Alma Mahler, Muse and Mistress of Fin-de-siècle Vienna

When Alma Mahler walked into a room, heads turned. Her magnetic presence and charismatic allure were like “an electric charge” in any gathering. She was a femme fatale who commanded fascination, adoration, and love and could enchant people in seconds. At the age of nineteen, with clear skin, an enigmatic smile, lustrous, flowing hair, and piercing, watchful blue eyes, Alma was called “the most beautiful girl in Vienna.” Her personality was mercurial; one minute she was the grande dame—imposing, regal, exuding authority—the next she was jolly and good humored, revealing “the Viennese soft femininity [which] even in her most awful moments, made it difficult to really dislike her.” Some likened her to a demigoddess to whom her admirers and devotees 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 harbored ambitions that were completely at odds with the behavior expected of young women in late nineteenth-century Viennese society. Her freedom mattered as she challenged the constraints imposed on her.

Alma was deeply romantic. She needed to be loved fiercely and also to feel love with a passion that fired her being. 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 painter Gustav Klimt, though he never made a golden portrait of her and did not become her lover. Composer Gustav Mahler was her first husband, and, after he died in 1911, the wild expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka openly became her lover. Her second husband, the architect Walter Gropius (with whom she had had an affair while married to Mahler), founded the modernist Bauhaus movement; her third was the then widely read novelist and poet Franz Werfel. Several other writers, composers, and artists who worshiped her praised her for her “unique gift,” her “profound, uncanny understanding of what creative men tried to achieve, and her capacity to persuade them that they could do what they aimed at, and that she, Alma, understood what it was,” as one associate described it.

Alma had not anticipated this. At eighteen, music was her passion. Her consuming aspiration was to be a composer, an extremely ambitious goal for a young woman. Nothing moved her as much as her usual twice-weekly visits to the opera, which left her enraptured and her imagination overwhelmed by its beauty and grandeur. But women composers were almost nonexistent. 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 their very 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 the spirit that flows from mysterious sources. Her belief in her innately superior pedigree, descended as she was from a painter father, Emil Jakob Schindler, whom she was convinced was a genius, gave her an unshakeable confidence in her own worth. From him came her profound conviction that the pursuit of artistic excellence was the only truly worthwhile goal and that only a person of exceptional creative talent was worthy of eliciting her love or capturing her soul.

But, when she was twenty-one, Alma was faced with a dreadful dilemma. She had to choose between her passion for a genius nearly twice her age, Gustav Mahler, and the pursuit of her own precious goal, her music. She chose the genius. Why? She had become persuaded of the nobility of giving herself entirely to a superior being who would “give my life meaning,” she explained. It was a capitulation of her inner being to the prevailing view of the role of the wife, and it happened, despite her stubborn nature and her modern ideas, because of the overwhelming intensity of her love.

Although the loss of her own music left a lasting wound, music would remain her source of strength during a life of passion and high drama, shadowed by tragedy with the premature loss of her first husband and the deaths of three of her four children. Love was the core of her existence and the wellspring of the power that this restless and irrepressible woman would from then on exercise over those in her orbit.

Born in 1879, Alma Schindler was brought up as a child in the bohemian artistic circles to which her parents, Emil and Anna Schindler, belonged, and, as an adolescent at the busy hub of the influential Viennese avant-garde, the Secession movement cofounded by her stepfather, the artist Carl Moll. She was a young woman of exceptional vitality and intellectual curiosity, eager and open, like a flower to the sun, to life and new experience.

The milieu of her self-discovery was fin-de-siècle Vienna, the magnet for talent and enterprise from across the sprawling Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg) empire and the crucible for innovation and new ideas in every sphere of culture and intellectual thought. Artists, composers, writers, dramatists, architects, and scientists of the psyche all sought to express the new soul and spirit of modern man and woman, their condition of uncertainty and nervous anxiety, their rejection of ossified principles, and their search for inner truth through emotional and psychological introspection. In so doing they shaped the intellectual currents that defined the twentieth century.

