Gustav Mahler and His World in 1910

During the Mahler anniversaries of 2010-11, Norman Lebrecht published a book called Why Mahler? Now, as then, even the most fervent Mahlerian might well ask of any book on this subject, “Why Another Book About Mahler?” Musicologist, author and lapsed cellist, Stephen Johnson, has given us a compelling answer in the form of his latest volume, The Eighth: Mahler and his World in 1910.

I am sure I am not alone among musicians and Mahler aficionados in having an entire large section in my library given over to books about Mahler. Almost all of them fall into one of a handful of utilitarian archetypes of varying scope, ambition and quality. There are, of course, the biographies, ranging from Henry-Louis de La Grange’s magisterial four-volume masterpiece to svelte introductory handbooks. There are overviews of Mahler’s music, whether covering only the symphonies or everything, that range from common touch collections of program notes to the exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, analyses of Donald Mitchell. There are first hand accounts from people who knew Mahler, including Bruno Walter, Ernst Krenek, Alma Mahler and Natalie Bauer-Lechner, and collections of essays of varying levels of quality and cohesion. There are even some very fine book-length studies of individual works, notably Stephen Hefling’s outstanding book about Das Lied von der Erde, and Peter Franklin’s about the Third Symphony. In spite of its title, Johnson’s book is not simply another of these. It is something richer and more wide-ranging. It marks a new and different kind of book about Mahler. Now we know “why.”

But why a book about the Eighth? Mahler was himself a composer of contradiction and paradox. Johnson ends his book with a quotation from Beethoven which appears throughout The Eighth like a Leitmotif, “sometimes the opposite is also true.” The Eighth Symphony may well be Mahler’s most-loved work – it’s semi-annual appearances at the BBC Proms are invariably sold out months in advance.  And yet, among many Mahler listeners and interpreters, it remains one of the perennial black sheep of his output alongside the hugely misunderstood and under-valued Seventh. Many leading Mahler conductors have either completely or largely avoided conducting it, including Bernard Haitink (who put the work away after a 1988 performance at the Concertgebouw), Iván Fischer and many others. It’s been called a backwards step in Mahler’s development, an incoherent mishmash of different languages that don’t work together, an unstructured non-symphony, and the musical analogue of a Barnum and Bailey Circus. Most often by Mahler’s otherwise  most devoted listeners.

Johnson would have done us all a service to write a worthy explanation of, and apologia for, Mahler’s last choral masterpiece, but he’s done much more. This is a book ‘about’ the Eighth, rather than ‘on’ the Eighth, with this work as the focal point, rather than the subject, of this fascinating book. The piece and its premiere serve a center of gravity for an exceptionally engaging and wide-ranging exploration of Mahler’s late music, his fraught relationship with his wife, his engagement with philosophy, his place in one of the richest moments in cultural history, the emergence of psychoanalysis and much more. There are insights to be found here into not only the life and work of Mahler, but those of Alexander von Zemlinsky, Hans Gál, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Schoenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Klimt and others. Johnson writes perceptively about everything from national identity, to Viennese Heurigen wine bars, to sex.

For those readers already well acquainted with Mahler’s life story, there are many episodes described in the book with which they will already be familiar, such as the extraordinary circumstances of the Eighth’s sensational premiere, Mahler’s encounter with Freud, and the funeral procession of a New York fireman which inspired the harrowing opening of the last movement of the Tenth Symphony. And yet, I would think that for even more the most fanatical Mahlerian, Johnson offers some new insight or some fresh interpretation of even the most well-known events in every chapter.

There are extended descriptions and discussions of not only the Eighth Symphony, but of Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and the Tenth (discussed mostly through the prism of Derryck Cooke’s Performing version). Narrating musical events in prose is, at best, an unsatisfying necessity. Without such descriptions of a work’s unfolding, it’s more or less impossible to highlight the ideas in the music the author wants to discuss, but if words could adequately describe music, we wouldn’t need music. Johnson handles this inherent problem very well – he moves from descriptions of musical events to exploration of musical meaning about as elegantly and efficiently as one can. Mahler fans tend to be incredibly possessive of his music and hugely opinionated about its meaning. Johnson has a disarmingly easygoing way of suggesting new readings of Mahler’s works that I think most will find refreshing rather than confrontational.

