Nevertheless, she was on the point of giving herself to Zemlinsky when she met Gustav Mahler, a composer who was just on the point of becoming great. This characteristic flirting would persist throughout her life. She thought he was hideously ugly, but in order to become his student she flattered him by saying that he was ‘becoming too attractive to her’. When she began to develop her own interests in music in the form of song composition, she engaged the services of Alexander von Zemlinsky. One of her first serious connections was with Gustav Klimt, but the relationship was nipped in the bud by her mother, who disapproved of the liaison. Her widowed mother married one of her father’s artistic colleagues, and Alma mixed at her social ease in the Secessionist artistic circles that were established in Vienna towards the end of the nineteenth century. As a young woman, obviously aware of her physical attractiveness, she had a series of chaste but coquettish relationships with older men. The remainder of her life seems to have been a search for powerful authority-figure substitutes for the father she had lost. But their rise in fortunes was cut short when the patron shot himself and her father died when she was quite young.Īlma was not close to her mother, and had no time at all for her younger sister. The family eventually became successful via some royal patronage that was common in the Hapsburg Empire at that time. She was born in 1879 to a father who was a rather feckless painter and a mother who was an ex-singer. And she had a penchant for artists, writers, and men of power that led to a succession of husbands and lovers. She was rich, famous, gifted, and very glamorous in her younger years. Alma Mahler was one of the most famous (some would say infamous) grandes dames of the first part of the twentieth century.

Thomas mann mahler