daron aric hagen

Vienna Zentralfriedhof, February, 1990. I first saw The Third Man on 19 December 1978 at the Oriental Theater and, sitting in the dark as the final credits rolled, I made myself two promises: first, that I would visit Vienna, and two, that I would one day turn Graham Greene's novella into an opera. I wasn't Joseph Cotton and this certainly wasn't a film, but I was standing in the spot where Holly leaned against the cart and watched Anna walk away and knew it.

Harry's cosmopolitan, decadent; Holly's provincial, innocent. Holly's naïveté is suspect in itself. It makes his take on morality dangerously simplistic—he's blind to his own hypocrisy. After visiting the children's ward and seeing the horrible end result of Harry's criminal act, Holly's forced to kill him, forced to sacrifice personal loyalty to moral obligation. Although I loved Welles' portrayal of Lime (who wouldn't: the bad guy always gets the best lines—especially if he's a well-read scenery chewer who gets to supply his own!), I am hard-wired to identify with the character of Holly.

Greene ultimately accepted the satisfactoriness of Carol Reed's ending. Reed had crafted something deeper than Greene had intended, perhaps. Certainly, as many film critics have suggested, Anna might be understood to be a stand-in for Vienna, and Holly for the occupying American forces: one must recall that Holly's on his way to the airport and out of her life. Anna's supposed to betray her love (albeit for an evil man) for not just the fellow who killed him, but for a fellow who is about to skip town?

I had come from Venice to pay my respects. Treading the same streets trod once by the west's greatest composers hadn't had the effect on me that I'd thought it would.  I was prepared for the place's chiaroscuro of timelessness and decay. But I hadn't experienced the sort of ewigkeit in Vienna that I had hoped for and even expected—the eternal now; instead, I had felt smothered by an eternal and never-to-be-forgotten yesterday.

I spent the afternoon in the Musiker section. Beethoven's monument left me strangely unmoved; Brahms' impressed, but didn't warm me; I felt nothing as I admired Schoenberg's chilly modernist cube; it was Schubert's that squeezed my heart and wouldn't let go. Cold, unexpected tears. Slowly, as the afternoon wore on, everything became grayscale. Snow began to fall.

Broke, I could either copy music in a garret on the Margaretengürtel or on Saint Mark's Place—it made no difference. I'd been living abroad for nearly a year. It was time to go home.