Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  “Mama,” Gucki said, offering the flower.

  Her daughter, the only thread keeping her in this world. The beautiful little girl whom she had so sadly neglected during Gustav’s illness. Alma drew back the covers and made room for her child. Burying her face in Gucki’s hair, she smelled her clean skin. Anna Justine, angel of life, calling her mother back from the void.

  Alma’s convalescence was long and slow. But Gucki and music were her door back into the world of the living. For Gustav’s soul lived on in his symphonies, and Gucki likewise craved the comfort of her father’s music. Forcing herself out of her sickbed, Alma dressed and dragged her weakened body to the piano where she had composed her first lieder. And there she took her place beside her seven-year-old daughter. Alma played and played. Sometimes she and Gucki played together. Other times, her daughter sang. Alma and Gucki made music all day long. They took their meals at the piano. Alma played through Gustav’s symphonies and song cycles until at last she had finished his entire monumental repertoire.

  Then there was only her music left. Her songs. She played them over and over, scarcely believing that she had written them. Gucki sang the lyrics in her pure, high voice. The voice of innocence.

  On a warm July afternoon, Alma played piano with the windows open, the curtains fluttering as wide as wings. Gucki’s and Maria’s voices drifted in from the garden. Alma smiled to hear her daughter laughing and playing again as a child should. Glancing up from her score, Alma saw Mama in the doorway.

  “Alma, you have a visitor.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not seeing anyone. Take their card. I’ll write them a note.”

  In the past seven weeks, Alma had been deluged with condolences. Her mail, opened and unopened, piled as high as a snowdrift. Dr. Fraenkel wanted to come to Vienna and whisk her away on a trip to Corfu. She rooted her fingers stubbornly on the piano keys.

  Mama merely stepped aside, revealing the tall figure behind her. Walter.

  Alma opened and closed her mouth, then rose shakily from the piano bench. Was it truly him, come all the way from Berlin? Mama closed the door behind her while Walter slowly crossed the room. Moving with a lion’s grace, he was just as handsome and elegant as she remembered. He took her hands and they searched each other’s eyes.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” they said in unison. Walter was mourning his father’s death.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” Alma said. “I didn’t know if you would come.”

  Their correspondence had been sporadic at best.

  “I wanted to wait a decent interval after your husband’s funeral.” Walter bowed his head.

  Alma nodded, her eyes filling. Walter pulled her into his arms. For a long while they held each other in silence, both of them too choked to speak.

  “Now we’ve known each other for more than a year,” Walter said.

  As a widow, Alma could lift her face to his and kiss him without betrayal. Lean into his embrace. Gustav had wanted her to go on living. Life is precious. Yet she and Walter hadn’t seen each other in eight months and they were both bereaved. To think that this was their first meeting since their night of love on the Orient Express back in October. Alma felt like a completely different person from the miserable wife who had fallen so desperately in love with Walter at Tobelbad the previous summer.

  “It’s been hard for you,” he said. “I can see how you’ve suffered, looking after him until the end.”

  Alma couldn’t keep herself from crying. “I never realized how much he needed me. He was such a noble soul. Even when he was dying, that man’s love was like nothing I ever—” She swallowed back her words. How could she be telling this to Walter? But she wanted him to understand the heaven and hell she had gone through this past year. She yearned for his empathy. Let him hear her truth and love her, scars and all.

  “What do you mean his love?” Walter took a step back. “You weren’t intimate with him, were you?”

  The very question left Alma floored. “He was my husband.”

  Walter expelled a sharp breath. “So when did you become his wife again? I thought he was impotent.”

  Alma closed her eyes, unable to get over her incredulity. Had Walter truly been that naïve? “I was always his wife. Of course, I loved him. I gave him everything.”

  Walter rubbed his eyes as though he could no longer bear to look at her. “So you can’t be faithful to anyone then? Not to him and not to me.”

  Alma reeled as though he had punched her. “How dare you? You had no qualms about loving another man’s wife, but now you lecture me on being faithful?”

