Patrick Bade
Alma: “The Loveliest Girl in Vienna”
Patrick Bade - Alma: The Loveliest Girl in Vienna
- Well, first of all, a big thank you to Susan Soyinka who sent me this wonderful book on the Emigre artist, Albert Reuss. And I find him really interesting and I’m hoping I will have an opportunity to talk about his work in forthcoming lectures. But I’m going to start off by satisfying all those people who’ve been clamouring for Tom Lehrer on Alma Mahler. So here he is, first of all, introducing his famous song about her.
[Tom] Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers, the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read. It was that of a lady named Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel, who had in her lifetime managed to acquire as lovers, practically all of the top creative men in central Europe. And among these lovers who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which is what made it so interesting. There were three whom she went so far as to marry, one of the leading composers of the day, Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied von der Erde and other light classics. One of the leading architects, Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus School of Design, and one of the leading writers, Franz Werfel, author of The Song of Bernadette and other masterpieces. It’s people like that-
And now we’re going to hear the song itself.
[Tom] Last December 13th-
I hope we will.
SONG BEGINS
♪ The loveliest girl in Vienna was Alma ♪ ♪ The smartest as well ♪ ♪ Once you picked her up on your antenna ♪ ♪ You’d never be free of her spell ♪ ♪ 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 ♪ ♪ Alma, tell us ♪ ♪ All modern women are jealous ♪ ♪ Which of your magical wands got you ♪ ♪ Gustav and Walter and Franz ♪ ♪ The first one she married was Mahler ♪ ♪ Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav ♪ ♪ And each time he saw her he’d holler ♪ ♪ Ach, that is fraulein I must have ♪ ♪ Their marriage, however, was murder ♪ ♪ He’d screamed to the heavens above ♪ ♪ I’m writing Das Lied von der Erde ♪ ♪ And she only wants to make love ♪ ♪ Alma, tell us ♪ ♪ All modern women are jealous ♪ ♪ You should have a statue in bronze ♪ ♪ For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz. ♪
SONG ENDS
And so on. Well, this is my list of her husbands and lovers, but it’s not an inclusive one. It starts off with the Gustav Klimt top-left. And he gave her her first kiss. I’ll tell you more about that later, which she never forgot. And then she moved on to the poor, hapless Zemlinsky, and she really teased him and tormented him, and made his life miserable. He never really got over that. Then the first husband, Gustav Mahler, middle-top. And on to Walter Gropius, who was the first extramarital affair. Then there is Gabrilowitsch, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. That was also while she was married to Mahler. And I’m not sure that went further than a very passionate kiss in the moonlight. Then there’s the extremely obnoxious, my goodness, she did choose them, Hans Pfitzner, composer, top-right. Then there’s the composer, Shcreker, bottom-left, the world famous biologist, Paul Kammerer, next in, Oscar Kokoschka, who was really a victim, as I will describe later. Then there was the third husband, Franz Werfel, and then her final fling when she was already in her sixties, with a young Catholic priest who was half her age, could have been her son. And she took his virginity. And that was in the late 19, early thirties. His name, Johannes Hollensteiner. Now, she was occasionally capable of a platonic friendship, not often. Usually if men interested her as creative personalities, she could only really think of them in amorous terms. The great exception was Arnold Schoenberg. She had a lifelong friendship correspondence with him, and there’s a whole book of letters between them, which are very interesting. There’s never an amorous tone to their letters. In fact, it took her, took them 10 years of correspondence to go from the formal Z form to the do form. Now, why?
What was this compulsion she had to seduce every talented and brilliant man that she met? Here she is as a little girl, there is a very obvious Freudian explanation, and it was the explanation that Freud himself actually came up with. She was the daughter of a painter called Jakob Emil Schindler, who was very, very famous in his day, he was regarded as a genius. And he died when she was 12 years old. And this obviously affected her deeply. Show you the work of Emil Schindler, which is, he’s very accomplished artist. His reputation has not really lasted. I mean, there are pictures by him on show at the Belvedere, but he, I would say he’s a rather conventional artist. And his work was certainly eclipsed by the great Viennese painters who came after him. But that doesn’t matter. It’s just that she grew up thinking that her father was this great genius. Here’s another work by Emil Schindler. Now, the first kiss, the first kiss, she was 18, he was 37. This is the devilishly handsome, and sexy Gustav Klimt. And what a place to have your first kiss. Their first kiss was one evening while they were strolling on the Piazza San Marco. And this was so wonderful, it really aroused her sexual feelings. And she confided to her diary, we’re going to hear more from this diary later on. And unfortunately, her mother indiscreetly found the diary, and read this absolutely, ecstatic description of this wonderful kiss that she had with Klimt. So Klimt was in big, big trouble because of all of this, partly because Alma’s stepfather, her mother’s husband was a colleague of Klimt. He was an artist called Carl Moll. So he really berated Klimt for this. And Klimt wrote a letter, and I’m going to read it to you, it’s quite a long letter. It’s interesting because Klimt was otherwise a man of very few words, both verbally and on paper. And there are hundreds and hundreds of letters of Klimt, but they’re always very short, very practical to the point. So this is, by quite a long way, the longest letter that has come down to us from Klimt.
