Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof

Richard Strauss to Manfred I Mautner Markhof in the deep despair of 1941

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Richard Strauss had helped Manfred I considerably by intervening with Goebbels. With the handed-down words, “He is a friend, it must be a mistake”, he got him out of the Gestapo prison. And in return, the latter then hid Richard Strauss’s grandson Richard, whose mother was Jewish, in the Simmering factory disguised as a worker. In this way, a friendly relationship between the families was maintained until the next generation, because it was precisely that Richard, who, in turn, entrusted me in the 1980s with his daughter Madelaine’s entry into the advertising business.

The following letter is preserved in handwriting and describes in a moving way the desperate mood Richard Strauss was in during the winter of 1944.

 

Garmisch 24.1.44

Dear friend Manfred,

After a lot of worrying and anxiety and your, unfortunately all too justified, concerns, Christian finally arrived here happily with the good Martin and reported how lovingly you and the dear Pussy have taken care of my homeless children. Many thanks also from the very desperate Pauline! In my destroyed life, the family now is the last and only ray of hope (I especially thank you for taking Richard into your care, even though I thought about his future a little differently). I hear with great regret that many bad things have already happened to you. Hopefully at least your beautiful new home will be preserved, even if I have to say goodbye to the happy hours there forever.

**

Maybe you will come back here again, where we could (for the time being!) play a Skat as a memory. In the house next door, I can even offer a small picture gallery (a very beautifully preserved Madonna from Northern Italy and a very exceptional piazetta), and furthermore I can present a new arrangement of the “Rosenkavalier waltz“, which the dear Philharmonic Orchestra will play at my forthcoming funeral, so that I do not enter the waltz heaven too sadly when I join my name mates, because my life has been over since August 16th. My life’s work has been destroyed, the German opera has been destroyed, German music has been banished to the inferno of the machine, where its tortured soul suffers a sad, miserable existence, my dear, beautiful little house, of which I was so proud of, destroyed.

***

I will never see or hear my works again in this world – I wanted Mozart and Schubert had taken me to their Elysium at the age of 80, I could have brought Gluck the beautiful bust. Well, let us forget about it! Forget it all! Now I only hope that my incorrigibly optimistic children with healthy skin will come out of the horror of poor, beautiful, and dear Vienna. We have already prepared everything for their welcome: whatever furniture and household items they will bring with them will be stored. I am trying to accomplish things with the help of military relations, which, thanks to the good General Schubert (whom I wrote a letter of thanks yesterday), has proven to be the only feasible option to find a second furniture van, and also to continue to prepare the grounds here for “racial defilers” and “half-breeds”!1

****

Tomorrow I will find out more details, and I will also try to have a spare hut built, perhaps also with the help of the Wehrmacht. In any case, the children can get into a warm bed as soon as possible, where Christian already feels very comfortable. Please, show this letter to Bubi – I cannot write everything again. I will only give you a message when I have something new to report. My poor wife has calmed down a bit now, too. Please, give my greetings to the whole dear Mautner family especially to the honoured parents who have always been cheerful “with me” and dear poor Böhm – how often do I think of him and his beautiful Strauss week!


Gone – gone it says in the Capriccio!

Yours faithfully,
Richard Strauss

 

1 Strauss alludes to the fact that his son Franz is married to the Jewess Alice, whose son Richard was considered to be a Jewish half-breed according to the racial ideology of the NS since the Nuremberg Laws (1935).

 



Richard Strauss’s handwritten lines to his friend Manfred I Mautner Markhof

Written by Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof

Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof

Manfred I Mautner Markhof, Richard Strauss and Skat

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Manfred I Mautner Markhof, also known as MMM, had a long-standing, deep and respectful friendship with the great composer Richard Strauss. A passion that connected them, was undoubtedly Skat. The following memories have been shared in the Mautner Markhof family:

As is well known, Richard Strauss was a passionate card player who also liked to play for quite large amounts. However, he never entered a gaming room. When MMM once asked him in Monte Carlo why he never went to the casino, he said that on the one hand he was bored with losing little money, but on the other hand never wanted to get involved in playing beyond his means, however exciting such a game might be. This attitude seemed so reasonable to MMM that he had never entered a gaming room again from that time on.

