January 16, 2020 19
feet and give myself to them, body and
soul.... There’s too much zest in me.”
All the while, she was a dedicated stu-
dent of piano and composition with Jo-
seph Labor, a blind organist. As Haste
points out, “It was not an option for her
to study at a music academy because
women were barred from entry.” But
Alma’s next conquest was Alexander
von Zemlinsky, a promising young con-
ductor and composer who recognized
her talent and offered to give her more
advanced music lessons. When Zemlin-
sky arrived at her house, however, there
was “a chorus of dismay.” Zemlinsky
was ugly and, worse, he was poor. He
was also Jewish. Alma moved in a cul-
turally influential circle of assimilated
Jews, but anti-Semitism was also very
much a part of her world. “What a pity
that [she] is so conspicuously Jewish,”
she wrote of a friend she admired.
Haste refers to her “startling and
tasteless anti-Semitic asides in her dia-
ries,” which is a rather tasteless and
startling way to put it, considering the
depth of Alma’s lifelong prejudice, and
the way it affected her personal and
family relationships. Alma as a young
woman was, perhaps, reflexively anti-
Semitic, at least compared to the ma-
ture Alma’s insistent and conscious
anti-Semitism. But her belief that Jews
were inferior never wavered. As to her
two Jewish husbands, Mahler and Wer-
fel, she seemed to relish both her radi-
cal liaison with a decadent race as well
as the opportunity to “lift” her Jewish
husbands up, perhaps even to convert
them. Though Mahler had already con-
verted to Catholicism in order to be-
come the conductor of the court opera,
there were rumors that Alma had Wer-
fel baptized against his wishes, or did it
herself, when he died. Even with Zem-
linsky, Alma made no secret that the
bestowal of her beautiful and Christian
self on a small, ugly Jew was a gracious
act of magnanimity.
Zemlinsky quickly fell in love with
Alma; two other men proposed to her
“out of the blue”; and she became in-
volved with Max Burckhard, director
of the Burgtheater. Caught between
girlish romantic longings and strong
physical desire, both of which she
wrote about with complete frankness
in her diary, she dreamed “of giving
[her] body” to the older man until the
day he “came closer and closer, and fi-
nally he kissed me—and this was the
worst of it—touched my mouth with
his tongue.... Klimt’s kiss and Burck-
hard’s kiss—the former was heaven—
today it was hell.”
As a young woman, Alma has both
a familiar, contemporary appeal and
one that feels culturally remote. Her
diary entries burst with judgments of
operas and symphonies, with court-
ship and copulation. Shocked when she
realizes human sex is similar to that
of dogs, she writes, “And that’s what
Klimt called ‘physical union,’ this jig-
ging about. It’s revolting, disgusting.
Do humans pull the same faces as dogs.
Ughhhhhhh.” Yet she cannot keep her
eyes off the bulge in Burckhard’s trou-
sers. When Zemlinsky proposes to her,
she notes that “incidentally, my sexual
organs are strangely disturbed.” There
is that “zest,” her “desire—my cursed,
churned up desire.”
When Burckhard heard she was
thinking of marrying the Jewish Zem-
linsky, he said, “For heaven’s sake,don’t marry Z. Don’t corrupt good
race.” She didn’t marry him—but in-
stead another potential race corruptor,
Gustav Mahler. After Alma and Gus-
tav attended the same dinner party in
1901, Zemlinsky, Burckhard, and her
two other suitors were quickly cast
aside. Within two months, Alma and
Gustav were engaged.Sounding a little like Alma herself,
Haste writes that in the years before her
marriage, A lma “was compelled to cre-
ate music, driven by a spirit that flows
from mysterious sources.” She went to
the opera two or three times a week, to
concerts at the Vienna Philharmonic
every Sunday. A true Romantic, she
preferred Wagner to Mozart:Our century, our race, our outlook
on life, our blood, our heart—ev-
erything is decadent! That’s why
people prefer operas in which the
music whips up every feeling and
tears us apart like a whirlwind.
We need madness—not dainty
pastorales—to refresh the heart
and mind.She writes about music with the same
hot-blooded ardor she uses to de-
scribe her feelings about men. “I want
to do something really remarkable.
Would like to compose a really good
opera—something no woman has ever
achieved,” she writes in her diary. “Oh
Lord God, give me the strength to
achieve what my heart longs for—an
opera.... I pray to you that I may suf-
fer no defeat in the battle against my
weakness, against my femininity.”But it was love, Haste says, that “was
the core of her existence and the well-
spring of the power that this restless
and irrepressible woman would... ex-
ercise over those in her orbit.” Mahler
seemed to bring together her needs
for love, music, and genius, though
she was more impressed with him as
a conductor than a composer, describ-
ing his First Symphony as a “jumble
of styles—and an ear-splitting, nerve-
shattering din.”
Gustav wrote a letter to his fiancée
that raises hackles today for its conde-
scension toward a female artist. It raised
Alma’s, too. After she ended a letter to
him abruptly because she wanted to
get back to her music, he replied, “If
we are to be happy together, you must
be my wife, not my colleague.” Her
friends had flattered her, he said, by
overstating her talent. She valued her
“individuality,” but in truth, he wrote,
she had not yet reached a state of “fully
reasoned intrinsic being.” Everything
in her was “nascent, latent and unde-
veloped.” What she could become, and
must become in order to marry him,
was “the highest and dearest part of
my life, my faithful, valiant partner,
who understands me and spurs me on
to higher things... a heaven, in which I
can always submerge, retrieve and con-
stitute myself—all that is so indescrib-
ably noble and beautiful—so much and
so great—in a word: MY WIFE.”
Not surprisingly, the twenty-two-
year-old aspiring opera composer who
saw herself as a tortured artist in train-
ing, who spent hours and hours practic-
ing counterpoint, who had just weeks
before turned down three other men,
one of whom took her talent seriously,“[A] stirring blend of memoir, letters to
his young sons, and meditations on the
humbling nature of parenthood...
FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIEDTHE THINGS THEY CARRIED
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