Will Johnson’s book on the Eighth serve as an eye opener for those Mahlerian listeners and performers who have always found the work to be a blind spot? Well, as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him or her drink. But one hopes the doubters will, if nothing else, follow Johnson’s own example. He most endearingly describes his somewhat negative previous verdict on the Eighth Symphony, as presented in the book Companion to the Symphony (1992) “monumentally wrong.” Sometimes, the opposite is also true.

Book Review: The Eighth: Mahler and his World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson. B y Kenneth Woods.

Kenneth Woods , April 23, 2020. 

Stephen Johnson ends this thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8, and much else besides, with a quotation attributed to Beethoven, of which Oscar Wilde would have approved: “Sometimes the opposite is also true.” The legends attaching to Mahler’s life, especially in the final years, are treasured by lovers of Mahler the Titan, and woe betide anyone daring to question them. But Johnson, one of the finest contemporary musicologists, is also a demythologiser of the gentler sort, and all the more persuasive for it.

Mahler wrote the Eighth in 1906, in an astonishing eight weeks. The new symphony “was to be his religious rite, his High Mass, but conceived and expressed in terms that were both mystical and humanist”. He chose to set the words of the ninth-century Christian hymn “Veni Creator Spiritus”, along with passages from the close of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, and fashioned music meant to match the grandeur of both texts. The result is either one of the triumphs of 20th-century musical composition, or an overwrought mess. Of course, it may well be both – sometimes the opposite is also true.

The symphony was premiered in Munich in 1910, at the new Musik-Festhalle. For Mahler, the four years that had elapsed since the completion of the Eighth had been fraught with trials and tragedies – and worse was to follow. In 1907, he was forced from his position as director of the Vienna Court Opera; he discovered, by accident, that his heart was defective; and his doted-on four-year-old daughter Maria died of scarlet fever. Years afterwards, Alma Mahler wrote that these were the “three hammer-blows” that marked the beginning of the end for the composer, who was to die in 1911, at the age of 50. It makes for a good story, in the true Viennese tradition that combines tragedy and kitsch and then adds an Alp-size dollop of Schlagobers (whipped cream).

How much truth is there in Alma’s version of Mahler’s final years, and how much of it may be put down to her predilection for melodrama and self-promotion? Here, it does well to tread carefully. Alma is a much-maligned woman, and rightly so, in many instances. She was egotistical and self-aggrandising, certainly, but she had much to battle against. Before they were married, Mahler sent her a long “pre-nup” letter, informing her that henceforth she would have to forgo her own musical ambitions – she was a passable composer, and might have been more than that, given time and freedom – and devote herself to the all-consuming task of making him happy.

In 1910, she was to have her revenge on him, in part unwittingly, for his smothering of her talent. The young architect Walter Gropius, with whom Alma was conducting an affair, wrote a love letter to her at Toblach in the South Tyrol, where she and Gustav were staying. Either calculatedly or by a Freudian slip, the hotly impatient lover addressed the envelope not to “Frau Direktor Mahler”, but to “Herr Direktor Mahler”. The composer innocently opened the letter, and the hammer fell. Johnson throws doubt on two of Alma’s “hammer blows” – Mahler’s ousting from the Vienna Opera turned out to be a blessing, and his faulty heart did not prevent him from composing at least three more major works – but there is no doubting the weight of this fourth blow.

These amatory matters are entirely pertinent to the story of the Eighth Symphony and the compositions that followed it, including the symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde – which many consider Mahler’s masterpiece – the Ninth Symphony, and the unfinished Tenth. Johnson sees the essence of the Eighth not in Christian iconography, but in its celebration of artistic and sexual creativity.

