Far more than as a composer, Alma Mahler‑Gropius‑Werfel is best remembered as a femme fatale who wrapped one famous artist after another around her finger. A selection of her songs is being performed in the Recital Hall, and Preludium is publishing a brief portrait of her extraordinary life to mark the occasion.

‘And that is the story of Alma,
who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalmer
was one that had known how to live.’

Shortly after Alma Mahler‑Gropius‑Werfel’s death, the satirical singer–songwriter Tom Lehrer was well versed in the details of Alma’s love life. In a smooth waltz tempo, he named off the men from whom she had taken her various surnames – the composer Gustav Mahler, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel – just a few of the many luminaries who marked her life. Born the daughter of the successful landscape painter Emil Schindler in 1879, Alma long aroused more interest owing to her lifestyle and personality than for her music.

Although her œuvre is modest, her biography reads like an extensive who’s who of early twentieth‑century Vienna. Even in her youth, Alma Schindler was hailed as das schönste Mädchen Wiens (the most beautiful girl in Vienna), and the painter Gustav Klimt was among her early admirers. Her first lover, the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, taught Alma, an outstanding pianist, the fundamentals of composition. Remarkably for the time, Zemlinsky had great admiration for both Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner – a dual, almost contradictory, influence that perhaps shaped Alma’s own style – melodic, yet harmonically original and progressive.

While Alma revered Zemlinsky’s genius, she found him physically repulsive and even expressed contempt for his Jewish origins. Not long after ending the relationship, she was engaged to Gustav Mahler, nineteen years her senior, in 1901. Like Zemlinsky, Mahler was a Jew baptised into the Catholic Church – a detail that apparently mattered little to her. Reflecting on both their music, she once wrote, ‘He thinks nothing at all of my art – and thinks a great deal of his own – and I think nothing of his art and a great deal of my own.’ One condition of their marriage was that Alma give up composition altogether. Indeed, Gustav considered the idea of competing fellow composers in a marriage ‘ridiculous’. To the surprise of all, the strong‑willed bride acquiesced. 

The Mahlers’ social circle included Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern – three figures who would later form the core of the Second Viennese School. At this point, however, they were still steeped in the tradition of late Romanticism and would remain lifelong admirers of Mahler. Incidentally, Schoenberg, like Alma, had studied composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky, with the result that the three composers’ early songs share a musical ‘family tree’ with Alma’s no matter how individual their respective styles.

The Mahlers’ marriage was an unhappy one. Gustav was a solitary workaholic, while Alma was accustomed to being the centre of attention. To Gustav’s chagrin, she would often and openly flirt with other men – including Hans Pfitzner, a self‑proclaimed ‘anti‑modern’ composer and outspoken anti‑Semitic publicist whose compositions are valued primarily for their craftsmanship.

After the death of their five‑year‑old daughter Maria and the diagnosis of Gustav’s heart condition, the marriage spiralled further into crisis. In 1910, Alma began an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. When Gustav discovered the infidelity, he sought marital advice from Sigmund Freud in Leiden. In an attempt to salvage the marriage, Mahler started to pay greater attention to his wife, even encouraging her to take up composition again. He arranged for five of her Lie­der to be published and premiered, though it remains unclear whether these were new works or revised versions of earlier pieces from the Zemlinsky period. Ultimately, however, Gustav’s efforts to save his marriage came too late: he died in May 1911.

Now a wealthy widow in her early thirties surrounded once again by a legion of admirers, Alma soon embarked on several short‑lived relationships before beginning a three‑year affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. This was dangerous given Kokoschka’s pathological jealousy and Alma’s having rekindled her relationship with Gropius in the interim. Her affair with Kokoschka ended when he was sent to the front in 1914.

In 1915, Alma married Walter Gropius, with whom she had a daughter, Manon. Alma would later state that, as a non‑Jew, Gropius was the only one of her husbands who was ‘racially su­ited’ to her. Yet even this marriage was doomed from the start, owing in part to Alma’s affair with Franz Werfel. In early 1918, she was pregnant by the Jewish poet. Her premature infant son died after nine months. To expedite a divorce, Gropius took the blame, getting caught ‘red‑handed’ at a brothel.

Meanwhile, Alma and Gustav Mahler’s daughter Anna, then nineteen, divorced her first husband and married the experimental composer Ernst Krenek. Krenek once described his imposing mother‑in‑law as ‘a magnificently tarted-up battleship’ and a drunk. The professional widow even asked her son‑in‑law to complete Mahler’s Symphony No. 10 from his sketches in order to cash in. Krenek, however, claimed there was material for only two movements, and refused to make up the rest – much to Alma’s chagrin.

Alma demanded a daily quota of lines from Werfel, who earned a middling income as a poet, thereby transforming him into a lucrative novelist. Publishing Mahler’s letters also brought in money, and the Werfels soon owned three houses and lived in considerable comfort. Alma brought out five of her previously unpublished Gesänge. Her third marriage, too, would prove to be an unhappy one: as Alma grew increasingly anti‑Semitic, she began an affair with a priest. 

In 1935, her daughter Manon Gropius died at just eighteen years of age. Alma had considered her her ‘only real child’, dismissing the others as ‘half‑breeds’. This tragedy inspired Alban Berg to compose his Violin Concerto, dem Andenken eines Engels (to the memory of an angel), after which he himself passed away.

After Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany, Alma considered divorcing her Jewish husband. However, at the age of sixty and presumably fearful of loneliness, she instead emigrated to the United States in 1940 with Werfel and her ‘half‑Jewish’ daughter Anna Mahler. In ‘German California’, the Werfels quickly became central figures in the community of artistic émigrés there, mixing socially with Igor Stravinsky and Erich Wolfgang Korngold – the latter once hailed by Gustav Mahler as a ‘new Mozart’. One of Werfel’s books was even made into a successful film. Yet Alma remained unhappy, drinking excessively and engaging in all manner of intrigues. In 1945, Werfel died of a heart attack. 

Alma moved to New York, where her love life was rekindled one last time by an erotic correspondence with her former lover Kokoschka. She published an autobiography of questionable reliability. Alma continued to deny, and refused to treat, her diabetes, which she dismissed as a ‘Jewish disease’. She died on 11 December 1964 at the age of eighty-five.

Translation: Josh Dillon