What about your dreams of becoming a composer? Haunted by Alex’s words, Alma set aside Gustav’s scores to work on her own lieder. When Gustav returned to Vienna, she would ask him to help her, to teach her. Couldn’t a husband also be a mentor? She thought about Robert and Clara Schumann composing side by side.
Gustav’s letters, filled with both tenderness and soul-searching, arrived daily.
Only one thing troubles me, Almschi: whether a person who is already growing old has the right to such youth and beauty . . . I know I have much to offer, but that is no exchange for the right to be young.
He implored her to reply by return post and to write legibly, for he found her handwriting as difficult to decipher as hieroglyphics.
Imagine I’m sitting beside you and you’re telling me about your day-to-day life. Every detail!
Writing her reply, she described her spirited dinner conversation with Max Burckhard about the importance of her individuality and personal potential. How she must triumph as an individual soul, one who was devoted to her music.
Forgive me for cutting this letter short, dear Gustav, but I must work on my lieder. How magnificent that we’re both composers! That I should be your colleague and your wife!
The following day, Alma went Christmas shopping with her mother. Alma bought a pair of warm fur-lined gloves for Gustav and a pretty bracelet of silver and aquamarine for Gretl while Mama bought a hot water bottle for Cilli, whose circulation was poor and who was forever complaining about her chilblains.
All Vienna seemed to be out and about preparing for the festive season; the squares were crammed with market stalls selling gingerbread, oranges, wooden toys, and brightly painted spinning tops.
After they had finished shopping, Alma and Mama joined Carl at Café Sacher before riding home in an open fiacre, the winter sun beaming down with a brightness that illuminated everything with sharp, crystal clarity. The naked chestnut trees. The businessmen in their top hats tapping their canes in the dirty snow as they strode along. The steam rising off the sweating backs of horses pulling wagons, carriages, and omnibuses.
Alma’s heart lurched at the sight of Alex walking down Ringstrasse, his arm linked with that of a young lady she’d never seen before who gazed at him adoringly. Their laughter rose in the frosty air.
“Well, it looks like it didn’t take long for Zemlinsky to get over you,” her stepfather observed.
“Carl, don’t be crass,” Mama said. But she seemed unable to hide her relief that she no longer needed to worry about Alma marrying him.
Alma tried to turn her thoughts away from Alex, but she felt half-sick at the loss of him. For she was bereft of not only a lover and a friend but also the finest teacher she’d ever had. I betrayed him. I destroyed us. There was no way back. That bridge was gone. She had made her choice and that was Gustav.
When Alma stepped in the door, Cilli came prancing with the thickest envelope Alma had ever seen.
“From Herr Direktor Mahler!” Cilli’s face glowed pink with the romance of it all.
Even Carl was impressed with the heft of the missive. “Did he write you a love letter or an entire symphony?”
Alma dashed up to her room to read Gustav’s letter in privacy. Flinging herself on her bed, she tore it open, breathless not only from the sprint up the stairs but also from the hope that such a long letter must surely include some analysis of her lieder.
My beloved Alma,
It is with a heavy heart that I set out to write this letter. I know that I must hurt you, but I have no choice.
Her heart pricked in worry. Whatever could be the matter? He didn’t care for her music, was that it? It was true that after the initial interest he had expressed in her scores he had hardly spoken about them. Was it to spare her feelings from his honest appraisal?
As she continued reading that twenty-page letter written on stationery from the Hotel Bellevue in Berlin, every part of her froze. For it was not her music Gustav examined under the glaring spotlight of his scrutiny but her character. In his mind, she was no fully formed individual but an immature girl who lacked any original ideas of her own, who merely parroted the philosophies of those around her or the latest book she had read and only half-digested. How his words stung!
Not only that, he maintained that she had an inflated sense of her own importance as an aspiring composer, which Gustav blamed on men like Burckhard and Zemlinsky who had encouraged her not because she had any actual talent but merely because they were infatuated with her.
Because you are beautiful and men are attracted to you, they enjoy paying tribute to you. Would they heap such praise on an ugly girl? My Alma, you have grown vain, your vanity the result of what these men see in you, or would like to see in you . . .
Almschi, please read my words with care. Our relationship must not degenerate into a mere flirt. Before we speak again you must renounce everything superficial, all vanity and outward show concerning your individuality and your own work . . .