And you can say, “Mm, it’s a bit mealy mouth.” I mean, after all, he was 37 and she was 18, and he jolly would, well, should have known better, but this is what he has to say. “Alma has often sat next to me and we talked together without any harm. I have never courted her in any real sense. And even if I had, I would never have expected any success. There are many gentlemen coming to the house, paying their addresses to her.” We could just say that again. “I have had full suspicions of her and laboured under misapprehensions. It was only very recently, the trip to Florence had been decided on, but I noticed various things. The young lady must have heard a few things about my affairs.” His love affairs, of course. “A lot of it true, some of it false. I don’t know everything about my affairs myself, and don’t want to. But there is one thing I’m sure of, that I’m a poor fool to cut a longshore restore from suggestive questions, remarks. It seemed to me that young lady was not entirely indifferent to these matters as I had thought at first. This rather scared me as I had nothing but awe. I have nothing but awe and respect for a true love. And I came rather into conflict with myself, in conflict with my true feelings of friendship for you. But I consoled myself with a thought that it was just a little game on her part, a mood. Alma is beautiful, intelligent, and witty. She has everything a discriminating man could require of a female. But even as a game, it seemed disastrous to me. And it would’ve been my job to be sensible as I have more experience. And this is where my weakness begins. That evening in Venice came, I’m an embittered and sometimes person, and sometimes express myself in malice that is not without it’s dangers, which I deeply regret afterwards. So it was here as well, I had been drinking rather more quickly than was wise.
I’m not trying to excuse myself.” Yes he is, of course. “But what I said was rather more careless than it usually is. And that is probably what you heard from what you drew from your own conclusions, which are certainly too wicked, too black. Dear Moll, forgive me. And Miss Alma, I don’t think it will be difficult for her to forget all about it.” Well, actually she never did forget about it. She was carrying on about how wonderful that kiss was the rest of her life. And as I said, well, of course, nowadays we would say a man, or a mature man should have taken a bit more care. But in a sense, he’s right. If you read the diary, it is very clear that she in effect, stalked him and seduced him, was totally obsessed by rumours of his love life. Sadly, he never painted her, ‘cause she was exactly his type. Now, The Loveliest Girl in Vienna, I think that in the song, I think the quote actually comes from Bruno Walter, it was he who described her first as the loveliest girl in Vienna. So well, you can decide whether you think she’s lovely or not. I’ve just been having that conversation with Lauren, and Trudy doesn’t think she was all that lovely, but she had the luck to have the look that was considered beautiful at the time. She had the look of the Belle folk, quite a strong chin, very straight nose and so on, and a very voluptuous figure. This is a portrait by Klimt of Sonja Knips. On the left-hand side, you can see very much the same type of beauty. This is a portrait that Klimt made of his long-term lover, Emilie Floge on the left-hand side, once again, she could almost be a sister to Alma, who you see on the right-hand side. And this is a portrait, not a portrait actually, it’s a drawing by the Belgian symbolist, Fernand Khnopff, who came to Vienna, had a big, big success showing his work at the secession. And he met Alma and he fell head over heels in love with her. And he wrote her poems and she actually set one of them to music.
And as was her want, she flirted with him outrageously, partly, deliberately to provoke Klimt, and excite the influence, the interest of Klimt. Here she is again, in her teens, and throughout this talk, I’m going to be quoting her diaries, and they are absolutely extraordinary. Now, I’m going to, I won’t make a secret of the fact that I actually really don’t like Alma Mahler. I think she was in many ways an incredibly unpleasant woman. Some of you who live in London may have attended the event that the Jewish book we put on, I think it was two years ago, it was immediately before lockdown anyway, when I interviewed in front of an audience, I interviewed Cate Haste, who wrote the last biography of Alma. And I suppose like any, there have been previous biographies, and lots written about her. So Cate Haste, I think she felt she had to come up with a new version of Alma, which was more positive than all the previous ones. And I didn’t agree with her. I felt that she was doing a whitewash, and that she was excusing things in Alma, which to my mind are really inexcusable, most of all, her antisemitism. Anyway, this discussion between Cate Haste and me really got very heated indeed. I think the audience enjoyed it. They thought, “Where is this going? Are they actually going to come to blows by the end of this talk?” But anyway, the autobiography, the early volumes, the period that’s of main interest because it’s the period of Zemlinsky and Mahler. So from the late 90s to the early 1900s, they have been published and they’re, I would say that they are, if you want to understand Alma, you get more out of her diaries than you do out of the two main biographies that have been written of her. And actually the main interest of the Cate Haste book for me was that it quoted extensively from the later diaries, which actually haven’t been published.
