It must be rare for a popular song to have such a lasting influence on a posthumous reputation. However, this is the case with Tom Lehrer’s deliciously satirical tribute, ‘Alma’. Reading Alma Mahler’s obituary in 1964 — the ‘juiciest, spiciest, raciest’ he’d ever come across — Lehrer was amazed by her matrimonial CV and proceeded to immortalise it in a catchy lyric.
Not only had Alma been married three times, to the composer Gustav Mahler, to Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus, and, finally, to Franz Werfel, author of the runaway bestseller The Song of Bernadette, she’d also managed to bag as lovers some of the top creative men in the Europe of her time. Gustav Klimt had given Alma her first kiss, while her relationship with the Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka was ‘one fierce battle of love’, full of explosive sexual power.It was people like Alma, Lehrer quipped, who make you realise how little you’ve accomplished. She was both ‘the loveliest girl in Vienna’ and ‘the smartest’.
Alma has been portrayed in a host of books, plays and films. She has even given her name to a problem. ‘The Alma Problem’, coined by musicologists and Mahler scholars, refers to the ways in which she falsified and manipulated the written record of her life with the composer to her own advantage in the decades following his death in 1911. Her destruction of all but one of her letters to Mahler makes it almost impossible to determine the extent to which she acted as a nurturer of, and muse to, his genius.
She is problematic, too, as a biographical subject not least because her behaviour is such a mass of contradictions. She never lost the taint of anti-Semitism prevalent from her youth in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire and spent a lifetime making startlingly offensive remarks about Jews, fuelled in old age by her daily bottle of Benedictine liqueur.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in