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La Grande Veuve (1945 - 1964)
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Alma with a score of Gustav Mahler's,
at her house in Beverly Hills
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Alma with a portrait
of Gustav Mahler
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In the last 19 years of her life, Thomas Mann described Alma
Mahler-Werfel as "la Grande Veuve", the "Great
Widow" of Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel. Claire Goll's
assessment of the widow was more malicious. In Goll's view,
after Werfel's death Alma turned her eye to Bruno Walter.
She compared Alma Mahler, whose predilection for champagne
and Bénédictine did not reflect positively in
her figure, with a "bulging Germania", and
wrote of her:
"In order to freshen up her fading charms, she wore
gigantic hats with ostrich feathers; nobody knew whether she
wished to appear as a funeral horse pulling a hearse, or as
a new d'Artagnan. On top of that, she was powdered, made up,
perfumed and inebriated. This bloated Valkyrie drank like
a fish."
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Alma Mahler-Werfel
(Caricature by Dolbin)
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Alma on her arrival at the airport
in Tulln near Vienna in September 1947
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Alma Mahler-Werfel only revisited her old home city of Vienna
briefly on one occasion in 1947. Her mother had died in the
autumn of 1938; her stepfather Carl Moll, her half-sister
Maria and Richard Eberstaller, who had both been longstanding
members of the Nazi Party, had committed suicide in April
1945. Her visit revolved mainly around settling financial
matters. She embroiled herself in court proceedings with the
Austrian state over Edward Munch's painting "Summer Night
on the Beach", which Walter Gropius had given her once
on the occasion of the birth of their joint daughter, and
which, following Alma's emigration to the USA in April 1940,
Carl Moll had sold to what is now the Austrian Belvedere Museum.
Alma lost the case, because she could not credibly substantiate
that her stepfather had done this without her consent. The
proceeds of sale of the picture had moreover been used n order
to carry out necessary repairs to her house on the Semmering.
Moll had not been personally enriched. Until the 1960s, she
strived to recover the painting, and refused to tread on Austrian
soil again. In the court proceedings there was also mention
of the fact that, at the end of the 1930s, Alma had attempted,
via her brother-in-law, to sell Anton Bruckner's handwritten
manuscript of the first three movements of his 3rd Symphony
to the Nazis.
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Alma Mahler-Werfel with portrait of
her
deceased husband, Franz Werfel
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Alma at Werfel's desk in her house
in Los Angeles
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For her 70th birthday, Alma Mahler-Werfel received an unusual
present which also documents the extent to which she was indebted
to the cultural scene. Months before her birthday, a couple
she knew had written to her friends and acquaintances and
asked them each to write on a sheet of paper. Among the 77
well-wishers who transmitted their congratulations in this
way in a birthday book, were her former husband Walter Gropius,
Oskar Kokoschka, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer,
Franz Theodor Csokor, Lion Feuchtwanger, Fritz von Unruh,
Willy Haas, Benjamin Britten, her former son-in-law Ernst
Krenek, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, conductors
Erich Kleiber, Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Stiedry and Leopold Stokowski,
as well as former Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg.
Arnold Schönberg, who had not been invited to contribute
to the book due to a previous quarrel with Alma, dedicated
a birthday canon to her with the text: "Centre of
gravitation of your own solar system, orbited by radiant satellites,
this is how your life appears to the admirer."
The autobiography "And the
Bridge is Love"
In 1951 Alma moved to New York, where she had bought four
small residential apartments in a house on the Upper East
Side. She herself lived on the third floor, and used one apartment
as a living area and another as sleeping quarters. The two
apartments on the floor above were used by August Hess, Werfel's
former valet, and by her guests. For some time already she
had been working on her autobiography, which was based on
her diaries. She was initially supported by Paul Frischauer
as ghost-writer, but they had fallen out with one another
back in 1947 when he criticized her numerous anti-Semitic
slurs. In the 1950s she worked with E. B. Ashton. He too perceived
the necessity to censor her diaries due to her anti-Semitic
utterances and numerous attacks on people who were still living.
In 1958, "And the Bridge is Love" appeared in English.
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Alma's house in NY,
120 East 73rd Street
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Alma's library in her New York
apartment,
with portrait of Gustav Mahler
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The reactions to this English edition were muted. In particular,
Walter Gropius reacted angrily, hurt by the representation
of their earlier love affair. The reactions of other friends
and acquaintances, such as Paul Zsolnay, made it clear to
Alma that a German-language edition, which had already been
contemplated, should not be published without significant
changes to the text. Willy Haas was given the task of preparing
an edition for the German-speaking market, and was to smooth
over the original text still further. Alma's previous ghost-writers
had already suggested to her that she delete her racist political
views. It was only the reactions to the English edition which
changed her mind: "Please remove all traces of the
whole Jewish question," she wrote to Willy Haas.
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Alma's music
room in her New York apartment, with a painting by her
father, Emil Jakob Schindler
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Alma with conductor
Eugene Ormandy
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Her German-language biography, "Mein Leben" (My
Life), in no manner found the positive reception which Alma
had expected. The book was considered "salacious",
ambiguous, and contradictory, and provoked caricature due
to its egocentric presentation. Long-term friends such as
Carl Zuckmayer and Thomas Mann had already distanced themselves
from her following publication of the English version.
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Alma Mahler,
New York 1962, two years before her death
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Alma's library in
her New York apartment, with the famous portrait by
Oskar Kokoschka showing
her as Lucretia Borgia
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Alma's death
Alma Mahler-Werfel died in her New York apartment on 11 December
1964 at the age of 85. The first funeral ceremony took place
two days later, with Soma Morgenstern giving the eulogy. However,
Alma was not buried until 8 February 1965, beside the grave
of her daughter Manon in Vienna's Grinzing Cemetery.
The obituaries which appeared after her death referred, under
the influence of her autobiography, mostly to her marriages
and love affairs. The combination of attraction, admiration
and antipathy which she triggered in many is also expressed
in a poem written and published spontaneously by songwriter
and satirist Tom Lehrer after her death.
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Alma on her deathbed (photographed
by Trude Fleischmann, December 1964)
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Friedrich Torberg's obituary for Alma Mahler-Werfel, published
in 1964, explains why so many creative artists were fascinated
by her:
"Whenever she was convinced by a person's talent,
she left such person - often with an energy bordering on brutality
- no further path open other than that of fulfilment. They
were then under a duty in relation to themselves and to her
and the world, and she experienced it as a personal affront
if a gift which she had recognized or indeed promoted was
not then generally acknowledged. Incidentally, this happened
to only a few, and to them she remained affectingly loyal.
Success bewitched her, but lack of success did not divert
her. Her enthusiasm, her commitment, her ability to sacrifice
herself knew no bounds, and must have been both a fascination
and an incitement purely for the reason that there was no
hint of uncritical idolization about her, because her powers
of judgment refused to be clouded by anything.
This was undoubtedly also the reason why so many creative
men stuck with her. This was the place where their own productivity
progressed and bore fruit [...] . She had a way of arranging
and directing which, with a geometric inevitability, made
her the figure at the centre, and all were content with this,
since this central figure stood firm and, rather than herself,
placed the others centre-stage."
< back: Emigration
(1938 - 1945)
< The most beautiful
girl in Vienna (1879 - 1901)
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