They’re truly, truly extraordinary. When you think for most of the period that these diaries were being written, Queen Victoria was on the throne. I’m sure you all know that the advice given to young, it was not thought that women could possibly be interested in sex or enjoy it. And young English women were always told when they got married to lie back and think of England. Well, Alma was never going to do that. She was extraordinarily fascinated by sex all the way through her life. And she expresses this in her diary. I don’t think she was, well, obviously, it’s normal human thing, but I don’t think it was that unusual in Vienna. I remember all those years ago when I read Alessandra Comini’s wonderful book on the Egon Schiele Portraits. And she had been round talking to Viennese ladies of Alma’s generation, and they came up with really extraordinary frank descriptions of their sex lives. I thought, “Wow, this was quite something in Vienna at this period.” But in one of her diary entries, this is before the turn of the century, she describes flirting with one of her admirers, as usual, a much older man. And she says in her diary that she was absolutely, she couldn’t take her eyes off the bulge in his trousers. And she goes on to say, “My sensuality knows no bounds. Why am I so boundlessly lascivious and licentious? I long for rape, whoever it might be.” That’s quite an amazing thing for a well brought up young girl to write in her diary in the 1890s. The most extraordinary entries are really to do with her relationship with Alexander Zemlinsky. I’ve touched on this, of course, in my previous lecture. He was a man of, I think one has to say he was ugly. Everybody said that he was small, chinless, certainly not a beautiful man. And when she first meets him, she says, “Zemlinsky cuts the most comical figure imaginable, a caricature, chinless, small, bulging eyes.” And then a few days later, she meets him at a dinner party on the 28th of April, 1900.
And she says, “I went with the greatest disinclination, and had a wonderful time, spoke almost all evening with Alexander von Zemlinsky. He’s dreadfully ugly and yes, I found him quite enthralling. At table, he asked me softly, and what do you think of Wagner? The greatest genius who ever lived, I answered calmly. And which work of Wagner is your favourite? Tristan, my reply, which so delighted him that he was quite transformed, and he became truly handsome. Now we understand each other. I find him quite wonderful.” I shall ask him around, she said. And then, so a little later, well, actually the next year, she tells this relationship has continued. He’s advised her and helped her with her own ambitions to become a composer, and he’s criticised her songs. And she writes in her diary, “What do I want of him? Yes, I like him beyond words. But when he arrived, his incredible ugliness, his smell. And yet when he’s there, I grow strangely excited.” And then she discovered, she was always wanting to know about other people’s love lives. And she discovered that he had a relationship with a Jewish woman who he actually eventually married. And she writes in her diary, “You Jewish sneak, keep your hook-nosed Jew girl, she’s just ripe for you.” And then she says, “Is he one of those half Jews who never succeed in ridding themselves of the Semitic?” Now, at this point, I’ve had a very lovely correspondence actually with Alessandra Comini. And she, after my Zemlinsky talk, she, I mean, she said according to her researches, Zemlinsky was actually one 16th Jewish. But throughout his life, I think probably because of his slightly caricature appearance, everybody assumed that he was Jewish and thought of him as a Jew.
And certainly Alma did. And this anti-Semitism and one of the points where the discussion between me and Cate Haste did become very heated indeed, she was trying to excuse Alma’s anti-Semitism. And she said, “Oh, well, that’s how it was in Vienna. Everybody was anti-Semitic in Vienna.” And there’s an element of truth in that. I think it was sort of, there was a kind of ambient anti-Semitism. And you can, if you read diaries and letters of the period, you can often find comments that strike us as anti-Semitic. But I would say that Alma’s anti-Semitism went far, much, much further than this. I would say it was something almost obsessional. And it didn’t get better with the years, it got worse. And her diary is absolutely full of horrible anti-Semitic comments. And you might think, “Well, why did she marry two Jews, and why did she have so many Jewish lovers?” And I think there is a quite interesting, complicated psychological process here. One, you could also ask the question, “Why was this girl who was considered to be the most beautiful girl in Vienna, why was she not always but very often involved with very ugly men?” And I think she wanted to feel beautiful. She’s totally obsessed with her own beauty. She’s always talking about it in the diary. And she wants to feel that she’s this beautiful, incredible out-of-reach person who’s to be worshipped . And even after the second World War, she has a rant against Bruno Walter, 'cause he said something in the Biography of Mahler that she didn’t like, that she felt was demeaning to her. And in her diary, this is late 1940s when she had long, actually lost her beauty. She was not one of those women who kept her beauty into middle or old age. And her entry in the diary is, “Well, those Jews are so ugly and I’m so beautiful, and that’s why they all hate me.”