  “You were never mine! Only his. Your love letters to me were full of Gustav. His health. His music. His praise of your music. You’re still his.” He waved his hand at the stack of Gustav’s scores beside the piano. At Rodin’s bronze bust of Gustav on the sideboard.

  “Walter, please.” Alma reached for his hands and spoke from the depths of her heart. “I love you. Let me love you.”

  “I wonder,” he said coldly, “if you can truly love any man.”

  Stung, she fought down the urge to slap him. “And you?” she asked him. “Do you love me?”

  “I honestly don’t know anymore.” His eyes were flinty as he pulled free from her grasp. “You’re a different woman than I thought you were. I think it’s best if I go.”

  Shaking in anger and hurt, Alma grabbed him by the lapels and forced him to look her in the eye. “After all the risks I’ve taken for you, all the torture we both caused Gustav, you want to just walk away.”

  His eyes slid past hers. “I need to think things through, Alma.”

  She let him go. Watched him stumble away. He nearly bashed his head on her mother’s hanging lamp on his way out of the room. When he was gone, her lungs deflated. Too numb for tears, she sank onto the piano bench. First I had two men. And now I have none. She stared blankly at her music.

  Did Walter’s abhorrence prove that she was an awful woman? Not only had she destroyed Gustav with her betrayal, she was a heartless monster incapable of real love. That parting look Walter had given her, as though she were pure filth. A cesspool that unsuspecting men could drown in. So vile that no man would ever be able to love her once he knew how truly depraved she was inside.

  Alma began to play her song “Ansturm.” Her voice cracking in pain, she sang, giving herself to the crescendos. For the first time in her life, she stood entirely alone. Beholden to no one. Not to a husband. Or to a lover. Or to Mama and Carl. Even if I am a bad woman, I’m my own bad woman. Alma played her song defiantly to its end.

  Gustav loved me, truly loved me, for exactly who I am. If a soul as profound and wise as he could love her so deeply, then surely there must be something about her that was loveable. She cupped her hands over her face and sobbed, stirred to her depths. Love surged inside her. For her departed husband. For her living daughter. For this precious life.

  What if there are no good women or bad women? she asked herself. What if pure and impure, faithful and loose, madonna and whore were simply poisons used to reduce a healthy woman to a gibbering, nerve-sick wreck? Men make the rules and we break them so we don’t go mad. And what if she were not just one color or hue, dark or light, but the whole spectrum? As in Goethe’s Faust, the Eternal Feminine was not just the Holy Virgin but also the Magna Peccatrix, the great sinner. Golden Lilith bloomed inside her. Every facet of womanhood, sacred and profane, from the heights to the depths. What if every woman, her included, embodied all of it? The paradox and totality.

  The time had come to face life again with wide-open eyes. Playing her music, Alma saw her future open before her. I will leave my mother’s house. Even though Carl thought it unseemly for the Widow Mahler to rent her own apartment, Alma resolved to do just that. Tomorrow she would begin making enquiries to find a new home for her daughter and herself. At the age of nearly thirty-two, I am finally my own woman.

  Alma began to play a song she had written as a girl, her setti
ng of Otto Julius Bierbaum’s poem “Ekstase.” Ecstasy. For you, Gustl. For her husband who had returned to the ineffable. In death, in life, Gustav would always be a part of her. Always.

  God, your heavens are now revealed to me,

  And your wonders lie before me

  Like meadows in May, shimmering beneath the sun.

  You are the sun, my god, and I am with you.

  I see myself ascending into paradise.

  Your light surges within me like a chorale.

  Then I, the wanderer, open my arms wide

  And fade into the light like the night

  Surrendering into the red burst of dawn.

  Alma rose from the piano and stepped outside into the sunlight for the first time in seven weeks. Today I know the eternal source of all strength. Kneeling beside Gucki on the green grass, Alma hugged her daughter. It is in nature, in the earth, in the people I love. She would go on living with her head lifted high but with her feet on the ground where they belonged.

