The Empress’ Literary Tastes
Elizabeth was passionately fond of both music and poetry. From her
father she had acquired a perfect mastery of the zither, but she had
also a beautiful voice and was a piano pupil of Liszt, and often sung
and played at court charity concerts. Her favorite composers were
Rubinstein, Chopin, and Wagner, to the latter of whom she proved a true
friend by sending him a large sum of money at one of his times of
greatest need, and after his death she made one of her incognito trips
to Bayreuth to hear the Wagner productions there.
For art, too, she had the greatest enthusiasm. Both Makart and Munkacsy
were warm personal friends of hers and she would often spend hours in
their studios. She never went to the theatre in her later years, but
always manifested great interest in the foremost actors and actresses in
Austria and showed them many kindnesses on various occasions.
It was in literature, however, and poetry in particular, that she found
her greatest inspiration and distraction. She was never without a book
in her hand and would sit or wander about for hours so absorbed in her
reading as to completely forget the passage of time, while as for her
general knowledge competent judges have declared it to be amazing. “To
converse intelligently with the Empress,” said Hasenauer, “one should be
well versed in history, science, and art.”
She translated the whole of Schopenhauer into modern Greek and was an
earnest student of Rousseau and Voltaire. But her prime favorite in the
literary world was Heinrich Heine, for whom she had the greatest
reverence and admiration; she possessed all his works, many of them in
manuscript, and many touching instances are told of her kindness to the
great poet’s family. She had learned to love his poems soon after her
marriage, in her first days of sorrow and disillusionment, and they
always found a responsive echo in her heart. Anxious that his memory
should be honored publicly, she interested herself in the erection of a
monument to him in some German city, heading the subscription list
herself with a large sum. The plan was in a fair way to succeed, when a
letter arrived from Bismarck to the cabinet in Vienna, expressing his
surprise that the ruler of a friendly neighboring country should wish to
do public honor to a poet who had insulted the Hohenzollerns. As a rule,
Franz Joseph and Elizabeth respected each other’s peculiarities and
differences of taste, but in this case, on account of the Triple
Alliance, the Emperor was obliged to ask his wife to remove her name
from the list, and, thanks to this episode, it remains for the future to
erect a monument to Heine in Germany. But Elizabeth was determined not
to be thwarted and had her revenge, for, learning that the Danish
sculptor Hasselriis in Rome had already prepared designs for a statue of
her favorite poet, she commissioned him to execute it in marble and had
it placed in front of her palace at Corfu. Apparently the Hohenzollerns
did not resent this, however, for the then Emperor of Germany was most
attentive to her whenever she was travelling in that country. He always
made a point of calling upon her with his wife and is said to have
considered her one of the cleverest women he ever met.
There were not many books that she cared for, but she loved to read her
favorites again and again. Heine was the only one of the German poets
whose works she understood and treasured. Neither Goethe nor Schiller
appealed to her, nor did the modern French poets interest her, although
she thought highly of Lamartine. In English she specially admired
Shakespeare and Byron, Shakespeare indeed ranking only second to Heine
in her affections. She made excellent translations of several of his
plays and could repeat whole scenes from them by heart. “Hamlet” and
“Midsummer Night’s Dream” were her favorites, and she had a painting of
Titania and her lover with the ass’s head hanging in each of her
palaces. “Our illusions are the asses’ heads that we all kiss,” she used
to say.
She wrote charmingly herself, and while on the long journeys that
consumed so much of her time she would send long letters every week to
her husband and children, containing brilliant descriptions of her
travels, bits of poetry or translations, often illustrated with
exquisite pen-and-ink or water-color sketches. These valuable souvenirs
are all preserved in the Hofburg, together with what she called her
“day-book,” a sort of diary covering many years.