She said. So then back to the diary. This is the 24th of September 91. And this is what she says, “I’ve just been watching two flies copulating, they were so still, so imperturbable. And now and then a shiver rang through their wings. I blew them, they flew off lethargically, the one with the other and resumed their activity a little further away. How I envied them, the flow of one into the other. I find it beautiful, wondrously beautiful. How I long for it. My Alex.” That’s Zemlinsky. “Let me be your font. Fill me with your holy water.” She says. And then she writes, “I would be gladly pregnant for him. Gladly bear his children, his blood and mine commingled. My beauty and his intellect.” Of course, to quote the words of George Bernard Shaw, she hadn’t considered the frightful prospect that it might, the combination might result in his beauty and her intellect, which would’ve been a dreadful prospect. But, and she was a woman, I mean, she had four children altogether, and only one survived to adulthood. I would say she was a woman without a maternal bone in her body. But she was always having these fantasies of, she’d meet a man who she admired, who she found attractive. And the first thing she would fantasise about was having his baby or would even propose to have his baby. And this was a fantasy that followed her through, as we shall see, until her deathbed. So that was at the residence in September the 24th. And then not long after that, few weeks after that, she’s fantasising about having Zemlinsky’s baby. She meets Gustav Mahler or she knows of him. She goes to the opera all the time, so she greatly admired him as a conductor. And literally, and of course, she’s very excited to be admired by the greatest conductor of the day.
And just a few days later in her diary, she writes, “Alexander von Zemlinsky, who’s he?” Question mark. There was a brief tussle in her mind between Zemlinsky and Mahler. But Mahler was always going to win out. He was a much, much better prospect. There was one entry in the diary after that where she says, “Oh dear, what would I do if Zemlinsky becomes famous?” But she was never put to the test on that one, 'cause sadly, he never did become famous, or at least not till long after he died. Now, there was, what am I going to play you next? Yes, I want to play you this, a song that Zemlinsky wrote for Alma. You could put together a wonderful, actually a series of concerts of all the music that was inspired by Alma or dedicated to her, I think probably more than any other woman of the 20th century. And this song of love for a steel-hearted princess. This obviously expresses Zemlinsky’s feelings about his relationship with Alma. That was a real whirlwind romance. They were married remarkably quickly after their first meeting. Mahler was a man of a very considerable sexual experience. As I mentioned before, he had that idea that the chief conductor of an opera house had duet senior of overall singers, and he had plenty of affairs with all of them. Nevertheless, their first attempt at sex were somewhat disastrous. And as we know so much about all of this in really gruesome detail, I can hear some of you saying already, “Oh my god, too much information.” So you may feel that Alma’s diaries altogether contained too much information. But before they married, Mahler sent Alma a notorious letter in which he said, “If you want to marry me, you have to give up any ambition to be creative yourself.” And here is the actual letter. “A husband and wife who are both composers. How do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals. Do you have any idea how ridiculous it would appear?
Can you imagine the loss of self-respect it would later cause us both? If at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching something I urgently needed, or if, as you wrote, you wish to relieve me of life’s trivia, in such a moment, if you were befallen by inspiration, what then? One thing is certain, if we are to be happy together, you will have to be as I need you to be. Not as my colleague, but as my wife.” Well, obviously, I think to most women today, they would be appalled by a letter like that, would be enough to put them off the wedding. Another point where Cate Haste, and I almost came to blows was whether Alma was a victim or not in this situation, and how dreadful it was she had to give up her ambitions to be a composer. And I said, “No, no, she didn’t. Alma, yes, it was difficult for women to make a career in the arts in the late 19th, early 20th century as painters or as musicians. But plenty did. And there are either a dozen, at least, quite successful women composers from this period, contemporaries of Alma. And none of them had the advantages or the choices that she had. She had choices. First of all, she didn’t have to marry Mahler. There were plenty of other men who wanted to marry her. Plenty other men like Zemlinsky who would’ve actually supported her career if she’d really wanted a career as a composer. I don’t think she wanted it.” This was it. With, I think she had, she was gifted, I’ll play you a couple of her songs later, they’re wonderful songs. They stand out very well. You can put her songs in a Liede album with songs of Straus or Wolf or Faure or other composers of the period. And they really are up to scratch. They’re not put into the shade. But I think the trouble with Alma was that composing was never going to be the daytime job. Men were her daytime job. That was what she was really interested in. So they got married for the first few years. I mean, in fact, in her diary, she responds to this demand from Mahler. She’s thrilled by it.
