Ecstasy
Page 1
Contents
* * *
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prelude
Liebestod
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Adagietto
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
I Am Lost To The World
27
28
29
30
The Lonely One In Autumn
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
My Storm Song
41
42
43
Ecstasy
44
45
46
Historical Afterword
Sample Chapter from ILLUMINATIONS
Buy the Book
Read More from Mary Sharratt
About the Author
Connect with HMH
Copyright © 2018 by Mary Sharratt
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sharratt, Mary, 1964– author.
Title: Ecstasy : a novel / Mary Sharratt.
Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045483 (print) | LCCN 2017051670 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544800922 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544800892 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Mahler, Alma, 1879–1964—Fiction. | Mahler, Gustav,
1860–1911—Fiction. | Composers’ spouses—Fiction. | Composers—Fiction. |
Vienna (Austria)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3569.H3449 (ebook) | LCC PS3569.H3449 E29 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045483
Cover design by Martha Kennedy
Cover image: Private Collection Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images
Author photograph © Reg Whitman
v1.0318
For Joske, who loves the music of both Mahlers
I have two souls: I know it.
And am I a liar? When he looks at me so happily, what a profound feeling of ecstasy. Is that a lie, too? No, no. I must cast out my other soul. The one which has so far ruled must be banished. I must strive to become a real person, let everything happen to me of its own accord.
—Alma Maria Schindler’s diary, January 16, 1902, translated by Antony Beaumont
Prelude
January 1899
Theresianumgasse
Vienna’s Fourth District
Nineteen years old, Alma Maria Schindler longed body and soul for an awakening. In the family parlor, redolent with the perfume of hothouse lilies, she sat at her piano and composed a new song.
“Ich wandle unter Blumen und blühe selber mit,” she sang, as she played. I wandered among flowers and blossomed with them.
The lyrics were from a poem by Heinrich Heine, but the music was entirely her own. Closing her eyes, Alma let the song play itself, as though it were a living creature she had birthed and let loose in the world. Whether her music was any good or not, she had no idea, but it shimmered with passion poured straight from her heart. Painters, like her late father, the great Emil Schindler, revealed the innermost workings of their souls with brushstrokes, bold or delicate. The piano was her canvas, her notes the play of light and dark, color and texture.
“My art,” Alma whispered, and then jumped to see her sister, Gretl, one year younger, watching from the open doorway.
Still in her dressing gown although it was two in the afternoon, Gretl seemed to be nursing another headache. But instead of scolding Alma for making such a racket, she sat in the armchair beside the piano and asked her to play the song once more.
“It’s uncanny,” Gretl said, when Alma had finished. She gazed down at the book of lyric verse opened to the Heine piece Alma had chosen. “You always find a poem that expresses what’s inside you. Anyone who hears this song will know you as well as I. It’s that intimate.”
Her sister’s face was as pale as the lilies in their vase, and her dark eyes were fixed on Alma with a solemn scrutiny that unnerved her.
Alma searched for a lighthearted reply. “That explains why my lieder are so introspective! No jolly, thigh-slapping folk songs for me then.”
To her relief, Gretl’s mood seemed to lift and they laughed together.
“Just imagine,” Gretl said, thumbing through the red-leather-bound Baedeker travel guide on the side table. “Another seven weeks and we’re off to Italy! I can hardly wait to leave this dreary snow behind.” At that, she went off to dress.
Alma played her song again, adding subtle variations to the theme. Joy seized her, a buoyancy that blossomed inside her. Losing herself in the labyrinth of sound, she allowed her yearnings to soar. If only I were a somebody. Oh, to compose an opera, a truly great one—something no woman had ever done. She would call her opera Ver Sacrum, sacred spring, after the journal of the Secession art movement. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was the Secession’s vice president. His paintings lined the parlor walls along with those of his colleagues and friends. Gustav Klimt. Max Klinger. Fernand Khnopff. Koloman Moser’s exquisitely framed letterpress print spelled out the Secession’s motto.
To every age its art.
To every art its freedom.
Freedom, Alma exulted. Her stepfather’s circle was the vanguard, the cutting edge. They had defied the rigid conventions of the academy to create their own unique styles. After this break from tradition, the arts could never be the same again. As hidebound and conservative as Austria might be, with its emperor who seemed to live forever through every scandal and revolution, Vienna was a bubbling font of artistic innovation. Ver sacrum, indeed! Not only were there avant-garde painters and architects, reform dress that liberated women’s bodies from crippling corsets, and new writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but there were also young composers. With her entire being, Alma longed to leave her mark among these blazing new talents. Oh, to compose symphonies and operas that truly expressed the spirit of this modern age! How she longed for the vision and strength to see her dreams reach fruition.