In the incomparably beautiful Eden Hotel in Nervi they both played Piquet for days because a third person was missing for Skat. MMM had an unlikely lucky streak and continued to win. At that time, foreign exchange management in Germany was very strict and money transfers abroad were almost impossible. After MMM had just collected his winnings, Richard Strauss asked him to call the mighty musician of Monte Carlo, Monsieur Ginsberg. He answered the phone and Strauss picked up the handset, which had always made him uncomfortable.

To the great delight of the other, Strauss agreed to conduct a second concert. MMM was pleased as well, but Richard Strauss only meant with a smile on his face, “After the losses you inflicted on me in the game, I have no choice but to conduct another concert, because after all the hotel bill has to be paid.” My grandfather, from his own experience, always had to strongly contradict the rumour that Richard Strauss was a bad loser. Strauss liked to play and, with equanimity, pocketed profits as well as accepted losses.

The reason why Richard Strauss was such a passionate Skat player was because that activity was the only way that allowed him to clear his mind, to switch off from the music – as he emphasized several times. Music always accompanied him everywhere, and the notes just flowed out of him. When the German composer Hans Pfitzner once complained to Richard Strauss, “If you only knew how much effort and hard work went into my opera Palestrina, you would talk differently!”. He replied, “I don’t know why you compose at all when you find it so difficult.”

Manfred I. Mautner Markhof (center), Richard Strauss (right)

 

Written by Theodor Mautner Markhof

Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof

The Kupelwieser Waltz

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The Kupelwieser Waltz is a unique case of an oral tradition, the written documentation of which we owe to the good friendship of my grandmother Maria Mautner Markhof (née Kupelwieser) with Richard Strauss. On this from the memoirs of my grandfather Manfred I Mautner Markhof:

“My wife once played a small but very typical waltz from Franz Schubert, a friend of her great-grandfather Leopold, to our friend Richard Strauss. It was composed in 1826 on the occasion of the wedding of her great-grandparents, Leopold Kupelwieser and Johanna von Lutz – a cousin of  Franz Grillparzer. It is a characteristic of this incredibly talented and music-loving era that Schubert did not need to write that waltz down at all, it was enough that he played it a few times and everyone could replay it by heart. This is how my wife had learned it from her grandfather Paul Kupelwieser – the founder of Brioni – and so the family’s waltz was preserved for the next generation. One day now, before an agreed game of skat in Simmering, to our greatest delight, Richard Strauss suggested putting the waltz on paper. My wife played for him, he took some notes and a few days later he gave us a neat fair copy of the little piece of music. In terms of music history, this document is remarkable, since Richard Strauss obviously could not resist colouring some expressions “Straussian”, what music lovers and connoisseurs will recognize immediately.”

Kupelwieser Waltz, version of Richard Strauss by Isolde Ahlgrimm, Deutsche Grammophon

Kupelwieser Waltz version of “Pussy“ Mautner Markhof, Deutsche Grammophon

Report Austrian Music Magazine

The Waltz

Sheet music Kupelwieser Waltz, 1943

Maria “Pussy” Mautner Markhof playing her beloved family waltz

by Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof

Beate Hemmerlein

Manfred I and the “Karl Schranz Affair”

