Passionate Spirit
The Life of Alma Mahler
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A new biography of Alma Mahler (1879-1964), revealing a woman determined to wield power in a world that denied her agency
History has long vilified Alma Mahler. Critics accused her of distracting Gustav Mahler from his work, and her passionate love affairs shocked her peers. Drawing on Alma's vivid, sensual, and overlooked diaries, biographer Cate Haste recounts the untold and far more sympathetic story of this ambitious and talented woman. Though she dreamed of being the first woman to compose a famous opera, Alma was stifled by traditional social values. Eventually, she put her own dreams aside and wielded power and influence the only way she could, by supporting the art of more famous men. She worked alongside them and gained credit as their muse, commanding their love and demanding their respect.
Passionate Spirit restores vibrant humanity to a woman time turned into a caricature, providing an important correction to a history where systemic sexism has long erased women of talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sympathetic, engrossing biography of Viennese socialite and composer Alma Mahler (1879 1964), Haste (Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint) traces Mahler's struggle to find equilibrium among her men (all creative geniuses), her erotic desires, and her own musical ambition. Haste mines Mahler's diaries and memoirs, and interviews her granddaughter to uncover her complexities and contradictions (she had many close Jewish friends, but nevertheless spouted anti-Semitic remarks). Ever excited by brilliant minds, Mahler married three men; each relationship began as an affair: composer Gustav Mahler; architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement; and the bestselling Jewish novelist and poet Franz Werfel (whom she escorted over the Pyrenees mountains by foot and across the Atlantic by ship to protect him from Nazi persecution). One lover the eccentric artist Oskar Kokoschka, who "satisfied her yearning to be loved and worshipped" commissioned a life-size Alma doll to dote on after their split. Mahler hosted legendary salons throughout Europe and the U.S., as Haste enthusiastically details ("What drives me around the world like a flame in too much wind. I am forever yearning!"), but also suffered hardship (three of her four children died tragically). Haste beautifully reprises the life of this force of nature.
