Both sides, now: recalling the fractured and frayed history of Alma Mahler

Less than six months after the death of Alma Schindler on Dec. 11, 1964, the satirist Tom Lehrer wrote a song that he said was inspired by “the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.” Worth checking out on YouTube, his ballad “Alma” is highly entertaining but does little justice to a figure who has frustrated historians attempting an accurate portrait.

Born Aug. 31, 1879, in Vienna, Alma Schindler has come to be seen in two different guises. Long famous primarily for her marriages to and affairs with celebrated men, she has been lionized as a female incarnation of inspiration, but also derided as a fin-de-siecle groupie. As one of her biographers, Oliver Hilmes, summarized, “For one camp, she is the muse of the four arts; for the other an utterly domineering and sex-crazed Circe, who exploited her prominent husbands exclusively for her own purposes.” (Her songs, along with works by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, will be performed July 19 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia.)

Viennese journalist Marietta Torberg once declared, “She was a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool.” Even her own daughter Anna (1904-1988) recognized the dichotomy: “I used to call her Tiger-Mommy. And now and then, she was magnificent. And now and then, she was absolutely abominable.”

To understand the contradictory nature of this remarkable woman, we need to take into account the society that shaped her and was, in turn, shaped by her. Like Alma, Vienna had two distinct natures in the decades before World War I. One was the whipped-cream-and-operetta Vienna of popular imagination and the other, a darker side fueled by growing nationalism and political unrest. The denizens of Vienna, it was then said, were “dancing on the rim of the volcano.” 

The chasm that separated the lower and upper classes was enormous, and vast portions of the Viennese population lived in appalling squalor. Meanwhile, the emerging merchant middle class turned its attention to artistic and intellectual pursuits, with the result that Vienna was unmatched as an incubator of design, graphic arts, architecture, literature, theater and music. In the social circles she moved through, it would have been difficult for Alma not to encounter creative geniuses; she was known for her wit, intellect and musical talent, along with being regarded as the most beautiful woman in Vienna. Thus it was inevitable that many would become attracted to her.

One of the first was artist Gustav Klimt. Although they became infatuated with each other, their affair apparently never progressed beyond passionate kisses. But her relationship with her composition teacher, the homely Alexander von Zemlinsky would be much more physical. Alma vacillated between physical passion and revulsion for Zemlinsky, but dumped him after meeting Mahler. He told a friend, “I didn’t care for her at first. I thought she was just a doll. But then I realized that she’s also very perceptive. ... One doesn’t normally expect such a good-looking girl to take anything seriously.”

She certainly took Mahler seriously, and barely three months later, they were married, by which time she was already pregnant. They had musical commonalities; both worshipped the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas had been the vehicles of some of Mahler’s greatest conducting triumphs; Alma reportedly was able to play a piano reduction of the complete Tristan und Isolde from memory. Unfortunately, Alma also emulated Wagner’s infamous anti-Semitism, which is particularly ironic, considering that two of her three husbands — Mahler and later Franz Werfel — were Jews.

Before their marriage, Mahler famously sent Alma a 22-page letter in which he made it clear that she would have to abandon her own creative activities: “The role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me; yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner.” Alma’s acquiescence set the stage for the dynamics that would strain their marriage nearly to the breaking point, and she sadly wrote, “I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself.”

During their whirlwind courtship and first year of marriage, Gustav composed his Fifth Symphony, and the famous Adagietto has been termed a love letter to his bride. Perhaps it was frustration of her creative instincts that eventually led Alma into an affair with Walter Gropius, founder of the legendary Bauhaus school of design. In 1910, having learned of Alma’s affair, Gustav became consumed by anxiety that she was about to leave him and reluctantly sought counseling from none other than Sigmund Freud.

To win back his wife’s affection, Gustav now encouraged her to compose, and even edited and arranged for the publication of her Five Songs (four of which will be performed on July 19, along with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony) in 1910. But it may have been too little, too late; even as he rehearsed for the premiere of his Eighth Symphony, her affair with Gropius continued. Gustav, who had been diagnosed with a heart ailment, died in May the next year.

Alma would marry Gropius on Aug. 18, 1915, but not before engaging in a tempestuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who immortalized her in his painting “The Bride of the Wind.” While he was serving in the Austrian army during WWI, she abandoned him to return to Gropius. Kokoschka, who would later claim that Alma had aborted his child, subsequently had a life-size, anatomically correct doll made to look like her; he would appear in public with it at cafés or the theater.

After she married Gropius, Alma gave birth to a baby boy in 1918, but gossip termed it the love child of writer Franz Werfel, with whom she had begun an affair in fall 1917. She and Gropius divorced in October 1920. She lived openly with Werfel for years, finally marrying him in 1929. World War II forced them to flee to California, where a few of Werfel’s works inspired Hollywood films and where she presided over stellar gatherings with the likes of Max Reinhardt, Igor Stravinsky, Benjamin Britten, Bruno Walter and Thomas Mann.

Following Werfel’s death in 1951, Alma moved to New York, where she lived the rest of her life in a two-room apartment.

The headline of her obituary in the New York Times cited her as “Alma M. Werfel, Widow of Writer,” but today she is most often called Alma Mahler, despite her two subsequent husbands, and that, during the 50 years that she outlived the composer, she worked assiduously to manipulate the historical record of their relationship. Her campaign was so thorough that historians have coined the term “The Alma Problem” to describe their predicament. As her daughter told a biographer of Franz Werfel, “If you were planning on using my mother’s memoirs as a basis for your research, then you should forget the whole project right here and now.”

Today musicologists are beginning to focus less on the verbal record and more on the musical one. Alma wrote some 50 songs — or even twice that, by some accounts — but only 14 still exist. Dianne Follet, who has taught women’s music history at Muhlenberg College, wrote, “Her songs, perhaps even more than her writings … reveal Alma’s true nature. They verge on the melodramatic, as did Alma; they are complex, as was Alma; they are contradictory, as was Alma. It is in her songs that we meet her, and it is through her songs that she assumes her rightful place.”

Perhaps we should give Alma the final word. In November 1901, she wrote, “A new idea occurred to me: art is the outcome of love. While love, for a man, is a tool for creativity, for a woman, it’s the principal motive.”

This is an excerpt of an article that appears in Ravinia magazine. To read the full version, click here.