The winter of 1900 and 1901 proved the most prolific time Alma had ever known. She composed a piano trio and a violin sonata as well as sonatas, adagios, and rondos for solo piano. And lieder! A new song, “Ekstase,” drawn from Bierbaum’s poem of pure spiritual ecstasy, shimmered with her every yearning.
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.
Zemlinsky was delighted when Alma played and sang “Ekstase” for him.
“Such a pity you weren’t born a boy,” he said. “As a girl, you’ll experience countless setbacks.”
“I want to make my mark,” she told him fiercely.
Oh, to sense the heights. To be a mountain. To be great and expansive, bursting with potentiality. To let myself go, just once.
At the end of February, Mama returned from Stuttgart looking pale and haggard. When Alma asked her about Gretl, her mother offered only the most oblique replies.
“Your sister just needs time to settle into her new life,” Mama said, fussing over little Maria’s hair ribbons. “Meanwhile, she’s taking the waters. There’s a lovely sanatorium, Bad Cannstatt, on the outskirts of Stuttgart. The second biggest thermal spa in Europe after the baths in Budapest—just imagine!”
Why all this subterfuge? How it rankled Alma that both Mama and Gretl appeared to deem her unfit to know what was really going on. Just because I’m not married, they think me an idiot. Gretl’s letters revealed absolutely nothing but were filled with banal ramblings about Wilhelm’s work at the academy.
Alma’s anxiety hung like a smoky cloud inside her brain, keeping her awake at night. In the midnight stillness, she heard Mama and Carl talking.
“She hasn’t yet been given sexual fulfillment,” Alma heard her mother say. “Wilhelm only goes so far and no further. He told Gretl it was because he didn’t want children.”
Alma threw her quilt over her face in despair. So Gretl had gone through with the marriage despite her misgivings, and all for what—to be left a virgin and shunted off to a sanatorium when her unhappiness became too much of an inconvenience to her husband? If I get my hands on Gretl’s pistol, I’ll shoot Wilhelm myself. Her sister’s debacle proved the ultimate disillusionment—even marriage wasn’t a guarantee of being initiated into the mysteries of sex.
Alma thought that Mama’s return might signal the end of Muhr’s being their constant dinner guest. But he still appeared at their table at least twice a week. Mama seemed especially charmed by him and thought nothing of leaving him and Alma alone in the parlor while she put Maria to bed and Carl went out to smoke his cigar.
One night in March, Alma played her latest composition for Muhr—a song set to Rilke’s poem “Bei dir ist es traut.” She knew that Muhr loved Rilke’s poetry. While he sat in the chair she had come to think of as Zemlinsky’s, she played and sang.
All is peaceful wherever you are.
Tender clocks beat as in days of old,
Telling me sweet things, but not too loudly.
Somewhere a gate opens, outside into a blooming garden.
Evening listens at the windowpanes.
Let us stay silent—no one knows we are here.
As the last note reverberated, Alma sat with her eyes closed, her head bent over the keys. She wondered what Zemlinsky would make of this song. Oh, please let him be pleased by it. Muhr remained uncharacteristically silent—perhaps because it wasn’t good at all. A sense of defeat washed through her.
“Alma,” Muhr said, in a strangled voice.
She twisted on her piano bench to see him kneeling. The glimmer from the gaslights shone on his monocle and brilliantined hair.
“Herr Muhr, are you all right?” she asked in alarm, wondering what he was doing on the floor. Had he suffered from an attack? A stroke? He gaped at her with a half-open mouth, as though struck dumb. But she was even more aghast when he began to speak.
“Alma Maria, we’ve become fast friends, have we not? We talk of everything together, from Rilke to Persian miniatures. Will you marry me, my darling?”
Thunderstruck, she could only stare at him. Then, piece by piece, it all fell together. The dinner invitations, Mama and Carl conspiring to leave her and Muhr alone together. Carl and her mother wanted her married off, and Felix Muhr was their handpicked choice. At thirty, he was just the right age. He was rich and revered Carl as a genius. He owned a villa in Baden on the outskirts of Vienna, he was reasonably handsome, and he wasn’t Jewish. The perfect candidate in all things but one—Alma didn’t feel anything for him, not as a man, even though she had cherished their budding friendship.
“Perhaps you hesitate,” Muhr said, “because of your musical aspirations. Of course, I would want you to continue composing.”
Alma imagined Mama, Carl, and Cilli eavesdropping, holding their breath while they awaited her reply. Would it not be beneficial to all parties? Of the two of them, Alma had the stronger personality, and Muhr seemed mild mannered enough to keep his word and let her have her own way. Surely, she could do worse.
But what about love? If she married him for money and convenience, wouldn’t she die inside? Alma shuddered to think of giving her body to a man for whom she felt not a drop of passion. Then again, it chilled her to imagine never giving her body to anyone. Never maturing, never fulfilled. The entire conundrum was simply too awful.
Muhr awkwardly clambered to his feet. His monocle slipped and he adjusted it. “My dearest Alma, you don’t have to give me your answer straightaway. Think it over for as long as you wish. Perhaps I should ask again in six months, which shall give us a chance to become even better acquainted.”