Yet underlying the city’s buoyant cultural energy was an ominous sense of unease. The multinational empire of Austria-Hungary, which for three centuries had held together a kaleidoscope of nationalities and ethnic minorities covering much of central Europe, had begun to fragment. Demands by minorities for greater autonomy and increased rights to control their own languages and territory were opening up fissures that threatened the empire’s cohesion and stability. Faced with these intractable problems, the Viennese zeitgeist turned increasingly toward the unifying and exuberant balms of art and culture, in which pursuit the city could still lay claim to be the capital of Europe.

Within this atmosphere of cultural ferment, the guide, mentor, and polestar of the young Alma’s existence was her father, the painter Emil Jakob Schindler. She would spend many hours in his studio, watching him paint, “standing and staring at the revelations of the hand that led the brush,” and through this she acquired an intuitive sense of the process and struggle of artistic creation. Such intense involvement with the artist she loved unreservedly nurtured in her young imagination fantasies of patronage: “I dreamed of wealth merely in order to smooth the paths of creative personalities. I wished for a great Italian garden filled by many white studios; I wished to invite many outstanding men there—to live for their art alone, without mundane worries—and never to show myself,” she wrote.

Alma’s love of music dated back to her childhood when her “profoundly musical” father sang beautifully his favorite Schumann lieder and her mother, Anna, a trained singer, joined in. Emil Schindler took his intelligent, growing daughter seriously. His conversation was “fascinating and never commonplace,” she recalled. When she was eight, he led Alma and her sister, Gretl, into his studio to tell them the story of Goethe’s Faust: “We wept, not knowing why. When we were all enraptured, he gave us the book. ‘This is the most beautiful book in the world,’ he said. ‘Read it. Keep it.'” Her furious mother thought it unsuitable reading for small children and removed it. As her parents argued, Alma and Gretl listened behind closed doors with bated breath. Their mother won: “But in my mind a fixed idea remained: I had to get the Faust back!” Alma wrote.

Her unwavering devotion to Goethe spawned a burgeoning interest in literature and, later, philosophy. But her education was otherwise patchy. Though Alma appears to have attended school for a short period, she and Gretl, in common with other bourgeois Viennese girls, were taught at home by tutors. Alma’s tutors were either “nasty” and were dismissed, or they were nice and taught them nothing. Girls had been admitted to secondary school in Vienna since 1868, but until 1892, when Alma was thirteen, they were still barred from the gymnasium— the grammar school—and access to universities was still impossible. The education of girls, including Alma, tended to focus on social skills—French, dress making, and piano, rather than the philosophy and literature that inspired her.

Alma remembered herself as “a nervous child, fairly bright, with the typical hop-skip-and jump brains of precocity I could not think anything through, and was never able to keep a date in mind, and took no interest in anything but music.” Later she railed loudly against this neglect of girls’ education: “Why are boys taught to use their brains, but not girls? I can see it in my own case. My mind has not been schooled, which is why I have such frightful difficulty with everything. Sometimes I really try, force myself to think, but my thoughts vanish into thin air. And I really want to use my mind. I really do. Why do they make everything so terribly difficult for girls?”

However, she had acquired through her father a deep appreciation of painting and of the arts. Schindler, though influenced by plein air painters like Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, and Charles-François Daubigny, had developed his own vision of landscape known as poetic realism—atmospheric paintings saturated with feeling, which convey a strong sense of transience in images that are both aesthetic and subjective. He focused not on the heroic panorama of landscape but on the mundane and everyday—the vegetable garden, the mill and stream near their house, the poplar tree avenue—which he transformed with fluent brushstrokes in different light and atmospheric conditions into statements of poetic truth. Although rooted in the Viennese tradition, his style reflected the new understanding of nature that was spreading across Europe. In Alma’s eyes, he was the true prophet of the Austrian landscape.

In complete contrast, Alma’s expansive imagination was also fired by the opulent spectacles of her father’s friend and associate, Hans Makart, the most fashionable artist of the era. His dramatic, ornate representations of allegorical, historical, and classical motifs decorated Vienna’s public buildings and private neo-Renaissance palaces, and he was the dominant influence on painting, fashion, and interior design: Makart hats and Makart red were all the rage, along with the Makart bouquets—bunches of dried flowers, ostrich feathers, and grasses that decorated the salons of the bourgeoisie.