  There are so many different lives and selves within one woman’s life, Alma reflected. As a girl, she had dreamed of living for her music, of composing operas and symphonies. Then, for nine years, she was the wife and muse of a great man. Now she was a widow with a half-orphaned daughter to raise by herself. How many more incarnations were still in store for her? She was on her own, as unfettered and free as a woman could be, even as her grief cracked her wide open.

  What new life might emerge? What new woman?

  Historical Afterword

  Readers will be interested to know that after Mahler’s death in 1911 Alma went on to publish two more collections of lieder: Four Songs for Voice and Piano in 1915 and Five Songs for Voice and Piano in 1924. Three additional songs were discovered posthumously, two of which were published in 2000. Beyond these seventeen surviving lieder, nothing else remains or has been found. We do know that, according to her early diaries, Alma composed or drafted more than a hundred songs, various instrumental pieces, and the beginning of an opera. These “lost” works may have been destroyed in World War II after Alma fled Austria and left most of her belongings behind, or she may have destroyed them herself. We will never know what posterity might have lost.

  Her surviving songs are now regularly performed and recorded, and are available on CD and YouTube. Susanne Rode-Breymann’s Die Komponistin Alma Mahler-Werfel, Sally Macarthur’s “The Power of Sound, the Power of Sex: Alma Schindler-Mahler’s Ansturm” in Feminist Aesthetics in Music, and Diane W. Follet’s luminous essay “Redeeming Alma: The Songs of Alma Mahler” were crucial texts in my portrayal of Alma as a composer. The exhibition “The Better Half—Jewish Women Artists Before 1938” at the Jewish Museum of Vienna was pivotal for my portrayal of the sculptor Ilse Conrat and the prevailing and crushing misogyny that all creative women in early twentieth-century Vienna were up against.

  Mahler’s death left Alma a very well-to-do widow. Shortly after we leave her in the novel, she made good on her aspiration for an independent life, finding an apartment for herself and her daughter. In 1912 she began a headlong, turbulent affair with the young Oskar Kokoschka. The artist immortalized their passion in his iconic painting The Bride of the Wind. But when Kokoschka’s behavior became rather too alarming (he was obsessed with her dead husband and liked to dress in Alma’s clothing and sign his letters with her name), she broke off with him and reconciled with Walter Gropius. Alma and Gropius married in 1915 and had a daughter, Manon, but Gropius’s lingering jealousies of Alma’s former love interests cast a shadow on their marriage. In 1917 Alma fell in love with the young poet Franz Werfel, and in 1918, she gave birth to a son, Martin, who died in infancy. After divorcing Gropius in 1920, Alma helped nurture Werfel’s career as he went on to become a best-selling novelist. They married in 1929. In 1938, only weeks before the Nazi Anschluss, they fled Austria (Werfel was Jewish) and later dramatically escaped Vichy France by hiking over the mountains into Spain, where they eventually reached Lisbon and sailed to the United States. They lived in Los Angeles, where Werfel worked as a novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter.

  After Werfel’s death in 1945, Alma moved to New York, where she championed Gustav Mahler’s posthumous reputation and was an inspiration to the young Leonard Bernstein. She died in New York in 1964 and is buried in Grinzing Cemetery, Vienna, with her daughter Manon Gropius, who died of polio at the age of eighteen.

  Anna Justine Mahler, known by her childhood nickname Gucki in the novel, was Alma’s only child to outlive her. Unlike her mother, Anna succeeded in fully realizing her artistic dreams, becoming a celebrated twentieth-century sculptor. Her bronze bust of Gustav Mahler is housed in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of her late father’s most beloved concert venues.

  Alma’s sister Gretl was permanently institutionalized for her mental illness in the autumn of 1911. She died in an asylum in 1940, possibly the victim of a Nazi-run euthanasia program.

  Trying to capture Alma’s essence in one novel proved to be an extraordinary challenge—she was truly a larger-than-life woman.

