Róbert Berény & the Cellist

Robert Bereny, Woman Playing Cello, 1928, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph Hungarian National Gallery

October 2018

What do you see when you look at this painting? A woman in a red dress playing a cello, no? And then what else do you see? What I see, after I take in the luscious vermillion of her dress and the honey amber of her cello, is the way in which her entire body seems given over to the act of making music. How her thighs turn inward to clutch the instrument as she leans over and into it, how her right arm is extended out at an almost painful angle to produce just the right note, and how her fingers, all ten of them, are bent to their tasks with rigid intensity. Then there are the legs, long, lean and elegant, hastily splayed out across the canvas, all but superfluous to the making of her music. And the feet, the furthest points away from her instrument seem barely to touch the ground as the music transports the cellist. And yet these feet are rendered with such affection, beautiful and dainty in high heels they bracket her galvanized body. Only the face seems still as she gazes down and away from the audience, and crucially from the man who is painting her, Róbert Berény, the cellist’s husband of two years.

I’ve written about this painting before in my novel-forever-in-progress. In a scene set in the National Gallery in Budapest, where this painting hangs, my protagonists, a pair of kids on the verge of love are having their first date. My character sees the cellist in contrast to her pre-war, Impressionist predecessors in their ridiculously over-sized, uncomfortable dresses, forever decorative and idle. To her the cellist embodies a modern ideal of womanhood: profession and passion. She tells her boyfriend how life-like the painting is, so like actually watching a performance. The funny thing is that the truth behind this painting could not have been more different. Eta Breuer, the woman in the painting, Róbert Berény’s second wife, was a gifted young musician, but upon marrying him in 1926 she never played the cello again. In this painting Eta only simulates musical passion for her husband. What we see is not a woman made whole by her music, but a woman crushed by her music.

Eta Breuer with her cello, Berlin, circa 1920s, photograph Gergely Barki & Artmagazin

Róbert and Eta met in Berlin in the early 1920s. She was 27 and he was 39. Eta had gone there from Budapest to study the cello, and Róbert was in exile, recovering both from his failed first marriage and the failed Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. His first wife had been Béla Kun’s secretary, the leader of the whole disastrous project. Berény had received a government commission to design a call-to-arms poster for the Communist Party which became very famous (https://goo.gl/images/GrQFd4). After 1919 Berény was sent to jail while his first wife escaped to Vienna with their daughter. When he was released he left Hungary and fled to Vienna to join them, but their love was spent and their marriage over. Berény moved on to Berlin, fell into a deep depression and stopped painting. What he never stopped doing, however, was playing violin. As a boy he’d learned the instrument and only at the age of 17 had chosen art over music. Throughout this time he played classical music, improvisations and even his own compositions. It was not until he met Eta, several years later, that he began to paint once more. It was not until she met Róbert that she stopped playing the cello for good. Why did she do this? Why would anyone throw their passion away? The easy answer is that the cello was never Eta’s true passion. That playing music was not oxygen and balm to her the way writing is to me. Or maybe the answer lies in the fact that the roots of passion and love are inextricably bound in hate?

In 1926 the couple moved back to Budapest and married. Róbert was once again the fashionable, successful artist he’d been before the war, mixing with artists, musicians and intellectuals of his day. Meanwhile Eta’s cello sat accusingly in a corner, one-by-one its un-played strings snapping in disgust. Gossip, rumour and theories abounded in their circle of friends as to why Eta never played any more. The psychoanalysts among them said it must be her childhood, the women who were jealous of her beauty said it was just indolence, still others speculated about migraines. In 1930 their daughter Anna was born. These were difficult years for the Jews of Hungary, who were systematically vilified, pauperized and excluded from Hungarian life. The Berény’s lived in increasingly straitened circumstances, but they did so in a spirit of mutual affection. When guests came to the house they would warn them which chairs were safe to sit on and which simply weren’t. Once when they were having a lunch party a huge piece of plaster fell from the ceiling onto the table beside the soup tureen. Stoically, calmly, Róbert picked up the table, moved it over, then continued eating his lunch.

In 1939, before the war broke out, Róbert convinced Eta to play the cello again. She finally agreed. Perhaps it was the desperation and doom they must have all felt because of the impending war, perhaps Eta was curious about her cello after all? New strings were ordered. When they arrived on August 31st Eta re-strung her instrument immediately, nerves all ajangle. When she was ready she told her husband she was scared, so he left the room. She sat down and played. Their house filled with her beautiful music. It was the first time in fifteen years she’d played. It lasted just a few minutes, after which Eta threw her cello to the ground and swore that she would never again play. The next day WWII broke out. The Berény’s spent the war years in hiding during which the majority of Róbert’s work was either lost or destroyed.

When I look at “Woman Playing the Cello” now I see something in her face that I hadn’t seen before. I see how she strains with the effort, I see evasion in the averted face, not concentration. I see now that she was animated not by music but by her love for Róbert, by his belief in her. Perhaps he hoped that if he painted her playing her cello it might re-ignite her love of music. Perhaps Eta herself believed it. She certainly acted the part of a rapt musician convincingly, at least in this painting, for there was one other cello painting Berény made of his wife, nine years after the first one, in 1937.

Robert Bereny, Woman with Cello II, 1937, © Estate of Robert Bereny, oil on canvas, photograph found on alma.leonor.wordpress.com

To see it makes one wish he hadn’t. Eta sits on the arm of a chair, her cello is beside her, propped up against the front of the armchair. She holds the neck of the instrument and her bow in one hand, the other hand sits idly in her lap. This time she stares out directly at the audience, at Róbert, but her eyes are nevertheless veiled, unreadable. She wears a red dress again – Oh Róbert, what were you thinking? – only this dress is so narrowly cut that a cello could never have nestled in its folds. Although Eta never posed for him again with her cello, she was the subject of dozens of his other paintings. In next month’s post I’ll be writing about a very different Berény painting, his most famous one, and a very different Eta.◊

P.S. The photograph of “Woman Playing the Cello” is taken from the book Festői Szerelmek by Krisztián Nyáry

(Corvina Publishers, Budapest, 2016).