Alma fell under Makart’s spell for a time: “I loved trailing velvet gowns, and I wanted to be rowed in gondolas with velvet draperies floating astern,” she wrote. She was entranced by stories of his legendary parties, when “the loveliest women were dressed in genuine Renaissance costumes, rose garlands trailed from ballroom ceilings, Franz Liszt played through the nights, the choicest wines flowed, velvet-clad pages stood behind every chair, and so forth to the limits of splendor and imagination.”

Alongside this romantic extravagance there was in Alma a practical young woman with a sense of the difficulties and hardships of life. For her family’s comparatively comfortable existence had been only recently earned.

Excerpted from Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler by Cate Haste

On Alma Mahler, Muse and Mistress of Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. By Cate Haste. LitHub, September 16, 2019.

Bloomsbury

Muses still exist — today, we call them star f*****s — but their glory days are past. A handful continue to cast their spell: Lou Andreas-Salomé (Nietzsche and Rilke); Cosima Liszt (Wagner); Dora Maar (Picasso); Beatrice (Dante). And then, of course, there’s Alma.

To say that Alma Mahler liked men — the composer was the first of her three bewitched and tormented husbands — is a bit like saying that Popeye was keen on spinach. Alma, however, was more discriminating in what she devoured: only genius would do. “All I love in a man is his achievement,” she announced. “The greater his achievement the more I love him.” She also loved sex, a point made a trifle more coyly by Alma’s latest biographer, Cate Haste, (she was “eager and open, like a flower to the sun, to life and new experience”) than by Alma herself. “My sensuality knows no bounds,” a girlish Alma confided to her diary after eyeing the exciting bulge in an admirer’s trousers. “I simply must get married.”

The 22-year old Viennese beauty was three months pregnant in March 1902 when she married the middle-aged Gustav Mahler. Alma’s racially sensitive family — they would later support the Nazis — were enraged by her choice of “an elderly degenerate”. But Alma, enraptured by Mahler’s skills as a conductor — she disliked his compositions — even more than by his pearly white teeth and gratifying ardour, defied them. “I felt that only he could shape my life,” she declared. At her husband’s request, she renounced a career as a composer of lieder — no great loss, judging by the handful that survive — to star in the twin roles of muse and mother.

Mahler was an egotistical and demanding husband, but Alma remained unexpectedly faithful until the summer of 1910, when a handsome young architect, Walter Gropius, took her by storm, disclosed his adulterous passion to the thunderstruck composer and invaded the couple’s home. More precisely, a surprisingly naive Mahler found the lovestruck Gropius skulking under a nearby bridge and invited him in.

The ups and downs of the following year — Mahler died in 1911, causing a lull in Gropius’s campaign of cuckoldry — were mere ripples beside the tempest of Alma’s next love affair. The man in question was the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, whose “flaming and fluctuating passion” (in Haste’s memorably odd description) was evinced in a gift of “flaming red” pyjamas which became the Austrian-born artist’s own preferred loungewear. Alma, despite noticing “something hopelessly proletarian in his structure”, was smitten again. “This wonderful human being once belonged to ME”, she would sigh after a chance encounter with Kokoschka in later years. Kokoschka had meanwhile found consolation in the arms of a life-sized Alma doll, which, after various social outings, was thrown away. Police, advised of the discovery of a headless corpse, liberally soused with red wine and sprawled upon a garden lawn, took no action.

Idiotic though Alma often sounds — Haste is unwise to rely so heavily upon her subject’s comically gushing diaries — she performed well in the great crises of her life. The devastating loss of her first child, little Maria Mahler, had been followed by the premature death of Mahler himself and Alma’s subsequent guilt about two-timing Gropius with Kokoschka. In 1918, Alma was off again. “I feel NO REGRET!” she declared, sweeping aside the fact that Gropius was still her husband. Her child by the poet Franz Werfel died the following year.

