Fan of Love

Alma Schindler was one of the most influential muses of the late 19th and early 20th century. She began composing at a very young age and she married Gustav Mahler who was 19 years older. One of the conditions of the marriage was that she stop composing. This frustrated her and she began having affairs notably with Oskar Kokoschka and Walter Gropius. Whom she married after her divorce from Mahler who then tried to woo her back by encouraging her music. Never too true to one man she had numerous affairs with famous men mostly artists and she married the Austrian writer Franz Werfel. In the 1930’s due to the oppression of the Jews she and Werfel moved to Los Angeles where she held forth in a famous artists salon. One of her daughters Anna Mahler became a well-known sculptor.

I learned about this extraordinary woman because of a comedic song “Alma” written by Tom Lehrer. He said,“Hers was the spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read”. It was the stuff of famous ballads, so he wrote one.