The Fractured Self

My thanks go to the specialist contributors whose reflections appear in the second part of the book.

Diana K. Weekes, my colleague and collaborator on this project, has been endlessly helpful and supportive. She not only undertook the massive task of transcribing the letters, translating Moodie’s non-English letters and checking the text as it took shape, but also advised on the final selection of letters and assisted speedily and generously with many other tasks of translation as requested. Diana would also like to acknowledge the unfailing interest, support and assistance of her late sister, Virginia Weekes.

We would like to thank the Mariann-Steegmann-Foundation (Switzerland) and the Marshall-Hall Trust (Melbourne) for their generous financial support. For administrative support in connection with the latter grant, we acknowledge Creative Partnerships Australia and the Australian Cultural Fund.Finally, our best thanks to Dr Laurel Plapp, Jaishree Thiyagarajan and the production team at Peter Lang Oxford for their work and care in turning a complex manuscript into a book.

Her career spans two of the most tumultuous decades of twentieth-century German history, and her letters reflect the impact of external events on the life of an individual involved in public life and subject to its vicissitudes. In particular, the letters chart her efforts to accommodate, as a working professional, the cultural policies of the Third Reich. By the thirties she was a German citizen by virtue of her marriage, but the fact that she was foreign-born and unable to validate her Aryan status places her in a group which, to date, has not received much attention from scholars of this period. I argue that her death, of accidental barbiturate poisoning, was the result of cumulative psychic fractures related to the moral and personal compromises forced upon her by her position and the circumstances of the regime and the war. These issues are refracted in her letters through the constraints of censorship as the 1930s progressed.

We have selected some 270 letters from among the c.500 that I have collected over the course of several decades. Her first surviving letters are those written in English to friends and family in Queensland from the day of her departure in 1907. But the present selection begins from the time of her return to Germany in 1918, since this was when her range of activities and acquaintance began to expand and her life as a musician to assume its permanent shape. It is very clear that Moodie wrote many more letters than have survived. In her letter to Werner Reinhart of 28 April 1924, for instance, she refers to her “formidable post” and many times she mentions spending a whole day on her letters. Much of her letter-writing would have been utilitarian in purpose, concerned with her travel, holiday, concert or rehearsal arrangements. Although she refers to a telephone as early as January 1921, her peripatetic lifestyle – about which Hans Pfitzner was to complain so bitterly in his letters to her from the early 1920s – made this form of communication difficult and she does not seem to have embraced it with any enthusiasm until the early 1930s. As she wrote to one correspondent, “Letters written to the Berlin address however always reach me”.

The selection of letters for this book has been shaped in the first instance by the accident of survival. Moodie’s constant travelling in the years before her marriage, her many changes of address, the destructive impact of the war, the circumstances of her death, and her husband’s wartime situation and post-war marriages all seem to have mitigated against the preservation of personal papers of any kind. The only letters to remain in her son’s keeping were those to and from Rainer Maria Rilke and, most affectingly, a final Abschiedsbrief to her husband.

It is immediately striking that most of these recipients are men, but this perhaps says less about Moodie herself than some might like to think. The world of music in the early twentieth century was, as she was very well aware, a man’s world. Of the two female correspondents included here, one is Erdmann’s wife and the other Moodie’s student. Her letters to these women, though fewer in number, allow us to glimpse a different side of her nature. Here is Moodie as wife, home-maker and mother, as caring teacher and sympathetic colleague and friend.

The selection is dominated by her letters to Werner Reinhart. The exact circumstances of their meeting are not known. But from the time of her first appearance as soloist with the Musikkollegium Winterthur in October 1922, when she stayed as Reinhart’s guest at Rychenberg, the Reinhart family villa in Winterthur, she wrote to him regularly, at least once a week, until her marriage in 1928. After that her letters became less frequent and more formal, though the abiding importance of his friendship was never in question.

