The great chandeliers dimmed.

Washed in light before me, the players ranged, almost a hundred of them. Violins, violas, cellos, basses—bows poised to strike. Woodwinds and brass raised to lips. Timpani ready to pound. Abruptly, I raised my baton. All chatter and coughing hushed. Breaths were held. Starched shirtfronts ceased their crackle, sumptuous ball gowns their rustle. The moment I relished most: the whole world waited for me. The baton slashed. The first chords hammered out: the overture Consecration of the House. Thus, the immortal Beethoven proclaims, “Watch out, it’s a new day!” Here, at this inaugural concert, I am hymning a paean to the indestructible spirit of mankind. Most of the war ruins are gone. Vienna has been reconstructed. Also gone, unhappily, is any sense of proportion. The ultimate civic effort was to repose in this hall, which turned out to be ugly in the extreme. But here we are, alive, well, and prospering. This Wiener Festspielhaus—Vienna’s new festival hall—is hideous but striking, a building in tune with the latest architectural horrors of the midcentury. Glass, steel, terrazzo, travertine, jagged concrete loops and pillars swooping up and down at irregular intervals on the outside. Pale blue velvet plush on the inside. Pale blue! Is there no more red and gold? The orchestra sprawls in some outlandish spot halfway up the south wall. And the audience intrudes on all sides—even behind the players! So that there is never a refuge from their silly faces nodding to the music, attempting to aid me by beating time—disastrously out of time, their looking so dedicated.

One was obliged to approve of Krummhorn’s design, what with the whole city behind him. The Festspielhaus represents the new Europe, they told me. It is a break from the past of feudal principalities, minor kingdoms, Hapsburg pomposities, and, most of all, from the so-called evils of the Anschluss—the union of Austria with the Third Reich—redeeming it from its status as a backwater after the loss of Imperial Austria-Hungary. Good, good. So be it. I was never one to stand in the way of history. But the sound of these new concert halls! So bright, so naked, so lacking in mystery! Is this really Europe? Hardly. America, the efficient stepchild from across the Atlantic, is lashing out at its progenitors with a vengeance. Let me tell you what I think. It’s all typical American hyperexposure. Who but they could have seized with such indecent haste upon Freud and his Jewish friends to make a public pastime of licking each other’s psychic sores? Gessler, my manager—I manage him, not the other way around—had fussed dreadfully about it. But he needn’t have bothered. Rotten taste usually triumphs. The main thing is that it is I who triumphed. My personal struggle was over and done with when I had been appointed Generalmusikdirektor of the Österreichische Symphonie and its opera. And, unhappily, of this place.

As I say, I will not stand in the way of history. I give them Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms in the new transatlantic style, piercing and bright. I do it in the same way at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Philharmonic Hall in New York, the annual festival in Edinburgh, of which I am co-director, the Teatro de la Revolución in Buenos Aires, where I conduct a half-season each winter, the Salzburg Festival every other year, Wagner at Bayreuth, also every other year, and now here at this new Vienna concert hall, of which I am now—forgive my satisfied repetition—permanent, residing, reigning Generalmusikdirektor. And don’t think I haven’t got my eye on my old rival, von Karajan, in Berlin!

But this is dreadful. I have not introduced myself. It is so easy to be swept up in this postwar informality. The name, as everyone must know, is Kapp-Dortmunder. Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder. I started life as plain Hermann Kapp. I added the Dortmunder after accepting leadership of a provincial opera house in the Ruhr. I concluded that it was good for a conductor to have such a name. You have to have lots of syllables for the tongue and jaws to work on. It inspires respect. I am certain that other maestri thanked heaven for their multisyllabic names: Toscanini, Stokowski, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Schmitt-Isserstedt, Mengelberg, von Karajan, and so on. You will have noticed that those with short names are invariably known at large by both the first and last. I refer of course to such as Charles Münch, Fritz Stiedry, Malcolm Sargent, Henry Wood, Thomas Beecham—as well as the Jew Schlesinger, who understandably chose to conceal himself behind the name Bruno Walter. We, the single-named Barbirollis, Stokowskis, Koussevitskys, and Kapp-Dortmunders, bear a tangible advantage. To be known simply as Kapp-Dortmunder is eminently satisfying.

My wife does not care for the name—she is my second wife, I should point out. Many wonderful women have wished to share my life. One young woman, Krisztina, I loved and lost. We never married, but I have never ceased to think of her. I think she would have desired to be simply Frau Kapp. More about her later. Margot, my present wife, owns an international chain of design consultants. Very chic. She has great beauty, enormous flair, and business sense. So you can understand why she elected the euphonious sobriquet of Margot St. Monarque. That is not her real name, however, even though she is Swiss. We travel a great deal; I on my tours, she on hers. The next part should really come from others, but you see I am perfectly candid. I am fifty years old, but look at least fifteen years younger. I have all my hair, somewhat en bouffant, interestingly streaked with gray. Even though I limp noticeably, because of frightful injuries suffered in the recent war, I hike, climb mountains, sail, drive racing cars, ski on land and water—and visit the masseur. In addition, I am agreeably tall and have a lean build, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones. I’m told that I am handsome. Then of course, besides the inner repose and meditation that I bring to my profession, the conductor’s trade itself is physically stimulating. One works hard and perspires generously. There is much swinging of the arms, twisting of the body, crouching low, and on occasion, flinging oneself in the air. This is excellent for the circulation, the liver, the digestion, and the lungs. Thus I am quite fit, and barring unfortunate accidents, there is no reason why I should not join the ranks of other noted maestri in living to a ripe and healthy old age.

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