As a little girl, Alma Schindler travelled around the Adriatic on a ship specially chartered by Crown-Prince Rudolf to take her father to the scenic parts of the Habsburg dominions he had commissioned him to paint. A few years later she was studying composition with Zemlinsky (one of her fellow-students being Arnold Schönberg), being pursued by Gustav Klimt and receiving crates of books from Max Burckhard. Then she met the newly-appointed director of the Hofoper, a certain Gustav Mahler, and reader, she married him...

...and that would have been enough for most people, but Mahler died in 1911 when Alma was only just in her early thirties. We've still got to fit in a stormy affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, a wartime marriage (and peacetime divorce) with Walter "Bauhaus" Gropius, and what seems to have been the most important relationship in her life, with the writer Franz Werfel, whom she started living with whilst still married to Gropius, and eventually married in 1929. And of course there's a lot of European cultural and political history to get through in that time too. Modernism, the Great War and its aftermath, the rise of fascism, antisemitism (Alma was from a patrician Austrian background, whilst both Mahler and Werfel were of Jewish descent), the path into exile at the start of the war, the German exile community in transit (or in Transit) in Marseille, Los Angeles in the days when it was Vienna-on-the-Pacific, and so on.

Alma seems to have known absolutely everyone. Everyone who was anyone in music, of course, as well as writers, painters, politicians, actors; not just Austrians and Germans, but French (Ravel spending inordinate amounts of time making himself beautiful in her bathroom), Italians (Margherita Sarfatti, whom Alma tried to persuade to found an international league of fascists against antisemitism), British (she met Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in America and they became firm friends; there's also a magnificent cameo appearance by GBS in Venice), Irish (a glorious snapshot of James Joyce and Franz Werfel on a pub-crawl in Paris), Americans (the appalling Mr and Mrs Upton Sinclair, who committed the sin against good taste of installing a stairlift), and so on... Not everyone gets a mention, though: Alma is unsurprisingly coy about her friendships with prominent Austrian fascist sympathisers like Anton Rintelen, and there are a few unexplained absences from the index, like Elias Canetti, who was a regular visitor to her Vienna house.

As you would expect, these memoirs are not entirely frank, and you can probably get a more detailed list of Alma's lovers and their chronological overlaps on Wikipedia, if that's what you're after. Since she'd written another book about her time with Mahler, that part of her life is treated in a very condensed way here, and she also doesn't say very much about Gropius, who was still alive at the time of writing and whom she had treated rather badly. In 1915 she suddenly tells us that she's decided to marry him, with only a vague mention that she'd known him earlier (in reality, they had a holiday affair in 1910 that led to a serious crisis in her marriage with Mahler). And he fades out of the book just as quickly, once Werfel arrives.

Something that amused me was to see how Alma's attitude to Richard and Pauline Strauss had changed since the earlier book, where they are portrayed quite nastily, as Bavarian buffoons and terrible misers. Twenty years later, she's expressing great respect for his music and admiration for his friendship and support of Mahler's music. And she has apparently seen the point of Pauline, who makes a very strong team with her husband in private life, however clumsy and tactless she may be in public. (But Richard is still made to talk in comic Bavarian dialect...)

Alma as a mother is tricky to get hold of in this book. Obviously it must have marked her that only one of her four children survived into adulthood: when she's writing about her daughter Manon, who died of polio at eighteen, it sounds sincere and very moving, and she does keep coming back to her feelings about that, but at other times she seems to be able to go for fifty or sixty pages at a stretch without mentioning any of her children, and she often seems to have parked Anna and Manon somewhere whilst she went off on her travels. Of course, in some ways, she really still was an upper-class woman of the late nineteenth century, however much she asserted her right to be taken seriously as an intellectual in her own right and associated with modernists. You just need to look at what she says about her "servant problems" in Beverly Hills to remind yourself of the cultural gap between her and us...

Lively and fun in a highbrow-voyeuristic sort of way, if you don't mind being buried in an avalanche of dropped names. Very interesting if you want some background to Werfel's novels; if you want to know more about Mahler, read the other book. ( )

Es ist nicht leicht zu sagen, was von dieser Autobiographie zu halten ist. Sicher darf man nicht alles wörtlich nehmen. Aber sicher auch, dass Alma M.-W. großes musikalisches Talent hatte, das durch ihre Ehe mit Mahler unterdrückt wurde, so dass sie ihren Schaffensdrang indirekt lebte, durch Forderungen zur Kreativität an die Künstler, von denen sie geliebt wurde – Mahler, Kokoschka, Werfel, ... – und ihrer Förderung. Sicher auch, dass viele der Künstler, denen sie begegnete, sich ihrere Anziehung nicht entziehen konnten. Gelegentlich stößt man auf Worte, die so aufrichtig klingen, dass sie nicht angezweifelt zu werden brauchen: „Was wißt ihr Erdentrottel von meinen ungeheuren Glücken, die ich mir herbei-imaginiere ... treils durch Liebesrausch ... teils durch Musikrausch ... teils durch Weinrausch ... starke Religiosität ... Was wißt ihr Erdentrottel von meinen Glückseligkeiten ... Mit eisernen Krallen erkkralle ich mir mein Nest ... Jedes Genie ist mir gerade der rechte Strohhalm ... als Beute für mein Nest ...!“ (Sept. 1927; S.153) Und sie schreibt fünfzigjährig: „Ich bin seit zehn Jahren unausgeglichen und spiele irgendeine Rolle. Nach außen: die sozusagen glückliche Geliebte eines anerkannten Dichters.“ (Aug. 1929; S. 166).
Es ist interessant, Alma M.-W.‘s Bericht über die Flucht mit Werfel 1940 über die Grenze nach Spanien mit anderen Berichten (z. B. mit Lisa Fittko‘s Erinnerungen ) zu vergleichen. Ihre Bemerkungen über Varian Fry klingen als ob ihr völlig das Verständnis der Hilfeleistung, die ihr und Werfel zuteil wurde, fehlte.
Befremdend ist ihr Urteil über Verdis Character: „Verdi ist ein merkwürdiger Fall von masochistischer Selbsterniedrigung. Nur so kann ich mir seine literarische Vorliebe für Mischrassen-Liebschaften oder –Ehen erklären.“ (S.281).

Es ist nichts-desto-trotz lesenswert weil es eine, wenn auch keineswegs objektive, Schilderung dieser Zeiten und dieser Gesellschaftsschicht bringt. (IX-14) ( )

«Mi madre Alma era una leyenda, y las leyendas son difíciles de destruir», reconoce hoy Anna, hija de Gustav Mahler. De hecho, casi la totalidad de su larga vida (ochenta y cinco años), fue el escenario de grandes conmociones, y ella tuvo el privilegio de asistir en primerísima línea a todo ello, prácticamente del brazo de los protagonistas de la historia del arte de nuestro siglo : Mahler, Gropius, Kokoschka, Werfel, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Thomas Mann… Cuando se publicó Mi vida, que recoge sus papeles, diarios, cartas y notas, Alma era ya muy mayor, y es improbable que haya podido «reescribirlos» para el público. Tanto mejor, pues participamos así de las aventuras, las emociones y los pensamientos en la intimidad de un personaje contradictorio, pasional y desconcertante. De haber nacido un siglo más tarde, habría sido compositora y directora de orquesta ; en aquel entonces, consagró su vida a aquellos hombres en quienes reconocía la genialidad, y, cual experta cortesana, supo atraerse por igual a amigos, amantes y maridos, célebres todos. ( )