The creative spirit the symphony invokes, according to Johnson, is not the Holy Ghost, nor the Blessed Virgin as she is figured in the Hollywood ending Goethe tacked on to Faust, and the salvation it offers is not only spiritual but carnal. The creator spiritus Mahler calls on is no other than Eros, the true “creator of the world”. Johnson writes: “In the words of the ancient Latin hymn Mahler had read the message that had evidently struck Goethe too: fired by love, real erotic love rather than some disembodied ideal, we … can scale the Heavens.”

Yes, but the niggling question remains: is the Eighth as good as Mahler thought it was, and as many continue to insist it is? This symphony is unique among the 10 that he composed but uniqueness does not ensure greatness. To some ears, the Eighth suffers from the bombast and pomposity that infects so much of German music of the Romantic era. Compared to, say, the Second, that truly revolutionary work, the Eighth can sound not so much dramatic as panic-stricken, even hysterical. Johnson makes a strong case for its quality, musically and philosophically, in this magnificent, strongly argued and yet wonderfully subtle study. Whatever our final judgment may be on the Eighth, having read Johnson, we shall never listen to it in the same way again.

The Eighth by Stephen Johnson review – Mahler and sexual creativity. By John Banville. The Guardian, May 16, 2020.

Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is an extraordinary creature, vast in its ambitions and almost megalomaniacal in its demands. Eight top-rank vocal soloists; two large mixed choirs and a boys’ choir; 22 woodwinds; 17 brass; an offstage brass band of seven; nine percussion; celeste; piano; harmonium and organ; two harps; mandolin; and full strings to match.

Mahler even suggested that some of the parts might be doubled. No wonder it has become known as the Symphony of a Thousand, a title invented by the impresario Emil Gutmann, whom Mahler had engaged to make the 1910 premiere of his visionary work a saleable proposition.

Sold it had to be, in order to finance its excesses and to fill Munich’s spanking new Musik-Festhalle. But Mahler was also worried and embarrassed — worried that this was turning into a circus, “a catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show”, and embarrassed to see the streets of Munich littered with images of himself as great composer/conductor. A new biography was in the bookshops, and copies of the score were casually left on café tables to lure punters. Our own sense of the tension between PR and lofty spirituality was alive and kicking a century ago. “There have been better symphonies that had less advertising,” wrote one critic; another declared Mahler to be “our contemporary Christ”.

It was as a conductor, rather than a composer, that Mahler was best known in 1910. His career path, from provincial Bohemia to the Hofoper (the court opera in Vienna) and the New York Philharmonic, was dazzling. Along the way, he invented many of the customs and practices of today’s classical music and operatic world, not least the tremendous figure of the conductor as magus. Yet as a composer, he was less feted, somewhat in the shadow of his friend Richard Strauss.

In 1906, Mahler attended the legendary Austrian premiere in Graz of Strauss’s supremely provocative opera Salome and, on the train home, wondered if popular success could be at one with artistic integrity. The Eighth, which he started sketching in that same year, was perhaps the answer.

 To become music director of the Hofoper, Mahler, who as a child had excelled in Mosaic religious studies and attended synagogue, had to be baptised a Christian. His Eighth Symphony is a synthesis of Christian spirituality and voguish pantheism. Falling into two parts, it sets the famous ninth-century hymn of ecstasy “Veni creator spiritus” as a vast and ravishing vocal composition, introduced by a huge ecclesiastical summons on the organ; and part two of Goethe’s Faust, a more typically Mahlerian display of passionate yearning and instrumental colour.

“All my previous symphonies,” Mahler wrote, “are merely the preludes to this one. In the other works everything still was subjective tragedy, but this one is a source of great joy.” It was a huge success, crowds surging towards the platform after it had finished.

