Back home once more, Alma played piano. Steeped in concentration, she gave herself wholly to the prelude and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde while her music teacher, Adele Radnitzky-Mandlick, looked on. Alma had been studying with her since the age of twelve. They had become so close, she called her Frau Adele. How Alma reveled in this deep immersion in music, her consolation and refuge. The one still point amid her turmoil as she struggled to forget Klimt and reconcile herself to the changes in her family. Mama had commandeered Alma’s bedroom for the new nursery, thus obliging Alma to move into Gretl’s room. It would be only a temporary inconvenience, Mama had argued, seeing as Gretl would be married next September. Still, this meant that Alma and her sister would be cooped up together for more than a year as their home seemed to shrink around them.
“Absolutely sublime,” Frau Adele said, when Alma had finished. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more nuanced interpretation.”
Frau Adele, her guardian angel. Her teacher was an elegant woman in her thirties who earned her living as a musical mentor of promising young women. Her recitals showcasing her protégées were famous. Some months ago, Alma had performed in the neo-Renaissance concert hall in the Palais Ehrbar and received resounding applause and praise. The Neue Freie Presse had declared her brilliant, a rare talent.
“I’m both sad and delighted to inform you that I have nothing left to teach you.” Frau Adele’s smile indicated that this was the greatest honor any of her students could bestow on her. “You have reached the point where you’re ready to take it a step further.”
Alma leaned forward, her heart trilling in hope.
“You’re now ready to study with my teacher,” Frau Adele said. “Dr. Julius Epstein at the Vienna Conservatory.”
Alma leapt off the piano bench and breathlessly hugged her teacher.
“Go get your parents, my dear,” Frau Adele said. “We must talk it through with them.”
Her head swimming with euphoria, Alma dashed off to find Mama. Her shoes clattered on the polished wooden floor. Mama would scold her for making scuff marks. Their family had lived in this house for four years, but it still didn’t feel like home to Alma—it seemed too sterile and new, built by Julius Mayreder to Carl’s specifications and decorated to Carl’s tastes. His Japanese and Chinese porcelain cluttered the cabinets designed by Koloman Moser. All so curated and self-conscious, Alma thought. The residence of an aspiring patrician.
Alma found her mother in the sewing room, the one place besides Alma and Gretl’s room that remained free from her stepfather’s aesthetics.
“Mama!” She pulled her mother up from her wicker chair so abruptly that her knitting tumbled from her hands. “Frau Adele says I’m ready for the conservatory!” Alma had every expectation of her mother’s blessing. Mama herself had studied voice there. “Come, she wants to speak to you.”
Grabbing Mama’s hand, Alma tried to rush her back to the parlor, but pregnancy made her mother’s progress cumbersome and slow.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Mama said, pulling her hand free. “You fetch Carl.”
Alma felt her stomach drop. “Why?” Why did her stepfather have to butt his head into everything, even her dream of becoming a great composer?
“You know very well why,” Mama said. “He controls the purse strings.”
With a sigh, Alma stalked off down the stairs, out the back door, and down the gravel path to her stepfather’s studio in the back garden. Its huge windows ran nearly the entire length and breadth of the walls. Alma’s resentment bubbled like witch’s brew. Gretl and I must share a room because he impregnated our mother. But he gets an entire freestanding building to himself. His studio was as big as a laborer’s cottage. And there he worked on his canvases, pretending to be a great painter while, in fact, he earned most of his money dealing in other people’s art. The vice president of the Secession.
Try as she might, Alma couldn’t take him seriously as a father figure. He was four years younger than Mama. Only eighteen years older than Alma was. But she arranged her face in an expression of stepdaughterly affection as she knocked on his studio door and stepped inside. Smiling as sweetly as she could, she took his arm and coaxed him away from his unfinished still life.
Cilli, the maid, served coffee and apricot streusel while Frau Adele stated her case to Mama and Carl. Alma perched on her chair, her sweating hands clasped in hope.
“Alma’s nineteen, the perfect age to begin a serious course of study,” her teacher said. “As it stands, she’s a very talented amateur. But she has the potential to become a professional. With her virtuosity, she belongs in the concert hall.”
I’ll study with Dr. Epstein! I’ll write symphonies and operas! Alma saw her future beckon like a glimmering castle on the horizon.
“I’m sorry to say our finances are tight at the moment.” Carl lifted his palms in apology. “You must understand, Frau Radnitzky, we have another child on the way and Gretl’s wedding to pay for. It’s not as though Alma will have to support herself with her music. A girl as pretty as my stepdaughter will be married in a few years.”
