see also http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/mahler/index.html

Mahler(-Werfel) [nee Schindler], Alma Maria

(b Vienna, 31 Aug 1879; d New York, 11 Dec 1964). Austrian composer. A daughter of the Viennese landscape-painter Emil Schindler, she studied music with Labor and took composition lessons with Zemlinsky. In 1902 she married Gustav Mahler, then director of the Vienna Hofoper, after agreeing to abandon her compositional aspirations. Their complex and often unhappy marriage (Mahler was nearly 20 years her senior) lasted until his death in 1911; of their two daughters only Anna Mahler, the sculptor, survived. Marital crisis in 1910 prompted Mahler to publish five of Alma's songs; other collections appeared in 1915 and 1924, the year in which she published her influential edition of Mahler's letters and the facsimile manuscript of his Tenth Symphony. By that time she had married and divorced the architect Walter Gropius (a daughter, Manon, died in 1925). In 1929 she married the poet and novelist Franz Werfel, with whom she subsequently fled Nazi Austria, via France, for America, arriving there in 1940. In California Alma became an influential, if contentious, hostess to the European emigre community, maintaining a similar lifestyle in New York after Werfel's death in 1945. She died in 1964 and was buried beside her daughter Manon in Grinzing, near Vienna.

Mahler-Werfel's autobiographical writings colourfully document the history of a Nietzsche-inspired New Woman of the 1890s who subsequently professed sympathy with Mussolini and certain German fascists (not Hitler), whose anti-semitism she affected to share -- to the distress of her Jewish friends and husband Werfel. Her songs are lyrical in manner and marked by occasionally bold chromatic harmony. The 14 that survive, mostly attributable to the period 1900--01, were published as Funf Lieder (1910), Vier Lieder (1915), both by Universal, and Funf Gesange (Weinberger, 1924). The latter includes her 1915 setting of Werfel's 'Der Erkennende' and poems by Novalis, Bierbaum and Oehmel. No other works are known to survive.

WRITINGS
ed.: Gustav Mahler Briefe 1879--1911 (Vienna, 1924)
ed.: Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam, 1940; Eng. trans. as Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters,1946, 4/1990, ed. D. Mitchell and K. Martner)
And the Bridge is Love (London and New York, 1959) [with E.B. Ashton]
Mein Leben (Frankfurt, 1960)
Tagebuch-Suiten 1898--1902, ed. A. Beaumont and S. Rode-Breymann (Frankfurt, 1997; Eng. trans., 1998)
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY
GroveW (P. Franklin) [incl. further bibliography]
S. Filler: 'A Composer's Wife as Composer: the Songs of Alma Mahler', JMR, iv (1983), 427--42
F. Giroud: Alma Mahler, ou l'art d'etre aimee (Paris, 1988); repr. as Alma Mahler or the Art of Being Loved, trans. R.M. Stock (Oxford, 1991)
S. Filler: Gustav and Alma Mahler: a Guide to Research (New York and London, 1989)
S. Keegan: The Bride of the Wind: the Life and Times of Alma Mahler-Werfel (London, 1991)
H.-L. de La Grange and G.Weiss, eds.: Ein Gluck ohne Ruh': die Briefe Gustav Mahlers an Alma (Berlin, 1995)
A. Weidinger: Kokoschka und Alma Mahler (Munich, 1996)
 

PETER FRANKLIN