October 1959
The young Alma Schindler was called the most beautiful girl in Vienna. She was the daughter of a painter to the Austro-Hungarian court, and as a young girl spent all her time composing and playing music and reading. When she was twenty-two she met and married Mahler, who was twenty years older than she: he proposed to her at their third meeting demanding that she instantly give up her music and live for his alone. This she did for nine years until his death - seeing him through five symphonies and enduring consecutively his indifference and his frantic jealousy. Towards the end of this time she met a young architect called Walter Gropius, who fell madly in love with her and wrote a letter declaring himself, which he addressed to Mahler. Frau Werfel says; ‘What came then defies description … I had the elemental feeling that I could never leave Mahler. When I told him so, his face became transfigured and he clung to me every second of the day and night, ecstatic with love.’ But also: ‘All of a sudden I knew that my marriage was no marriage, that my own life was utterly unfulfilled.’ When Mahler entered his final illness she nursed him devotedly from America to France and home to Vienna, where he died.
After Mahler’s death she met Oskar Kokoschka, who came to draw her, and who after this one meeting wrote her a remarkable letter in which, among other things, he said: ‘ I know I will lose the faculties I should direct toward a goal outside myself that is sacred to you and to me. If you can respect me then make a real sacrifice and become my wife in secret, while I am still poor.’ She did not marry him, but for three years they were inseparable: he painted her incessantly and was insanely jealous, removing her from the rest of her life excepting her daughter (she had two by Mahler, but one died). In 1914, Kokoschka joined the army, and shortly afterwards she married Gropius, and had a daughter by him. This marriage came to a sudden end, however, after she had met and fallen in love with the poet and novelist Franz Werfel. She lived with him, but did not marry him until 1929, and the rest of the book contains their life together, including their flight from Europe to America, where he wrote The Song of Bernadette. He died before he had completely finished dictating his last book.
It is clear that with Werfel she achieved a remarkable marriage - of all the men she had met and who were deeply attracted to her, he came first and last in her heart. After Mahler and Kokoschka he must have seemed far easier to love as well as adore - he was gayer, more gentle, and his muse did not drive him with the same ferocious intensity; also he did not prevent her from mixing with other artists, as he, too enjoyed their work and their company.