  

 Alma’s gutsiness was most admirably displayed during a nightmarish departure in 1938 from Vienna — where she was booed for refusing to display a swastika on her car — and a perilous journey through Europe to the safety (Werfel was a Jew) of America. Here, Werfel’s publication of The Song of Bernadette — inspired by the couple’s 1938 unplanned detour to Lourdes — became a lucrative bestseller. Alma’s last phase as a much sought-after New York widow (a friend nicknamed her “La Grande veuve”) was not troubled by poverty.

Lively, well illustrated and enjoyably juicy (we learn that one besotted admirer liked to kiss any chairseat that betrayed a lingering imprint of Alma’s bottom), Haste’s genial romp through Alma’s follies lacks only the rich historical context and shrewd insights of Oliver Hilmes’ fine biography of Alma (2015), a book which still awaits a British publisher.

Passionate Spirit — the juicy exploits of Alma Mahler. By Miranda Seymour. The Financial Times,  June 27, 2019. 

Alma tell us,

    All modern women are jealous,

    Which of your magical wands

    Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

So runs the chorus of Tom Lehrer’s witty 1965 ballad about Alma Mahler, widow of three artistic luminaries (the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel) and the lover of several more. Lehrer’s song was inspired by chancing upon ‘the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read’ not long after Alma’s death in New York in December 1964 at the age of eighty-five. Her Upper East Side apartment was a shrine to a century of Austro-German culture, crammed with books, paintings and manuscript scores given to her by her famous husbands, lovers and friends.

Lehrer’s facetiousness about Alma’s sex life is generous in comparison with much of the writing about her. The Gustav Mahler industry, in particular, is vicious in its representation of Alma as a self-serving narcissist who exaggerated her own role in the life of the great man, massaged the facts and was even, on account of her affair with Gropius, responsible for his death at the age of fifty. She was, the legend goes, an artistic gold-digger in whose eyes a man’s sexual attractiveness increased in proportion to his artistic ‘greatness’. But in this, as in so many other matters, Alma didn’t help: during a three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka, which became darker and stranger as time went on, she told him that she would marry him only when he had created a masterpiece (she never did). And why at the end of her life, after marrying three well-known artists, did she revert to the name of the first? Was it because she reckoned that Mahler was the most important, the ‘greatest’ of the three?

Against this backdrop, it’s rather welcome, and unexpected, to read Cate Haste admit in the foreword of her new biography, ‘I like Alma’. This book, which she has called Passionate Spirit, 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 were legion and became more pronounced as she got older, and Haste does not attempt to varnish these. Alma was, undoubtedly, obsessed with her own allure. She was also indiscreet in recording her famous lovers’ sexual performance and proclivities: Mahler’s erectile dysfunction, Kokoschka’s sadomasochism, Werfel’s fantasies about having sex with disabled people – did the world need to know? She was a manipulative and inconsistent parent to her only surviving daughter and she could be ruthless when she wanted to finish a relationship, as was the case with Gropius.

Alma’s most damning flaw was her anti-Semitism, which was sometimes casual and sometimes aimed with devastating precision, and which she harboured despite having two Jewish husbands, several Jewish lovers and many Jewish friends in the intellectual communities around her in Vienna and later in Los Angeles and New York. All the contextualising in the world can’t take away the cold horror of the politically conservative Alma’s 1936 confession in her diary following a disagreement over the Spanish Civil War with Anna, the left-leaning daughter she had with Gustav, that ‘it is such a sorrow for me to have given birth to a 150% Jew.’

But if, as Haste proposes, Alma defined her life through love, this book does a good job in helping us understand why so many people, men and women, found something to love in her, right to the end of her long life. Alma grew up at the heart of the cultural hothouse of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Her father was the painter Emil Schindler and, following his death, her mother married the painter Carl Moll. The Moll household became a meeting place for artists of the newly formed Secession, and young Alma’s startling beauty and sharp intelligence shone brightly in these gatherings.