Help me, divine power, she prayed, she who had disavowed all formal religion. Guide me. See me through. May I suffer no hindrance in the battle against my weakness. My femininity.
Suite 1
Liebestod
1
May 1899
Venice
Here is where my awakening shall occur, Alma told herself. In magical Venice, in the spring of the year and the spring of her life. Never mind that it was pouring rain and fog hung as thickly as wool.
In the hotel salon, she played piano, accompanying her mother who sang lieder to entertain their fellow tourists sheltering from the miserable weather. How beautiful was her mother’s soprano, how flawless her diction. Mama had been an opera singer before she married Alma’s father, n
ow almost seven years dead.
At the song’s close came a burst of applause. Alma beamed at her audience. Sitting among the English and German tourists were Gretl; their stepfather, Carl; and his colleague Gustav Klimt, who seemed to regard Alma with amused speculation. For Easter, Herr Klimt had given her a silly card of a shepherdess encircled by adoring sheep sporting gentlemen’s hats—Alma kept it tucked in her journal.
He is so handsome, she thought, heat rising in her face. With his powerful body, his curly hair and beard, he reminded her of the figures on ancient Greek vases. If Gustav Klimt had even the faintest clue how infatuated she was, she would die. Thirty-seven years old, the most celebrated painter in all Vienna, he could marry a countess just by snapping his fingers.
Nonetheless, Alma made herself stare right back at him to prove she wasn’t some giddy girl he could disarm with a smile.
Her stepfather was so fond of Klimt, he had all but begged him to join them on their journey through Italy even though Klimt swore that he hated foreign travel and was terrible with languages. As a painter, Carl was nowhere near as brilliant as Klimt—or Emil Schindler, whose protégé Carl had been. Klimt and Papa are giants, Alma told herself. But Carl was a lesser talent who hung on to the coattails of the great in hope that some of their glory might rub off on him. It wasn’t that her stepfather was a bad man, but Alma often wondered why Mama seemed to worship him.
Alma set her sights higher. Nothing less than a man of brilliance would do for her, a truly modern man who understood her need to continue composing even after she was married. She wasn’t one, like her sister, to settle for the very first suitor. Gretl was engaged to the tedious Wilhelm Legler, a painter of almost numbing mediocrity. No, Alma vowed to wait for the right man, the one whose love would help her unfold to her highest purpose.
Rising from the piano bench, Alma was gathering up her music scores when an elderly English lady approached her.
“Fräulein, you played so beautifully, like a concert pianist,” she said. “Tell me, who was the composer?”
“I am,” Alma replied. She lowered her eyes.
“My daughter composed all eight lieder we performed,” Mama added, with warmth and pride.
The English lady seemed most impressed. She grasped Alma’s hands. “Keep on composing, won’t you, dear? Show the men that we women can achieve something.”
Alma found herself flushing and speechless, seized with both a bottomless joy and an ambition that left her breathless. Many a girl showed talent and promise only to give it up for marriage, as Mama had done when she was only twenty-one and pregnant—out of wedlock!—with Alma. But wasn’t a new age dawning, all the rules for art, music, and society changing at once?
As the English lady and her companions took their leave, Gretl announced that she was dying for a game of whist, so Mama and Carl sat down with her at the card table. But Alma could think of no pastime more deadening to the intellect and spirit. Mumbling her excuses, she carried her music scores upstairs to the room that she and Gretl were sharing.
Closing the door behind her, Alma sank into an armchair and buried herself in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which Mama considered unseemly for a young girl. But Mama had long given up trying to control what Alma read. You’re so stubborn, her mother was always saying. So boneheaded.
Yet truth be told, Alma was rapidly losing patience with Emma Bovary. She found the character incomprehensible. Her madness, her degrading love affairs, her endless lying to herself and others—was this woman flighty, cowardly, or simply coarse and common?
Tossing the book aside, Alma opened the French doors and stepped out on the balcony to breathe in the fresh, cool air now that the rain had finally let up. The canal below was gray with a shimmer of yellow as the sun broke through gaps in the fog. Gray was her favorite color, the way it so seamlessly merged with other hues. An artist’s daughter, she observed how every raindrop on the balcony rail became a gleaming pearl. The crumbling palazzos across the canal seemed almost rosy. Everything flickered and glowed in dreamy gray light.
Hearing a noise in the room, Alma left the balcony and stepped inside.
“Gretl?” she called. She had left the door unlocked since her sister was always forgetting her key.
Instead, she found Gustav Klimt standing in the middle of her room. Her heart began to pound even as she told herself that he must be looking for Carl and had wandered in here by mistake.
“Alma,” he said. “Are you on your own?”