Would it be possible for you to regard my music as your music from now on? As for “your” music, I prefer not to discuss that in detail right now. But how can you imagine both husband and wife being composers? Have you any idea how ridiculous and degrading such a rivalry would become? What would happen if inspiration strikes you—as it did when you broke off your last letter to me—when you’re obliged to look after the house for me or to bring me something I need?
You must become the person I need if we are to be happy together. My wife and not my colleague.
Gustav closed by telling her he would send his servant to collect her reply the following morning—she must have her answer prepared by then.
The pages of his letter fell to the floor. It was as though a cold hand had wrenched her heart from her breast. What remained was a gaping void. Nothing left to cling to anymore, not her music or even her sense of self. Just the promise of his love and their future as man and wife if she agreed to his demands.
But how could she abandon her music? Could he truly force such an ultimatum on her? The power is mine! I can refuse! Just as she had refused to let him burn The Collected Works of Nietzsche. But insisting on her own music would mean losing him. Their engagement would be over before it had even been officially announced. She had lost Alex irretrievably. And now she must lose Gustav, too?
If she married him and carried on composing behind his back, it would still destroy her creative spirit. It was hard enough to compose without doing it under the cloak of secrecy without any encouragement or help at all. He thinks nothing of my music and everything of his own. What contempt he had displayed for her dream of a marriage of two composers who believed in and supported each other. That kind of partnership would have worked with Alex. But not with Gustav. Never with Gustav. And it was her own fault for turning Alex away. Then again, what if Gustav was right and Alex had praised her only because he desired her?
I am so broken, so useless, my talent so slight. For if her gift was genuine, Gustav surely would have recognized it, would he not? Perhaps he was being cruel to be kind. Sparing her from the humiliation of having the greater world mock her mediocrity and pretensions. All of Herr Labor’s criticisms slammed inside her head. If that’s the best you can do, you might as well give up. You can’t be taken seriously!
Alma began to pace, clutching herself and shivering. The fire in her grate had dwindled to ash. If only I were a somebody, a real person, capable of great things. But I am a nobody. The weight of Gustav’s words bowed her down to the ground. I am just another bourgeois girl prettily running her fingers up and down the piano keys. I am not remarkable. No Clara Schumann. My ambitions are laughable. Alma couldn’t imagine ever feeling like her old self again, the girl of last summer who was writing her first opera.
She let out a cry as Mama entered the room in a rustle of midnight-blue silk.
“Alma, why aren’t you dressed? Have you forgotten about Siegfried tonight? My dear, why are you crying?” Her mother looked searchingly into Alma’s eyes before bending to pick the twenty pages of Gustav’s letter off the floor.
“As fond as I am of Mahler, I would advise you to refuse him,” Mama said. “He can’t ask you to give up your music. It’s monstrous.”
The two of them rode in the cab to the opera. They huddled together, bundled against the cold in their winter coats and fur stoles, a rug across their laps to warm their legs. Alma felt a welling up of gratitude to hear that at least her mother believed her talent was real and worth fighting for. Still, she could not stop crying. She was torn in half.
“Don’t give him any written reply.” Mama squeezed Alma’s gloved hand. “Let him come to you—he’ll soon be back from his travels. Perhaps he’ll even apologize and realize he’s been completely unreasonable. Although, I must say, he was very honest about what he expects from a wife—we have to grant him that. If you should agree to marry him under those conditions, at least you’ll go into it with your eyes wide open. No naïve illusions about becoming his protégée.”
Alma could still not believe how much this hurt, like a hooked arrow sunk deep in her flesh. If only she and Gustav could have discussed this in person, in a conversation that she had a voice in, things could have been so different. No matter what choice she made regarding Gustav and her music, his letter would leave an indelible scar.
At the opera, to Alma’s deepest embarrassment, she found that she and her mother were seated in the same row as Felix Muhr, her former suitor—the rich architect with his monocle and brilliantined hair. Noting Alma’s swollen red eyes, he beat a path over all the legs and feet to hover at her side.
“My dear Alma, what has happened to leave you looking so miserable?”
“Do you think I’m vain, Herr Muhr?” Alma asked him. “Should I stop composing?”
“Stop when you’ve been blessed with such a gift?” He shook his head in incomprehension. “Lovely Alma, what vile person has put such ideas in your head?”
He called me lovely. Which, in Gustav’s view, proved he was only flattering her on account of his own self-serving agenda to win her, to have her. This was absolutely wretched. She could no longer accept a compliment without assuming the worst of the one who offered it. She couldn’t bear to look at the adulation on Muhr’s face.
“Herr Muhr,” Mama said. “You must come to dinner this week! How we’ve all missed your visits.”
Then the curtain opened, and Muhr retreated to his seat. Alma leaned back and watched Erik Schmedes in the role of Siegfried, showing off his bare muscled legs and casting sultry glances at the women in the audience, including her. She should have been in her element, cocooned in her wonder of her beloved Wagner, but all she could think of was how inferior this conductor was to Gustav. The orchestra didn’t sound as rich. Even Schmedes didn’t seem to be performing at his full power. Gustav’s genius had touched her, opened something in her, and now she was unable to get him out of her mind even to experience a moment’s peace.
Her thoughts revolved around Gustav’s accusation of her being vain. If she indeed was, it wasn’t the vanity of the vapid young ladies she met at parties, who could only chatter about their gowns and coiffures, and would faint at the very thought of reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. Hadn’t she tried her utmost to make something of herself? Even if she knew she couldn’t hope for a glittering career as a world-class pianist or the first woman conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, she had until today sincerely believed that if she persevered she would eventually compose works of great beauty. That even if she wasn’t the next Wagner or Strauss, she might still create a body of work that would outlive her. I existed for a reason. I gave something to the world. I mattered.
And yet, even if her talent was real, talent in itself was not enough. One must be brave enough to seize one’s gift and go to battle for it. One had to be a hero like Siegfried, slaying the dragon and then braving the ring of flame to awaken his Brünnhilde. Was she courageous enough to withstand the trial by fire that was Gustav’s letter and fight for her music even if that meant losing him forever? Brave enough to set off on her own without Alex, without Gustav, just she and her music, men and their proposals be damned?
But she had to marry someone eventually—she couldn’t possibly stomach living as a spinster all her days, never knowing love, that deep awakening of the body. And Mama, she feared, would indeed invite Muhr to dinner. Her mother’s hints to Muhr and Alma would grow bolder and bolder. In the kindest way possible, Mama and Carl were pushing her out by degrees. They wanted her respectably married off, the mistress of her own household.
Be honest with yourself for once, Alma—you’re not a hero. Heroes were men, swaggering and strong, like Erik Schmedes with his sword and piercing tenor. Women, if they wanted to be loved, surrendered themselves in a living sacrifice of devotion, as Brünnhilde did at the climax of Götterdämmerung, immolating herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre.
Alma told herself that she would end up serving a man anyway. Would it not be a nobler calling to serve genius instead of mediocrity? How would it be to look back and think, I could have married Gustav Mahler if only I had been brave enough. Faithful and loving enough.
In the past three years, she had fallen in love with three men of genius. First Klimt, then Alex, then Gustav. Mama had forcibly separated Alma from Klimt, then she had come between Alma and Alex. Did her mother intend to interfere again? Alma didn’t think she could bear it a third time. After this sundering, there would be nothing left of her. She would have to settle for some bland figure like Muhr whom she might like but could never love. The window was closing. At twenty-two years of age, how much longer could she play the carefree socialite before she faded away, a figure of pity, some queer woman like Klimt’s beloved Emilie Flöge, a fallen woman and yet a spinster, set apart from the rest of womanhood? The third sex.
My only hope of distinguishing myself, of doing something truly remarkable, is by marrying a great man and sharing his destiny. Something inside Alma died at the thought of marrying a Muhr instead of a Mahler.
The next morning Alma sat at her piano and tried with her entire soul to compose. To prove to herself that she had a gift that she couldn’t relinquish. Something innate, a part of her that could not be severed. Even Gustav would have to acknowledge that creative spark inside her. But never had she felt emptier or more stupid, her every note more cloying than the last until she wanted to smash her fists on the piano keys and shriek like a maiden in a Greek tragedy. Rend her garments and keen.
For the sake of getting out of the house, Alma offered to run errands for Cilli to the baker and greengrocer down in Döbling. Tearing off down the street with the maid’s stout wicker shopping basket on her arm, Alma nearly collided with a stranger who stepped in her path.
“Are you Fräulein Alma Maria Schindler?” he asked her.
This must be Gustav’s servant come to collect her reply that she had not been able to write. A wave of white-hot heat cramped in her belly.
“Are you Herr Direktor Mahler’s messenger?” She didn’t even try to hide her temper. “I have nothing to give you.”
