FEMME VITALE

Alma Mahler-Werfel, a woman with qualities.

- ALEX ROSS

The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, she was born Alma Maria Schindler, the daughter of the operetta singer Anna Bergen and the landscape painter Emil Schindler. She hoped to make her way as a composer, but that dream ended when, in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, she married the musical titan Gustav Mahler. After Mahler’s death, in 1911, she had an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then was briefly married to the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Her final husband was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she followed into exile, first in France and then in the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles. She lived until 1964, the most legendary widow of the twentieth century. Those who write about her—there have been eight biographies and half a dozen novels—tend to refer to her as Alma. This has the unfortunate effect of making her sound like a young girl in the company of grown men. Better to call her by the name under which she is buried: Mahler-Werfel.

She was, and remains, smolderingly controversial. The German writer Oliver Hilmes begins his 2004 biography, “Malevolent Muse” (originally published as “Witwe im Wahn,” or “Wacky Widow”), with a damning sampling of the epithets that have been hurled at her: a “dissolute female” (Richard Strauss), a “monster” (Theodor W. Adorno), an “oversized Valkyrie” who “drank like a drainpipe” (Claire Goll), “the worst human being I ever knew” (Gina Kaus). Mahler-Werfel was described as an incorrigible antisemite who enslaved Jewish men and drove them to early graves. According to one Mahler enthusiast, she was a “vain, repulsive, brazen creature.” Hilmes quotes a few ostensibly positive comments as well, although the praise is faint: Erich Maria Remarque dubs her a “wild, blond wench, violent, boozing.” In the end, the biographer categorizes his subject as a “classic hysterical woman.”