Extract from Passionate Spirit
The Life of Alma Mahler
Chapter 1
When Alma Mahler was nineteen, with clear skin, an enigmatic smile, lustrous hair and piercing watchful blue eyes, she was called ‘the most beautiful girl in Vienna.’ Soon she became a femme fatale who commanded fascination, adoration and love and was able to enchant people in seconds. When Alma walked into a room, heads turned. Her magnetic presence was like ‘an electric charge’ in any gathering, it was said. With her mercurial personality she was one minute the grande dame – imposing, regal, exuding authority; the next she was jolly and good-humoured, revealing ‘the Viennese soft femininity [which] even in her most awful moments, made it difficult to really dislike her.’ Some likened her to a demi-goddess to whom one brought gifts. Others loathed her.
Alma was a modern woman who lived out of her time. With an independent will, an intelligent mind of her own, and a strong sense of her own worth, she harboured aspirations and ambitions that were completely at odds with the behaviour expected of young women in late nineteenth century Viennese society. Her freedom mattered as she challenged, but only up to a point, the constraints imposed on her.
Alma was deeply romantic. She needed to be loved fiercely, and also to feel love with a passion which fired her being. But only superior creative talents inspired her love. She was irresistibly and erotically attracted to a series of extraordinary men of glittering talent and genius, each of whom would make his distinctive mark on the European cultural landscape. Her first infatuation was with the famous painter Gustav Klimt, though he never painted a golden portrait of her. The composer Gustav Mahler became her first husband, and after he died in 1911, the wild Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka openly became her lover. Her second husband, Walter Gropius (with whom she had had an affair when married to Mahler) founded the modernist Bauhaus movement in architecture, while her third was the then widely read novelist and poet, Franz Werfel.
Several other writers, composers and artists who worshipped and loved her praised her ‘unique gift’ – her ‘profound, uncanny understanding of what creative men tried to achieve, an enthusiastic, orgiastic persuasion them that they could do what they aimed at, and that she, Alma, understood what it was,’ as a close associate described her.
Alma had not anticipated this. At eighteen, music was her passion. Her consuming ambition was to be a composer, an extremely ambitions goal for a young woman. Nothing moved her as much as her usually twice weekly visits to the opera which left her enraptured and her imagination overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur. But women composers were almost non-existent. Girls were taught the piano not to encourage their creativity but to burnish their accomplishments as elegant and cultured wives. Women were still barred from studying at the Music and Art Academies. Their capacity for creativity was deemed, then and later, to be limited, parochial, ‘domestic’, and their creative vision, by nature, far inferior to that of men. If, as happened to Alma, a work revealed remarkable talent, its merits were belittled, or attributed to the influence or direct intervention of another – male – composer.
The adverse climate did not dim Alma’s ambition. For she was compelled to create music, driven by that spirit which springs from mysterious sources. She was convinced that her pedigree was innately superior because she was descended from a painter father, Emil Schindler, whom she believed was a genius, and this gave her an unshakeable faith in her own worth. From him came her profound conviction that the pursuit of artistic excellence was the only truly worthwhile goal and only a person of exceptional creative talent was worthy to elicit her love or capture her soul.