 In The Eighth, Stephen Johnson leads us through all the complexities of the work with skill and sensitivity. It’s clearly a piece that he reveres. In its embrace of joy and spiritual uplift, it has been the most controversial of Mahler’s symphonies in our own day, lacking that juxtaposition of sublimity and the banal that makes the composer such a postmodern pin-up.

Johnson’s defence involves not only a journey through the piece itself, underlining the subtlety and complexity that defy the overkill; but also a look at the world from which it sprang and the extraordinary and tangled personal story which somehow, despite all that objective joy, it still embodies. As a celebration of Goethe’s Ewig-Weibliche — eternal feminine — it was a sonic pedestal for Alma, Mahler’s wife, who was both drawn to his genius and suffocated by his demands.

As a singer, I come at Mahler from the intimate, supremely human and often painful subjectivity of his extraordinary body of songs. In the midst of all the Eighth’s high-mindedness and vast horizons, it’s somehow a relief to return to the little details of Alma’s contemporaneous affair with the young architect Walter Gropius — her escape from the Mahler machine — or to picture her high romantic disappointment with Mahler as he arrived at their wedding wearing galoshes.

The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910, by Stephen Johnson, Faber, RRP£14.99, 314 pages

The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. By Ian Bostridge. The Financial Times, April 17, 2020.

A kind of gigantism took hold of the European mind in the years before the first world war. It shaped everything, from empires to poetry. In the confidence of new technology and new ideas, things could be attempted on a larger scale than ever before. The mental power of the age could be measured in the sheer size of the things it produced. This might be ‘Jacky’ Fisher’s Dreadnought in 1906, which set off a European arms race in huge battleships, or a great construction — the Victoria memorial in front of Buckingham Palace is nothing to the one built in Kolkata.

Even plays were being conceived on a scale beyond the capacity of any human audience (to culminate in Karl Kraus’s Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit), and novels many times the length of War and Peace, such as Proust’s. Not everything was realised — Otto Wagner’s colossal projects for Vienna ran into the sand of the imperial family’s implacable dislike of the architect — but an astonishing amount was achieved, and still stands as an example of what confidence can do. We might admire it; we might want to react against an overblown and bombastic tendency; but there’s no escaping it.

One of the areas where the appeal of size proved most seductive was music. Upscaling could take two forms; in length of invention and size of ensemble. Composers had often felt the appeal of masses of performers, and the challenge of sustaining a single musical structure beyond the scale of, say, Beethoven’s Eroica had been long appreciated.

After Wagner’s massive extension of both orchestra and timespan in the seven music dramas from Das Rheingold to Parsifal, a sort of arms race among composers began. In theory there was nothing to prevent a composer from exploring an expansion in only one aspect, and writing a short piece for a huge orchestra, or a very long one for a chamber ensemble. In practice the two tended to go together; Webern’s exquisite miniatures for a huge orchestra, the Six Pieces of 1909, were a rarity and, for economic reasons, remain rarely performed.

Mostly, what we can see is a tendency for music to become longer and more opulent in its demands. Piano concertos, which had stretched in Brahms’s hands from three movements to a symphonic four, now went to five movements and a choral finale (Busoni). It is thought that the largest musical forces pressed into action were in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, premiered in 1913 — just as other large-scale forces outside the concert hall were about to be called on, or called up.

Much of the appeal to composers of these ensembles was in the possibility of exploring myriad small combinations within a huge range of sounds; the appeal to audiences, undoubtedly, was the overwhelming thrill of a huge ensemble at full stretch. That appeal, whether in a Richard Strauss tone poem, The Rite of Spring, or the splendid sound of a nine-member trumpet section in Janacek’s later Sinfonietta, has never gone away.

Neither has the association with other, more aggressive expansions. Gustav Mahler’s eighth symphony, the subject of Stephen Johnson’s book, contains the pointed words ‘Drive the enemy far from us/And grant us lasting peace’, and was described by its composer as a Geschenk der ganzen Nation — a ‘gift to the whole nation’. Some unlikely people gave into these fantasies. Arnold Schoenberg, on creating the 12-tone method in the early 1920s, told Josef Rufer that he had ‘made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years’ — a very poignant thing for an Austrian Jewish composer to say innocently in 1923.

