behavior at once. Genius cannot be imitated; by trying to do so you merely make yourself look ridiculous. Better a mediocre Csillag than a first-class imitator of Caruso.”

It was easier said than done. A mind as receptive as his, having heard Caruso’s painful tale as Canio, could free itself of the experience only the way a viper’s poison can be removed from the flesh: with the blade of a sharp knife. Nándor Csillag was always having to put an imaginary blade to himself if he wanted to be able to perform on stage at all. To his eternal misfortune the roles he was most often asked to perform were those of Canio and Turiddu, in which Caruso was simply unsurpassable.

When he had set out on his singing career, Nándor Csillag tended to give himself airs and let it be known that he would be a bigger star in the firmament than Caruso. They smiled at his punning on his surname. But he was serious. He would have liked at least to have been known as the Hungarian Caruso. With his extravagant coiffure and dress, too, he copied his model. In time he gave up the wearing of jackets, cloaks, pelisses, and headgear reminiscent of stage costumes, but even then in the opinion of his father he tended to the bohemian rather than to the middle-class in his attire. He adored expensive Parisian perfumes, the wilder shores of fashion, and even more the latest triumphs of technology. He acquired novelties of the hugely expensive type partly in the interests of promoting his health (waves of hypochondria would sweep over him in a rhythm now gentle, now more serious), and partly because
of his temperament (constructing objects with his hands always had a soothing effect on him).

His orders to the importer Gyula László for an American ball-bearing–operated power drill, suitable for drilling to a depth of five millimeters in marble, stone, iron, or wood, were more quickly delivered than those of any Pécs craftsman. He similarly secured the wonder hammer, which united eighteen different tools in one, from adjustable S-wrench to saw, reamer to metal rule, all these nickel-plated, with a miniature anvil and vise, from the toolmakers V.M. Weiss berger, by appointment, K. u. K. suppliers of tools.

He was certainly the only inhabitant of Pécs to order from Vienna a heatable bath with artificial waves. This piece of equipment, serving both one’s physical and mental welfare, was crescent-shaped when seen from the side, but head-on it was like a giant cradle. Filled to its capacity of forty liters of water, one could take a wonderful bath in it, waves being produced if one managed to use one’s own weight to rock the construction to and fro. Nándor Csillag also purchased a steam generator sauna. The manufacturer Károly Becker guaranteed that his bath would resist spillage even in the case of the most powerful generation of waves. In this product Nándor Csillag was not disappointed. He ran a bath so often in the con traption—every other day—that his manservant called him Water Vole behind his back. He was, however, disappointed by the flat-foot corset, which was uniquely manufactured by Székely and Partner, orthopedic shoemakers of Budapest, at 9 Museum Boulevard. The genuine Zagorian Mountains chest cordial lived up to the claims made for it: a glassful of this herbal decoction consumed every morning certainly prevented him from acquiring any kind of cough or wheeze.

Naturally he purchased a number of gramophones, in this sphere insisting on the products of Schwartz & Manotone as manufacturers. The record players of Schwartz & Manotone,
as the firm’s slogan proclaimed,
Speak, laugh and sing, out in every tongue they ring
. In their record catalogue were the recordings of artists of the first order, which Nándor Csillag bought, virtually without exception. He dreamed of his voice being recorded at some point, like the arias of Caruso, but this never became a reality.

Several other things he had hoped for stubbornly and persistently also failed to materialize. Despite every effort he failed to secure contracts from either Covent Garden or La Scala, Milan. It was in these two opera houses that his unsurpassable ideal had heaped success upon success. By the time this would have been timely for Nándor Csillag, Enrico Caruso was arousing feverish excitement among opera-lovers overseas, chiefly in the diamond horseshoe seats in the Metropolitan Opera House. Nándor Csillag envied him from the bottom of the purest of hearts not just for the hundreds of thousands of dollars but the ten-or fourteenfold encores, lasting more than fifteen minutes, in which the New York Italians excelled, climbing onto the gallery for the Bravos! and stamping the floor. Nándor Csillag scored the greatest success of his career at the Vienna Opera, where he twice had to reprise the Glove Aria from
Rigoletto
, but for him the audience never rose to its feet. This was something he could never forgive them; sometimes he would call them ticket-buying riff-raff.

His most secret desire, to sing on the same stage as the maestro, seemed quite unattainable. Nándor Csillag appeared in many places in Europe in second-rank companies and theaters, which secured him a comfortable way of life and a decent reputation, but neither happiness nor peace of mind. Only at the small workbench he had constructed in his shed did he find, while he worked there, himself at peace, or perhaps at ceasefire.

Rare were the moments when the suspicion dawned that his gifts and his skills were perhaps not after all of the same
order as those of the great Caruso, and between such flashes of insight long years would intervene, during which he attributed the imperfect arc traced by his career to ill-intentioned impresarios, illiterate audiences, corrupt managers, crass reviewers, and scheming rivals. Sometimes he put it down to downright misfortune. From his pale face the unusually round, light brown eyes blazed out; around his lips a constant, tense dissatisfaction had etched curlicues of bitterness.