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:
Milch-Sheriff adapts this text in her “Alma” opera and juxtaposes an allusion to the funereal drumbeat of Mahler’s Third Symphony.
The musicologist Nancy Newman, in a 2022 article titled “#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed,” dissects Mahler’s letter in light of the #MeToo movement. Newman identifies signs of what has come to be known as gaslighting: in this instance, a man’s effort to distort a woman’s sense of reality, leading her to “doubt herself and subordinate her ambition to his.” Emblematic of that strategy is Mahler’s offhand obliteration of his future wife’s compositional ambitions. When they first met, Mahler showed interest in her work; in the letter, though, he dismisses that work as trivial, while admitting that he has not examined any of it. In another devious move, he disavows being the sort of husband who expects his wife to be a mere housekeeper, even as he demands just that role of her. Especially cruel is his assertion that men praise her music only because she is beautiful. “Just imagine the situation if you were ugly,” he writes. As Newman notes, the entire performance was gratuitous, since the customary domestic duties would have curtailed Mahler-Werfel’s composing anyway.
Mahler’s defenders insist that he didn’t ban his wife from composing; rather, he simply offered her a choice. Rode-Breymann counters that freedom of choice was illusory for young women of the period: until they married, they usually had to remain with their families. Mahler-Werfel, moreover, had just moved into a house overseen by a stepfather whom she distrusted. (In her diary, she compared her situation to Napoleon’s exile on St. Helena.) Yet Rode-Breymann acknowledges that Mahler-Werfel already felt uncertainty over her composing—she wrote in 1900, “What can a pathetic little woman like me achieve? Nothing!”—and that Mahler should not bear sole blame for her subsequent musical silence. She retained a degree of agency, however circumscribed. One other power differential bears mentioning: Mahler, as a Jew, encountered prejudices that his wife never had to face. “He was a Jewish Christian and had it hard,” Mahler-Werfel once wrote. “I was a heathen Christian and had it easy.”
The marriage was charged, combustible, and by no means one-sided. At first, Mahler-Werfel found herself trapped in the monastic world of a man who was always “striving in the infinite.” She wrote in her diary, “I feel as if my wings have been clipped.” She executed not only domestic tasks but also professional ones: copying out her husband’s scores, managing his finances, mitigating noise disturbances. Still, she asserted herself and began to influence the trajectory of Mahler’s career. It was through her that Mahler encountered the Secessionist painter Alfred Roller, who, in 1903, created a duskily evocative staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” at the Court Opera—a landmark in operatic history. She introduced Mahler to Schoenberg and other radical youths. And she responded avidly to the abstract, proto-modernistic language of Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, which remained her favorites. It might be argued that she counterbalanced her husband’s tendency toward bombastic naïveté.
A period of crisis began in 1907, when Maria Mahler, the couple’s first child, died of diphtheria, at the age of four. (Anna, the second child, lived until 1988.) The same year, Mahler was given a diagnosis of heart disease. Seeking a less stressful routine, he and the family moved to New York, where he took a post at the Metropolitan Opera; in 1909, he took over the New York Philharmonic. Mahler-Werfel had a miscarriage and suffered from depression. Relations grew strained. Finally, in 1910, came a fabled explosion that has been dramatized in several Gustav-and-Alma movies. At an Austrian spa, Mahler-Werfel embarked on an affair with Gropius, who had yet to win renown as an architect. After she left the spa to join her husband at his summer composing retreat, Gropius bombarded her with letters, addressing one of them not to an agreed-upon intermediary but to Mahler himself. Gropius then decided to confront Mahler in person, essentially demanding the release of his wife. Mahler handled this melodrama with remarkable composure; apparently, the two men digressed into a discussion of the brokenness of modern art. Mahler-Werfel was left to choose the man she wanted. She decided to have it both ways, remaining at Mahler’s side while secretly continuing the affair with Gropius.
