Alma Mahler Quotes

...it is a grubby business writing novels. Composers can think about God and the ineffable. We have to imagine the buttons on a coat. [Thomas Mann, to Alma Mahler Werfel]

It’s ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help.” “Are you reading Alma Mahler again?” “No.” Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs.

Alma also had a brief dalliance with Klimt. Actually, just name any famous man from the period, and you can assume that Alma Mahler had an affair with him. If there was a man in Vienna at the time with whom Alma did not canoodle, he was not worth knowing.

This time I am not going to Amsterdam, only as far as Leiden. “Only?” I’d prefer Mengelberg to Freud? It’s better to practice now with the Konzertgebouw than with this... But it’s been agreed upon. I cannot withdraw now. No if's and but's. Surrender to the man..., to the analysis of course, like to music. All good and evil forces... Almaria... What? Alma. And above all, the winner sits on her throne. My play of strings. Longing.

Creative artists are probably no more difficult to seduce than plumbers, the problem is meeting them.

The glorification of culture in all its manifestations was such that Vienna was probably the only city in the world where fathers rejoiced when their sons decided to devote their lives to music or literature.

Alma era una romántica empedernida. Necesitaba sentirse intensamente amada y experimentar el amor con una pasión que encendiera su ser. Pero tan solo inspiraban su amor aquellos que poseían un talento creativo desbordante.

As the young husband and wife lay in each other’s arms, each contemplating past, present, and future, Clint recognized the music as the adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony. It was one of the most famous movements in the entire symphonic repertoire, but it was also one of the most debated. Mahler ostensibly composed the adagietto as a love song to his wife, Alma, but when played at the much slower tempo preferred by many conductors, the music instead evokes a feeling of profound melancholy. After almost eighty years, musicologists and aficionados still couldn’t agree whether the music was supposed to be happy or sad, whether it was an expression of intense love and devotion or of unmitigated despair. Clint was struck by the irony that this music would be playing at this moment in his life, and his mouth curled into an ambivalent smile. Was he happy? Was he sad? Would he ever again be certain?

It's strange. When I put something incomprehensible into a picture, it's usually because the form and colour interest me and because it just happens to fit in. Thwn my friends come along : 'What is that suppose to mean _' And they rack their brains for an interpretation, finding so many ingenious explanations that I feel quite proud of all the unarticulated ideas concealed in my pictures." - Fernand Khnopff to Alma Mahler, while walking in the Prater in Vienna, from her diary July 1899

When Mahler went to a composing retreat, she began having an affair with Walter Gropius, the architect who founded the Bauhaus School. I do not really like the Bauhaus School. But if you started dating the founder of an architectural movement, I’d support you and think your choice was great, and I’d pretend to like his architectural movement when we were all hanging out because I’m a good friend. So Alma was an adulteress and creatively unfulfilled—but she was just killing it with her choice of men.

Finally, Vienna was the only city in the world in which artists and intellectuals made no attempt to revolt against the bourgeois élite. On the contrary, they remained for a long time perfectly integrated with it. Together they formed a coherent and complete stratum of society in which everyone knew everyone else, and all were united in cultivating ‘art for art's sake’.

Nevertheless, girls were brought up to regard their virginity as something sacrosant, prudery was the rule, hysterical breakdowns were frequent. Men, single or not, went to obtain from actresses or working girls what the women of their own milieu longed to give them but could not, for their honour stood in the way. A respectable woman, in Vienna as elsewhere, did not possess a body. If she discovered she did have one, then the devil must have got into the holy water. Once her sexuality was aroused, the irripressible violence of her instincts, her natural propensity to lewdness, would be unleashed. Women had to be defended against themselves, by education and constraint. And it was from them, insatiable women with thighs outspread, that men must be protected if they were not to lose the best of themselves. For a lustful woman diverted a man from the intellectual preoccupations of which he had the monopoly, she distracted his energies from superior accomplishments, she was the natural enemy of morality, reason, and creativity.

Gustav Mahler always carried Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre with him on concert tours, for instance, and read aloud from the Critique of Pure Reason to Alma when she was in labour.

I was born to be lonely / And loneliness is my destiny, / For I feed off my own thoughts. [Alma Schindler, Diary entry for May 20, 1899]

Alma decided she had to get out of the 'disastrous house' on the Hohe Warte.... Werfel had never found the grandeur of it comfortable and had often escaped elsewhere to write. They decided to rent it out. After packing up 10,000 books and 5,000 sheets of music, their paintings and furniture--'in reality junk for eternity, and baggage during everyday life'--she threw a party... [citing Alma's diary entry for June 15, 1937]

What will become of us?...I only play Bach at the moment because he is the only one who frees me from the prison of my thoughts.' 'God in heaven. One CAN'T live without hope...' [citing Alma's diary entries for August 31 and September 1, 1938]

This evening : Fischl and Mayreder debated on Secession, Fischl pro and Mayreder contra - primarily against Olbrich. It's all very well to dismiss him, to criticize - but just try doing better yourself dear Mayreder ! It was the fourth time that M. had called on us in the last few days, and we're heartily glad to be rid of him. Nobody misses him, myself least of all. - I wonder if he's still fond of me? He's very taken with the Secessionist painters, being particularly 'enamoured' - as he puts it - of Bacher, Engelhart and Klimt. Of the latter he says he can well understand young ladies falling for him "in a big way". Oh yes, that was fun : while Kuehl, Klimt, Mayreder, Jettel etc. were here, Klimt gave me the idea of shaping my bread into a heart. I did so, then he formed a toothpick into an arrow and plunged it into the heart. He took red wine and made it flow from the would. It looked really good. He gave it to Mayreder as 'my wounded heart'. On reflection, I can see that it was a very brutal joke and I regret it, for at the time Mayreder gave me a look that went straight through me. Incidentally, Klimt knows that M. is fond of me. He noticed - and said as much as well. I didn't deny it.