I grew very fond of him, not only because of his musicianly qualities but also because as a man he was so simple and honorable, and I was glad to hear later on that he had made an excellent position for himself in Vienna.
This summer of 1922, I visited Vienna again after many, many years. I felt that the war should be completely over for us and that we should seek in every way to re-establish cultural relations with our former enemies.
I found Stehmann still at the Vienna opera, now no longer called Kaiserliche but Staats-Oper. It was a joy to see him again, but the war had brought to him also great misfortune! He told me that from his savings, while a member of my opera company and from subsequent savings in Vienna, he had bought a house with several acres of land in the Austrian Tyrols. With tears in his eyes he showed me photographs of this property. The house was charmingly situated in a picturesque valley with the Tyrolean Alps beyond. After the war this territory was taken over by Italy; and that government, wishing to drive out the Austrians and settle the land with Italians, had compelled Stehmann to “sell” his property for a sum fixed by them. He had no choice and the price which he received amounted to about thirty-seven thousand five hundred kronen, which happened to be the amount I had paid that morning for a pair of shoes—at the present valuation about three dollars and seventy cents! The Poles claim that Bismarck pursued the same policy in Posnia when Prussia endeavored to suppress Polish national aspirations, by forcing them to sell their lands to the Prussian Junkers.
I was sorry on arriving in Vienna not to see once more the venerable old singer, Marianne Brandt, but she had died, aged eighty-four, during the previous winter. In 1884-85 she had been one of the main props of my father’s inaugural German opera season; and her emotional intensity in “Fidelio” and as the mother in “Le Prophète” had made a deep impression on our public. Nature had not endowed her with beauty of face or figure, and she always insisted: “I have been a virtuous woman all my life because I am so ugly that no man would ever look at me.”
Wagner had invited her to Bayreuth to sing the part of _Kundry_ in “Parsifal,” but whether because of her lack of beauty or because, as she thought, of terrible intrigues on the part of Madame Materna, she sang the rôle only once and always remained exceedingly jealous of Madame Materna, whose rather amplitudinous charms, she insisted, had completely hypnotized Wagner.