Late that summer, Mahler-Werfel was out for a walk when she heard strange music emanating from Mahler’s studio: not the agonized Tenth Symphony, which was then being sketched, but her own songs, which Mahler had found among her papers. “There is genius in you,” he said to her. Mahler arranged for five of the songs to be published. Mahler-Werfel was gratified by the gesture, although it came too late to revive her compositional drive; she wrote a little more, but the spark had left her. The couple reconciled during Mahler’s final New York season, in 1910-11. Their closeness deepened when Mahler fell mortally ill. He died on May 18, 1911, in Vienna. Whatever difficulties they had experienced, Mahler-Werfel knew that she had shared her life with an immense musical force, and she propagated Mahler’s cause ever after, living long enough to witness his reputation soar posthumously. But she later wrote, of that 1901 letter, “Somewhere in me burned a wound that has never entirely healed.”
The funeral meats were not yet cold when Mahler-Werfel began to be besieged by men who wished to take charge of her. The British composer Cyril Scott sent a condolence card with a brooding photographic portrait attached. Gropius was first in line, but he pushed too hard for a commitment, failing to understand the depth of Mahler-Werfel’s grief. After an encounter in the summer of 1911, he drafted a letter to Mahler-Werfel with a fatuous metaphor: “These days were one big symphony of love, from the most extreme adagio to a roaring furioso.” Later that year, Mahler-Werfel had a fling with the biologist Paul Kammerer, for whom she briefly worked as a lab assistant, overseeing a colony of praying mantises. When the relationship didn’t pan out, Kammerer threatened to shoot himself at Mahler’s grave. Hysteria was in the air, and it did not emanate from Mahler-Werfel.
The most extreme case was Kokoschka, whose affair with Mahler-Werfel began in 1912, three years after he won notoriety for his garish stage piece “Murderer, Hope of Women.” Kokoschka’s Alma obsession went deep enough that it constitutes an entire phase of his career. In the celebrated 1913 painting “The Bride of the Wind,” the lovers embrace in a Wagnerian welter of color. A portrait from the same period casts Mahler-Werfel in a Mona Lisa pose, though with the famous smile distorted into something like a smirk or a grimace. Among other Alma-themed images, the most spectacular shows Kokoschka having his intestines unwound from his body, with Mahler-Werfel operating a spinning wheel.
In her autobiography, Mahler-Werfel wrote that she had dreaded the idea of bearing Kokoschka’s child, because he struck her as “virtually murderous.” Indeed, she got an abortion early in the relationship. Kokoschka’s behavior justified her fears. He lurked outside her house and monitored her visitors. In a letter, he imagined “scraping from your brain with a knife every single one of those alien ideas that run counter to me.” Like Gropius, he resented her loyalty to Mahler, accusing her of performing a “dance of death” with a “man who was alien to you.” He tried to overcome her resistance to marrying him by prematurely publishing a wedding announcement. When, after a succession of such incidents, Mahler-Werfel backed away, Kokoschka’s mania only escalated. Notoriously, he commissioned a life-size doll of his love, which he paraded about, mutilated, and left in his garden, supposedly attracting the attention of the police. He further ventilated his frustration in his play “Orpheus and Eurydice,” in which Orpheus goes to the underworld, retrieves Eurydice from Hades (Mahler), and then stabs her to death. None of this stopped Mahler-Werfel from hailing Kokoschka as a genius. The Mona Lisa picture hung in her study to the end.
Amid the Kokoschka chaos, Mahler-Werfel returned to the relatively stable Gropius, marrying him in 1915. Because Gropius was fighting in the First World War, the couple saw little of each other, although they did produce a daughter, Manon. Mahler-Werfel admired Gropius’s architectural talent but had little sympathy for the hyper-objectivity of the emergent Bauhaus movement. Furthermore, Gropius turned out to be, in Mahler-Werfel’s eyes, a Spiessbürger, a provincial philistine. Her daughter Anna acidly commented, “She was married to an Aryan once. She was so bored.” In 1917, Mahler-Werfel met a man who interested her a great deal more: the twenty-seven-year-old Franz Werfel, noted for poems of flamboyant Expressionist character. Two years earlier, Mahler-Werfel had set one of them to music: “Der Erkennende,” or “The Recognizing One,” which speaks of the inevitability of loneliness. (“How we push it away, what we love.”) The song is one of Mahler-Werfel’s last compositions, and perhaps her finest. The music is stark, declamatory, and ironic in its use of gentler major-key harmonies for some of the darkest lines.