Mahler was one of the foremost architects of the colossal in music. Though his fame was principally as a conductor and director of the Vienna opera house, he was producing a series of symphonic works that had been stretching the boundaries of the form in all directions — the six movements of the third symphony, the inclusion of unheard-of symphonic instruments such as mandolins, guitars, sledgehammers, retuned solo violins, and very large orchestral forces.

Even so, the eighth symphony stands apart. It calls for eight vocal soloists and multiple choirs, and an orchestra reinforced to the last degree, containing such extravagant additions to the usual as piano, celesta, organ, harmonium, two mandolins and four harps. It goes on for a very long time — and includes a full setting of the last scene of Goethe’s Faust Part II.

It was Mahler’s greatest triumph in his lifetime as a composer when it was premiered in 1910, though interestingly, in a very pro-Mahler age, it is now his least performed symphony. That is partly due to the expense and difficulty of putting together all those forces (demanding two mandolin players is just asking for trouble). But it may also reflect the general view that the eighth is too deliberate a bid for greatness, riding on the coat-tails of the greatest classic in German literature; too voulu.

It has much elaborate sounding counterpoint —the highest claim to seriousness of German music — but it is largely an illusion. The first movement is full of moments that appear to be on the verge of launching a double fugue, one of the greatest traditional challenges to a composer’s skill, but they almost never come to anything. (The most ingenious fugue of the period is the outrageous and very funny palindromic double fugue in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.) This is not really what Mahler was good at, which you can see in the fourth, sixth and ninth symphonies, and the miraculous shadowplay of fantasy in the middle movements of the seventh. The eighth is a bit of a press release.

The symphony was written at great speed in 1906, in his summer retreat on the Worthersee in Carinthia. Its premiere, in 1910, handled by the impresario Emil Gutmann, was held in Munich, in a newly built concert hall seating 3,200 people. Ticket prices were high, and Gutmann, without consultation, advertised the piece under the screamingly vulgar slogan ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. Mahler disapproved, but the epithet stuck. (Gutmann was being literal, too; the first performance is believed to have called on 1,028 performers.)

The audience was an omnium gatherum of cultural might: Thomas Mann, Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Webern, the young Korngold, Stefan Zweig, Dukas and Saint-Saens were all bowled over by it (apart from Saint-Saens). Mann was so overwhelmed he wrote a fan letter — and the following year gave the hero of his novella Death in Venice Mahler’s face, exactly described.

There was a less public drama attached to the symphony. Mahler’s wife Alma was, unusually, the dedicatee of the work. The summer of the premiere was also the year of her enthusiastic affair with the young architect Walter Gropius. It was the experience of the eighth symphony in those Munich performances that persuaded Gropius that the affair must be broken off: this was a genius whose life should not be troubled.

Johnson has written an engaging and enthusiastic account of the eighth, but it is very much a chronology of events. And it doesn’t quite live up to the suggestion of its subtitle, as much more could have been said about the place of this symphony in the general culture of its time. Symphonic music was central then; any literary intellectual could follow a symphonic argument in detail, and — as Mann’s Doktor Faustus was to show — keep up with the most advanced developments.

Johnson puts the symphony squarely in the context of Mahler’s musical career, and is happy to share his passionate keenness for the music — which is all very well. But I finished the book intrigued by the practicalities of the project, and wondering about what the symphony inadvertently reveals, as well as what it so energetically insists on saying.

Review of the book : The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson

Gustav Mahler’s bid for greatness: the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’.  By Philip Hensher. The Spectator, March 18, 2020.

Stephen Johnson 

The 50 greatest Mahler recordings.   Gramophone,  March 10  , 2020

Interested in Gustav Mahler ?

Mahler Foundation

Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft

Gustav Mahler Stichting

Colorado Mahler Fest

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.