Manon Gropius
Manon Gropius died of polio at eighteen and became the dedication of one of the great violin concertos. She was the daughter of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, and Alma Mahler - who had been married to Gustav Mahler, left Gropius for the writer Franz Werfel, and collected the men of her generation with some deliberation. Her childhood was spent between them. Everyone who wrote about her describes the same thing: an extraordinarily beautiful and gentle girl in a household of enormous egos, who wanted to act and had begun to train for it. She caught poliomyelitis on holiday in Venice at Easter 1934, was paralysed from the waist down, and spent a year in a wheelchair before dying in April 1935. Alban Berg, a friend of the family, abandoned the opera he was writing and produced a violin concerto in a few months, inscribed to the memory of an angel. It quotes a Bach chorale - it is enough, Lord - in its closing pages, and it is the last work he completed. He died that December of blood poisoning from an insect bite, at fifty, and the concerto was first performed in Barcelona four months after him. So the memorial outlived both the girl it was written for and the man who wrote it within a year, and is now the most played violin concerto of the twentieth century. Her mother, who had buried a daughter by Mahler as well, wrote that she had been the most beautiful human being in every sense. She is the reason a great many people who have never heard of Walter Gropius know the phrase to the memory of an angel.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 1935 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: historical_figure
