When Wittgenstein and Hitler were whistling schoolboys together
Icherish scraps of personal information about great men. At the age of ten, and using only bits of metal discarded as useless, Ludwig Wittgenstein built a working sewing machine. I classify this achievement as even more remarkable than writing the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. This was before he spent a year in the same school, in Linz, as Hitler, his exact contemporary. Imagine: two remarkable boys with unforgettable staring eyes, in the same class. But details of their juvenile encounters are unrecorded. Wittgenstein was an expert whistler and could thus perform an entire Beethoven symphony, in perfect pitch and even, so I’ve heard, produce a chord. Is this possible? Less difficult, I’d think, than making a complex machine out of scrap. Hitler was a good whistler, too, able to delight Kameraden in the trenches with the full score of his favourite opera, Lehar’s Merry Widow. There must have been a vogue for sophisticated whistling in the last decades of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. When Mahler was conductor of the opera there, in the first decade of the 20th century, he always went home to lunch. Outside the block of flats where he lived on the third floor, he would whistle, with great power and accuracy, the opening bars of Beethoven’s C-Minor Symphony, so that the cook, hearing it, would have the food on the table by the time the maestro came through the door. What would one not have given to hear these three men whistle together the great trio from Rosenkavalier!
I am disappointed to find that there is no entry in the New Grove on human whistling, surely the commonest form of music ever practised by the human voice, long antedating singing. There is an assumption, in my view erroneous, that whistling reflects mental vacancy. Thus Shakespeare has Antony sitting on the wharf, alone and stupid, whistling while he waits for Cleopatra’s barge. And Dryden pictures the ploughman trudging along who ‘whistled as he went for want of thought’. Hard to imagine Wittgenstein emptying his mind as he rattled through Beethoven’s rendering of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ in his Ninth Symphony, a favourite whistle-subject. My guess is that, for him, whistling actually stimulated ratiocination or at least his imaginative faculties.
I was taught to whistle by a Dominican nun, almost on my first day at school. But she did not know how to do that piercing kind of whistle made by thrusting two fingers into each side of your mouth. ‘Ah, that’s not genteel,’ she said in her soft Galway accent. Whistling thus was supposed to be the province of corner boys, roughs and the kind of youths now known as hoodies. I recall Ted Heath once saying at dinner, ‘Rather than be prime minister, what I’d most like to have done in life was to have written an operetta or musical, the kind that has tunes which the errand-boys whistle.’ Most schoolmasters went to a lot of trouble to stop boys in their care whistling. The rules at my boarding school included one which read, ‘Romping, whistling and throwing stones are at all times forbidden.’ Benjamin Jowett, seeking to raise the tone of Balliol while its master, banned whistling in the quad ‘and other forms of horse-play’ without considering the unusual phenomenon of whistling horses. Once, stranded in Pall Mall with a group of highminded friends without transport late at night, the Hon. David Astor, for many years editor-proprietor of the Observer during its heyday, suddenly produced — using the fourfinger trick — an ear-splitting whistle which had a cabby appear in an instant. When congratulated on this acquirement, Astor explained, ‘It’s the only useful thing I learnt in all my years at Eton.’ Poets like the word whistle because of its sound as well as its associations. It was linked to drink. Chaucer, in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’, uses the phrase, ‘Her jolly whistle wel y-wet’. I suspect Shakespeare was a good whistler: he cer tainly conjures up a host of images with the word. Romeo uses a whistle as a special warning of danger during his trysts with Juliet. You whistled for a dog or a hawk — and also for a woman. Smirking and boasting in King Lear, Goneril says to the Duke of Albany, ‘I have been worth the whistle.’ And there are those tragic, moving and mysterious lines in Othello when the Moor says of Desdemona:
If I do prove her haggard, Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind, To prey at fortune.
No pretty woman ever really disliked being whistled at. There is a delightful moment in the old days of Hollywood when ‘Betty’ Bacall teaches Humphrey Bogart how to whistle for her: ‘You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.’ (Nice to think that Miss Bacall is still alive and occasionally makes a memorable appearance, this time of year, at London parties; she once came to one of mine.) There is a famous little poem of Burns, ‘O whistle an’ I’ll come to you, my Lad’, which has an emphatic assertion of maidenly resolution:
Tho’ father and mither should baith gae mad, O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my Lad.
Unfortunately this bold saying was appropriated by M.R. James, greatest of ghoststory writers, for the title and theme of the most petrifying of all his tales, though, as I recall it, the summons was not a human whistle in this case but made upon some small primitive instrument, like a bosun’s pipe or dog-whistle or one of those shrill flûte-à-becs used to attract birds when fowling. Whistling up a ghost is an old notion, rather as superstitious sailors try to whistle up a wind during a dead calm (and have an absolute ban on whistling during a storm, just as actors are not allowed to quote Macbeth in the green room). Burns was a good and powerful whistler, like all who have steered the plough. But some of his whistling references baffle me. What did he mean by writing: ‘Her mutchkin stowp as tooms a whissle’?
Whistling of the superior kind is a dying art, I fear. Time was when crooners sometimes whistled a verse of their songs, instead of singing — I remember Bing Crosby doing so, and very well too. But today’s pop singers do not whistle; they are too busy grabbing cheap publicity by insisting that they care about world poverty.
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