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There is an unknown melody that has been haunting me now for several days. It appears sometimes very clearly and sometimes only the first bars are heard by the inner ear as a faint echo. It came like an unannounced guest one has once known, but whose name one has forgotten. Its repeated emergence irks me now and I try to turn it away as if the unrecognized guest had stayed too long and has become wearisome. If I but knew what that tune is! I am searching in vain in my memory. I must have heard it long, long ago. Where was it?
Was it not in the Vienna Opera? It occurs to me that the melody I do not recognize must have something to do with my father.… My memory calls his image up .… his face … his sidewhiskers .… his beard was like Kaiser Franz Josef's .…. or rather like Jacques Offenbach's.… The image of the composer emerges quite distinctly as if it were a photograph. …. The penetrating eyes and the pince-nez on a ribbon. …. And then I know suddenly what the melody is: the aria of Antonia from The Tales of Hoffman. As if a floodgate had been opened, an abundance of images emerges. When my sister and I went to the Vienna Opera for the first time in 1901, I was 13 years old.
We had heard our father speak about the Tales of Hoffman before. At the first performance of Offenbach's opera in 1881 a terrible fire had consumed the Vienna Ringtheater. Many hundreds of people had perished; my father had saved himself by jumping from a window. Many superstitious persons in our city, at that time, had tried to establish a connection between the catastrophe and the personality of the composer. They said Offenbach had an “evil eye” whose glances had magical power to harm people. They