I have been scratching my head to try and recall if there have been any historical parallels to the lifestyle Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel chose. The only one I can think of is Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, who lived between 69 and 30 BCE. To cut a long bit of history short, she was banished to Syria by her brother (who was co-sovereign to the throne) where she met Julius Caesar who helped her regain her kingdom and bore him a son who became Ptolemy XIV. After Caesar was assassinated in the Roman Senate on the Ides of March 44 BCE, she came back to Egypt, met Mark Antony and bore him twins. In 31 BCE they were defeated by Octavius however, whereupon Mark Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra clasped an asp to her bosom.
The life that Alma Mahler chose to live, especially in her later years, bore a certain resemblance to Cleopatra, if not in the way it developed, but in the choices she made regarding her partners and in the way she ‘handled’ them. Both were very amorous and both sought out persons who possessed creativity and authority, in Cleopatra’s case the latter while Alma Mahler was more attracted to the intellectual man.
Alma was born in Vienna in 1879 to Hamburg singer Anna Sofie Bergen and the prominent Viennese landscape painter Emil Schindler. Soon after her marriage the mother had an affair with Julius Victor Berger, which resulted in the birth of Alma’s half-sister Grete in 1881. Her mother also had an ongoing affair with Carl Moll, her husband’s student and assistant. When Alma was 13, her father died from appendicitis, and her mother married Carl Moll soon after that.
Alma met Gustav Klimt, the secessionist painter, through Carl Moll. Klimt and Alma became lovers but the affair soon cooled off when, in 1900 Alma started studying composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky. Under his tutelage, Alma wrote several songs, an instrumental piece and even an opera. They fell in love but kept their affair secret. On 7 November 1901 she attended a fashionable Viennese salon which Gustav Mahler also attended. He was at the time chief conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, a post that saw Mahler convert from Judaism to Catholicism, which coincidentally was Alma’s religion.
Mahler and Alma married three weeks later, a wedding that Alma’s parents vigorously opposed mainly because Mahler was born Jewish and there was a 19-year gap in their ages. She was only 22.
From the beginning, Mahler insisted that “the role of composer falls to me, yours is that of a loving companion.” While Mahler composed, Alma partied and spent most of her time with composer Hans Pfitzner and old flame Zemlinsky. Eventually she became depressed and entered a sanatorium to recover from her abandonment. There she met a handsome would-be architect called Walter Gropius who was four years her junior. They had an affair which continued well after they both left the sanatorium. Soon after Gropius ‘mistakenly’ sent a letter to Alma but addressed it to Gustav Mahler! Hurt and furious, Mahler sought counsel from Sigmund Freud, who advised him to stay in the marriage and encourage Alma to return to composing music. Mahler continued composing his eighth symphony, dedicating it to Alma, supervised her songs and helped to publish five of her Lieders. In return she promised to stop seeing Gropius, but immediately trotted up to Paris to be with him!
In December 1910 Mahler, whilst in New York in the second year of his appointment as conductor of the New York Philharmonic, succumbed to a heart ailment. The following year, having returned to Europe he developed a severe blood infection and died on 18 May 1911 aged 51. Alma claimed to be too ill to go to his funeral.
Regardless, Alma continued on her merry way. She conducted affairs with a few well-known personalities and one, biologist Paul Kammerer even threatened to shoot himself over Mahler’s grave. In 1912, her step-father Carl Moll commissioned 26-year-old Oskar Kokoschka to paint a picture of Alma and immediately fell in love with her. They made love every time he stopped painting her. But Kokoschka had a wild streak in him and showed his jealousy in ways that frightened Alma. She became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion.
Meanwhile, Alma recommenced her affair with Gropius. By now, he had become world-famous and had progressed to being a professor and chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard. They married in 1915 and Alma gave birth to a girl, Monah, who died in her teens. But Gropius also had a jealous streak in him and he started berating Alma over her affair with Kokoschka.
Two years later Alma had discovered a new love; poet and playwright Franz Werfel. Alma described him as ‘a bow-legged, fat Jew with thick lips and floating slit eyes’. Gropius was now entrenched as a soldier in the German army. When he arrived home unexpectedly one night, Alma suddenly realised that her love for him was something approaching ‘bored loathing.’ When he left the following day to join his regiment he sent Alma a message. ‘Splinter the ice in your features,’ it read, which was a quote from one of Werfel’s poems.
By 1918 Alma was pregnant again, the father was unknown but one presumed it was Werfel. They called the daughter, Manon. Alma was still married to Gropius and Werfel pleaded with Alma to allow him to keep Manon but she died of water in the brain. In 1920 Alma divorced Gropius after having lived with Werfel for more than a year. Nine years later Werfel and Alma married but before long she tired of him. It was rumoured she spent a lot of time with Mahler’s assistant conductor, Bruno Walter at a flat that Alma had rented for the occasion.
Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 and it was becoming untenable for the Werfels (despite the fact Franz had converted to Catholicism) to live in the Third Reich. Although Alma was very much a Nazi sympathiser and an admirer of Mussolini, Werfel had written a number of satirical pieces lampooning Hitler. They high-tailed it to France in 1940 and found themselves in Lourdes, at the foot of the Pyrenees. There, they found refuge at the home of a family who had known a local peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous and they saw the results of her miraculous healing powers. Werfel vowed that if he and Alma came out of their latest ‘adventures’ safely he would write a novel about Bernadette.
By now Hitler’s tentacles had also reached France and the Werfels hurriedly made their way to Portugal where they boarded the ssNea Hellas for New York arriving there on 13 October 1940. Eventually they settled in Los Angeles where Werfel wrote his highly-successful novel The Song of Bernadette, which subsequently also became a film with Jennifer Jones in the leading role. In 1945 Franz Werfel died of a heart-attack.
Alma moved to New York in 1951 where she published Mahler’s letters and papers. She was also quite wealthy by now, profiting from the royalties of Werfel’s publications.
She died on 11 December 1964, aged 85. Her obituaries used information from her autobiography where she unashamedly wrote about her lurid affairs, listing her conquests by name.
Since then, scholars of Mahler’s life have doubted Alma’s version of her days with Mahler. Her accounts have been found to be unreliable, false and misleading. According to one scholar, Hugh Wood: “Often she is the only witness, and the biographer has to depend on her while doubting with every sentence her capacity for telling the truth. Everything that passed through her hands must be regarded as tainted.”
Featured image : Portrait of Alma Mahler by Oskar Kokoschka