  This is a work of fiction, but the major events and characters in the novel are based on fact, including Alma’s friendship with the ethnomusicologist and activist Natalie Curtis. In the interest of streamlining the narrative, I have conflated some parties and concerts. For example, Alma did go to see the Vienna premiere of Mahler’s First Symphony but not with Zemlinsky. However, she and Zemlinsky went to many other concerts together. My two main research bibles were Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries 1898–1902, selected and translated by Antony Beaumont, and Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, edited by Henry-Louis de la Grange and Günther Weiss. I also drew on Alma’s memoir, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, edited by Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner.

  The biography I found most illuminating was Susanne Rode-Breymann’s Alma Mahler-Werfel: Muse, Gattin, Witwe. As coeditor of the German edition of Alma’s diaries and a professor of music, Dr. Rode-Breymann has unparalleled insights into Alma’s life and work. The most fair and balanced of the English-language biographies, in my opinion, is Susanne Keegan’s The Bride of the Wind: The Life of Alma Mahler. Jens Malte Fischer’s monumental Gustav Mahler was key to my portrayal of Mahler.

  Biographers have differed dramatically in their readings of Alma Mahler’s life and their interpretations of her character. She was a complex, transgressive, ambitious, and often perplexing woman full of unending contradictions. In the popular imagination, Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel is the mercurial femme fatale with the three genius husbands, not to mention her artistic lovers on the side. The cliché of Alma as the voracious, man-eating, hysterically self-dramatizing seductress leaves a hollow impression. There certainly had to be more to Alma than that to explain why such a brilliant and sensitive man as Mahler loved her so profoundly.

  The deeper I delved into Alma’s story, the more complex and compelling her character revealed itself to be. Shortly before her marriage to Mahler, the twenty-two-year-old Alma Maria Schindler wrote in her diary, “I have two souls: I know it.” Born in an era that struggled to recognize women as full-fledged human beings, Alma experienced a fundamental split in her psyche—the rift between being a distinct creative individual and being an object of male desire. The suppression of her true self in order to give up her own music at Mahler’s behest and become the woman he wanted her to be was unsustainable and inhuman. Eventually, the authentic Alma erupted out of this false persona.

  What emerged was a free-spoken woman far ahead of her time, who rejected the shackles of condoned feminine behavior and insisted on her independence and her sexual and creative freedom. Like unconventional women throughout history, Alma faced a backlash of misinterpretation and outright condemnation.

  But Susanne Freund’s 2007 documentary, Big Alma, and the more recent German-language biographies, such as Susanne Rode-Breymann’s work, reflect a much more nuanced view of Alma. Haide Tenner’s Ich möchte so lange leben, als ich Ihnen dankbar sein kann, about the five-decades-long
correspondence and friendship between Alma Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg, reveals a lesser-known side of Alma, namely that she was a devoted patron of other artists. She provided Schoenberg and his family with much needed moral and financial support. Arnold Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria Schoenberg Nono, quoted in Tenner’s book, remembers Alma as a dear and loyal family friend, and is saddened by the tarnished image that some biographers have attached to her. Some people, Schoenberg Nono told Tenner, just want Alma to be bad.

  Alma was not only a composer and a patron, but also what in German is called a Lebenskünstlerin, or life artist—she pioneered new ways of being as a woman and this in itself was a work of art.

  A symphony of gratitude goes out to my editor, Nicole Angeloro, whose insight and expertise are such an inspiration to me, and to my agent, Jennifer Weltz, for believing in this book from the beginning. As always, I remain indebted to David Hough for his copyediting and fact-checking brilliance. Arias of praise go out to the entire team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  I wish to declare my endless love and gratitude to my husband, Jos Van Loo, for sharing my love for the music of both Mahlers and accompanying me to countless concerts, three research trips to Vienna, and a pilgrimage to Alma and Gustav’s summer homes in Maiernigg, Austria, and Dobbiaco, Italy.

  I would be a much poorer writer without the sisterhood and support of my writers group. Huge hugs and thanks to Cath Staincliffe, Sue Stern, Olivia Piekarski, Anjum Malik, and Livi Michael for sharing Alma’s journey with me. I also wish to express my gratitude to Jenna Blum, M. J. Rose, Kris Waldherr, and C. W. Gortner for reading Ecstasy in manuscript.