Some two hundred letters survive from Moodie to Reinhart, written between October 1922 and 16 February 1943, of which we have included 136. Her last letter was sent on to Reinhart by Moodie’s husband some months after her death. Only five of Reinhart’s letters to Moodie remain as copies in Reinhart’s files, though it is clear from her responses that he wrote to her regularly, even if not quite as often as she to him. Unsurprisingly, those he kept are formal business letters concerning her performances with the Musikkollegium, Winterthur. Of the personal letters he wrote to her, none remain. We may only know about their relationship from what is reflected in her letters to him. It is a relationship that invites speculation.

From the beginning, her letters to Reinhart are striking for their mix of formality and intimacy. On the one hand, they never moved past the formal “Sie”, a feature perhaps more indicative of his reserve and need to preserve a particular public persona than a measure of the depth of feeling between them. On the other, especially in the early years of their friendship, she loved to address him with playful nicknames. A special favourite (always in English) was “Pussy” – an endearment of particular familiarity, which appears in various permutations in her letters from the 1920s, up to the point of the birth of her first child. In other sobriquets, such as “Prince”, “Indian Prince” or “marchand de coton”, we may catch echoes of Reinhart’s social status or professional interests. Yet others reveal aspects of their relationship: his gift to Moodie of her Gofriller violin produced “Guarnerio” or “Guarnerius”; her habit of weekly letter-writing yielded “Werner, my own Sunday day pet”. In general, she did not use his first name in her salutations and if, after her marriage, these settled to a habitual, English-language “Reinhart dear” and her language stabilised to German, there is no doubting her tenderness. Since Moodie’s salutations are so expressive of her mood and her relationships, we have left them as in the original letters.

Moodie’s first language was English, though one can point to the fact that she only spoke English exclusively until she was about 8 years old, and after that probably only domestically with her mother until her mother’s death in 1918. She learnt French as her second language, but as a child, and would have spoken it in all situations outside the home from 1907 until she left Brussels in 1918. She acquired German as a third language, probably from as early as 1911 (when she was 13) and spoke German in her daily life for at least twenty-five years (1918–1943), as it was essential to her work and many of her lasting friendships were with exclusive German speakers. In certain situations (and countries) and with certain people (for example, Rainer Maria Rilke) she continued to speak French. Increasingly after her marriage in 1928 and as the Third Reich consolidated its control over German life through the 1930s and into the 1940s, German became her matrix language.

German-language letters comprise almost two-thirds of this selection; after 1935, she writes exclusively in German. Nonetheless it would be a mistake to claim that Moodie has a single base of language or discourse; she is what linguists would call a balanced or true tri-lingual. In her letters to Reinhart, she reaches for whatever word or phrase or colloquial expression in whatever language serves best to communicate her ideas, to enhance a letter’s expressive playfulness or lighten an otherwise serious topic. Except when she is writing carefully, style is not her first priority. She writes fluently and idiomatically, often at speed and without correction, with a fine flair for observation and description and a great sense of humour.

Irrespective of the language in which they are written, Moodie’s letters reflect the influence of cross-language interference – in spelling, grammar, vocabulary and word order. Accordingly, and quite apart from the interest of the circumstances in which the letters were written and the importance of the recipient, the letters have a distinctive charm and character.

While German was still very much her third language, Alma struggled with the difficult word order and tended to use a more typically English sentence construction, one that sometimes made long sentences easier for an English-speaking reader to comprehend. Occasionally, however, when she was writing in English but clearly thinking in German, her language became almost comically entangled where she used German sentence construction, or translated German words and idioms too literally. In addition, she never really concerned herself with grammatical punctuation, a vital component of German syntax. Commas are strangely absent even from some of her letters in English. Capitals are used in an arbitrary fashion, new paragraphs start either at random or not at all, and ampersands (in English) or the abbreviation “u.” for und (in German) are habitual, so wherever possible these features have been reproduced in the text.