Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel : A Real Woman

Tom Lehrer, my favorite satirist, retired while he was at the top of his game. His final album—"That Was The Year That Was" (1965)—contained a song entitled "Alma." What follows is Lehrer's introduction, the lyrics of "Alma" (Lehrer played a Viennese waltz tune.), and Lehrer's closing remarks about marriage. All are classics. Just recently, a book about Alma's marriage to Gutav Mahler was reviewed in the The Sunday Telegraph and the book verifies Tom Lehrer's unerring satirical accuracy. If this is (fair & balanced) connubial nonsense, so be it.

Tom Lehrer's "Alma"

Last December 13th, there appeared in the newspapers the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary that has ever been my pleasure to read. it was that of a lady name Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel who had in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in central Europe, and, among these lovers, who were listed in the obituary, by the way, which was what made it interesting, there were three whom she went so far as to marry.

One of the leading composers of the day: Gustav Mahler, composer of "Das Lied von der Erde" and other light classics. One of the leading architects: Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus School of design. One of the leading writers: Franz Werfel, author of "The Song of Bernadette" and other masterpieces. it's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. it is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years. It seemed to me, in reading this obituary, that the story of Alma was the stuff of which ballads should be made. So here is a modest example.


Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel [Click on image to enlarge.] 

The loveliest girl in Vienna
Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna,
You'd never be free of her spell.

Her lovers were many and varied,
From the day she began her -- beguine.
There were three famous ones whom she married,
And God knows how many between.

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Which of your magical wands
Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?

The first one she married was Mahler,
Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav.
And each time he saw her he'd holler:
"ach, that is the fraulein I moost have!"

Their marriage, however, was murder.
He'd scream to the heavens above,
"I'm writing 'Das Lied von der Erde,'
And she only wants to make love!"

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
You should have a statue in bronze
For bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Gus, she met Gropius,
And soon she was swinging with Walter.
Gus died, and her tear drops were copious.
She cried all the way to the altar.

But he would work late at the Bauhaus,
And only came home now and then.
She said, "what am I running? a chow house?
It's time to change parters again."

Alma, tell us!
All modern women are jealous.
Though you didn't even use Ponds,
You got Gustav and Walter and Franz.

While married to Walt she'd met Werfel,
And he too was caught in her net.
He married her, but he was carefell,
'cause Alma was no Bernadette.

And that is the story of Alma,
Who knew how to receive and to give.
The body that reached her embalma'
Was one that had known how to live.

Alma, tell us!
How can they help being jealous?
Ducks always envy the swans
Who get Gustav and Walter,
You never did falter,
With Gustav and Walter and Franz.

I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said: "Dearest, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself." Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was addressed "Occupant."

Speaking of love, one problem that recurs more and more frequently these days in books, plays, and movies, is the inability of people to communicate with the people they love. Husbands and wives who can't communicate; children who can't communicate with their parents, and so on. And the characters in these books, and plays, and so on, and in real life, I might add, spend hours bemoaning the fact that they can't communicate. I feel that if a person can't communicate the very least he can do is to shut up.


[x The Sunday Telegraph]
Mahler's meddling wife
by Tom Payne

Review of Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife.


From his childhood, Gustav Mahler's life clanged with the sound of the lofty and the banal colliding. He recalled listening to a military band, too distracted to notice he'd peed in his pants. He disrupted the singing of a cantor in the synagogue by yelling, "That's horrible!" and requesting a nursery song. It explains why he produced sublime movements in his symphonies, only to send them up in the following movement; why he makes trombones rasp and clarinets caw.

So it was with the crisis of his life. When he was preparing for the premiere of his eighth symphony – a glorious hymn to creation, unscathed by his uglifying urges – he became a cuckold.

His wife, Alma Mahler, wasn't a liar, exactly. In her version of the story, Mahler knew about Walter Gropius's devotion to her before the affair began. But her memoirs of life with Mahler are full of inaccuracies and distortions. In this edition of Mahler's letters to his wife, which includes much new material, Antony Beaumont is able to correct many of these blemishes. He is fairly courteous about the corrections and concludes that "by the time she sat down to write [her memoirs], her recollections of people, places and events had themselves parted company with reality".

But Alma's treatment of the letters shows that she could edit the truth quite actively. When she published them after Mahler's death, she suppressed a phrase or paragraph here, a postcard, telegram or whole letter there. This book prints them all. Beaumont is used to this kind of restoration: with Susanne Rode-Breymann, he managed to make magnificent sense of Alma's scrawly, doctored diaries. (They are still revealing their secrets – as we learn here, in one entry she referred to her daughters as brats, only later deciding that "children" was a better word.)

So, although we don't have Alma's letters, we can learn about her through what she decided to conceal in Mahler's. She took out the sentences in which Mahler complained she had forgotten to pack his comb or demanded to know why a manuscript hadn't reached him in the post. Sometimes it looks like she took out the boring bits.

Except that the boring bits tell their own story. Before they married – when Mahler was nearly twice Alma's age – he wrote her a long, self-conflicting but candid letter dealing with her own ambitions as a composer. On the one hand he wrote: "I don't want you to believe that I take that philistine view of marital relationships which sees a woman as some sort of diversion, with additional duties as her husband's housekeeper." On the other he told her: "The role of the `composer', the `bread-winner', is mine; yours is that of the loving partner, the sympathetic comrade." He conceded that it was a lot to ask, but Alma acquiesced.

Still, she didn't want to be remembered as Mahler's skivvy, or as a dumb beauty. She took out lines such as "If there's anything you don't understand in [Holderlin], you must ask me." These alterations might have stopped Mahler looking like a patronising nag, but one could already surmise that he was inept at handling his young, wilful spouse. When he failed to buy her a birthday present, he wrote: "What more can one give, when one has already given oneself?" Considering the sacrifices she'd made for him, you'd think a nice hat would have been a start.

The reader can make what he wants of the quotidian details that emerge from this correspondence – sometimes they're revealing, sometimes they're not. But one approach towards the book as a whole is to think of it as a Mahler symphony – it starts off with bold statements announced by a large orchestra, settles into chunks of fugues, alarms and excursions, and ends with affirmations of faith and visions of heaven. The desperate love the composer expressed in his last letters are the consequence of the strident defining of terms with which he began the marriage.

Beaumont does an excellent job of commenting on the letters. He doesn't intrude, preferring to rely on other sources to fill in the narrative rather than improvising it himself. And although the letters can only hint at their author's swings from triumph to trauma, we do at last have the whole sequence. The best way to serve Mahler is to skip nothing. As he remarked to Sibelius: "A symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing."

Copyright © 2004 The Telegraph Group Limited