27 Facts About Alma Mahler

Alma Mahler married composer Gustav Mahler but he died in 1911.

In 1915, Alma married Walter Gropius, and they had a daughter, Manon Gropius.

In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Werfel and Alma Mahler fled, as it was unsafe for the Jewish Werfel.

Alma Mahler Maria Schindler was born on 31 August 1879 in Vienna, Austria, to the famous landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler and his wife Anna Sofie.

Alma Mahler was tutored at home and brought up in the Catholic Church.

Alma Mahler studied composition and counterpoint with Josef Labor, a blind organist who introduced her to a "great deal of literature".

In 1895, Anna Schindler, Alma Mahler's mother, married Carl Moll, Emil Schindler's student.

Zemlinsky and Alma Mahler fell in love and kept their relationship a secret.

Alma Mahler teased Zemlinsky about what she thought were his ugly features, saying she could easily have "ten others" to replace him.

Alma Mahler noted that to marry Zemlinsky would mean she would "bring short, degenerate Jew-children into the world".

On 9 March 1902, she married Gustav Alma Mahler, who was 19 years her senior and the director of the Vienna Court Opera.

Gustav was not interested in Alma Mahler's compositions, desiring for her to abandon composing.

In June 1910, after becoming severely depressed in the wake of Maria's death, Alma Mahler began an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius, whom she met during a rest at a spa.

Alma Mahler subsequently distanced herself from Kokoschka and resumed contact with Walter Gropius, who was serving in combat at that time.

Alma Mahler became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Martin Carl Johannes Gropius.

Leonard Bernstein, who was a champion of Gustav Alma Mahler's music, stated in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1973 that Alma Mahler-Werfel had attended some of his rehearsals.

In 1951 Alma Mahler-Werfel moved to New York, where she had purchased four small condominiums in a house on the Upper East Side.

Alma Mahler lived herself on the third floor and used one apartment as a living room, the second as a bedroom.

Alma Mahler-Werfel died 11 December 1964 in New York City.

Alma Mahler was buried on 8 February 1965 in the Grinzing Cemetery of Vienna in the same grave as her daughter Manon Gropius and a few steps away from Gustav Mahler.

Alma Mahler Werfel had loaned the paintings to the Oesterreichische Galerie before fleeing the Nazis; Carl Moll, a militant Nazi, gained control of them, selling the Munch to the Oesterreichische Galerie in 1940 and keeping the others until, fearing retribution from the Red Army, he committed suicide.

Alma Mahler-Werfel filed claims after the war but was only able to recover the Kokoschka portrait.

Alma Mahler played the piano from childhood and in her memoir, reports that she first attempted composing at age eight in the beginning of 1888 on the Greek island of Corfu.

Alma Mahler studied composition with Josef Labor beginning in 1894 or 1895 and until 1901.

Alma Mahler met Alexander von Zemlinsky in early 1900, began composition lessons with him that fall, and continued as his student until her engagement to Gustav Mahler in December 1901, after which she ceased composing.

Alma Mahler briefly resumed composing in 1910, but stopped in 1915.

Alma Mahler appears in chapter 6, "Montredon" of the 2019 novel, The Flight Portfolio, by Julie Orringer.