Alma

Abstract Alma Mahler wrote two remarkable books: Gustav Mahler and her autobiography And the Bridge is Love. After Mahler’s death she became the mistress of Oskar Kokoschka, the painter, and married the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, in 1915. Soon they parted and were divorced. By Gropius she had a daughter, Manon, whose death from polio at the age of eighteen is commemorated in Berg’s Violin Concerto, with its dedication ‘to the memory of an angel’. In 1929 she married the writer Franz Werfel and eventually settled in the United States, where she died in 1964. Although she lived to the hilt for fifty-three years after his death, one senses from her writing that Gustav Mahler, even when she reacted against his music, dominated her existence. Their marriage was, on the face of it, doomed to failure, yet despite storms and stresses it held (just) because of Mahler’s intensive love for her. They were Hans Sachs and Eva personified. Her books are often fearfully inaccurate, they may have offended individuals, but by their frankness and tactlessness as an unlikeable self-portrait they give an unrivalled, if distorted, picture not only of Mahler but of a whole artistic circle. The letters Mahler wrote to her for ten years are a moving and vivid revelation of his real personality, belying the superficial impression of him as a neurotic megalomaniac teetering on the brink of madness, a misrepresentation for which Alma is largely responsible. She lays candid stress on his egocentricity, his intolerance, his incredible gaucherie in som rersonal dealings, but through her pages and through his letters shines a man with a keen sense of observation, a philosophical acceptance of human frailties, a sardonic sense of humour, an astute business mind and a touching capacity for real affection. He could laugh at himself. Writing to Alma in 1910 he admitted he had lost his temper at a rehearsal of the Eighth Symphony but later: ‘I came out of my corner like a sulky boy.’ It is also clear that, despite her pretensions, he was by miles her