20 The New York Review
was horrified. She did what any con-
flicted young woman would do: “Half-
crazed with grief, I got into my finery
and drove to Siegfried—in tears!” But
by the next morning, she had a different
outlook: “What if I were to renounce
my music out of love for him?... I
must live entirely for him, to make him
happy.” The same Romantic spiritual
elevation she associated with being an
artist was now assigned to sacrificing
herself to an artist. His love would “el-
evate” and “purify” her; she was “im-
bued with the holiest feelings” for him.
The letters of Gustav and Alma have
an almost frenzied urgency, but Gustav,
selfish and demanding, was also candid
and blunt. He was forty-four; he knew
his own talent and ambition and what
he required. A more sympathetic read-
ing of his letter would be as a warning
to his young fiancée, offering a chance
for her to escape:
If you were to abandon your music
in order to take possession of
mine, and also to be mine: would
this signify the end of life as you
know it, and if you did so, would
you feel you were renouncing a
higher existence? Before we can
think of forging a bond for life, we
must agree on this question.Alma accepted the terms, commit-
ting herself to propping up his creative
genius, entering a marriage governed
by the mandates of Gustav’s ruthless
schedule. When he worked as a con-
ductor during the winter, Alma would
prepare his soup as he walked up the
four flights to their apartment, so that
it would be placed on the table, hot, as
he sat down. When he worked in his
mountain composing hut in the sum-
mer, he could not be disturbed in any
way. Alma was not allowed even to
play the piano during the long, lonely
days. Gustav followed a strenuous ex-
ercise program, and Alma, huffing and
puffing, was required to accompany
him on long, steep hikes through the
mountains, even during pregnancy.
When Alma was in agony during labor,
Mahler tried to “distract” her by read-
ing aloud—from Kant.
In her various memoirs, Mahler’s
widow did not hesitate to bitterly bring
up the difficulties of marriage to a ge-
nius, particularly the sacrifice of her
music. But she did faithfully uphold
that part of the marital bargain. It was
in an entirely different area of matri-
mony that she strayed.
By 1910, Alma had given birth to two
daughters, Maria and Anna. She lost
Maria to scarlet fever and diphtheria
when the child was only five. After this
tragedy and years of accommodating
her intense and often unwell husband,
traveling across Europe and to New
York City with him, Alma was worn
out. Following the enviable fashion of
her class and time, she went to a spa to
recover. There, she met a young man
named Walter Gropius, the architect
who later established the Bauhaus.
Gropius, not yet famous, was recov-
ering from a year of hard work setting
up his first firm. He was younger than
Alma, good looking, and, importantly
for her, Aryan. They fell into a pas-
sionate affair that continued by letter
and occasional assignation even after
Alma returned to her mountain home,
where Gustav was composing his Tenth
Symphony. Preposterously, Gropius
addressed one of his love letters not to
Alma but to Gustav. Whether or not
it was a mistake, as Gropius claimed,
the rest of the summer saw Gustav
sprawled, by day, weeping, on the floor
of his composing hut; insisting, by night,
that the door between his and Alma’s
bedrooms be kept open so he could be
sure she was breathing. Gustav even in-
vited Gropius, who was spotted hiding
like a troll beneath a bridge, to come to
the house, then respectfully retreated
so the lovers could decide what to do. It
is a scene from an overwrought opera,
but it was real and ravaging to all three
of them.Gustav’s suffering while finishing the
Tenth Symphony is documented in the
tortured notes scrawled on the score:
“To live for you!... To die for you!
Almschi!... Farewell my lyre!... Fare-
well!” The anguished Gustav feared he
was going insane: “The devil is danc-
ing with me, /Accursed madness, seize
me!” He dedicated his Eighth Sym-
phony to Alma, and he consulted Freud.
On a long walk together, Freud later re-
counted, they spoke “of every possible
thing.” Gustav said he was in love with,
faithful to, but no longer excited by his
wife. Freud wondered why Mahler had
not married a woman named Marie,
since his mother’s name was Marie and
he was obviously fixated on his mother.
Gustav revealed that Marie was Alma’s
middle name and Freud, presumably,
was gratified. Alma’s account of the
therapeutic walk is a little different, the
most important wisdom imparted by
Freud being, according to her and her
alone, a horrified reproach to Gustav:
“How dared a man in your state ask a
woman to be tied to him?”
Touched by her husband’s new devo-
tion and convinced that he would die if
she left him, Alma sent Gropius away.
Gustav wrote her daily love poems,
smothered her slippers in kisses, and
listened again to her music, pronounc-ing it good and begging her to resume
composing. Alma was undeniably
talented, and her songs are admired
today, but this episode points as much
to her extraordinary power as a muse
as to her gifts as an artist.