By 1918, Mahler-Werfel was pregnant again. Gropius assumed at first that he was the father, but it turned out to be Werfel. The labor nearly killed her; Martin, the child, lived less than a year. Gropius eventually agreed to a divorce, though not without an ugly burst of bitterness. He wrote to Mahler-Werfel, “Your noble being has been degraded by the Jewish spirit.” Kokoschka’s comment about Mahler being “alien” to Mahler-Werfel was probably uttered in the same vein.
Within a decade of Mahler’s death, Mahler-Werfel had acquired a reputation as a femme fatale, a sort of intellectual dominatrix. In 1915, the Viennese satirist Peter Altenberg published a vicious sketch, titled “Alma,” in which Mahler-Werfel is depicted flirting with a lover—presumably Kokoschka—at a performance of her late husband’s “Kindertotenlieder.” The scene is almost certainly fictional—Mahler-Werfel denied attending the event in question, and Kokoschka was in Italy at the time—but it gained traction all the same. What might be called the slut-shaming of Mahler-Werfel reached its peak after her death, when the songwriter Tom Lehrer wrote a sniggering ballad called “Alma”: “Her lovers were many and varied / From the day she began her beguine / There were three famous ones whom she married / And God knows how many between.” There was, in fact, nothing particularly outré about her love life, other than the fact that she allowed herself the same freedom as the men with whom she consorted.
Werfel, a Prague-born, German-speaking Jew who had won praise from Kafka in his youth, was a different sort of man: convivial, buoyant, only moderately vain, lacking in extreme ambition. “He does not hound me to death like the others,” Mahler-Werfel wrote in her diary. In contrast to Gropius and Kokoschka, Werfel unreservedly loved Mahler’s music and felt no jealousy of the dead. The new suitor earned extra points for reciting aloud the text of Schoenberg’s unfinished oratorio “Jacob’s Ladder.” At the time, Werfel adhered to bohemian ways, pontificating in cafés and shouting slogans at leftist demonstrations. Mahler-Werfel set about reforming him. In place of billowy poems and mystical dramas, he began producing hefty middlebrow novels, many of which proved wildly successful.
Some of Werfel’s friends thought that this metamorphosis had ruined his literary gift. Werfel said, “I don’t know whether Alma is my greatest fortune or my greatest disaster.” Yet the novels include several formidable achievements: “Class Reunion,” a tale of high-school sadism; “Embezzled Heaven,” which touches on the misery of exile; the eerie sci-fi novel “Star of the Unborn”; and, above all, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” a 1933 chronicle of the Armenian genocide which doubles as a prophecy of the Holocaust. Mahler-Werfel was intimately involved in these projects and in some instances proposed their subject matter. In the case of “Musa Dagh,” she recognized the book’s resonance. In October, 1933, she wrote in her diary, “It is a gigantic achievement for a Jew to write such a work at such a time.”
Less salubrious was Mahler-Werfel’s own political evolution in the twenties and thirties. Enthralled by Mussolini, she gravitated toward Fascism and supported such like-minded Austrian politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. (So did Werfel, who wrote propaganda on behalf of the Austrofascist regime that came to power in 1933.) Hitler impressed her less. “NO DUCE,” she writes in her diary, after seeing him speak in Breslau in 1932. Six years later, after Britain and France had capitulated at Munich, she seems to have warmed to the Führer, calling him a “genius” who deserves the “greatest admiration.” Hilmes, in his prosecutorial biography, quotes this passage in an effort to portray Mahler-Werfel as an outright Nazi. But he omits a subsequent passage in which she retracts that praise, or, more precisely, thinks past it: “When I see the nastiness that the Nazis carry out—do I belong there? Absolutely never!” Ultimately, she is a reactionary of the Never Hitler camp. She accepts her strange fate: “I must now wander to the end of the world with a people who are strange to me.”
