Alma Mahler-Werfelaus expressionism + impressionism + modern

Alma Mahler-Werfel (b. 31 August 1879 in Vienna; † 11 December 1964 in New York, N.Y.) was an Austrian composer, author, editor and socialite.

Life

Alma was the daughter of the Viennese landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler and Anna Sofie Schindler, née Bergen, who was trained as a singer.

Alma Mahler’s great talent was music, which she practised intensively on the piano and composing in her youth. Although musicologist Susanne Rode-Breymann has found evidence of almost fifty piano songs in the Diary Suites, composed between 1898 and 1902, only seventeen of them are known to date. The other compositions of other genres that appear in the diary suites have also been lost to this day. Rode-Breymann describes two decisive “fault lines” in the “professionalisation” of Alma’s musical talents. On the one hand, after years of successful piano lessons with Adele Radnitzky-Mandlick, she wanted to perfect her skills with the renowned pianist Julius Epstein, but this was prevented by her stepfather Carl Moll. On the other hand, she had to give up her composing in order to be able to marry Gustav Mahler. There are indications that during her marriage she always took her composition portfolio with her from Vienna to the summer resort and that her husband Gustav Mahler discovered it there in 1910. He then “urged” her to publish some of the songs.

Throughout her life, Alma Mahler-Werfel accompanied important artists on their journeys through life and was on friendly terms with a number of European and US artists, including Leonard Bernstein, Benjamin Britten, Franz Theodor Csokor, Eugen d’Albert, Lion Feuchtwanger, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt, Ernst Lubitsch, Carl Zuckmayer, Eugene Ormandy, Maurice Ravel, Otto Klemperer, Hans Pfitzner, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Alban Berg, Erich Maria Remarque, Friedrich Torberg, Franz Schreker, Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schönberg and Erich Zeisl.

The painter and president of the Vienna Secession Gustav Klimt courted her when she was only 17 years old. She had a relationship with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky based on her admiration for the composer and his recognition of her talent; she had composition lessons with him for a year, alongside her first composition teacher Josef Labor. Years later, on 11 December 1910 in Vienna, he premiered Alma’s 5 Lieder, sung by Thea Drill-Orridge and with him as piano accompanist.

In 1901 Alma Schindler decided to marry Gustav Mahler, the composer and Viennese opera director, who was 19 years her senior; she then had two daughters with him. The last entry in her diary suites is dated 6 January 1902, two months before this wedding. This was the end of this immediate source for Alma Schindler’s artistic development.

During Gustav Mahler’s lifetime, she had an affair with the architect and later Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, whom she married in 1915 after Mahler’s death and a violent intervening love affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. Their daughter Manon was born in 1916. After divorcing Gropius, she became the wife of the writer Franz Werfel in 1929, with whom she had a son who died young and with whom she emigrated to the United States in 1940. She described her life after her marriage to Mahler in the autobiography My Life.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mahler