From Publishers Weekly
Not unlike his grand and idiosyncratic musical oeuvre, Gustav Mahler’s marriage to Alma Mahler straddled the border between the Romantic 19th and the Modern 20th centuries. Even as they shared a mutual ambition to realize their full potential as artists, Alma soon fell into the traditional role of dutiful wife to her genius husband. Ultimately, their relationship was far more complicated than this single dynamic, but a year before they married, the 22-year-old Alma already sensed the ambiguous influence the much older and fiercely self-dedicated Gustav would have on her. "Already I am aware of changes in myself, due to him," she confided to her diary. "He is taking much away from me and giving me much in return. If this process continues, he will make a new person of me." As Gustav’s letters suggest, Alma produced her own equal and opposite effect, intimate vibrations that were registered in Mahler’s massive structures of sound. Her famous liaisons with other prominent artists of her time—including painter Oskar Kokoschka and architect Walter Gropius—almost seem prefigured here as well, as a vicarious outlet to her own stifled artistic agency. Collectors of Mahleriana will find this expertly compiled volume indispensable. More than half of its 350 letters and postcards are published for the first time, and many of the old letters, which were once heavily emended by the distorting hands of Alma herself, are restored to their original form. Accompanying editorial notes—and generous excerpts from Alma’s diaries and memoirs—help bridge the chronological gaps between letters and provide further context for the Mahlers’ relationship. But it’s the novel-like intensity of the pair’s complex and tempestuous love affair that will really broaden the audience for this book beyond its sure-fire appeal to students of modern art and feminism.
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Book Description
Gustav Mahler and Alma Maria Schindler were married in . . . 1902. The bride was twenty-one and a half years old, her groom a few months short of forty-two. Apart from their substantial age difference, it seems to have been the very disparity of their intellectual and social backgrounds that drew them together. Mahler was attracted to Alma by her beauty, her alert mind and emotional intensity. Though aware that he possessed by far the broader outlook, he trusted in Alma’s ability and willingness to learn from him."—from the Introduction
"Once the stiffness of unfamiliarity has been softened by a few months of marriage, Mahler’s style of correspondence with Alma is generally simple, direct, and astonishingly down-to-earth. In a manner akin to that of his musical style, he spikes his language with witticisms and double-entendres, colloquialisms and quotations from librettos and classical works of literature."—from the Preface
This profusely illustrated collection of Gustav Mahler’s letters to his wife Alma is more comprehensive than any previous edition; it contains 350 letters, 188 of them until now unpublished. Since 1995, when the German edition of this book was first published, two events have served to expand its horizons: the publication in 1997 of the complete text of Alma’s early diaries, dating from January 1898 to March 1902, and the publication in 2003 of a catalogue of all Mahler letters acquired from the Moldenhauer Archives. With the aid of this new material, the editors were also able to revise the dates assigned to many of the letters. Commentaries and annotations throughout the book have been corrected and expanded annotations included. The editors’ introduction provides a biographical context for the correspondence that follows.