Alma documented her life at this time in breathless style in her diaries. It included a chaste love affair with Gustav Klimt and a less chaste one with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. She wrote in her diaries with equal passion about her rich cultural life: going to the opera and the theatre, reading Spinoza, Goethe, Rilke, Byron and Zola and, most of all, making music. Alma was an accomplished pianist, capable of playing through entire Wagner operas. In time, she began to compose music herself. She worked hard and the songs that survive from this period show genuine originality and promise.

When in 1901 Gustav Mahler, nineteen years her senior and director of the Vienna State Opera, proposed marriage, with the added condition that she should give up all ambitions to be a composer in order to be ‘the loving partner, the sympathetic comrade’ to him, the 22-year-old Alma was shocked. But, having slept on it, she agreed. Her most trenchant critics cite the fact that she so readily chose to marry an important man rather than pursue her own musical career as evidence that she had neither the talent nor the commitment to be an artist herself. But Haste reminds us that, without a single other woman to look up to among the eminent artists who surrounded her, even the spirited Alma may have felt that this was her only option. And this sacrifice cost her dearly: ‘I feel as if a cold hand has torn the heart from my breast,’ she wrote in her diary.

And so Alma’s path as wife, lover and muse to a series of male artists, rather than artist herself, was set. She described carrying her own songs around inside her ‘as if in a coffin’. We can’t know for certain if this renunciation of her artistic self contributed to her subsequent bouts of depression and her alcoholism, but there were many more trials to come: Mahler’s illness and early death, the deaths of three of her four children and the deprivations and dangers of two world wars.

In the first part of the book, Haste is clearly intoxicated by Alma’s early diaries, and other voices are crowded out, including her own. But Haste’s writing comes into its own when she zooms out, particularly when dealing with the years leading up to the Second World War, when Alma found herself caught up in world events. Alma,  by then in her sixties, showed stoicism and altruism as she accompanied Werfel and other Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals into hiding in the South of France. After a scramble on foot over the Pyrenees into Spain, they eventually reached safety in the United States. Alma and Werfel set up house in Beverly Hills among famous other émigrés, including Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Marlene Dietrich.

Passionate Spirit does not answer all of the questions about this complex, flawed and contradictory character. But it is a welcome and engaging narrative of a life that, surely, has not yet been fully explored.

Not Your Average Muse. By Gillian Moore. Literary Review, July 2019.

On the second page of “Passionate Spirit,” the English biographer Cate Haste runs up her flag: “I like Alma Mahler, ” she declares. This statement places the author in direct contradiction to three famous husbands, numerous lovers and most of Alma’s acquaintance. A femme fatale who proclaimed herself a muse to genius, Alma Mahler aroused lust in her youth and gossip-seekers into her 80s. But not many people who knew her liked her very much, or for very long. I clearly remember her daughter, Anna Mahler, telling me that at no time in her long life did her mother ever have a devoted female friend.

The ditty that Tom Lehrer sang on her death in 1964—“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”—still rings true. Alma used her beauty and her wit to get the men she wanted. By marrying three big names, she achieved immortality by proxy. Her own legacy to our cultural heritage consists of a clutch of drawing-room songs and two published memoirs, the former unimpressive and the latter largely untruthful.

These caveats aside, there is something appealing about Ms. Haste’s attempt to retell a well-trodden life story from a 21st-century, egalitarian perspective. “I particularly like the modern young woman who emerges from the pages of her early diaries,” explains Ms. Haste, “when she was untrammeled by convention and bent on realizing herself and her talents despite the odds against her as a woman.”

The odds against her were, in fact, greater than her sex. Born in Vienna in 1879, the child of a painter, Emil Jakob Schindler, and his opera-singer wife, Alma was raised in bohemian squalor and make-do morality. Schindler was ineffectual, possibly gay. In his absence his wife slept with the landlord to make the rent, conceiving an illegitimate child. She later took her husband’s pupil, Carl Moll, as a live-in lover.

The family fortunes were transformed by the sudden patronage of Crown Prince Rudolf, who commissioned Schindler to paint landscapes of Austrian lands. Even so, Alma grew up with a sense of foreboding, trusting no one. Her need for self-reliance turned critical when her father died of a burst appendix just before her 13th birthday.

