Kozlowski: Dispatches from a fallen empire

20th-century classical music often feels like an assault on the ears, but I do enjoy some… 20th-century classical music often feels like an assault on the ears, but I do enjoy some pieces, particularly when they have a very good reason for sounding strange. A textbook example is “La Valse” by Maurice Ravel. The number begins in an unsettling fashion with some muttering of the woodwinds and gradually develops into a grandiose and pompous waltz. Then the sound begins to disintegrate and sag under a kind of weight, slowly breaking into a series of grotesque and tortured fragments. Finally, the piece ends with five sharp notes, dissipated and unresolved.

Ravel intended this piece as a commentary on 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, which, while glittering on the outside, rotted internally, dying its own tortured death in the mud of World War I. “La Valse” seems especially appropriate when considering the decline and death of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which left a legacy of decaying architecture and the present chaos in the Balkans — a chaos that embroiled America’s military in the 90s, and threatens to do so again, if a new, malignant power emerges.

This predicament has weighed heavily on my mind the last few days because I’ve traveled through some of the ashes of that empire — starting in Krakow, Poland, going through Budapest, Hungary, and winding up eventually in Zvornik, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The remnants of Austria-Hungary’s dual monarchy — which collapsed in a series of revolutions and partitions and other strife after being on the losing end of World War I — are both visible and invisible and, in all cases, depressing. Baja, in Hungary, has all the markings of a once-prosperous town: The city hall takes up half a block and is five stories tall, with a kind of bogus-Vienna type facade. The town square is imposing and well-lit, ringed by hotels that once hosted the likes of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. The hotels boast grand restaurants, high-ceilinged rooms and lobbies that reflect bygone ideas of luxury. And yet the facades of those hotels are crumbling — I saw ants in my room, and the town hall looked only half-used. Finally, the fact that few shopkeepers spoke English, German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Russian or Polish indicated that very few foreigners were visiting this city, which is a shock considering that the Serbian frontier is only 20 miles away.

Of course, Baja is a rather obscure town. However, even Budapest — the cultural and political center of Hungary and a former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — had a distinctly drab, shabby appearance left over from 40 years of communism that was not erased by 20 years of something else.

The visible remnants of decay are nothing that money, energy and a coat of paint can’t fix. The invisible rubble, however, is maddening and potentially dangerous. I once met some Hungarians my age in Croatia who commented wistfully that the Adriatic, a sea neither Austria nor Hungary touches today, once hosted displays of Habsburg military might. In this atmosphere, it is very easy for aspiring despots to find an audience by saying, as Hitler did, “We would still be great if not for Group X” or, “We would still be great if only we had strong leadership untempered by quarrelsome democracy.” Indeed, the European Union is watching the rise of far-right parties in Hungary with considerable alarm. Even the center-right government is limiting press freedoms.

Meanwhile, the constant trouble in the Balkans is a legacy of not only one defunct empire, but two: the Austrian and the Ottoman. Both powers treated the Balkans as a buffer region and happily used the ethnic groups already there to take potshots at one another. They also practiced the politics of divide and rule. Both strategies worked reasonably well, so the Nazis copied them in World War II. So today some ethnic groups are considered stooges of one of these hated empires, or of the Nazis, or both (I won’t even address the factor of communism). Some ethnic groups once under the thumb of these empires now yearn to claim their “rightful place in history,” with grandiose ideas about what that place is. Cue extreme nationalism.

All too often, irritation at these “stooge” ethnic groups has served as an excuse for murder, and those murders have served as an excuse for revenge. So you end up with a nasty 87-way feud that involves millions of people in whose names horrible atrocities have been committed. In order to keep a lid on all this, both Europe and the United States have had to get involved in a region in which few Americans really understand what is going on. Heck, it’s so confusing, those in former Yugoslavia hardly have it figured out themselves.

“La Valse” attempts to illustrate a system in distress through the power of music, and it would no doubt be astonishing to Ravel that the decay he attempted to describe continues to be evident today. We are still forced to listen to “La Valse,” and the United States and other countries find themselves trying to dance to its grotesque majesty.