The Aesthetic Empire of Alma Mahler-Werfel
The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, she was born Alma Maria Schindler, the daughter of the operetta singer Anna Bergen and the landscape painter Emil Schindler. She hoped to make her way as a composer, but that dream ended when, in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, she married the musical titan Gustav Mahler. After Mahler’s death, in 1911, she had an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then was briefly married to the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Her final husband was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she followed into exile, first in France and then in the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles. She lived until 1964, the most legendary widow of the twentieth century. Those who write about her—there have been eight biographies and half a dozen novels—tend to refer to her as Alma. This has the unfortunate effect of making her sound like a young girl in the company of grown men. Better to call her by the name under which she is buried: Mahler-Werfel.
She was, and remains, smolderingly controversial. The German writer Oliver Hilmes begins his 2004 biography, “Malevolent Muse” (originally published as “Witwe im Wahn,” or “Wacky Widow”), with a damning sampling of the epithets that have been hurled at her: a “dissolute female” (Richard Strauss), a “monster” (Theodor W. Adorno), an “oversized Valkyrie” who “drank like a drainpipe” (Claire Goll), “the worst human being I ever knew” (Gina Kaus). Mahler-Werfel was described as an incorrigible antisemite who enslaved Jewish men and drove them to early graves. According to one Mahler enthusiast, she was a “vain, repulsive, brazen creature.” Hilmes quotes a few ostensibly positive comments as well, although the praise is faint: Erich Maria Remarque dubs her a “wild, blond wench, violent, boozing.” In the end, the biographer categorizes his subject as a “classic hysterical woman.”
In recent years, Mahler-Werfel has received more sympathetic attention. The late British writer Cate Haste, in her 2019 biography, “Passionate Spirit,” tries to dispel the image of a “devouring maenad,” her title implicitly challenging Hilmes’s. Haste emphasizes the tribulations that Mahler-Werfel suffered as a wife and a mother; she had four children, only one of whom lived past the age of eighteen. Susanne Rode-Breymann’s “Alma Mahler-Werfel,” published in German in 2014, focusses on Mahler-Werfel’s composing, her artistic passions, and her dynamic friendships with dozens of major artists. In the music world, amid ongoing efforts to honor female composers, Mahler-Werfel’s songs have come to the fore. Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic will perform five of them alongside Mahler’s Fifth Symphony next month. There is even an opera—Ella Milch-Sheriff’s “Alma,” which had its première last year, at the Vienna Volksoper.
Rehabilitation can go only so far. Casting Mahler-Werfel purely as a victim minimizes the power she wielded, particularly in her relations with Jews. At various points in her life, she was both oppressed and oppressor. We are confronted by a personality of maddening complexity—no less complex than that of any of the august men around her. At the age of eighteen, she wrote of her desire to accomplish a “great deed,” in the form of a “really good opera, which no woman has yet done.” Although that goal eluded her, she found another kind of greatness, by overseeing, from the fortress of her taste, a cultural empire. She was, her friend Friedrich Torberg wrote, a “catalyst of unbelievable intensity.” Once, in conversation with the Austrian journalist Bertha Zuckerkandl, Mahler-Werfel spoke of having to handle the moods of a genius like Mahler. Zuckerkandl quoted the adage about no man being a hero to his butler, adding, “Is there a genius for us genius women?”
Mahler-Werfel’s papers reside at the Van Pelt Library, at the University of Pennsylvania. Browsing through them is like attending a red-carpet gala for the chief artistic luminaries of the early twentieth century. Beyond the husbands and the lovers, you find letters from personalities as varied as Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Luise Rainer, and Thornton Wilder. Benjamin Britten asks Mahler-Werfel to accept the dedication of his song cycle “Nocturne”; Erich Wolfgang Korngold does the same for his Violin Concerto. Igor Stravinsky sends what appears to be a handmade Christmas card. Lotte Lenya tells her to write a memoir. Marlene Dietrich supplies a reading of Franz Werfel’s astrological chart. Leonard Bernstein asks, in German, to see the score of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. One scrap of paper contains a guest list for a dinner party that she hosted in Los Angeles: Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir.
At the core of the collection are Mahler-Werfel’s diaries, which offer a chronicle as indispensable as it is problematic. The most detailed entries cover the years 1898 to 1902, when she was coming of age in Vienna. Turning the pages of the journals, which have been published complete in German and abridged in English, you see items typical of a vivacious young person: holidays are celebrated, faces sketched, vacation postcards pasted in, crushes confessed. (Her first kiss was with Gustav Klimt.) There are also signs of intellectual ambition. The first volume is emblazoned with a paraphrase of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Always act as if the maxims of your will could become the principle of a universal law.” Several pages are given over to excerpts from Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Wagner performances elicit ecstatic responses. Leading musicians are briskly assessed: Mahler is “a genius through and through,” Strauss a “genius pig.” Such pronouncements were to be expected from young men, less so from young women. She asks a teacher, “Why are boys taught to think and girls not?”