Alma’s throat constricted. In six months she would turn twenty-two. How much longer could she remain unwed before she became ridiculous—the dried-up spinster nobody wanted?
“Of course, it’s your decision alone,” Mama said later, after Muhr had gone home. “But think long and hard before you refuse as good a man as Felix Muhr.”
Alma attempted to wash away her confusion in a cascade of piano chords, playing “Liebestod,” the music she always turned to for comfort. She released her entire soul into the pathos of those notes. And she counted the hours to her next lesson. How deeply she had come to rely on Zemlinsky.
Unfortunately, Zemlinsky had the habit of canceling their lessons at the last minute if he had important rehearsals. Nor was he reliably punctual. Three days after Muhr’s proposal, Zemlinsky arrived so late that Alma had given up on him and had washed her hair in preparation for that evening’s party at the Taussigs. Carl was immured in his studio, and Mama, Maria, and Cilli were out, leaving Alma to open the door in exasperation, her damp hair hanging loose and unbound while she waited for it to dry.
“You’re more than two hours late,” she informed Zemlinsky. “At six, the Taussigs are sending their carriage for me. I should really turn you away.”
Zemlinsky bridled, clearly not expecting that kind of reception. “My tram broke down!”
“Your tram, Herr Zemlinsky, is always breaking down.” She folded her arms in front of her.
Not wanting to answer the door in her dressing gown, Alma had hastily thrown on her one article of reform dress, a loose gown of linen with embroidered accents—a birthday present from Aunt Mie. The unfortunate garment reminded Alma of a pretentiously bourgeois attempt at a shepherd’s smock, and it didn’t flatter her in the least. She felt like an enormous billowing sail.
“I’ll have you know that I walked all the way from the Ringstrasse,” Zemlinsky said, his voice rising along with the color in his face. “And now you want to turn me away? Do you really need three hours to dress for a party?”
“What business is it of yours how long it takes me to get dressed?”
Alma had to wait until Cilli and Mama were back just to get into her evening gown with all the tiny buttons up the back, and she also wanted Mama to help arrange her hair.
“Fräulein Schindler, if you want to be my student, you either compose or you carry on as a socialite. One or the other. You can’t do both. I suggest you stick to what you do best and go to your parties.”
Alma glared at him, angry enough to spit. How dare he turn up so late and then talk to her like that, as if he never went to parties or caroused in coffeehouses past midnight? A thousand ripostes rippled on her tongue. But she didn’t dignify his remark with a reply, choosing instead to lead him into the parlor in icy silence. Since he was here, she might as well have her lesson, or part of it, seeing as she couldn’t start dressing until the others were back.
Flicking her damp, loose hair behind her shoulders, she sat at the piano and began to play her newly composed adagio. Not the Rilke song. It would have devastated her to hear him rip apart her Rilke, considering the foul temper he was in. Her eyes on her score, she played her adagio with as much verve as she could muster, not even glancing his way until she had finished.
His eyes were as soft as velvet. “That’s one of your best pieces yet. It truly expresses your character.”
“How so?” she asked tepidly.
“Your unpredictability,” he said. “Your sudden changes in mood.”
“My unpredictability?”
Appearing to ignore her jibe, he sat beside her on the piano bench and began to play her score with such sensitivity that she could scarcely believe it was her own work she heard.
“So mercurial and bewitching,” he said, when he had finished. “Just like you.”
She closed her eyes and let his praise course through her. Then she swallowed hard. “Felix Muhr asked me to marry him,” she blurted, flushing with shame even though she had no reason to.
Zemlinsky blinked, his face gone white. “I’d advise you to accept. Isn’t that what you want? What everyone expects of you?”
Alma looked at him in disbelief, her eyes filling with the tears she could no longer hold back. “To give myself to a man I don’t love? Do you really think so little of me?”
He looked so helpless then, his mouth quivering.
As Alma moved to reach for another score, her long, loose hair spilled over the piano bench, one tress flicking like a flame across Zemlinsky’s thigh. When their eyes met, he began to shake. Before he could pull away, Alma seized his arms. His face washed red; he kissed her hands, then bent his brow to them. Gently, she rested her head on his, breathing in the scent of his silky brown hair, innocent of pomade. Let me die here. This is my heaven.
They drew apart slowly and stared at each other. Clumsily, like two children, they kissed each other’s cheeks, and then held each other, his face buried in her hair, her fingers tracing the contours of his shoulder blades through his blue serge suit. Taking his face in her hands, she gazed at him with all the love burning inside her.
“Alex,” she said.
He kissed her lips and she kissed him back, no longer the naïve girl Klimt had thought he could lead astray. She was a woman kissing her lover with her full passion, kissing Alex so long and hard that her teeth hurt. He held her so close that she felt his heartbeat as her own.
“Alma,” he said. “All winter long I was wrestling with my love for you. I tried so hard to stop loving you, but I couldn’t.”
Her heart opened, light surging through her breast. O sweet ecstasy.
“Now I shall write, compose—everything!—all for you,” he murmured, his mouth in her hair. “It’s such a joy that you’re an artist, too. We’ll always have that in common.”