Wittgenstein

The pianist Paul Wittgenstein is the hero of this family saga, finds Noel Malcolm

When I first heard the title of this book, I supposed (wrongly) that it was about the sleekly modernistic house which the 20th century's most famous philosopher helped to design, for his sister Gretl, in Vienna.

The basic shape - three oblong boxes fused together - may not have been his idea, but Wittgenstein became obsessed both with the internal detailing and with getting the proportions exactly right. Famously, when the builders thought they had completed one of the main rooms, he asked them to raise the ceiling by three centimetres.

advertisementTwo points emerge from that story: that Wittgenstein was an unworldly man where money was concerned; and that his family could afford to be unworldly about money, as they had it in colossal quantities.

Ludwig's father was in fact one of the richest men in Austria, having built up an industrial empire of mines, steel mills and factories.

By the time that Ludwig (the youngest of eight children) was born, in 1889, the Wittgensteins were living in grand style in a Viennese 'Palais', enjoying the best of everything - especially music. Their musical soirées, attended sometimes by Brahms, Strauss or Mahler, were among the best in Vienna, and they also had a major collection of manuscripts by Mozart, Beethoven and others.

You could almost say that music was in the Wittgensteins' blood. The great violinist Joseph Joachim was a first cousin, and they were also related, more remotely, to both Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer.

Read an extract from Alexander Waugh's biography of the Wittgensteins
If these details are familiar to some readers, it is because they have featured in the background material to biographies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the one member of the family who is world-famous today.

But in 1928, when he finished work on his sister's house, he was hardly known as a philosopher at all, having published just one fearsomely difficult treatise. Indeed, having written that work, he had abandoned philosophy and taken a job as a provincial schoolmaster (a job he in turn abandoned, when he was prosecuted for knocking one of his 11-year-old pupils unconscious).

By this time, and for most of the rest of Ludwig's life, there was only one really famous member of the family: his brother Paul.

Alexander Waugh's rich and wide-ranging study, The House of Wittgenstein, weaves together the stories of many of Ludwig's siblings and other relatives, but at its core is the biography of the pianist Paul Wittgenstein.

The book would be worth reading for this element alone - except that it couldn't, as Paul's life can scarcely be understood apart from his unusual background and his various familial entanglements. Hence the 'House of...' approach which Alexander Waugh has taken.

Paul, the closest sibling in age to Ludwig, had some of his younger brother's qualities: asceticism, an iron will, an inability to dissemble, and a sometimes comical unawareness of how the world worked.

(Once, in New York, he complained to a friend that his shoes were hurting, and that the replacement pair he had asked the Wittgenstein staff in Vienna to send him had not arrived. 'Why don't you buy a pair here?' asked the friend. He looked at her in astonishment: 'What a wonderful idea. I never thought of that.')

He gave his debut concert in Vienna in December 1913. Eight months later, during his first week on the Eastern Front, he was hit in the right elbow by a Russian bullet; surgeons at a field hospital amputated most of his right arm, and he was taken off to Siberia as a prisoner of war, eventually returning to Vienna after more than a year of atrocious ill-treatment.

But during that year he had made up his mind to continue his career as a pianist; and that is what, with his Wittgensteinian iron will, he proceeded to do.

The Wittgensteinian money also helped. Realising that the repertoire for the left hand was extremely limited, he commissioned concertos and other pieces from a number of leading composers, including Strauss, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Ravel and, later, Benjamin Britten.

The fees he offered were huge, but the composers soon discovered that he believed himself to have thereby bought their music in a truly comprehensive way: he wanted not only exclusive performance rights, but also the right to engage in large-scale tinkering with the score.

Almost every composer fell out with him sooner or later.

But these disputes were as nothing compared with the complex feud that developed between him and his sister Gretl over the family fortune. It had been placed in a Swiss trust fund; the Nazis, in control of Austria after March 1938, were determined to get their hands on it; and they played a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with Gretl and her other sisters, registering the family as Jewish (which it was in Nazi eyes, though it had been Christian for a century) and then offering concessions - half-Jewish status, or even exit visas - in return for the family gold.

The story of these negotiations, in which Gretl seems to have behaved as a dupe of the Nazis while Paul acted with remarkable rectitude, is grim and fascinating, and has never been told in detail before.

Much in this book, indeed, is the fruit of original research in archives and private collections; Waugh has done a masterly job, untangling a mass of financial and psychological complexities, while never over-encumbering the central, personal stories. His writing is brisk, confident and colourful, but without striving for effect, and the book is a pleasure to read.

On finishing it, I put on (for the first time in years) the LP of Paul Wittgenstein's recording of the Ravel concerto, conducted by Max Rudolf in New York. Some of the critics quoted by Waugh complained that Wittgenstein's playing was heavy and over-pedalled; but I found the pedalling deft and intelligent, and the gossamer passages beautifully done.

Thanks to Waugh's book, I could feel much more deeply the energy, the iron will, and perhaps also the innocence of this remarkable man; and for that I was truly grateful.