Mahler-Werfel enjoys describing the lavish circles in which her family moves, yet she keeps a certain distance. Her father, whom she worshipped, died when she was twelve; her mother went on to marry the painter Carl Moll, with whom she had already been having an affair. The young Alma took a cynical view of her mother’s displays of grief and developed a lifelong aversion to funerals. It was not a particularly warm or happy family, as its subsequent history attests. In the nineteen-thirties, Moll embraced Nazism; his daughter Maria, Alma’s half sister, was married to a judge who became a Nazi official. All three killed themselves in 1945, as the Red Army approached Vienna. Margarethe, another half sister, was institutionalized at an early age and died in a German psychiatric facility in 1942. A researcher who has studied Margarethe’s case told me that she should be considered a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program.
Mahler-Werfel took refuge in music. An excellent pianist, she could sight-read her way through difficult scores, including entire Wagner operas. Decades later, she would while away the hours playing Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” though she would stop when she became aware of someone else’s presence. In composition, her principal teacher was Alexander Zemlinsky, one of the finest musical minds in Vienna. Zemlinsky, who also mentored Schoenberg, discerned real promise in Mahler-Werfel but chided her for getting distracted by the social whirl. Unfortunately, he himself created a major distraction by falling in love with her.
Mahler-Werfel composed dozens of pieces in various forms. Only seventeen songs are known to survive. They are imaginatively crafted, showing particular invention in their harmonic writing. “Die Stille Stadt,” or “The Quiet Town,” a setting of a poem by Richard Dehmel, begins with an ambiguous assemblage of chords of the kind you often find in Zemlinsky or early Schoenberg: a D-major triad; Wagner’s “Tristan” chord, a half-diminished seventh; and a dominant seventh on D-flat. In the following measure, we land in D minor, but ambiguity persists. Before the middle of the second measure, Mahler-Werfel has run through all twelve tones of the chromatic scale. An especially fine touch is the way the initial vocal descent is echoed by the piano, but with a B-flat raised to B-natural. In the third bar, the harmony veers into B major, adding to the unmoored, free-floating atmosphere—matching Dehmel’s image of a town wrapped in nocturnal fog.
Do these songs indicate a major composer in the making? Mahler-Werfel’s sterner critics scoff at the idea. The Mahler biographer Jens Malte Fischer grumbles that only an “embittered feminist dogma” would place her music on the level of Mahler’s. But no one is claiming that. Instead, the case of Mahler-Werfel dramatizes how opportunity, environment, and other contingencies shape artistic careers. Rode-Breymann draws a useful comparison to Alban Berg, whose sensuous, amorphous early work resembles Mahler-Werfel’s. Berg’s youthful songs offer few hints of “Wozzeck,” “Lulu,” and the Violin Concerto. But he had the chance to develop, with Schoenberg as his domineering guide. Zemlinsky contemplated sending Mahler-Werfel to study with Schoenberg, who possibly could have molded her as he molded Berg. When Schoenberg later studied her songs, he wrote to her, “You really have a great deal of talent.”
The question of Mahler-Werfel’s musical future was made moot by the advent of Mahler, whom she met in Vienna in 1901, at a party at Bertha Zuckerkandl’s. A colossally driven child of the Austrian provinces, Mahler had been directing the Vienna Court Opera for four years and was surrounded by a somewhat sycophantic circle of admirers. Mahler-Werfel, by contrast, promptly picked a fight with him by defending a Zemlinsky ballet that he had deemed incomprehensible. When, at another gathering, she was asked what she thought of Mahler’s music, she said, “I know little of it, but what I do know doesn’t appeal to me.” Mahler’s friends were aghast, but the man himself laughed. He seemed ready to share his life with a woman of pugnacious intelligence—one whose artistic tastes were, as Rode-Breymann points out, in many ways more progressive than her future husband’s. He had an old-fashioned attachment to Goethe and Schiller; she was abreast of Ibsen, Zola, Wilde, and the glittering artists of the Secession, of whom her stepfather was one.
The relationship moved quickly toward an engagement. In her diary, Mahler-Werfel expressed adoration for Mahler but wondered whether he would support her creative ambition, as Zemlinsky had done. She received her answer in a letter written on December 19, 1901—a twenty-page diatribe triggered by a casual comment that she had made about getting back to writing music. Mahler delivers an ultimatum: she must cease composing or the marriage is off. The essential problem, as Mahler sees it, is a practical one: if his wife finds herself in the mood to compose, she will be unable to attend to his needs. He writes, “From now on, you have only one profession: _to make me happy! _” Further, Mahler mocks the idea that a young woman could claim to possess a creative identity: “What do you imagine individuality to consist of? Do you consider yourself an individual?” Long after the point has been made, Mahler thunders on:
