Alma Mahler-Werfel

"Why did Alma Schindler (1879-1964), the beautiful and musically gifted daughter of a well-conducted Austin landscape painter, marry Gustav Mahler, who demanded that she stop composing?...(H)er diaries...reveal a young woman with an iron will...who neverthless craved a submissive role. If her genius husband brought Western music to the edge of modernism, Alma seems balanced onthe brink of the modern age -- a combination of proto-feminist and femme fatale". -- New Yorker"The Viennese enchantress...was one of our era's most fascinating and fabled women....The youthful Diaries...strongly illuminate her formative years....Valuable, too, are the attached letters, playbills, cocert programs, and snapshots...(and)Alma's charming drawings, attesting to yet another side of this complex personality....Absorbing...(and)...titillating....An incisive portrait of a young femme fatale and a vivid eyewitness account of endearing and enervating turn-of-the-century Vienna". -- Johnson Simon, New York Times BookReviewCapture(s)Alma's youthful impetousness and celebrated entanglements...(and)will find a wide audience". -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"The day-by-day account of where she went, who she met, and what she saw or listened to gives a good notion of daily life in Vienna at its peak". -- Kirkus Reviews"Noble self-sacrifice is the pose that the older Alma felt was the most becoming. But it is the early diaries, documenting her years as a vulgarian, sybarite, and egoist between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, which actually explain why Alma appealed to Mahler -- as well as to Gustav Klimt, Alexander Zemlinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Groupius, the lead tenor at the ViennaOpera, a senior official at the Austrian Ministry of Railways, a variety of compoasers, and an international specialist in the life cycle of the midwife toad". -- Times Literary Supplement