Alma Mahler

Alma Mahler composed songs, was made to stop by her first husband, and spent sixty years at the centre of European art as the wife or lover of a great many of the men who made it. She was the daughter of the painter Emil Schindler, studied composition with Zemlinsky, and had written around a hundred songs by her early twenties. Mahler proposed in 1901 on condition that she give up composing entirely, on the ground that there could be only one composer in a household; she agreed, and he relented eight years later, publishing some of her songs, after their marriage had nearly collapsed and he had consulted Freud about it. After his death she lived with Kokoschka, who painted The Bride of the Wind about the affair and commissioned a life-size doll of her when it ended, married the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and then the writer Franz Werfel, with whom she fled the Nazis over the Pyrenees in 1940. Her daughter Manon died at eighteen and Berg wrote his Violin Concerto for her. Her memoirs are vivid, self-serving and unreliable, and were for a long time the main source on Mahler. Kokoschka kept the doll for years, took it to the opera, and finally destroyed it at a party. Gropius was the father of her daughter Manon, whose death at eighteen from polio produced Berg s Violin Concerto, dedicated to the memory of an angel. Werfel wrote The Song of Bernadette in gratitude for their escape and it became a bestseller and a film in America, where they settled in Los Angeles. About seventeen of her songs survive and have been recorded seriously since the 1990s. Her diaries, unlike the memoirs, were published unedited in 1997 and are a far better source.

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