She thinks, “Oh, what a man. Yes, all I want to do is be his hand maid, and serve his needs.” And all this kind of thing. It was only somewhat later when she felt frustrated, and bored with her marriage that she came to resent this demand that he made of her. So the marriage was for a while certainly reasonably happy. But Mahler wasn’t the nicest human being in the world. He was a very selfish man, he was very egotistical, he always put his needs first, not hers. They had two children, Maria and Anna. Then Maria died of Scarlet Fever, and this in 1907. And this in a way crystallised Alma’s unhappiness in the marriage. And she began to look around and as I said, she had at least a heavy flirtation, and a passionate kiss with Gabrilowitsch, who you see on the left. These are actually both rather handsome men, so exceptional in her repertoire. And on the right-hand side, she had a real full-blown passionate affair with the architect Walter Gropius. That’s a very strange story, because he made a terrible Freudian slip. He actually wrote a passionate letter to Alma, and addressed it so that it actually went to Gustav. And that’s how Gustav found out about it. And that, Gustav realised it was a crisis in his marriage. And he consulted Freud. And he said to Freud, “Look, I’m really worried, because I’m old enough to be her father.” He was actually exactly double her age when they married. And Freud said, “No, no, no, don’t worry. That’s the whole point. She is somebody who’s looking for a father figure.” Well, that’s all very well, perhaps she was at this point. But as she got older, the lovers got younger and younger, as we shall see. Well, this crisis in the marriage really prompted Mahler to think about things. Actually, his credence, I would say. He realised that he’d been unfair to her. He looked again at her songs and he saw how good they were, and he arranged them to be published, and he encouraged her to return to composing.
And he was currently working on his eighth symphony, which you can see from the title page is dedicated, “Muner Lieben Frau Alma Maria.” So he’s dedicating his eighth symphony to Alma. Now, here is a song by Alma. I think it’s a very beautiful song. As I said, it would stand comparison with the best male composers of the period. I better move on 'cause it’s going to run out of time. But of course, the text of that was very much the way she thought about love. Now, Mahler dies in 1911, and Alma’s next big fling was with the young Oscar Kokoschka. And by the way, I’ve been advised by somebody who knew him well, actually, he was a family friend, that certainly by the 1950s, he was pronouncing his name with the stress on the second syllable and not first, which is a relief to me 'cause it’s easier for me to pronounce it that way. Anyway, Alma, he was, Os Kokoschka was a budding artist, he was invited to dinner with the Molls, that’s Alma’s stepfather and mother, she took one look at him across the table and thought, “Mm, I’ll have some of that.” And she got up and she beckoned him, and she led him into another room. And she sat down on the piano and she played him Tristan Und Isolda. Well, he got the message, that was, Tristan, as you will have gathered, was really her calling card. So they had, that was, is it 1913? It’s a year or so anyway after Mahler died, and they had an affair over the next year or so, this was probably, I suppose, in sexual terms, the most passionate affair she had ever had. She was 11 years older than him. So I suppose not such a huge discrepancy. This is his portrait of the two of them. This is Alma as the Mona Lisa. Many paintings around this time that, from his express, his passionate love, and his bliss with her that he’d made a series of fans as a kind of homage to her, expressing his love for her. He was very jealous, 'cause this is Alma, surrounded by all these men who want her.
And then of course, he was absolutely devastated when he wanted to marry. He was desperate to marry her. And she got pregnant and he was utterly crushed when he discovered that she’d aborted his child. This is his drawing of Alma spinning with his intestines. He felt tormented by her. And really cruelly, she mocked him and dismissed him. Told him to sign up to go and serve on the Russian front when the first World War broke up, which he did and was very severely wounded. And she, of course, she was really, by this point she’d had, “No, the sex had been great. Yes, yes, thank you, off you go.” She didn’t want any more from him. And she didn’t even bother to go and see him when he was in hospital, when he was wounded. This is the famous doll that Kokoschka commissioned. Since he couldn’t have her, he commissioned a life-size doll of Alma, and to everybody’s embarrassment and horror, when you invite him to dinner, he’d bring this doll of Alma with him. But she had regrets for her affair with Gropius. So with Kokoschka barely out the door, even before he was out the door, she was conniving to get back together with Gropius. And this is what she wrote in her diary, “I went to Berlin 14 days ago with the disgraceful intention of getting myself together again with this bourgeois son of the news. Finally, in the course of an hour, he fell in love with me again. We were in a restaurant where wine and good food raised our spirits. And where imminent farewell also helped. I went to the train with him. There love overpowered him so much that he dragged me with him onto the moving train, come what might, I had no choice but to travel to Hanover with him.
