Alma Mahler; Muse to Genius

by Karen Monson

“The most beautiful girl in Vienna”, she married Gustav Mahler, the composer and conductor who held the most powerful position in the world of music in 1902, when she was twenty-two. After Mahler’s death she married Walter Gropius, and stayed his wife throughout the years when he was founding the Bauhaus and revolutionizing the world of design. When she was fifty, she married Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette, The 40 Days of Musa Dagh, Jacobowsky and the Colonel, and much more. Alma was united in love, sexually or not, with Alexander von Zemlinsky, her music teacher and the only mentor ever recognized by Arnold Schoenberg; with Ossip Gabrilovitch, pianist and conductor; with Gerhart Hauptmann, the dramatist; and, most importantly, with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who called her a "wild brat" on her seventieth birthday and wanted the love they shared to be immortalized for future generations. The daughter of a celebrated Viennese landscape painter, Alma grew up privileged, with a taste for luxury but not always with the money to support her tastes. Over the years, she accumulated country houses, a dwelling of landmark stature on a Venetian canal and a mansion in Vienna. She might have become an important composer; had she been born a century later, she could have been a conductor. As it was, she devoted her life to men whom she considered to be geniuses.

Genres: Music, Biography

348 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good story, but I didn't like the telling much. Alma Schindler/Mahler/Gropius/Werfel lived a remarkable life that spanned most of the 20th Century and touched, intimately, the lives of several of the most creative men in Austria and Germany. I had hoped this biography would be more of a picture of the times and the lives she intersected, but what I got was perhaps a more personal biography than I wanted. The author primarily draws on Alma's diaries and own memoirs (which she admits may not be all that accurate) and the result is myopic in its focus. For example, we know Alma thought martinis tasted like turpentine but her relationship with Paul "Midwife Toad" Kammerer is given only a couple of pages that show no interest in his odd place in the history of biology. Likewise, Alma's escape from France with the aid of Varian Fry shows no awareness at all of Fry's place in history but treats him as faceless bureaucrat -- reflective of Alma's opinion perhaps, but hardly an objective treatment. Seeing Alma up close, she's not especially likable. The author provides some hair-raising examples of Alma's odd anti-Semitic streak, her self-centered tendency to manipulate the lives of others, and her fickleness. There are a couple of later biographies of Frau Mahler that I hope are better; this one feels too much like a summary and a gloss on the subject's own accounts of her amazing life.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eine interessante Lebensgeschichte einer speziellen Frau. Leider ist die Frau nicht sympathisch und die Autorin hat wenig erzählerisches Talent. Seitenweise werden abwechselnd selbstbemitleidende und selbstbeweihräuchernde Briefe von und an Alma abgedruckt, die wohl kaum jemand ernsthaft lesen wollte. Auch die historische Einordnung geht wiederholt verloren, es dreht sich alles nur um Alma und ihre Weltsicht.
Das Buch ist bedingt empfehlenswert für diejenigen, die sich für die damalige Kulturszene interessieren und einen Einblick wollen, wer mit wem verbandelt war.

[Frances Thornton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! Alma Mahler seems like a lost soul searching her whole life x

[Kafkasfriend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alma Mahler was more than a Muse she worked and influenced a broad range of art in Europe and its move to the US influences still clear today.