MAHLER, Alma – Ich Wandle Unter Blumen – STRING QUARTET

Other Identification:
Alma Mahler-Werfel {born Alma Margaretha Maria Schindler}
Birth: 31st August 1879
Death: 11th December 1964)
Alma Mahler was an Austrian composer, author, editor, and socialite. Musically active from her early years, she was the composer of nearly fifty songs for voice and piano, and works in other genres as well.

She married composer Gustav Mahler. Gustav was not interested in Alma’s composition, desiring for her to abandon composing. The lengthy letter Gustav sent her on 19th December 1901 is emphatic that she must give up composing, and Alma was able to artistically stifle herself and embrace the role of a loving wife and supporter of her husband’s music.

In June 1910, after becoming severely depressed, Alma began an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius (later head of the Bauhaus), whom she met during a rest at a spa. Following the emotional crisis in their marriage after Gustav’s discovery of Alma’s affair with Gropius, Gustav at last began to take an interest in Alma’s musical compositions, regretting his earlier dismissive attitude. In February 1911, Gustav fell severely ill with an infection related to a heart defect that had been diagnosed several years earlier, and passed away three months later.

After Gustav’s death, Alma did not immediately resume contact with Gropius. Between 1912 and 1914 she had a tumultuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who created works inspired by their relationship, including his painting ‘The Bride of the Wind’.  However, Kokoschka was too possessive for Alma. Alma then married Walter Gropius in 1915, and they had a daughter, Manon Gropius. Yet, throughout her marriage to Gropius, Alma also engaged in an affair with Franz Werfel. She and Werfel even began openly living together after. She did not marry Werfel until 1929 following her separation from Gropius. She then took the name Alma Mahler-Werfel.

In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Werfel and Alma fled, as it was unsafe for the Jewish Werfel. Eventually the couple settled in Los Angeles. In later years, her salon became part of the artistic scene in Los Angeles and New York. She brought together great artists such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, and many others. Werfel, who had enjoyed moderate renown in the US as an author, achieved popular success with his novel ‘The Song of Bernadette’, and the science fiction novel ‘Star of the Unborn’ published after his death. Werfel, had experienced serious heart problems throughout his exile, and died of a heart attack in California in 1945. In 1946, Mahler-Werfel became a US citizen.

Alma Mahler-Werfel died 11th December 1964 in New York City. She was buried on 8th February 1965 in the Grinzing Cemetery of Vienna in the same grave as her daughter Manon Gropius and a few steps away from Gustav Mahler.

As a composer, she composed or sketched mostly Lieder, but also is known to have composed around 20 piano pieces and a small number of chamber music works, and even a scene from an opera. She had briefly resumed composing in 1910, but stopped again in 1915. The chronology of her compositions is difficult to establish because she did not date her manuscripts and destroyed many of them herself; however, recent attempts to establish a chronological list of her works have been made. A total of 17 songs by her survive. Fourteen were published during her lifetime in three publications dated 1910, 1915, and 1924.