Volume 30, Number 14 · September 29, 1983
Having It All
By Gabriele Annan
Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius
by Karen Monson
Houghton Mifflin, 348 pp., $18.95
Alma Mahler (or Mahler-Werfel: she did not mind which) became legendary in her lifetime. This was intentional. She married three famous men: Gustav Mahler; Walter Gropius, architect and founder of the Bauhaus; and Franz Werfel, poet, playwright, and novelist. The last is not so famous anymore, except perhaps as the author of The Song of Bernadette—hélas, as André Gide might have said. Before marrying Gropius, Alma Mahler had a high-profile affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka. She had two children by Mahler, one conceived before they were married; one by Gropius; and one by Werfel during her marriage to Gropius. Of the four, only Mahler's second daughter lived to grow up. In between, Alma had countless affairs, among others with the painter Klimt, the composers Schreker and Pfitzner, and a fashionable Catholic priest called Hollnsteiner. Some of these affairs (though not the last mentioned: she initiated Hollnsteiner into sex) may have been no more than heavy flirtations. It is hard to be sure because almost all the evidence comes from Alma herself, and she was an auto-mythomaniac.
Review, 4220 words
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