Ravinia 2023 Issue 3

Left: Oskar Kokoschka’s best-known work, Die Windsbraut (1914; The Bride of the Wind or The Tempest ), is a self-portrait of the painter lying alongside the recently widowed Alma, created shortly after their meeting in 1912. Right: Early in their acquaintance, Alma asked to sit for a portrait; Kokoschka obliged with an iridescent-hued oil painting on canvas, similar in format to Gioconda (the Mona Lisa ), including the enigmatic facial expression. “ I want to do something really remarkable . Would like to compose a really good opera — something no woman has ever achieved. … Please God, give me some great mission , give me something great to do! Make me happy ! ” Prior to their marriage, Mahler famously sent Alma a 22-page letter in which he made it clear that she would have to abandon her own composi- tion activities: “The role of composer, the worker’s role, falls to me; yours is that of a loving companion and understanding partner.” Alma’s acqui- escence set the stage for the dynam- ics that would strain their marriage nearly to the breaking point, and she sadly wrote, “I have been firmly taken by the arm and led away from myself.” It was during the time of their whirlwind courtship and first year of marriage that Gustav composed his Fifth Symphony, and the famous Adagietto has been said to be a love-letter to his bride. Perhaps it was frustration of her creative instincts that eventually led Alma into an affair with the founder of the legendary Bauhaus school of design, Walter Gropius. In 1910, having learned of Al- ma’s affair, Gustav became consumed by anxiety that she was about to leave him and reluctantly sought counseling from none other than Sigmund Freud. The two living legends met at a spa in Leyden and are reported to have walked and talked for four hours. In a 1934 letter to Theodor Reik, Freud wrote, “The visit appeared necessary for him, because his wife at that time rebelled against the fact that he with- drew his libido from her. In highly interesting expeditions with him through his life history, we discovered his personal conditions for love, especially in his Holy Mary complex …” Freud’s mention of the “Holy Mary complex” is particularly insightful considering that only three weeks after their meeting, Gustav would conduct the premiere of his Eighth Symphony, the second half of which is a celebra- tion of the Mater Glorioso, or Virgin Mary, and the “eternal feminine.” Gustav wrote to Alma afterwards that the session left him “filled with joy.” To win back his wife’s affection, he now encouraged her to compose, and even edited and arranged for the 1910 publication of her Five Songs (four of which will be performed on July 19 along with Mahler’s Fifth Symphony). But it may have been too little, too late, and even as he rehearsed for the premiere of his Eighth Symphony, her assignations with Gropius continued. Gustav, who had been diagnosed with a serious heart ailment, died in May of the following year. Alma would marry Gropius on Au- gust 18, 1915, but not before engaging in a tempestuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who immortal- ized her in his painting The Bride of the Wind (also the title of a dreadful 2001 film biography of Alma). But while he was serving in the Austrian army during the First World War, she abandoned him to return to Gropius. Kokoschka, who would later claim that Alma had aborted his child, sub- sequently had a life-size, anatomically correct doll constructed to look like Alma, and he actually would appear in public with it at cafés or the theater. After she married Gropius, Alma gave birth to a baby boy in 1918, but the story told in gossip-loving Vienna was that it was actually the love-child of writer Franz Werfel, with whom she had begun an affair in the fall of 1917; she and Gropius divorced in October 1920. She lived openly with Werfel for years, finally marrying him in 1929, but the onset of the Second World War forced them to flee ultimately to California, where a couple of Werfel’s works were converted to Hollywood films and where she presided over stellar gatherings that included the likes of Max Reinhardt, Igor Stravin- sky, Benjamin Britten, Bruno Walter, and Thomas Mann. Following Werfel’s death in 1951, Alma moved to New York, where she lived the rest of her life in a two-room apartment. The headline of her obituary in the New York Times listed her as “Alma M. Werfel, Widow of Writer,” but today she is most frequently referred to as Alma Mahler, despite her two subsequent husbands and that, during the 50 years that she outlived the composer, she worked assiduously to manipulate the historical record of their relationship, fabricating records, forging portions of his letters to her, destroying all but one of her letters to him, and writing a rather fanciful volume of memoirs. Her PR cam- paign was so thorough and difficult to discern that historians have actually coined the term “The Alma Problem” to describe their predicament. As her own daughter exclaimed to a biog- rapher of Franz Werfel, “If you were planning on using my mother’s mem- oirs as a basis for your research, then you should forget the whole project right here and now.” Today musicologists are beginning to focus less on the verbal record and more on the musical one. Alma wrote some 50 songs—or even twice that, by some accounts—but only 14 are still extant. Dianne Follet, who has taught women’s music history at Muhlenberg College, wrote, “Her songs, perhaps even more than her writings … reveal Alma’s true nature. They verge on the melodramatic, as did Alma; they are complex, as was Alma; they are contradictory, as was Alma. It is in her songs that we meet her, and it is through her songs that she assumes her rightful place.” Perhaps we should give Alma the final word. In November 1901, she wrote, “A new idea occurred to me: art is the outcome of love. While love, for a man, is a tool for creativity, for a woman it’s the principal motive.” Currently a freelance writer, John Schauer was formerly the editor of Ravinia magazine for 22 years. Diary quotes are from the translation by Antony Beaumont. RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JULY 17 – JULY 30, 2023 20