Her daughter Anna said that when
Almajust stopped in the doorway, you
could immediately feel an electric
charge.... She was an incredibly
passionate woman.... And she
really paid attention to everyone
she spoke to. And encouraged
them.... She was able to enchant
people in a matter of seconds.Albrecht Joseph, eventually Anna’s
fifth husband, who was shocked by Al-
ma’s dowdiness when he first met the
legendary seductress in 1931, neverthe-
less noted that her “unique gift” was “a
profound, uncanny understanding of
what it was that [creative] men tried to
achieve, an enthusiastic, orgiastic per-
suasion that they could do what they
aimed at, and that she, Alma, fully un-
derstood what it was.” The intensity of
her belief in art and genius had the ef-
fect of creating an almost violent sym-
pathy. Gustav, like the other men she
loved, did not think he could survive
artistically without her.Gustav died in 1911 of pneumonia
after contracting heart disease, but
Alma and Gropius did not marry until- Alma had other affairs before
their marriage, including with a biolo-
gist who hired her as an assistant in
charge of observing the molting habits
of the praying mantis and who would,
publicly, sniff and stroke the seat after
she got up from it, until Alma finally
admonished his wife to “take more
care of him.”
And then there was Kokoschka.
Alma later described her three-year
affair with Oskar Kokoschka as “one
violent struggle of love. Never before
had I experienced so much strain, so
much hell and so much paradise.” Jeal-
ous and controlling, the artist stalked
her, patrolling her street after he left
her house to make sure no other man
visited. She refused to marry him, so
while she was in Paris he stole her docu-
ments and posted the banns in the Dö-
bling parish hall. “Oskar Kokoschka
could only make love to me with the
most peculiar game playing,” she later
wrote. “As I refused to hit him during
our hours of love, he began conjuring
up the most appalling images of mur-
der” of his supposed rivals “while whis-
pering murkily to himself.” One night
when she sang Parsifal at the piano, he
whispered “a new, eerie text” into her
ear, which caused her to scream and
cry, then to swallow a toxic dose of bro-
mine. (Kokoschka called the doctor.)
And through it all, he painted her.
When she had an abortion (she wrote
that she was afraid of “what might
grow in me”), Kokoschka took a blood-
stained cotton pad from her and kept
it with him, saying, “That is, and will
always be, my only child.” He painted
bloody, murdered children. He drew
“Alma Mahler Spinning with Ko-
koschka’s Intestine.” He insisted that
she cover her arms with long sleeves.
Kokoschka painted Alma entwined
with him in a boat on a stormy sea,
he painted Alma rising to the heavens
while he stood in hell surrounded by
snakes. Anna watched him work and
asked, “Can’t you paint anything else
except Mommy?”
When war came, Alma’s reaction
was, as even the temperate Haste must
admit, “an astonishing flourish of self-
aggrandizement.” “I sometimes imag-
ine,” Alma wrote, “that I was the one
who ignited this whole world conflagra-
tion in order to experience some kind
of development or enrichment—even if
it be only death.” By now, she wanted
to purify herself of the “evil fascina-
tion” of Kokoschka. She taunted him
until he joined the cavalry, then broke
off their relationship in unkind let-
ters. In despair, Kokoschka insisted
on being sent to the front, where he
was wounded so badly he was reported
dead in the Viennese papers. Though
she later defiantly published a facsimile
of Mahler’s manuscript of his Tenth
Symphony, revealing (for a good price)
his intimate, despairing notes, she was
less keen on allowing her own letters to
reach the public. After rushing to Ko-
koschka’s studio with her set of keys,
she removed and burned her notes to
him.
Though Kokoschka had not in fact
died, her interest in him had. She was
back to writing letters to Gropius.
When she saw him while he was on
leave, Haste writes, “their passion was
rekindled,” and they got married. Ko-
koschka dealt with this rejection by
commissioning a life-sized Alma doll,
with instructions to “please make it
possible that my sense of touch will
be able to take pleasure in those parts
where the layers of fat and muscle sud-
denly give way to a sinuous covering of
skin.” The doll, covered in fluffy swan
skin, suffered an ignominious end, be-
headed and bedraggled in a courtyard
the morning after Kokoschka threw a
raucous farewell party for it.
Alma spent the rest of the war in Vi-
enna fending off suitors, but she was,
she wrote, though “desired by so many
creatures.... STILL SO ALONE...Oskar Kokoschka: Double Portrait of Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, 1912Fondation^OskarKokoschka