Ravinia 2023 Issue 3

HOWDO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE ALMA? A FRACTURED HISTORY BELIES ALMA MAHLER ’S DEVOTION TO HER OWN CREATION BY JOHN SCHAUER LESS THAN SIX MONTHS after the death of Alma Schindler on Decem- ber 11, 1964, the satirical songwriter 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 high- ly entertaining but does little justice to a figure who has frustrated historians attempting an accurate portrait. Alma Schindler, born August 31, 1879, in Vienna, has come to be seen in two different guises. Long famous primarily for her marriages to and affairs with celebrated and creative men, she has, on the one hand, been lionized as a female incarnation of inspiration, and on the other derided as a promiscuous 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.” (Hilmes went so far as to title his biography Malevolent Muse .) Viennese journalist Mariet- ta Torberg (1920–2000) declared, “She was a grande dame and at the same time a cesspool.” Even her own daughter Anna (1904–1988) recog- nized 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 remark- able society that shaped her and was, in turn, shaped by her. Like Alma, Vienna had two distinct natures in the decades preceding the First World War. One was the whipped-cream- and-operetta Vienna of popular imag- ination—prancing Lipizzan stallions, Strauss waltzes, fairy-tale rococo palaces, and a flair for pastry unsur- passed anywhere in the world. But Vienna also had a darker aspect during the years that Alma lived there. The Imperial City was the capital of an empire that existed more in theory than practice, and the growing nationalism of its constituent Alma Mahler in 1909 RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 17 – JULY 30, 2023 16