Alma Mahler (1879–1964)
Alma Mahler had a social and romantic life that tends to overshadow her status as a composer. She was born Alma Schindler in Vienna, the daughter of a famous landscape painter. Her father encouraged her early interests in music, and she had several tutors. In 1900 she began studying piano and composition with composer Alexander Zemlinsky, which whom she had an affair.
In November 1901, Alma Schindler met Gustav Mahler, a 41-year-old conductor who was director of the Vienna Court Opera and had also composed four symphonies. They commenced an affair that overlapped with her relationship with Zemlinsky, and they were married the following year.
Alma had been composing music since she was a child, but Gustav Mahler’s attitude was similar to Robert Schumann’s 60 years earlier: He believed that a marriage could support only one composer, and she stopped composing for most of the duration of their marriage.
The marriage with Mahler was rocky, and Alma began an affair was architect Walter Gropius, who she married after Mahler’s death in 1911. After their divorce in 1920, she married author Franz Werfel, who later wrote The Song of Bernadette. From the 1940s she lived in Los Angeles, where she was a frequent hostess to the émigré community, including Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann, and then New York City, where she lived long enough to see Leonard Bernstein conduct her first husband’s music.
Most of Alma’s compositions seem to date from before her marriage to Mahler. Although she is believed to have composed piano music, chamber music, and a scene of an opera, her surviving compositions total only 17 songs, 14 of which were published during her lifetime.
Alma Mahler’s Five Songs for voice and piano were published in 1910 at the urging of Gustav Mahler, who was attempting a rapprochement with his wife after discovering her affair with Gropius. In English the titles are:
- “The Quiet Town” to a poem by Richard Dehmel
- “In My Father’s Garden” to a poem by Erich Otto Hartleben
- “Mild Summer’s Night” to a poem by Otto Julius Bierbaum
- “With You It Is Pleasant” to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
- “I Stroll Among Flowers” to a poem by Heinrich Heine
English translations are available on the Oxford Lieder website.