Anton von Wolkenstein-Trostburg

Anton von Wolkenstein-Trostburg, 1903

Count Anton Wolkenstein, Cosima Wagner , Countess Marie Schleinitz-Wolkenstein in front of the Bayreuth Festival Hall

Anton Karl Simon Graf von Wolkenstein-Trostburg (born August 2, 1832 in Brunnersdorf , Bohemia , † December 5, 1913 in Valsugana , Trentino ) was an Austrian diplomat .

Life

Initially in military service, Count Wolkenstein-Trostburg entered the diplomatic service in 1858 and became Counselor in London in 1870 , in Berlin in 1877 and Envoy Extraordinary in Dresden in 1880 . In 1881 he became section head of the trade policy department in the Foreign Ministry. He was involved in the negotiations on the Danube question and in the conclusion of the trade agreements with the German Empire from 1878 and 1881. In March 1882 he finally became the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in St. Petersburg , October 1894 in Paris . In 1903 he retired from the diplomatic service and from then on lived with his wife in Berlin, where she ran a famous literary salon in the Palast Hotel . The couple spent the warm season at Ivano Castle in Trentino , where the Count died in 1913, six months before the outbreak of the First World War .

marriage

On June 16, 1886, he married the newly widowed Countess Marie Schleinitz , née Baroness Buch, the famous salonière and patroness of Richard Wagner , with whom he had been close friends since his time at the Austrian embassy in Berlin. Under their influence he became interested in Wagner and Schopenhauer and attended the Bayreuth Festival . Harry Graf Kessler describes the relationship between the count and his wife, whom he deeply admires, in his memoirs:

“Once she unleashed a great, romantic passion: that of her second husband, Wolkenstein. When he was completely white and had been an ambassador for many years, he still behaved like a youth towards them. He looked at her with amorous eyes, bent over her hand with ardor, spoke to her in a different voice than to other women. The magic that her spirit, the remote and lively nature of her being, her high and fine culture exercised on others as well, was condensed around him into a spell from which he could not escape for a moment. Since he was of winning grace and refinement in his appearance and manners, he escaped ridicule even in a later epoch, less susceptible to such romantic marriages, while it shone every shadow of the comic with the radiance of its vitality. But whatever faint comedy floated around the relationship between the two old people was lost in the horror of the tragedy of their last days. She fell ill in the Palast Hotel in Berlin and died in her hotel room. While she was sick, the old count tended her with his knightly affairs and all the tenderness and adoration she was used to from him. He is said to have sat by her bed for hours and stared at her in silence. But when she was dead, all the varnish of his origins and upbringing fell off him, and what was left was an animal that had been shot and injured. He is said to have screamed on her deathbed for days, so that the hotel guests fled the hotel in horror. Then he too lay down and died. "

See also

• List of Austrian ambassadors in St. Petersburg
• Wolkenstein-Trostburg (noble family)

literature

• Petra Wilhelmy: The Berlin Salon in the 19th Century . Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1989, ISBN 978-3-11-011891-9 .

Web links

• Entry on Zeno.org

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Kessler, Zeiten und Zeiten (= collected writings , vol. 1), Frankfurt / Main 1988, p. 17 f.).

predecessor	Office	successor
Ladislaus Hoyos-Sprinzenstein	Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Russia 1882–1894	Rudolf von Khevenhüller-Metsch
Gustav Kálnoky	Austro-Hungarian ambassador to France 1894–1903	Franz I. von und zu Liechtenstein