Alma, who called Schindler “my Führer,” never recovered from the loss, always reaching out to men of artistic potential who bore some resemblance to Emil. Her mother, meanwhile, swiftly married the capable Moll, setting up a cultural salon in Vienna’s fashionable Hohe Warte district, overlooking the city.

Alma conducted her early experiments in love with Gustav Klimt, the leader of Vienna’s variant of the Art Nouveau movement, and with Alexander von Zemlinsky, her piano teacher. Neither passion reached physical consummation, apparently, though it was a close-run thing when she played “Tristan and Isolde” with Zemlinsky at the piano and they were unable to keep her hands off each other (if Alma’s diaries are to be believed). Eventually she went looking for another man old enough to be her father and alighted on Gustav Mahler, director of the Vienna Opera and the most talked-about man in the city.

Mahler was 41, mother-fixated, Jewish, sexually inert and fearful that he might not live long. He was low-hanging fruit. Alma, 22, plucked him in 1901, elevating herself to the status of Frau Direktor and, to echo Tom Lehrer, the most desirable woman in Vienna. The downside of the deal, according to Alma, was that Mahler prohibited her from composing, saying that one composer was enough in the family (we have only Alma’s word for this ban).

In the decade of her marriage to Mahler, she flirted with the composer Hans Pfitzner, the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch and various others while Mahler slaved in a forest hut composing one symphony after another. She also had two children, one dying of scarlet fever at the age of 5. In 1910, the last summer of his life, Mahler discovered her affair with the rising architect Walter Gropius. Mahler consulted Sigmund Freud, who advised him, in the interest of saving the marriage, to let Alma indulge her desires.

Gropius, a man her own age, was in the throes of founding the Bauhaus movement, his own style featuring, as Ms. Haste puts it, the “concept of a building as a total work, a rational and functioning entity.” Frustrated by his inattention, Alma waged a passionate affair with Oskar Kokoschka, a gritty painter whose most coveted work, “Die Windsbraut” (“The Bride of the Wind”), shows a couple lying together as a storm swirls around them, the half-draped female figure being “clearly Alma,” as Ms. Haste notes. Kokoschka’s obsession with Alma’s naked body ultimately terrified her. She married Gropius in 1915. While he was away at war, she seduced a 20-something Jewish poet from Prague, Franz Werfel, a tubby youth she sought to mold.

Alma, pushing 40, was no longer beautiful. “She looked like a laundry sack,” her daughter said. But she had only to enter a room to command total attention and could still arouse desire. Werfel, locked into a deteriorating sado-masochistic marriage, wrote his romantic Catholic best seller “The Song of Bernadette” at Alma’s behest (or so she said).

The problem with Alma’s version of events is that you never know what to believe. She doctored the truth in her published memoirs and, while her diaries were not intended for alien eyes, Ms. Haste is rather too prone to take Alma at her own inflated estimation. “Although famous for her attraction to creative geniuses,” Ms. Haste concludes, “throughout her life it was not the men who were her saviors. Composing, playing or experiencing music in different forms was her crystalline core. . . . And music was the voice through which she could express her passionate spirit. Her own music is her lasting, and living, legacy.”

This is, frankly, nonsense. I have studied the songs of Alma Mahler without ever being convinced of their originality, or even their authorship. Composed in a turn-of-the-century, late-romantic mood-swing, they owe much to the hands of Zemlinsky and the fashions of the day. If composing was Alma’s life force, as Ms. Haste maintains, one has to wonder why the urge was confined to two brief spells—with Zemlinsky and shortly after Mahler’s death, when she might have felt liberated to write a symphony. In the diaries, Alma records her doubt that she has any talent at all.

Composing was never her primary motivation. Alma’s life was a work of art, a pursuit of love on her own terms. Her main interest was the capture of men through whom she could find consolation for the loss of her father and, through their response to her, a vicarious immortality. She was neither feminist, nor heroine nor likable. After Werfel’s death, she was seen out shopping in Beverly Hills. Asked if she was not going to her third husband’s funeral, Alma said: “I never go to those things.”

‘Passionate Spirit’ Review: Songs in the Key of Me. By Norman Lebrecht.  The  Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2019.