The people in question are, of course, the Jews. Anti-Jewish slurs appear in Mahler-Werfel’s diary from the beginning, but they proliferate during and after the First World War, when antisemitism intensified in German-speaking lands. Some of her vilest comments fell on those closest to her: she would tell Werfel not to “act like a Jew,” and describe her daughter Anna as a Mischling—the Nazi term for a person of mixed race. Yet her rhetoric was too confused to qualify as racialized hatred. Even as she ranted that Jews were infecting politics with Communism, she celebrated Jewish artists. “The Jews are at once the most unheard-of danger and the greatest fortune for humanity,” she wrote in 1919, echoing her youthful hero Nietzsche. The fact that she inhabited a mostly Jewish milieu adds to the irrationality of her position. It went beyond the proverbial “best friends” situation: some of her best husbands were Jews.
Catastrophically, Mahler-Werfel kept up her bigoted outbursts after she and Werfel went into exile. At a gathering in Los Angeles, she announced that Hitler had done some good things and that stories of Nazi concentration-camp horrors were “fabrications put out by the refugees.” The writer Albrecht Joseph recalled the scene in a memoir:
Joseph, who later married Anna Mahler, felt that Mahler-Werfel was playing a “cat and mouse game” at such moments—pressing buttons, testing limits, exercising a “craving for power.” Her heavy consumption of alcohol didn’t help matters.
Werfel concocted a more tortuous explanation for his wife’s grotesque behavior. In a letter to his sister Marianne Rieser, he wrote, “The inner and outer life of Alma proves that she could not exist without Jewish spirit and Jewish soul.” The fact that she sometimes sounded antisemitic was, in Werfel’s view, a result of an elemental cussedness: “In her feelings of independence she is the wildest anarchist, in her fanaticism for beauty a monarchist. She is human in daily practice, but she hates humanity-loving phrases.” Werfel argued that his wife “suffered not under Jewishness but from Jewishness, as only certain very proud and sincere Jews can suffer it.” In other words, she exhibited the same kind of internal conflict that affected so many Jews of the fin de siècle, Mahler and Werfel included.
Mahler-Werfel’s actions tell a less dismal story than her words do. In February, 1938, on the eve of the Anschluss, she and Werfel were staying in Capri. Mahler-Werfel, sensing what was coming, ordered her husband to stay put and went home to Vienna, where she emptied bank accounts, secured jewelry, and arranged for the extraction of precious documents. The couple settled in the South of France, where Mahler-Werfel worked furiously to raise funds and organize a new life. Her most improbable scheme was to sell a Bruckner manuscript—the first three movements of the Third Symphony, which had been in Mahler’s possession—to none other than Hitler, a Bruckner fanatic. Her Nazi brother-in-law, Richard Eberstaller, unsuccessfully tried to mediate the deal. Mahler-Werfel was carrying the Bruckner score when, in September, 1940, she escaped from Nazi-occupied France to Spain through the foothills of the Pyrenees, in the company of Werfel and three members of the Mann family. “She was always ahead of us,” Golo Mann later recalled of the trek. “She did it like a goat.”
That same year, Mahler-Werfel had published “Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters,” a candid, ambivalent, yet fundamentally adulatory memoir of her first marriage. In the foreword, she notes that the Nazis had recently removed Rodin’s bust of Mahler from the foyer of the Vienna State Opera. The book is a counter-monument in prose, depicting an artist who upheld the highest ideals of German art. At the same time, it fires darts at artists who remained in Nazi Germany, notably Richard Strauss. Felix Salten, the author of “Bambi,” grasped what Mahler-Werfel was doing: “It was so masterly of you to have this book published right now.” Despite some inevitable inaccuracies and omissions, the memoir remains the best portrait of Mahler in print—an act of complex, intense devotion.
