|
Femme fatale - Alma Mahler
Alma Mahler, the composer Gustav Mahler’s wife, was
a lady out of the ordinary. Talented, beautiful and sparkling
erotic, and is remembered mostly due to her men.
“The three years with him were a single, intense battle
of love. Never before have I tasted so much strain, so much
hell, so much paradise,” Alma Mahler-Werfel said about
her lover Oskar Kokoschka, the master of expressionism, who
painted her as “Windsbraut” (“The Tempest”),
whom she began a passionate affair with in 1911.
“Nothing taste better than the sperm from a genius,”
she has said. Artwork of a strange and chaotic originality
from music, paintings, literature and perhaps even architecture
are left behind on her road through life, made by lovers who
were obsessed by her.
Alma Mahler got her first kiss from the famous painter Gustav
Klimt. The poet Gerhard Haupt was an early lover. The conductor
Alex Zemlinsky, her music teacher, was so in love with her
that he became physical ill when she dumped him to marry Gustav
Mahler, then musical director of the Vienna Opera.
Gustav Mahler tried in vain to chastise “his wild creature”,
and call on Sigmund Freud to get advice and comfort when Alma
had several adventures went to Walter Gropius, the genius
architect, who founded the Bauhaus (‘House of Building’),
one of the most influential architecture and design schools
of the 20th century.
When the affair ended, and since Gustav Mahler died, Alma
married the German painter Oskar Kokoschka, who was absolutely
possessed by her. It’s said that he became “wild
and crazy of erotically power”, which pictures from this
period clearly showed at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne,
which united the whole German-speaking avant-garde, and with
the Blaue Reiter in Munich.
Alma Mahler, the elegant society beauty, was considerably
older than him, and by 1913 her relationship with Kokoschka
was beginning to show signs of strain, and she cut him off
to marry Franz Werfel, Czech-born poet, playwright, and novelist,
Werfel’s best-known works include “The Forty Days
of Musa Dagh” (1933), a classic historical novel that
portrays Armenian resistance to the Turks, and “The Song
of Bernadette” (1941). The latter book had its start
when Werfel, a Jew escaping the Nazis. His central themes
were religious faith, heroism, and human brotherhood.
A liberated, passionate, mystical-erotic, half irrational
woman... Franz Werfel, eleven years younger than Alma, had
already been her lover for several years, even father to one
of her children who was born in her marriage with Gropius.
When the child later died the composer Alban berg wrote the
violin concert “Dem Andenken eines Engels”. It’s
most likely he had the child’s mother in mind.
Alma Mahler kept by Franz Werfel’s side and also followed
him to United States when the seizing of power by the Nazis
and the prohibition of his works made it impossible for Jewish
intellectuals to stay (and survive). Werfel died in Hollywood
in 1945. Alma was then 66 years old, and moved to New York
and even made yet another marriage, this time with an obscure
theologian, before she died at high age in 1964.
Alma Mahler was on one hand a femme fatale, who twisted the
head of some of the most influenced artists in Central Europe
whom she picked out of the catalogue of fame, and on the other
hand she was a free erotic authority that delivered others
talents. Modern feminists remember her with ambiguity. A liberated,
passionate, mystical-erotic, half irrational, who within 1890
to 1930 represented Europe’s outermost modernity.
In a theatre in Venice, Italy, it’s played from August
22. to September 21.: “Alma. A Show Biz ans Ende”
of Paulus Manker. It’s not played on one stage but on
the whole Palazzo Zenobio, with acts on several room at the
same time and on several languages, in the glare of candlelight.
A theatrical journey in the footsteps of a woman, Alma Mahler-Gropius-Kokoschka-
Werfel. Alma Mahler theatre production takes place in Lisbon
this year (2003), next year in New York. Check out www.alma-mahler.at
for updates.
In 2001 there was made a movie, “Bride of the Wind”,
a bio picture of her life, as well as “Alma Mahler”,
TV movie made in Croatia the same year. There is a also three
part TV film about Alma made by the Alma Productions.
Her maiden name was Alma Schindler, born August 31, 1879
in Vienna. Her father was the prominent Viennese landscape
painter Emil Jakob Schindler. Alma grew up in a privileged
environment. She began composition studies with Alexander
von Zemlinsky in 1897, her first lover, and she composed Lieder
and instrumental pieces as well as starting work on an opera.
When she, “the most beautiful girl in Vienna”, married
the composer Gustav Mahler, was he 20 years older than her.
Mahler said, perhaps typical for his time: “The role
of composer falls to me, yours is that of loving companion...!”
By the time Mahler, after a crisis in their marriage, suddenly
took an interest in her composition. He had five of her Lieder
printed, but by then she had long given up. “Ten years
of wasted development cannot be made up anymore. It was a
galvanized corpse that he wanted to resurrect.”
This woman who had wanted to achieve fame by virtue of her
own work now surrounded herself with famous men, “geniuses”.
But the energetic, ambitious Alma, often described as power-hungry,
was never the gentle, devoted muse. She writes in her memoirs:
“God granted me the privilege of knowing the brilliant
works of our time before they left the hands of their creators.
And if I was allowed to assist these knights for a while,
then my existence is justified and blessed!”
> zurück
|
|
