Passionate Spirit
The Life of Alma Mahler
Publisher
Bloomsbury
Published
2019
Haste’s latest work, Passionate Spirit The Life of Alma Mahler illuminates the life of an extraordinary, charismatic and controversial woman.
Born into fin de siècle Vienna, Alma Mahler was a talented composer and musician, who drew great men into her orbit and became their muse. These included her husbands, composer Gustav Mahler, modernist architect, Walter Gropius and the best-selling author, poet and playwright, Franz Werfel, and her lovers, the wild Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka and others. Her life is seen against the backdrop of turbulent European events, from the First World War and the collapse of the Austro Hungarian empire, through the chaos of the 1930s to her escape from the Nazis with her Jewish husband across the Pyrenees to America.
EXTRACT
Reviews
Cate Haste’s seductively accessible biography offers a sympathetic interpretation of Alma’s life. Written in elegant, lucid prose, her book is a treasure trove of European cultural riches and scandalous intrigue. [It] captures the turmoil of Alma’s affairs, her artistic disappointments, visceral appetites and the tragic deaths of three of her four children. She emerges as a tough, lively, cultured and wilful woman, who also composed highly regarded songs that were characteristic of her era.
ECONOMIST. 15 June 2019
Lively, well-illustrated and enjoyably juicy.
FINANCIAL TIMES. MIRANDA SEYMOUR
It’s rather welcome, and unexpected, to read Cate Haste admit in the foreword of her new biography, ‘I like Alma’. This book presents a more sympathetic portrait than we are used to, but it is, for sure, not a straightforward case for the defence. The evidence is incontrovertible that Alma’s flaws are legion and became more pronounced as she got older, and Haste does not attempt to varnish these. .... But if, as Haste proposes, Alma defined her life through love, this book does a good job of helping us to understand why so many people, men and women, found something to love in her, right to the end of her long life.
LITERARY REVIEW. GILLIAN MOORE (Director of Music London South Bank Centre)
Cate Haste seeks to reassess Alma’s legacy, asking if this charismatic, contradictory individual has been treated fairly by posterity. ... [Alma] does burst forth here with appealing force.
THE TIMES. REBECCA FRANKS
Cate Haste has wisely forsaken the harshly judgemental tone so often used about Alma and corrected significant errors that have contributed to the monster image.
SPECTATOR
In this sympathetic, engrossing biography of Viennese socialite and composer Alma Mahler (1879-1964) Haste traces Mahler’s struggle to find equilibrium among her men (all creative geniuses), her erotic desires, and her own musical ambition. Haste mines Mahler’s diaries and memoirs, and interviews her granddaughter to uncover her complexities and contradictions....... Mahler hosted legendary salons throughout Europe and the US , as Haste enthusiastically details (‘What drives me around the world – like a flame in too much wind. I am forever yearning), but also suffered hardship (three of her four children died tragically). Haste beautifully reprises the life of this force of nature.
US Publisher’s Weekly
Haste (Craigie Aitchinson: A Life in Colour, 2014, etc.) creates a sharp, sympathetic portrait of the sexually and emotionally voracious Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964), whose three husbands and many lovers brought her both prestige and notoriety... Haste draws largely on Alma's sometimes self-serving diaries and memoirs to recount her affairs before, after, and during her several marriages.
Haste is clear-eyed about Alma's emotional neediness, her "occasional intransigence," and her "deeply conservative, anti-Semitic" political views. A well-rounded portrait of an imperious woman and her eventful life.