At Least: Beginning

 It was the third time this week I'd awoke at 4:30 by Ignazia having sex upstairs with a seminary student. 

Ignazia is my landlady. She was the daughter of a lay theology professor in Trieste before coming to Vienna to be a painter's model. She makes a side living by tutoring seminary students struggling with theology: then she fucks them. 

Is she paid? Well, she's paid for the tutelage, I doubt she charges for the rest as I doubt the students know her intentions when they first come to her, but once they find out her practice, they stay in her tutelage, and I suppose they get better grades in seminary. 

As I have long since renounced belief in Hashem, I do my best to resign myself to no similar treatment, but similar treatment is not why I'm here. I'm here to be the next Wagner, and fucking whomever that takes is what I would do.

Not that any person of influence would look at my short, beefy frame, my Jewish nose and Hapsburg-like underbite, my heavy handed ambitions, my holier than thou belief in ars gratia artis and think: "Yes. That." But I came to Vienna to be the greatest composer since Wagner, the greatest playwright, the greatest artist, and even if no one else believes I can do it, I believe I can. 

My time will come. Ignazia looks the other way on my pounding her piano, my hoarse moaning of unending melodies to my own libretto, and I look the other way at her dooming the future's saints to perdition. I'm not in the apartment most of the time. Rather, I'm in the coffeehouses writing my melodies and words, humming the melodies as I write them so all cultural Vienna knows me as an institution of the coffeehouses: 'the composer,' 

The only problem is that they know me otherwise. When I'm not humming my melodies at tables, getting them embedded in Wien's unconscious, I'm playing violin in the corner: backup violinist in a cabaret band, and, to my shame, I'm good at it. I'm known as 'the fiddler', not the composer, and after it's done, every half drunk herr doktor and herr professor wants to bore me with their memories of gypsy fiddlers from their youths, while the beautiful girls always speak to my aging band leader: the 'legendary' Tamas Novak who's been Vienna's great upcoming cabaret singer-songwriter for thirty years. Everyone in Vienna knows Tamas Novak and his songs: so well do they know him that a dozen cafes pay us hunger wages to play our hits. 

Then, for one year, I started my own cabaret project. To my astonishment, I was good at it, and at least the ugly girls went home with me. But if cabaret is my destiny then Vienna is my nightmare. I am here for opera, not cabaret, and to opera shall I devote my every dreaming hour of my muse. For opera did I, Avraham Ticoczki-ben-Rebbe Yaakov, became Istvan Tauber. For opera do I go to mass every day at St. Stephan's. Between you and me, dear melomane, I'm no Christian, nor am I even baptized, but there are many rich Catholics who may underwrite a genius like I suspect I am, but no one would underwrite me out of simple artistic passion, they need know me as one of them. Rich Jews would underwrite a Catholic well before rich Catholics would underwrite a Jew, and so much of being Jewish in this world is assessing risk. 

Nights are for work, but there is no opera in the daytime. There is no family or women of which to speak or come home to. There is only the opera, and there is only the coffeehouses. At six forty every morning a stagehand sneaks me into the Staatsoper, I go hide in the toilet, and then at quarter of nine scurry over to section 1 of the Parterre like a rat--close enough that I can hear Mahler's commentary, far enough away that neither he nor most singers cat see me. Doubtless do some orchestra members and minor-roled singers, but I'm one of a few who regularly indulges this practice. All of whom are would be geniuses of the voice, the baton, the set design, but of course, I don't think any of them are particularly talented but me, and of course, they all think the same about the rest of us against themselves.