Without a nightgown or supplies, I had become almost violently the booty of this man. I must say, he did not strike me as truly evil.” So here is Gropius a little bit later. And of course, he’d already, this is the Fagus factory, he’d just designed that, one of the key buildings in the early history of modernist architecture. But she soon found she was bored with him. He was bourgeois, as she said. And so she then takes up an affair with the poet, Franz Werfel. Again, you’d think a sort of, he was much younger than her, there was a bigger age gap than there was with Kokoschka. He was very famous at the time, he was greatly admired who considered to be one of the great poets in the German language. So I think that the little snipe that Tom Lehrer makes about him being the author of The Song of Bernadette, and other literary masterpieces is really not fair. He was actually a major literary figure. And today, perhaps best remembered for his novel, Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which was, really brought the world’s attention to the Armenian, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. It had been more or less forgotten. Hitler famously said, “Well, of course we’ll get away with murdering the Jews. Who remembers what happened to the Armenians?” But he was very determined that people would remember what happened to the Armenians. So they have an affair, she gets pregnant again, but the child dies soon after it’s birth. Here they are in Vienna. And notice that they’re in her luxurious house in Vienna. But he’s sitting underneath Kokoschka’s portrait of her as the Mona Lisa. She never let her lovers or husbands forget each other. She liked to play off one against another. This is her setting or the song by Werfel.
But I think I’m not going to play you that because, actually she wrote this, she set this song. She obviously admired his poems 'cause she actually set this poem to music before she’d ever met him while she was still married to Mahler. Her last big affair was this Catholic’s priest. And I think Werfel, he must have been a very good natured man, and a very tolerant man. He said about this affair, “Oh well, let her have one more affair.” This is, of course, another composer that she had not an amorous relationship with, but an important relationship or friendship, and a creative friendship was Alban Berg. And his great operatic masterpiece, Wozzeck, some would say the greatest opera, certainly one of the greatest operas of the 20th century. And it’s dedicated to Alma. And I would like to play you a little bit of this, this orchest, this is a very rare recording. It’s not a commercial recording. It comes from a radio broadcast and it’s of Erich Kleiber. And he was the first conductor of Wozzeck in premiere in 1925. I think we’ll skip this. Now, Alma and Franz. And it was a successful, happy marriage. I mean, he was a saint, what can I say? And she just got more and more nastily anti-Semitic in her, I hope he never read her diary, in one entry, she describes him as a rather fat Jew with full lips and watery eyes. And she completely despised the fact his great love was for the operas of Verdi. He was a passionate lover of Verdi. And she wrote in her diary about his love of Verdi, “Every Jew is a mediocre person, and therefore they love Italian opera.” So they had this very wonderful life, but he, 1938 of course, it came to an end, and they had to flee from Vienna. They went to France initially, and then they had a very adventurous escape. This is a famous story, thanks to the great Varian Fry, the American who helped the intelligentsia of Europe to escape from the Nazis. He, Varian Fry really didn’t like Alma. He thought she was very arrogant and unpleasant. Nevertheless, he got them out of France and they managed to get over the Pyrenees into Spain with a suitcase. Must’ve been pretty heavy because it had the score, the scores of Mahler’s first symphony.
And Bruckner’s third symphony. And in fact, they were being trapped by the Nazis, 'cause Hitler, who adored Bruckner, was desperate to get his hands on the score of the third symphony. And it was really, and you could make a movie out of it, it was very, at one point they got separated from their luggage, and they thought, “Well, that’s it, we’ve lost the scores.” But they actually managed to get over the Pyrenees into Spain and to America with the scores. And then on the way, they visited Lord, and although Werfel was always a Jew, he never converted to Catholicism, although she, I think she had him buried as a Catholic, but that, he didn’t have any choice in that. He went to the grotto where the virgin appeared to Bernadette. And he made a vow. He said, “If we get out of this, if we escape, I’m going to write a novel about this.” And he did, that’s why he wrote The Song of Bernadette. And of course, it was made into a highly successful movie. And it made them a lot of money. And it meant that they were well off when they went to California. So here, he then died very young, or in his fifties. And here you see her as the widow Werfel, because in the 1940s, Werfel was a much more important cultural figure than Mahler was. And oh, I forgot to say, I mean, she never, according to her diary, she never rated Mahler’s music. There’s a quote I didn’t give you. Where is it? She says, she was talking about Mahler once, she always dwelled on the physical aspects of all her lovers and husbands that she found repulsive. And she says about Mahler, “I didn’t like, I don’t like his smell and I don’t like his music. I don’t believe in him as a composer.” That’s what she writes in her diary, and she didn’t really change her mind till towards the end of her life. But then, of course, in the 1960s, she’s still alive, she’s a very old woman.
