Alma Mahler was told to stop composing when she married Gustav Mahler in 1902. She obeyed, and became instead the living centre of European modernism, passing through marriages and affairs that spanned the greatest names in early 20th-century art. Her connection to the Salzburg Festival runs through Mahler: as his wife she belonged to the world that made the Festival possible.
The Story
Alma Schindler grew up in Vienna surrounded by artists and trained seriously as a composer before she married Gustav Mahler in 1902. Mahler, believing he could not share domestic space with a rival creative mind, required her to abandon composition as a condition of the marriage. She largely complied, though a handful of songs survived and are today recognised as genuinely accomplished work.
As Mahler's wife she entered the innermost circle of Viennese cultural life, and by extension the world that would go on to found the Salzburg Festival in 1920. The Festival's founding generation, including Max Reinhardt and Richard Strauss, were people she knew personally. After Mahler's death in 1911, Oskar Kokoschka fell desperately in love with her; his painting The Bride of the Wind (1914) was his response when she ended the affair, and it became one of the defining works of Expressionism.
She then married the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and later the novelist Franz Werfel, each relationship placing her at the centre of a different current in European art and thought. After the Anschluss in 1938, she and Werfel fled via France to the United States. Her memoir And the Bridge is Love (1958) remains one of the most candid and vivid documents of the world that disappeared.
