“Historical Anthology of Music by Women”
Alma Mahler was the daughter of the artist Emil Schindler. During her long life she became a confidante of important men from many different fields of creativity, and she married three of them. In 1902 she became the wife of Gustav Mahler, who was then the director of the Vienna Opera and was also building a reputation as a major composer. He died in 1911, and four years later, after an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, Alma married the architect Walter Gropius. The pressure of separation from Gropius during his military service in World War I, combined with an affair with the young writer Franz Werfel, resulted in separation and eventual divorce from Gropius. Alma and Werfel were married in 1929.
Alma’s involvement with various men has resulted in her popular reputation as a femme fatale. However, this image is unfair since it does not admit of her intellectual gifts. She was educated to be a composer, studying counterpoint with Robert Gound and the blind organist Josef Labor and, at the turn of the century, composition with Alexander von Zemlinsky. In her autobiography she wrote, “Alexander von Zemlinsky was one of the finest musicians and . . . the teacher par excellence. His technical brilliance was unique. He could take a little theme, . . . squeeze it, and form it into countless variations.”
While still a comparatively uneducated teenager, Alma began to compose music in many forms, including instrumental works. However, all her surviving compositions are in the form of the lied, generally for medium voice and piano. Three books of songs were published: Fünf Lieder (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1910), Vier Lieder (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1915), and Fünf Gesänge (Vienna: Josef Weinberger, 1924). In addition to these fourteen published songs, two songs Aus dem Zyklus “Mütter” von Rainer Maria Rilke survive in manuscript. A manuscript of the four songs published in 1915 survives on film in the Toscanini Memorial Archive of the New York Public Library. No other sources for Alma Mahler’s songs are known to exist; at the induction of the Third Reich in Austria, Alma and Franz Werfel left Vienna, leaving almost everything behind, including her manuscripts, which were destroyed when their house was bombed during World War II.
Alma and Werfel lived in France from 1938 to 1940; they were fortunate enough to escape when the Germans invaded France and to come to the United States. They lived in southern California near many of their friends, including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Bruno Walter. Werfel died in 1945; eventually Alma settled in New York, where she lived until her death in 1964, at the age of 85. Of her four children (three daughters and one son), only her second daughter, Anna Mahler, lived to marry and have children. Her elder daughter by Mahler, Maria, and her son by Werfel, Martin, died in childhood; her daughter by Gropius, Manon, died in 1935 at the age of eighteen.
In compositional style, Alma Mahler is something of a Januskopf. She has some affinity for the older piano style of Brahms and Liszt in her piano parts, which are demanding with wide ranges, full harmonies, and equal partnership with the vocal parts. In other ways, however, her style looks forward to the harmonic dissonance and tight forms of the Second Viennese School. Credence is lent to Alma’s description of Zemlinsky as a teacher by comparison of her works with those of a fellow student of Zemlinsky, Arnold Schoenberg.
The surviving songs show a decidedly modern taste insofar as the selection of texts is concerned: poems by Rilke (in the case of the two unpublished songs) Richard Dehmel (a taste shared with Schoenberg, who was writing Verklärte Nacht when Alma was writing some of her early songs), Franz Werfel, and Otto Julius Bierbaum, among others. Rarely, it appears, did Alma choose poems written before her own time; most of her poets were her contemporaries.
Performances of Alma Mahler’s songs have been rare,- the most widely publicized in the United States was a performance of six songs by Lorna Myers, mezzo-soprano, accompanied by Thomas Fulton, piano, at the 1980 Ravinia Festival. Among the songs in that recital was “Der Erkennende,” which is reproduced below. It has not been recorded to date, although it is one of the finest songs Alma wrote. The text is by her future husband, Franz Werfel. In her autobiography she wrote:
An episode in the summer of 1915 was the first cause of an upheaval in my life. . . . I bought the latest issue of a monthly called Die weissen blätter, and when I opened it I saw a poem: “Man Aware” (Der Erkennende) by Franz Werfel. . . . The poem engulfed me. It has remained one of the loveliest in my experience. I was spellbound, a prey to the soul of Franz Werfel, whom I did not know. . . . I set the poem to music, arbitrarily concluding halfway through the second stanza.
The following is a translation of the full text of Werfe’s poem, of which Alma set only the first three stanzas.
Human beings love us, and, unblessed,
They arise from table to lament us.
So we sit bowed over the cloth
And are indifferent and can deny them.
That which loves us, how we thrust it away!
And no sorrow will soften us callous ones.
That which we love snatches a place,
Becomes hard and no more reachable.
And the word that rules is: Alone!
When we impotently burn to each other.
One thing I know: Never and nothing is mine.
Mine alone to recognize that.*
See the friend who portions your food,
Behind brow and countenance gathering together.
Where your glance hastens to meet him too,
A rock abides to bar the entry.
When I float through the range of the lamps
And, evil wanderer, hear my steps,
Then I awaken and I am close by,
And I myself am one who sneers, and an Other.
Yes, who descends to this position,
Where the solitary one severs and cleaves himself asunder,
That one himself dissolves in his hand
And nothing exists to fold him up.
In no more slumber is he embodied,
He always feels, while we sustain ourselves.
And the night of life, which remains to him,
Is inescapably a forest of mourning.
*Alma’s setting ends at this point.
Further Reading
Filler, Susan M. “A Composer’s Wife as Composer: The Songs of Alma Mahler,” Journal of Musicological Research 4 (1983):427-41.
Mahler-Werfel, Alma. And the Bridge Is Love. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958. Autobiography.
Mahler, Alma. Mein Leben. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, i960.
Scholium, Robert. “Die Lieder von Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler,” Oesterreichische Musik-zeitschrift 34 (19791:544-51.
Werfel, Franz. Das lyrische Werk, edited by Adolf D. Klarmann. Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1967.
© 1924 by Josef Weinberger, Vienna/London. Reprinted by permission.
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