“It Had to Be Her: Review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler, 2019”, 2020-01-16 ():
[The Browser summary: “The amazing life of Alma Mahler. She married and/or romanced Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel. She was “anti-Semitic, narcissistic, boastful, and untruthful”. Was she also an “ambitious young woman who longed to be a great composer but became instead a great muse to great men?”. Was she an “artist stunted by society’s restrictions on women?”. Was she a “grandiose groupie, expropriating the fame of her husbands and lovers?” Perhaps uniquely, she was all three.” Mahler’s life dramatized the Viennese milieu, with absurd melodrama.]
The Alma Schindler of her early diaries, which she began in 1898, is, indeed, appealing. They reveal an ebullient teenager full of serious opinions and enthusiasms, a flirtatious young woman giddy with the attentions of the cultural elite in culturally elite fin-de-siècle Vienna. Alma writes about crushes and kisses and assignations on the Ringstrasse, about vigorously practicing the piano and earnestly studying composition, about attending the opera, about buying dresses and fighting with her mama. She is a girl—a splendid girl in a splendid city at a splendid time. She is vain and unsure of herself, self-aggrandizing as only a serious, determined, sensitive young person can be. The early diaries, published in English in 1998, end in 1902, just before she married Gustav Mahler. Alma lived for another sixty-two years, years of vainglorious strutting, scheming, and disloyalty, years chronicled by her own memoirs and by her later diaries (which have not been translated into English). Mahler scholars have a name for the challenge that arises from her unreliable tendencies: the Alma Problem. “She is routinely accused of massaging the facts to serve her own legacy”, Haste writes, “of suppressing or editing her husband Gustav Mahler’s published letters to remove critical references to her, for instance—acts seen, particularly by Mahler scholars (for whom she was for some time their principal source), as tampering with the archive.”…Touched by her husband’s new devotion and convinced that he would die if she left him, Alma sent Gropius away. Gustav wrote her daily love poems, smothered her slippers in kisses, and listened again to her music, pronouncing it good and begging her to resume composing. Alma was undeniably talented, and her songs are admired today, but this episode points as much to her extraordinary power as a muse as to her gifts as an artist. Her daughter Anna said that when Alma
just stopped in the doorway, you could immediately feel an electric charge… She was an incredibly passionate woman… And she really paid attention to everyone she spoke to. And encouraged them… She was able to enchant people in a matter of seconds.
Albrecht Joseph, eventually Anna’s fifth husband, who was shocked by Alma’s dowdiness when he first met the legendary seductress in 1931, nevertheless noted that her “unique gift” was “a profound, uncanny understanding of what it was that [creative] men tried to achieve, an enthusiastic, orgiastic persuasion that they could do what they aimed at, and that she, Alma, fully understood what it was.” The intensity of her belief in art and genius had the effect of creating an almost violent sympathy. Gustav, like the other men she loved, did not think he could survive artistically without her. ·…And then there was Kokoschka. Alma later described her three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka as “one violent struggle of love. Never before had I experienced so much strain, so much hell and so much paradise.” Jealous and controlling, the artist stalked her, patrolling her street after he left her house to make sure no other man visited. She refused to marry him, so while she was in Paris he stole her documents and posted the banns in the Döbling parish hall. “Oskar Kokoschka could only make love to me with the most peculiar game playing”, she later wrote. “As I refused to hit him during our hours of love, he began conjuring up the most appalling images of murder” of his supposed rivals “while whispering murkily to himself.” One night when she sang Parsifal at the piano, he whispered “a new, eerie text” into her ear, which caused her to scream and cry, then to swallow a toxic dose of bromine. (Kokoschka called the doctor.) · And through it all, he painted her. When she had an abortion (she wrote that she was afraid of “what might grow in me”), Kokoschka took a blood-stained cotton pad from her and kept it with him, saying, “That is, and will always be, my only child.” He painted bloody, murdered children. He drew “Alma Mahler Spinning with Kokoschka’s Intestine.” He insisted that she cover her arms with long sleeves. Kokoschka painted Alma entwined with him in a boat on a stormy sea, he painted Alma rising to the heavens while he stood in hell surrounded by snakes. Anna watched him work and asked, “Can’t you paint anything else except Mommy?” · When war came, Alma’s reaction was, as even the temperate Haste must admit, “an astonishing flourish of self-aggrandizement.” “I sometimes imagine”, Alma wrote, “that I was the one who ignited this whole world conflagration in order to experience some kind of development or enrichment—even if it be only death.” By now, she wanted to purify herself of the “evil fascination” of Kokoschka. She taunted him until he joined the cavalry, then broke off their relationship in unkind letters. In despair, Kokoschka insisted on being sent to the front, where he was wounded so badly he was reported dead in the Viennese papers. Though she later defiantly published a facsimile of Mahler’s manuscript of his Tenth Symphony, revealing (for a good price) his intimate, despairing notes, she was less keen on allowing her own letters to reach the public. After rushing to Kokoschka’s studio with her set of keys, she removed and burned her notes to him. · Though Kokoschka had not in fact died, her interest in him had. She was back to writing letters to Gropius. When she saw him while he was on leave, Haste writes, “their passion was rekindled”, and they got married. Kokoschka dealt with this rejection by commissioning a life-sized Alma doll, with instructions to “please make it possible 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 doll, covered in fluffy swan skin, suffered an ignominious end, beheaded and bedraggled in a courtyard the morning after Kokoschka threw a raucous farewell party for it.