Narcissist. Adulterer. Frustrated genius. Married to one of our greatest composers. Alma Mahler is without doubt one of the early 20th century's most colourful characters.
But was Alma really a narcissistic and coldly serial seducer of powerful men? Or just a creative, passionate woman trying to fight her corner in a male-dominated world? Let's delve into Alma Mahler's eventful life - and, along the way, we'll shed some light on the extraordinary image above.
Alma Mahler’s reputation as a serial, trophy-hunting adulteress, luring and then casting off one artistic giant after another, may be ineradicable. How accurate is it? Certainly, in addition to her three husbands – the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel – Alma enjoyed the favours of a number of talented men.
But too few commentators have tried to see things from Alma’s point of view, rather than portray her as an opportunistic social climber, neglectful of her wifely duties to a series of distinguished creative artists.
Some of Alma’s character traits, combined with a penchant for anti-Semitic remarks (despite her various Jewish husbands and acquaintances), make her a complex, perplexing figure maybe hard to love yet worthy of our attention.
But quite apart from the fact that Alma Mahler was a highly intelligent, accomplished pianist and singer, and a composer of even greater potential, any attempt to understand her has to take into account the social and psychological circumstances of her upbringing.
Mahler made her give up composing
Early admirers included the artist Gustav Klimt and the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky, with whom Alma had composition lessons from 1900. Zemlinsky unsurprisingly fell in love with his attractive 21-year-old pupil and Alma (despite referrring to him as a 'chinless, toothless, unwashed gnome') was sufficiently enamoured to consider marrying him.
But then the young Gustav Mahler span into Alma's orbit and after suffering agonies of indecision, she cast her lot with him. By the terms of an extraordinary pre-nuptial agreement, on which Mahler insisted and to which Alma consented with extreme reluctance, she gave up composing. Mahler feared that a wife who spent her time being creative would not give him the undivided attention he required.
She felt marriage would give her empty life meaning
Why did Alma agree to Mahler’s ban on her own creativity? And why – her detractors ask – if she was so serious about composition, did she not return to it after Mahler’s death in 1911? Alma Mahler, after all, was to live another 53 years – she died as an American citizen in New York in 1964. In short, she was keen to marry and Mahler’s talent made him worthy of her attention. She felt that marriage would give her empty life a meaning and that it would be a noble act.
Mahler had warned her of the likely deprivation involved and she was determined to prove herself strong enough to withstand it. As for not returning to composition, she felt that her status as Mahler’s widow required her to move on. She surely realised that the lack of a rigorous conservatoire education would lay her open to ridicule.
An alcoholic with a craving for devotion?
Scepticism about Alma, verging on outright hostility, has long been the default position of Mahler commentators. The eminent Mahlerian Henry-Louis de La Grange, author of a monumental four-volume biography of the composer, was first off the mark in a 1969 magazine article, while the biography was still maturating. Here he presented Alma as an ambitious, calculating and unreliable witness.
By the final volume of his biography, published in 1984, de La Grange sill struggled to understand Alma. He suggested that as an alcoholic with a ‘near-pathological craving’ for ‘admiration and devotion’ she was too self-centred to minister adequately to a creative genius.
Alma Mahler, Kokoschka, and the life-size doll
Alma’s stormiest affair was with the Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was able to come to terms with the inevitable break-up only by creating a life-size doll in the form of her, which he claimed to have taken to the opera.
Here's the story in full. After Mahler’s death, Alma and Kokoschka had a four-year affair. He was so traumatised by their break up that he volunteered for the Austrian army, and suffered brain damage while on the Eastern front.
In 1918, Kokoschka commissioned the avant-garde dollmaker Hermine Moos to make a full-sized, anatomically accurate doll of Alma, constructed to his detailed specifications. For months, Kokoschka provided Moos with painstakingly detailed sketches and written instructions, insisting that the doll be lifelike enough to fool the senses—fully functional in every way a real human body would be.
He took the doll to cafés and the opera
'Please make it possible,' he wrote Kokoschka, 'that my sense of touch will be able to take pleasure in those parts where the layers of fat and muscle suddenly give way to a sinuous covering of skin.'
The result, with its swanskin exterior and horsehair details, he dressed in custom-made underwear and clothing. He is said to have taken it to cafés and the opera, and he made several portraits of it. Finally, during a wild party, he smashed a bottle of wine over the doll's head and decapitated it.
Alma's diaries are painfully honest
We assume that Alma destroyed most of her letters to Mahler, Kokoschka and Franz Werfel, no doubt for fear that they would tarnish her image to posterity. The diaries that have survived, on the other hand, are painfully candid and honest.
