Quite soon Signor Supercilio was urging his parents to let him take Nándor Csillag to audition for the Budapest Academy of Music. There he caused a considerable stir-he was proclaimed a Wunderkind. From then on they went up to the capital once a month to work with a répétiteur. The proud father doubled the monthly amount allotted for the musical training of his son.
Nándor Csillag was in fact having a singing lesson when the heir to the throne was assassinated in Sarajevo. For days the name on everyone’s lips was that of the Schiller grocery, the scene of the fatal shots, at the intersection of Franz Joseph Street and the quayside. A horrified Sándor Csillag was exercised chiefly by the latter detail: “What a dagger in the heart it must have been for the Kaiser und König that the heir to the throne should have been killed on the corner of a street that bore his name!”
Only a month later the sky turned completely dark and there was a hurricane such that even the oldest locals could not recall its like. There was no rain, but flashes of lightning sizzled to and fro. Even trees with massive trunks were uprooted and seemingly solid roofs went crashing onto the road. The papers reported seven seriously injured. In Budapest a whirlwind resembling an American tornado caused the deaths of several people, ripping the belfries off three churches, and also caused some structural damage to the Chain Bridge.
“Is appen soon, sumsinna bigue,” said Signor Supercilio.
The Monarchy severed diplomatic relations with Serbia. In Pécs there was no end of patriotic marching up and down the city streets. A military band played the rousing Rákóczi March and other popular recruitment songs, enthusiastic gentlemen of a certain age raised their walking canes gunlike to their shoulders and marched to and fro as the ladies and children waved lanterns and pennants.
“Where will all this end?” asked Ilona of her husband several times a day.
“Storm in a Serbian teacup,” he would reply.
At first Nándor Csillag sang at weddings and family celebrations. His fame spread far and wide. Soon he was being invited to perform at musical soirées, together with professional singers. The posters proclaimed: Nándor Csillag, the golden-throated boy wonder from Pécs. When he performed he was chaperoned by his father or Aunt Tonchi.
The front pages of the newspapers were plastered with military reports when the postman brought a rust-brown envelope. It was from Milan. Signor Supercilio translated it for them: “You are asked performance, for charity, in Milano.”
It turned out that the concert was to raise money for Italian workers stranded in Germany: these unfortunates had already lost their jobs and were anxious to return home. Nándor Csillag’s mother was opposed to the trip. “Have you quite lost your senses? There’s a war on!”
Convinced that Italy would remain neutral, Sándor Csillag took his son to Milan. From the evening papers in Italy he managed to deduce that the following day Caruso would also be performing for charity in Rome, so they took the train to see him perform. Many years later, that evening was to be recalled by Nándor Csillag in The Book of Fathers.
On October 19, 1914, I had the good fortune to be among the select few to hear Caruso on the stage of the Teatro Costanzi. The audience gave an ecstatic welcome to all the performers. But nothing could compare with the whistling and torrential clapping that greeted the performance of Enrico Caruso. When Caruso sang the aria he made his own, “Ridi, Pagliaccio!,” his compatriots stood up to shout their endless Bravos and the display of joy seemed as though it would never end. The conductor, Maestro Toscanini, spent at least fifteen minutes tapping the rostrum, asking to be allowed to continue the program and unwilling to permit an encore. The theater manager hurried over to him and with much wringing of hands prevailed upon him to make an exception just this once. Caruso was then able to reprise the song, to the enormous satisfaction of all. This was for me the most important experience of my life. It is only since then that I have had some conception of how to perform in public.
There was no stage or role in the course of his career that was not blighted by the oppressive presence of the great Caruso. His efforts hardly amounted to more than a striving to shake off the harrowing burden of the Italian tenor, and he was unable to resist imitating even the least remarkable aspects of his technique. Ede Karsay, his manager in Budapest, was blunt: “Please to abandon this behavior at once. Genius cannot be imitated; by trying to do so you merely make yourself look ridiculous. Better a mediocre Csillag than a first-class imitator of Caruso.”
It was easier said than done. A mind as receptive as his, having heard Caruso’s painful tale as Canio, could free itself of the experience only the way a viper’s poison can be removed from the flesh: with the blade of a sharp knife. Nándor Csillag was always having to put an imaginary blade to himself if he wanted to be able to perform on stage at all. To his eternal misfortune the roles he was most often asked to perform were those of Canio and Turiddu, in which Caruso was simply unsurpassable.
When he had set out on his singing career, Nándor Csillag tended to give himself airs and let it be known that he would be a bigger star in the firmament than Caruso. They smiled at his punning on his surname. But he was serious. He would have liked at least to have been known as the Hungarian Caruso. With his extravagant coiffure and dress, too, he copied his model. In time he gave up the wearing of jackets, cloaks, pelisses, and headgear reminiscent of stage costumes, but even then in the opinion of his father he tended to the bohemian rather than to the middle-class in his attire. He adored expensive Parisian perfumes, the wilder shores of fashion, and even more the latest triumphs of technology. He acquired novelties of the hugely expensive type partly in the interests of promoting his health (waves of hypochondria would sweep over him in a rhythm now gentle, now more serious), and partly because of his temperament (constructing objects with his hands always had a soothing effect on him).
His orders to the importer Gyula László for an American ball-bearing-operated power drill, suitable for drilling to a depth of five millimeters in marble, stone, iron, or wood, were more quickly delivered than those of any Pécs craftsman. He similarly secured the wonder hammer, which united eighteen different tools in one, from adjustable S-wrench to saw, reamer to metal rule, all these nickel-plated, with a miniature anvil and vise, from the toolmakers V.M. Weiss berger, by appointment, K. u. K. suppliers of tools.
He was certainly the only inhabitant of Pécs to order from Vienna a heatable bath with artificial waves. This piece of equipment, serving both one’s physical and mental welfare, was crescent-shaped when seen from the side, but head-on it was like a giant cradle. Filled to its capacity of forty liters of water, one could take a wonderful bath in it, waves being produced if one managed to use one’s own weight to rock the construction to and fro. Nándor Csillag also purchased a steam generator sauna. The manufacturer Károly Becker guaranteed that his bath would resist spillage even in the case of the most powerful generation of waves. In this product Nándor Csillag was not disappointed. He ran a bath so often in the con traption-every other day-that his manservant called him Water Vole behind his back. He was, however, disappointed by the flat-foot corset, which was uniquely manufactured by Székely and Partner, orthopedic shoemakers of Budapest, at 9 Museum Boulevard. The genuine Zagorian Mountains chest cordial lived up to the claims made for it: a glassful of this herbal decoction consumed every morning certainly prevented him from acquiring any kind of cough or wheeze.