Redressing the Balance

Today at the National Gallery, I revisited the subject of Alma Schindler's marriage to Gustav Mahler. I was appearing alongside pianist and Oxford Lieder Festival artistic director Sholto Kynoch. It's been repeatedly stated that Alma was fundamentally a sort of temptress, a femme fatale, whose taste for the semen of geniuses was insatiable. She was certainly a strange individual, for she accepted the terms of this letter from Mahler, written from Dresden in December 1901:

A husband and wife who are both composers: how do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals: do you have any idea how ridiculous it would appear, can you imagine the loss of self-respect it would later cause us both? If, at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching me something I urgently needed, or if, as you wrote, you wish to relieve me of life’s trivia – if at such a moment you were befallen by ‘inspiration’ [a word which Mahler cruelly puts in inverted commas]: what then? Don’t get me wrong! I don’t want you to believe that I take the philistine view of marital relationships which sees a woman as some sort of diversion, with additional duties as her husband’s housekeeper. Surely you wouldn’t expect me to feel or think that way? But one thing is certain: if we are to be happy together, you will have to be ‘as I need you’.

The outcome is well known – Alma gave up composing and took up the role of wife – yet still we maintain a view, supported by an extremely passionate audience member at today's talk, that the blame for the stresses and strains of the Mahlers' marriage should be laid at Alma's door. I have the highest respect for Mahler's music, as any casual reader of this site will know, but I think it's high time we revised the Tom Lehrer view of Alma as Salome incarnate. Mahler was certainly no prophet. He was a pathological narcissist, who demanded everyone's worship of his work. That assertion should not dim our admiration for his music, but we shouldn't let that skew our perception of him as a man.

Having sought to become the new woman, the acculturated, assimilated woman, Alma became merely the ‘loveliest girl in Vienna’. Her acquisition of surname after surname, Schindler, Moll, Mahler, Gropius, Werfel, suffocated the Alma, the soul – Alma meaning soul – within her. Witty though it may be, can we really endorse Lehrer’s view that ‘All modern women are jealous. Which of your magical wands Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?’ Surely the modern intellectual woman, who Alma originally sought to be, would have defied Mahler’s claims on her vision.

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