Alma Maria Mahler

Alma Maria Schindler, later known as Alma Mahler-Werfel, was born in Vienna in 1879 and died in New York in 1964. The daughter of the landscape painter Emil Schindler, she received her musical training in her native city, where she took composition lessons with Alexander von Zemlinsky. Her life, however, was shaped by her ties to prominent figures of Central European culture rather than by an extensive musical career.

In 1902 she married Gustav Mahler, then director of the Court Opera in Vienna, after agreeing to give up her compositional ambitions. The marriage, complex and often unhappy, lasted until Mahler's death in 1911. During this period she lost two daughters, although one of them, Anna, would go on to become a sculptor. After separating from Mahler, she married and divorced the architect Walter Gropius, and in 1929 she joined the poet and novelist Franz Werfel. With him she fled Nazi Austria, passed through France and arrived in the United States in 1940.

In California she became an influential, though controversial, hostess to the community of European émigrés, and she maintained this way of life in New York after Werfel's death in 1945. Her autobiographical writings offer a vivid portrait of her youth, although her account of her political sympathies and antisemitic attitudes is controversial.

As a composer, her output is brief: fourteen songs survive, most of them composed around 1900-1901 and published between 1910 and 1924, in a lyrical style with sometimes bold chromatic harmony. No other works are known. Her legacy lies chiefly in her role as a participant in Viennese musical life, in her edition of Mahler's correspondence, in the facsimile manuscript of his Tenth Symphony, and in her memoirs.