The Mahler Revival gets going, everybody’s coming there, making their, Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britain, everybody is going to her and paying their homage to her, not as the widow of Werfel, but as the widow of Mahler. So she rather changes her identity from the widow Werfel to the widow Mahler. Here she is listening to the music of Mahler that she’d previously despised. So finally she died. And on her deathbed, she was delirious, and she was having a fantasy, a delirious fantasy that she was on top of a mountain. And that the Archduke Rudolph came to her on the mountain, and she offered to have his baby. So I suppose that was, for her, that was a happy way to go. That was a sort of fantasy that she enjoyed. So I’m going to finish now and see what comments, and questions we have.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: “How did Alma have the time and energy for so many lovers? I consider it’s a good week if I complete the laundry.”
A: Because she did have, or she did lots of practical things in the house. But of course, she always had servants to do a lot of the work.
Q: “So Bride of the Wind, her story, how accurate?”
A: I haven’t seen it. I don’t know, I haven’t seen the movie, I can’t tell you. Yes, Cate Haste. Yes, as I said, I’m very familiar with it because I read it very carefully, because I had to interview her for Jewish Book Week. Was a trivial point, Alma, this is her, but I can’t disagree with you or agree with you that she was 17, not 18. Well, anyway, she was half his age, and it was very naughty of him.
Q: “Her mother, what was her provenance?”
A: I think she was a singer, her mother. She was certainly in the performing arts. And as I said, she, after Emil Schindler died, she married. Yes, I know that she was very anti-Semitic.
Q: “Did she work?”
A: She was highly educated. You could say she was a frustrated artist. Yes, she was creative, she wrote wonderful songs.
Q: “Is this slut shaming?”
A: I don’t know. I mean, I have no, personally, I don’t hold it against her that she had lots of lovers if she was loving. I don’t feel that she was genuinely loving, that’s the thing. I don’t see that it’s any worse, Klimt had lots of lovers and I don’t see why she shouldn’t have lots of lovers too. But I don’t think she was very nice to her lovers. I think Klimt was probably an awful lot nicer to the women he had sex with than she was to the men that she had sex with.
“I don’t think Queen Victoria would’ve believed in.” No, I don’t think she either, after she did have nine children and she, Queen Victoria was quite earthy.
“Malevolent Muse, The Life of Alma Mahler by Oliver Hilmes is well worth a read.” I don’t know that, that sounds very interesting, presumably 2015. Zemlinsky, yes, he was, well, she’d already had another teacher before Zemlinsky, but he certainly guided her and helped her.
“If the one 16th was a straight shot through the maternal line, then Zemlinsky is a hundred percent Jew.” I’d have to ask Alessandra Comini, she’s the one who did the research.
“He was thought to be Jewish because of his caricature, this is.” Oh, of course, of course, there are. Hey, Paul Newman. Look at one of the most beautiful men of the 20th century. Jewish men can be fabulously beautiful, think of all of the great Jewish actors, and film stars that have been, but I’m just saying it conformed the stereotype of the caricature stereotype of the period.
“As a docent of the holocaust memorial centre in Michigan, I learned that it was Mahler’s wife who saved his music when she left for the US.” I don’t think so. I mean, she did take the first of the score, the autographed score of the first symphony with her. But it had been published. So it wasn’t like she saved it, she didn’t save the symphony, she just saved the score.
Q: “This is Ron Big. I’m not a psychologist, but would Alma be described today as a sex addict?”
A: No, I don’t think it’s sex. I don’t think it’s about sex. I think it’s about power.
“And she definitely was a nymphomaniac.” No, she was maybe an obsessive personality. I don’t think, that kind of woman that has to, I’ve met a couple in my life who feel that they have to seduce every man they meet. It’s not really about sex, it’s about something else. Yes, I gather that must be 2015.
“You object to this expression, one 16th Jewish.” I’m merely, I’m going to put the blame on Alessandra here. That’s what she said to me. The fact that… Anyway, I’m not getting into that. It’s too complicated and it’s too difficult really. Thank you. Alma studied privately. She didn’t go to the conservatoire. I’m glad you didn’t think there was too much information. And there was some quite nitty, gritty stuff there. The daughter who survived, she became an artist. And there are, through the female line, there are still, there’s descendants who are still around in London. She came to London, Anna Mahler.
Q: “Did she suffer from?”
A: Well, I mean, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate it. I mean, she’s very far from, as I said, from being an nymphomaniac, or I personally, it doesn’t shock me that a woman has say 10 or a dozen love affairs in a lifetime. I don’t think that’s that excessive.
“Man’s name.” I’m not sure which man’s name you want.