Amid the swirl of affairs, scandals, and imbroglios that make up this astonishing life, one element remains fixed: Mahler-Werfel’s inexhaustible passion for music and the arts. For all her grandiose blather, she was an extraordinarily attentive reader, spectator, and, above all, listener. Her radar for talent was nearly infallible, and she used Mahler’s royalties and other sources of income to support artists in need. She functioned as a kind of freelance curator, exulting vicariously in the triumphs of her favorites.
Looking through the University of Pennsylvania archives, I was struck by the procession of illustrious conductors—Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Willem Mengelberg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugene Ormandy—who sought her advice and approval. To some extent, the conductors saw her as a stand-in for Mahler, yet she also counted as a potentate in her own right. In a 1948 letter, Dimitri Mitropoulos is dismayed because he has heard that Mahler-Werfel disliked his rendition of Mahler’s Seventh. She reassures him that she was merely unhappy about a seating issue and that the performance itself was “wunderschön,” even if the first movement was too slow. She is conspicuously friendly to Bernstein, addressing him in one postcard as “My young genius.” The fact that Bernstein was both a composer and a conductor counted heavily in his favor: in her Mahler memoir, she wrote that reproduction is ephemeral but production is eternal.
Mahler-Werfel’s contacts with composers overrode national and stylistic boundaries. Her friendship with Schoenberg lasted five decades and was remarkably free of discord. She may have once written in her diary, “Schoenberg is too Jewish for me,” but Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, the composer’s eldest surviving child, remembers her as a stalwart friend of the family. Mahler-Werfel also opened herself to modern French and Russian styles, befriending Milhaud, Ravel, and Stravinsky. Later, she detected greatness in the young Benjamin Britten. Her youngest beneficiary was Christian Wolff, the son of the émigré publishers Kurt and Helen Wolff, who as a teen-ager had joined the avant-garde circle around John Cage. Wolff, now ninety, treasures a copy of Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces that Mahler-Werfel gave him seventy years ago—a score signed to her by the composer.
Berg, Mahler-Werfel’s quasi-doppelgänger, won her deepest allegiance. When, in the early twenties, Berg was struggling to complete “Wozzeck,” Mahler-Werfel offered him financial aid. Later, she underwrote the publication of the opera’s vocal score, which enabled Berg’s breakthrough as a composer. In 1923, two years before the première, she was playing through “Wozzeck” every day at the piano—an exceptional feat. In a letter to Berg, she said of the score, “My impression is ever greater, ever more significant, everlasting.” Perhaps she recognized in the work’s Mahlerian modernism the outlines of the masterpiece she had once yearned to write. Fittingly, the published score of “Wozzeck” bears the handwritten legend “Dedicated to Alma Maria Mahler.” Berg’s Violin Concerto, his final completed composition, is written in memory of Manon Gropius, who died, of polio, in 1935. The concerto is an image of a beautiful world disintegrating.
Mahler-Werfel’s final years were taxing, for herself and for others. Her health declined; she lost most of her hearing; she struggled to keep up the façade of the grande veuve, or “great widow,” as Thomas Mann called her. “Sometimes she was magnificent, and sometimes she was absolutely abominable,” Anna Mahler later said. The daughter achieved what had eluded the mother: she made her way as an artist, finding success as a sculptor.
Marina Mahler, Anna’s daughter, lives between France and Italy, running the Mahler Foundation and overseeing the Mahler Conducting Competition. She was twenty-one when her grandmother died. “Alma was luminous,” Marina recently told me. “I was in love with her, which made my mother upset. She was statuesque, powerful. She had this incredibly fragile, papery, but very beautiful skin. And these eyes, which were a certain kind of blue I don’t remember anyone else having. They were so clear and piercing. She didn’t talk about the past, even though it was all around her—the books, the photographs, the Kokoschkas. The love of life was still there. Which made her end rather terrible. I was there in the apartment with my mother. Alma had been in a coma, and she awoke with a scream, or an attempt at a scream. My mother went in. Alma clutched her arm and didn’t let go—a death grip. She was not ready to leave.” ♦
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