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On February 8, 1972, around half past eleven, the Austrian Airlines’ DC9 “Niederösterreich” lands with skier Karl Schranz at Vienna Schwechat Airport. When “Schranz sees the crowd waiting for him for the first time, his eyes light up. He sits up and straightens his tie”, writes Alfred Kölbel in the “Arbeiterzeitung”. “And there, on his black Olympic jacket, flashes a silver star – the logo of his ski supplier.” He arrives from Sapporo and 200,000 Austrians cheer him enthusiastically. A few days earlier, at the instigation of President Avery Brundage (1887-1975), the IOC had barred him from participating in the games with 28:14 votes. Schranz had violated the amateur athletic rules, that prohibited amateurs from making financial profits from their sporting activities. In the morning of the crucial IOC meeting, Brundage had received Japanese newspapers, in which Schranz advertised coffee. Since then, the Tyrolean has been seen as the victim of a persistent idealist. By the leading Austrian populists, Hans Dichand (publisher Neue Kronen Zeitung) and Gerhard Bacher (Director General of the Austrian public broadcaster ORF), the exclusion of Schranz was qualified as an unfair injustice and used for a hate campaign against the IOC. Schranz had fallen victim to the arbitrariness of an old backward man, as they proclaimed, and “Austria” would not put up with that. After all, one would have to admit, that practically all skiers are professionals, not to mention the amateurs of the Eastern Bloc who are more or less employed by the state! Minister of Education Fred Sinowatz asked the Austrian Olympic Committee (ÖOC) to withdraw the entire team from the games. The ÖOC and the Austrian Ski Federation (ÖSV) rejected that. The people’s soul was boiling. Manfred Mautner Markhof, as IOC member, had sent Brundage a letter of acceptance before the expulsion because he wanted to create a favourable atmosphere. That so-called “disgrace” led to Mautner Markhof’s mustard boycotted and his grandson being beaten up at school. Schwechater beer was reviled as “Judas beer”. ÖSV President Karl Heinz Klee had to take his daughter out of school because her safety was in question. Schranz was chauffeured to the stoked crowd at Ballhausplatz in Sinowatz’s official limousine. There he was received by the Federal Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who was uncomfortably touched by the “patriotic” feelings of the people. Schranz had to step onto the balcony three times, many of the enthusiasts had raised their right arms, which was for Kreisky too strongly reminiscent of the Nazi salute. He is said to have been so frightened by the media-induced hysteria that he changed the ORF law in 1974. The amendment cost Bacher the job.

Theodor Heinrich Mautner Markhof writes in his memories

My grandpa was appointed to several public offices. He was president of the Vienna Association of Industrialists, of the ÖAMTC, the Vienna Concert Hall, a senior official of the Chamber of Commerce and many other associations. As a member of the ÖOC (Austrian Olympic Committee), I think he was also its president, he put the whole family and me in a very strange situation. The Austrian skier Karl Schranz, who was very famous in the 1970s, apparently violated any rules of the Committee in 1972. The Olympic Games were purely an amateur event, and Mr. Schranz was sponsored by someone for money. Therefore, he was excluded from the winter games in Sapporo, unfortunately on site. This led to a national catastrophe, because television, ORF, extremely heated up the mood towards alleged injustice. The then World President of the IOC, Mr. Brundage, presented the journalists with a telegram from my grandfather with the following content, “I congratulate you on sticking to the Olympic idea.” Now the Austrians had found another “culprit” who could be held responsible for the fact that their idol had been that disparaged. That is how media hatred against my grandfather or rather everything that bore the name Mautner Markhof began. The phone at home was hot, strangers insulted us the worst. We also received bomb threats etc. At school, I was in the 5th grade at Hegelgasse, the students in my class were very nice, but all the other schoolchildren were less. When I thought I had to take my grandfather´s side and defend myself against the allegations, I had to take a lot of beating. I can still say today that I am still convinced that he was right on that point and Mr. Schranz was wrong. The people’s soul, however, was so stimulated by the ORF that Karl Schranz, who had to leave Olympia prematurely, was received like a state guest in Vienna. He landed in Schwechat and was brought to Ballhausplatz in an open limousine, the then Federal Chancellor Bruno Kreisky was also forced to put on an act. At that time, the route from the airport was via Simmeringer Hauptstraße and Rennweg towards the city centre. Crowds of people cheering Mr. Schranz wildly lined the way. So many people had gathered there before only for Hitler´s legendary appearance. All that had strange consequences. The first consequence was that the Austrians refused to buy our products. This situation only calmed down when the media stopped insulting us or my grandfather. Only slowly after one, then a little more quickly after two more months, the sales figures began to recover and finally paradoxically resulted in one of the best financial years in our family history. The lesson I learned from that story is that negative advertising also means advertising. If you can survive the period in question, it is even possible to make profit with its help. As a second consequence, we benefited from the chancellor’s seeming extremely uncomfortable with the excitement and crowds. As he was of Jewish descent himself and had seen the Third Reich, he had good memories that media power once out of control could also mean danger. So after a while he removed the former ORF director and changed the ORF law to prevent such situations in the future. Third consequence – I no longer believe the media at all, because the media spread opinions, but not the truth in the sense of objective facts. Nothing has changed to this day.