The man reached into his greatcoat pocket. “But I have this to give you, Fräulein.”
A letter, crisp and thin, with her name in Gustav’s handwriting. Her heart beat fast enough to render her woozy. Was it as Mama had predicted? Had he come to his senses? Had he softened, taking this dilemma away from her? To her mortification, she found herself sobbing in front of his messenger, who whipped off his cap as though in deep fear that he had offended her.
“Fräulein, please don’t be upset. The Herr Direktor’s back in Vienna and has given me his word he shall visit you this evening as soon as he’s finished at the opera.”
Turning her back on the messenger, Alma ripped open the letter and read it then and there with the stark December sun shining down on the page.
Never before have I so desired and feared a letter as the one from you that my servant is now on his way to collect. What will you tell me, Alma? It’s not what you say that matters most but what you are. Let us put all passion aside and rest in that inner calm and loving certainty to forge the bond that will bind us irrevocably till our last breath. At the very thought of seeing you again, my heart overflows.
Your Gustav
Alma could neither think nor act clearly. Everything began and ended with Gustav. There was no need to wait until evening—Gustav arrived that very afternoon, his eyes gentle and wide.
“Alma, you’re in tears.” He cradled her head to his chest. “My darling, what have I done? Can you still care for me now that you know how wretchedly honest I am with those I love?”
The choice is mine, she reminded herself. I can refuse him. She nearly laughed aloud to recall that this was the selfsame advice she had given Gretl when she was so anguished about giving up her country and religion for Wilhelm. What if Alma squared her shoulders and informed Gustav that she could never abandon her music? But she could scarcely find the words to express the torrent of emotion running through her.
“Of course, you’re right,” she began, “that our relationship mustn’t degenerate into a flirt but must be the marriage of two souls in harmony.” She took a deep breath before plunging on and speaking her truth. “Does one of us truly have to be subordinate? Must I sacrifice my own work to be your wife? Surely our love must be powerful enough to reconcile two opposing viewpoints.”
He gazed at her as though her questions drove a blade into his heart. “Almschi, my love, how can you think in terms of subjugation and opposition? If we marry, we exist for each other and hold nothing back. My music is yours now. I lay it at your feet.”
At that, he sat at her piano and began to play part of a scherzo from his embryonic new symphony.
“I wrote this last summer,” he said. “A devil of a movement. I fear no one will understand it. This is the chaos of new worlds being continually reborn.”
Alma sat beside him on the piano bench and followed the score while listening to him play. At least the music was a welcome distraction from the turbulence inside her. The scherzo was a peculiar mix of two dances—the Viennese waltz and a rustic country Ländler. A juxtaposition of sophistication and folkloric naïveté.
“It’s not chaotic,” Alma said, a decisive confidence filling her after so much confusion and turmoil. “It’s joyous. A celebration of life. It reminds me of being a child in the mountains in summer.”
No longer did she feel like the supplicant, the inferior, helpless one. Gustav, her idol, turned to her as if her critique had taken him by storm. He seemed to hang on her every word. With a composure she had not felt in so long, she began to play his piece back to him.
“But the tempo must be slower. You absolutely shouldn’t rush. Otherwise it loses its power and seems trivial.”
She played on at a stately pace, in a truly Viennese rhythm, imagining herself gliding across the ballroom floor. She lost herself in the scherzo’s emotional complexity, its vibrancy.
“Alma,” he said, sounding more humbled and respectful than she had ever heard him. “That’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”
When he looked at her like that, with such ecstasy, she felt caught up in the most sublime spiritual communion with this genius of a man.
“Don’t you see, my love?” He kissed her hands. “You are my music. I’ll write you into my every symphony.”
Her knees weakened to hear the love in his voice, his absolute devotion. If she could indeed be his inspiration, an indelible part of his work, and help him shine even brighter, then maybe that would be enough. Maybe that would redeem her sacrifice. With him, she might achieve a greatness incomparable to anything she might realize on her own.
“My muse,” he said. “My light.”
When he enclosed her in his fierce embrace, she thought that no other man could love her so deeply. That letting this man go would be the greatest mistake she would ever make. Had she ever felt anything so holy? When she held him, she no longer felt his body as something separate or divided from her own essence. They melted into each other.
It’s no longer a question of Gustav’s music versus my music. But only of music itself, divine and pure, which cannot be contained or owned by any human being. Alma promised to give him her all. To live for him and his music, which was also her music.