“Why, yes,” she said, without thinking. “The others are—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Klimt crossed the room in two huge strides. A gasp caught in her throat as he pulled her body against his, kissing her with vehemence and heat, his lips firm and insistent, his beard bristling against her chin. Her first kiss.
What magic was this? It was as though her hidden longing had summoned him straight into her embrace. Time seemed to drop away, everything before or after this single moment diminishing into nothingness as the ecstasy surged inside her, crashing like a wave inside her heart.
Klimt cupped her face to his. “I could see all the passion locked inside you while you were playing the piano. The time has come to set it free.”
She trembled just to gaze into his gray-green eyes.
“Love me,” he whispered, running his fingers around her lips.
She tenderly caressed his hair, feeling the thick, springy curls twining around her fingertips. She kissed him with a hunger that left her aching. The soft quivering in her belly and knees was countered by a shooting heat, a rising energy that made her want to dance. But instead of losing herself in her frenzy, she made herself slow down, kissing him with deliberation, savoring each nuance of his lips against hers, her chest against his, their lungs swelling in unison as if sharing the same breath. All the dusty descriptions of love scenes she had read in Madame Bovary and elsewhere seemed meaningless now. This was what passion, what awakening, truly was.
When Klimt asked if he could take out her hairpins, Alma nodded, moved beyond speech. He pulled them out one by one until her brown hair fell over her shoulders like a cloak. As if in holy awe, Klimt drew back and stared.
“How I long to paint you.”
He positioned her before the full-length mirror. His arm around her waist, he stood behind her, looking over her shoulder. When their eyes met in the mirror, he commanded her to look at herself, as though he, the artist, were revealing her own image to her for the very first time. Alma squirmed but couldn’t take her eyes off the mirror, for this was as exciting as it was uncomfortable.
This is what men see when they look at me. Tall, she stood shoulder to shoulder with Klimt. Her face was flushed with yearning, her blue eyes huge, blinking rapidly.
“You are so ripe and voluptuous,” he said, drawing her attention to her waving tresses flowing over her breasts. His hands traced the curve of her hips. Swinging her around to face him again, he stroked her hair.
“Alma,” he said. “My little wife.”
Oh, to marry Klimt.
A sweet ache bloomed inside her as they kissed, his tongue flicking between her teeth. Then she jolted at the sound of Mama’s and Carl’s voices in the adjoining room. Before Alma could think what to say or do, Klimt vanished, leaving her shaking and alone with her undone hair.
Moments later, Gretl sauntered in and looked at Alma as though she’d caught her sleepwalking.
“What, so dishabille in the afternoon?” her sister cried. “Did you catch the swamp fever? Mama says we must get ready and meet downstairs in a quarter of an hour. With any luck, Herr Klimt will come sightseeing with us.”
“What’s ailing you, Alma?” Mama asked, as they ambled across the Piazza San Marco. “There’s such a high color in your face. You look feverish.”
“Maybe it’s something I ate,” Alma managed, her heart beating hard and fast.
To think her mother could tell with just one glance that she was forever changed. She didn�
�t feel feverish as much as electrified. The fog had cleared and the blue sky opened into infinity. All around her Italian voices lilted like minuets. Ah, the gorgeous chaos of this square with its accordion players and acrobats and boisterous families and whispering lovers. This sense of utter freedom and levity was something Alma could have never experienced back in Vienna, where every single aspect of existence was so regimented, where even the parks were walled and gated, and it was forbidden to sit on the grass. Possessed by a whimsical abandon, she could barely keep herself from skipping and leaping like the laughing children racing one another across the cobblestones.
“Perhaps we better go back if Alma’s not well,” Mama said to Carl. “She should lie down and rest.”
“Nonsense,” said Carl, in his usual hearty fashion. “Fresh air and exercise will do her a world of good.”
Klimt trailed behind Alma, the heat of his very presence warming her back. Her lips felt swollen, inflamed from his kisses. Alma, my little wife. Mama said it was time he was married. Alma’s heart soared—was this why Klimt had allowed Carl to entice him on this trip even though he despised travel—because he wanted to court her? Perhaps Mama and Carl were even encouraging him—why wouldn’t they want to see her married to the president of the Secession movement? As his wife, Alma would compose operas as magnificent as his paintings.
Klimt fell into pace with Alma and took her arm. “Do you feel out of sorts, my dear?”
Alma offered him a secret smile and nodded.
“I am as well,” he said under his breath. “You know, there’s only one cure.”
“What’s that?” she heard herself ask, reveling in the strength of his muscled arm.
“Complete physical union,” he whispered.
If he hadn’t been supporting her, she would have tripped over her skirts and tumbled face-first. She and Klimt pressed on, disturbing a flock of pigeons that took to flight in a flutter of countless wings, gray feathers stroking soft spring air.