Alma Mahler Turning spotlight on operatic life of a Vienna legend

There are big, messy lives that can be called operatic and then there was Alma Mahler's. After her first kiss with the artist Gustav Klimt as a teenager and her dreams of a career in composing, passionate love affairs with an array of early 20th-century artists came in quick succession.

- Deborah Cole Berlin

She ended up marrying three of them, composer Gustav Mahler, writer Franz Werfel and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and was a subject of endless fascination for most of the last 150 years. Now the charismatic diarist and muse is getting a fresh appraisal in an opera that will have its world premiere in her home town this month.

Alma, by the Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff, at the Vienna Volksoper, spotlights Mahler's tragic experiences with motherhood after an unrelenting series of miscarriages and fatal child illnesses, as well as her thwarted creative identity, slippery relationship with the truth and unabashed eroticism.

The story unfolds backwards, beginning with Mahler as an embittered alcoholic in her 50s who is still grieving the loss of several children, lovers and her own musical potential. She is accompanied only by her surviving child, Anna, whom she had with Gustav - her first husband, whom she married in 1902. After Gustav's death in 1911, Mahler was married to Gropius for five years, during which time she began an affair with Werfel - later marrying him in 1929.

Anna is presented throughout as a 30-year-old woman, a kind of hyper-critical one-woman chorus. "Is there an artist you HAVEN'T slept with?" she wryly asks her mother after catching her once again in flagrant.

Milch-Sheriff said she saw Mahler's dead children, who haunt her on stage during the production, as both an enduring trauma she never overcame and a metaphor for her stillborn artistic ambitions, which she is seen on stage literally burying even as she skips her own babies' funerals.

Gustav Mahler, 19 years her senior and already the head of the Vienna Court Opera, wooed the talented young Alma Schindler but then gave her a fateful ultimatum when she tried to pursue her own composing in his shadow.