![]() ![]() Their days were regulated like clockwork. Life with Mahler was dispiriting for a woman used to a glittering social life. I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself. "I sit down at the piano, dying to play, but musical notation no longer means anything to me. However, later on, this monstrous ban on her composing created insurmountable problems. ![]() She became his amanuensis and offered him the most conscientious support. "The role of composer, the worker's role, falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner … I'm asking a very great deal – and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange." Astonishingly, Alma capitulated. Her own composing, meanwhile, was at Mahler's insistence, disregarded. In the astonishing, protracted prenuptial letter Mahler sent to Alma, he suggested that were she ugly, men would not care for her intellect and artistic talent. All the others who fell in love with me were little Jews. The only man who was racially suited to me. Speaking near the end of her life to writer Elias Canetti (who met her when he was involved with her daughter, Anna), she described Gropius, her second husband as "the true Aryan type. She was attracted to his enormous energy, dynamism and childlike innocence, but it doesn't seem that she was ever "in love" with him. She greatly admired him, the eminent conductor of the Hofoper (Court Opera), but she was never really a fan of his music, the sixth and seventh symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde excepted. She was a woman who needed to be surrounded by creative genius, and the young Alma Schindler married Gustav Mahler in 1902 when she was 22, already pregnant with their first child. This was total, until she had had enough, which always happened. ![]() Her many admirers, however, felt understood, valued, and were deeply affected and emotionally sustained by her energy and commitment to them. lacking in warmth, devoid of naturalness, sincerity and good sense". Siegfried Lipiner, one of Mahler's favourite intellectual adversaries, with whom the young Alma discussed Plato's Symposium, might have empathised with her liking for Nietzsche, but he found her "spiteful, vain and overbearing. She must have been an enchanting dinner guest: her deafness in one ear forced her to lean into conversations, ensuring maximum attention and intimacy. An older admirer sent her crates filled with classics including Stendhal and Ibsen. Her father, Emil Schindler, read her Goethe. Her marriages – to Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel – and her many relationships, including those with Gustav Klimt (who gave her her first kiss, at 17), her composition teacher Alexander Zemlinsky (her first lover) and painter Oskar Kokoshka (perhaps the only man she really loved), have made her one of the 20th century's most famous muses and femmes fatales.īorn in 1878, Alma had a privileged yet troubled upbringing in hedonistic Vienna. Like him, she was a passionate follower of Nietzsche. Pathological cruelty, antisemitism, vanity and a sense that the world owed Alma Maria Schindler something in token for her brilliance and beauty were some of the traits her admirers and enemies alike recognised in Alma, traits also shared by her hero, Richard Wagner. None of the music she chose for her funeral was by Mahler. She outlived Gustav Mahler by 50 years, destroying all but one of her letters to him, and suppressing or falsifying many of his to her for fear of being judged too harshly by posterity. Alma Mahler was a monster, no doubt, but she was a very intriguing monster. M usic is music whether composed by angels or monsters.
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