A white-hot rage climbed up Alma’s throat. Ignoring Carl, she appealed to Mama. “You went to the conservatory!”
“I received a stipendium,” Mama said quietly. “And in those days, I did have to earn my living at the opera. Life is so much easier for you, my dear, thanks to Carl looking after us all.”
Alma reeled from her mother’s betrayal.
“Besides,” Mama said. “You told me you didn’t like performing on stage and being on display.”
“But to not even have a chance,” Alma said, trying her best not to cry. “What about Ilse Conrat? She’s studying sculpture in Brussels. Her parents—”
“Are rich,” Mama said. “We, alas, need to think about economy.” She reached forward to pat Alma’s arm. “Of course, you’ll still continue your composition lessons with Josef Labor. There’s nothing wrong with being a talented amateur, Alma. We’re so proud of your accomplishments, aren’t we, Carl?”
Alma blinked back her tears and looked at Frau Adele. Her teacher appeared disappointed but resigned, as though this was not the first such exchange she had witnessed.
“Keep on playing like a virtuosa,” Frau Adele said when Alma saw her to the door. “And do keep up your lessons with Herr Labor. You owe it to yourself, Alma Maria Schindler. You have a gift.”
Alma shook her teacher’s hand and kissed her cheek. After saying good-bye and closing the door, she thundered up the stairs in a flood of tears. In truth, she had expected no better of Carl, but how could her own mother so abruptly dismiss her dreams of being anything more than a dilettante?
Mama planted herself at the top of the stairs. When Alma tried to dash past her, her mother took her arms and tried to hug her. “I’m so sorry, dear. But you don’t want to be like those Conrat girls. You know what people say about them.” Not only was Ilse an aspiring sculptor, but her younger sister, Erica, intended to study at the university. “Bluestockings aren’t taken seriously as women—they’re too mannish.” Mama dropped her voice and reddened. “The third sex.”
Pulling away from her mother, Alma ran into her and Gretl’s room—blessedly, her sister was out. She hurled herself on her bed. As hard as she tried to banish her mother’s words, the curse of becoming one of the third sex terrified her. Alma had to admit she was both fascinated and intimidated by the Conrat sisters. They put their femininity to the side to pursue years of lonely, dusty striving, yet they’d be lucky to receive even a portion of the regard heaped on men who walked the same path. And so they would doom themselves, Mama seemed to imply. Despised as the monstrous third sex, they would exile themselves from the comforts other women enjoyed. Namely love, marriage, and motherhood. And yet the thought of having to marry a man like Carl made Alma want to claw off her own skin.
Where on this earth do I belong? Mama was right in one thing, Alma was forced to admit—she didn’t enjoy performing in public. She hated the savage competitiveness among Frau Adele’s other students, and she would not be content with a career of merely interpreting other people’s music. No, music for Alma was something deeply intimate. Her essence. Her soul. More than anything, she dreamed of transforming her innermost emotions into cathedrals of sound.
I won’t be bullied away from my music or my dreams. I shall persevere. If one door was now closed to her, another remained open. Alma would devote her entire being to writing her own music.
The very next day Alma set to work composing a fantasia arranged around the leitmotif that kept surfacing in her diary: Loneliness is my destiny, for I feed off my own thoughts.
Meanwhile, Gretl, with an obsession bordering on mania, sat in the corner copying recipes into a book. Only a year ago her sister would have filled that selfsame book with her sketches. Was this what it meant to be a grown woman—abandoning any pretense of making anything of yourself just so you could serve your husband the perfect plate of Tafelspitz? But at least Gretl was moving forward in life instead of being left behind like Alma. Now that Mama and Carl are starting a new family, it’s time for us to move on, Gretl had said smartly—Gretl, who seemed only to look to her future when she would be married.
Not for the first time Alma wished she were a young man who could take his share of the family money and go his own way. The problem was there wasn’t much in the way of family money. Emil Schindler’s only fault was that he’d had no head for finance. He hadn’t even managed to write a will. After he died, everything had gone to Mama, and now everything of Mama’s belonged to Carl. Gretl and I are reduced to living off of Carl Moll’s charity, with nothing to call our own.
“Alma, those chords are so strident.” Gretl looked up from her recipes. Dark circles shadowed her sister’s eyes. “You’re giving me a headache. Can you play something more cheerful? Mozart would be nice.”
Exasperated, Alma rose from the piano. The parlor’s claustrophobic walls closed in as if to smother her.