Die Neue Musik

They are beautiful people. Composer Alban Berg

of the chiselled profile and well-tailored suit

- Prince Alban from girls' story-books- with his bride,

that "glorious D minor symphony" whom he saw stand

like a cut flower across the crowded concert-hall

of the Musikverein, the beautiful Helene,

ash-blonde, exquisite, wafer-thin, stroll arm in arm

over the Karlplatz to the Café Museum

there to meet "the director of Viennese cacophony,

Herr Arnold Schoenberg" of whom he is

the equivocal disciple. There is music in his eyes

and love-a love that will resound through alt Wien

with glockenspiel, celeste, and xylophone,

with hammer-blows, once Mahler's train has left

the West Station on a one-way journey, after nights

at the Fledermaus cabaret with Gustav Klimt,

renowned painter of female genitalia (though hidden

under daubs of gold), and after food and beer

at the Löwenbräu, behind the Burgtheater, then visits,

late, to ladies of the whip. And so the music comes,

more complex, dense, allusive than any heard before,

that sounds out passion-if not for his besotted bride

then for another's, inaccessible, but loved the more.