“In a magician book about Thomas Mann, there was a description of a Pyrenees escape.” “Alma helped Alban Berg get Wozzeck produced.” That’s no doubt why he dedicated it to her. And yes, I was going to talk about the violin concerto. I just thought I would, didn’t. “Which is?” Mahler’s daughter was with Walter Gropius who was incredibly beautiful. Everybody was in love with her, and she got polio and died and Berg dedicated it, the concerto, to the memory of an angel.
Q: “Where is she buried?”
A: Well, I’m not sure where Alma buried.
Q: “How did her diary become?”
A: Well, it’s, I find it amazing that, I mean, surely, oh well, I suppose actually her house was looked after by the Molls during the Nazi period, but it is amazing that the diaries and the letters, enormous numbers of letters survived. There’s a volume of letters between her, and that Gustav wrote to her. There’s a volume of letters that Schoenberg wrote to her, the tonnes of letters with Kokoschka and so on. “
Q: What year did she die?”
A: It’s the end of the sixties. I actually can’t remember off the top of my head.
Q: “Did her Jewish husbands know of her?”
A: And yeah, I bet they did. I bet she, well, certainly, I know that Werfel did, and he objected to it and he argued with her.
Q: “Can you please hear it?”
A: I don’t think we’ve got time to hear the, you can get that very easily, surely. You can buy it on CD or you can hear it on YouTube.
Q: “How do you rate the?”
A: I actually don’t think I’ve read that one.
“I believe Alma had to authorise the various attempts to complete the tenth.” Yes, she would’ve had to have done, and settled on the Deryck Cooke version, which really is the only one ever played today. I think she must have, they must have asked her permission. No, she didn’t marry three Jews, 'cause Walter Gropius wasn’t Jewish. He was Protestant actually. Yeah.
“You didn’t, Manon.” Yes, yes, I did. Well, we’ve just talked about that part, Manon Gropius dying young from earlier. Manon was, yeah, well, she had not a very good relationship I gather with Anna Mahler, the one who survived.
“This is Margaret. I knew a woman who had lots of lovers. She was also not nice to them.” Maybe a lot of men are masochists, aren’t they? It seemed to me that those men found somehow that attractive. I think there are men like that, there are men. My mother had a friend who, she was very Catholic and she had lots of lovers, and affairs and it cost her a lot in petrol, 'cause she had, if you’re Catholic, all you need to do really is go to confession. But she couldn’t go to confession every week with the same priest. So she had to drive all around the country finding different priests to confess to.
Yes, Paul Newman was very handsome, but his father was, yes, so not technically Jew if his mother wasn’t. Anyway, there are lots of fantastically beautiful Jewish men. So I certainly don’t want to give any credence to that prejudice of the period. And beautiful Jewish women. I mean, think of all the wonderful, I’m not going to say who’s Jewish and who’s not, 'cause I don’t want to get into that. But all those very beautiful Hollywood stars who were Jewish.
Q: “What was the reason for her anti-Semitism?”
A: I don’t know. To me, well, I did talk a little bit about that. I think that she wanted somehow to feel beautiful, and there was this stereotype that Jews were not beautiful. I dunno, there’s some very complicated psychological mechanism going on there.
“She’s definitely a narcissist.” Yes, I should have said that. That’s a very important thing too. In the book that I recommended by Salka Viertel, she mentions a gathering at which Alma Werfel comes up to Stravinsky and introduces herself, introduces Alma Mahler. Yes, I do. That is a fantastic book. What an amazing woman. Well, Salka Viertel had plenty of lovers. But as I said, both men and women, I’m not holding that against anybody. And no, your, “Children drown.” You’re thinking of Isadora Duncan, probably.
“She’s buried in Grinzing.” Thank you very much. “In the same cemetery as Mahler.” Right, Kirk Douglas, yeah, definitely.
Well, look at, I think Tony Curtis was extremely beautiful when he was young. Lots of very handsome Jewish men in Hollywood.
Q: “Were the Jewish husbands aware of her?”
A: Yes, they were. Although, before they married her, I’m not sure. I bet they were 'cause she was not one for holding back.
Hedy Lamarr, yes, no, she is amazingly beautiful, isn’t she? I’m going to talk about her briefly I think when we get to Prague and I’m sure Trudy will have things to say about Hedy Lamarr, such an interesting woman. Yes, that very good book. Rosemary Sullivan wrote the book, Villa Bel-Air, about this, Varian Fry getting all those artists across.
Q: “Did she?”
A: No, she didn’t meet Wagner 'cause Wagner died in 1883. Oh, she could have met him at four years old, but she didn’t.
And that’s it. Thank you all very, very much. And we’re going to have a bit of froth later in the week with Vinny’s operetta.