She also published two volumes of memoirs – Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (1946) followed by And the Bridge is Love (1959) – which, for all their inaccuracies and prevarications, are hardly an exercise in self-glorification. But De La Grange holds even that against Alma, accusing her of such ‘boundless narcissism’ that she could not bring herself to destroy the actual documents. Clearly she couldn’t win.
Alma’s autobiographies do provide a kind of truth as seen by her, coloured by personal experience; nor does she shrink from observations that reveal her feelings all too frankly. And indeed, De La Grange does admit that she left behind countless documents that actually contradict her published accounts.
Biographies of Alma Mahler
Of recent biographies of Alma, the most comprehensively researched is that of Oliver Hilmes. His painstaking trawl of archives, plus court and medical records, brings valuable information to light about Alma Mahler, her family circle and acquaintances. But he brings little in the way of sensitivity to his interpretation of this material. Indeed the title of the English edition is Malevolent Muse: the Life of Alma Mahler. (The German original, Witwe im Wahn – ‘delusional widow’ – is little better.)
Almost unbelievably, Hilmes resorts to Sigmund Freud’s long discredited, misogynistic theories of female hysteria to explain Alma’s behaviour.
A desperate desire to be wanted
A more empathetic interpretation would start from the observation that Alma Mahler had a troubled, unhappy childhood: her beloved father Emil Schindler died when she was 12 and when her mother remarried, she felt marginalised in the household. Her diaries reveal a wish to be at the centre of attention, stemming from a basic insecurity, even an inferiority complex.
Her compulsive flirtation arose from a desperate desire to be wanted: an inner need for self-respect. And the series of more or less disastrous affairs into which she threw herself can be seen as attempts to deal with unconscious sexual conflict by attracting and humiliating a series of lovers.
We should remember, too, that the diaries that survive are those of a young woman barely out of her teens. Mature and ahead of her time she may have been in many ways, but she was still suffering the pangs of love, the emotional turmoil and the lack of certainty about her place in the world. Alma was acutely aware that it was virtually impossible for a woman of her era, however accomplished and intelligent, to fulfil herself or fully realise her creative potential. (‘Oh! If only I had been born a boy!’ she laments.)
Marriage - the only path to self-fulfilment
Marriage was the only viable option, and Alma determined that being the wife of the prestigious director of the Vienna Court Opera was the most promising path to self-fulfilment, even if it meant sacrificing the one thing that meant most to her.
For all the frustrations of marrying an egotistical genius, she could earn a measure of satisfaction by facilitating the successful careers of such outstanding men as Mahler and Werfel.
Alma Mahler's compositions
A more informed appreciation of Alma’s accomplishments should take account of her compositional output, not least her song 'Einsamer Gang', written when she was barely out of her teens. It is clear that for Alma, musical composition provided a hugely important creative outlet.
Her diaries reveal that she composed prolifically: some 46 songs are mentioned by name and a further 27 without titles, though there may well have been others. She also wrote piano music (including an unfinished sonata) and chamber music (including a violin sonata and a fragmentary piano trio). She only published 14 songs in her lifetime. All the others were lost in World War II, so 'Einsamer Gang' is only the 17th surviving song of a considerably greater output.
Publication of Alma Mahler's songs
In 1900 Alma’s stepfather, the artist Carl Moll, decided to prepare a private publication of three of Alma’s songs – 'Leise weht ein erstes Blühn', 'Meine Nächte' and 'Einsamer Gang' – for her 21st birthday. Moll’s friend Koloman Moser, another of the leading lights of the Viennese Secession, was to design the publication.
The songs were not published at that time after all, though they did reach the stage of printer’s proofs, which Alma showed to Zemlinsky shortly before she began composition lessons with him. (She had already studied with the blind composer Josef Labor from 1894 or ’95 and indeed continued with him for a short time even after beginning with Zemlinsky.)
A song of loneliness
Those proofs are now among the Mahler-Werfel Papers in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, which acquired them as one of two lots auctioned at Sotheby’s in the early 1990s. In 2018, 'Einsamer Gang' was given its UK premiere and published for the first time.
'Einsamer Gang' exemplifies Alma’s customary sensitivity to the texts she set, and poignantly expresses the loneliness she felt in a world apparently indifferent to her needs. Her setting speaks more eloquently than any diary entry of the troubled spirit of this much misunderstood woman.
By Deborah Calland and Barry Millington
This article first appeared in the June 2019 issue of BBC Music Magazine