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biography

Alma Schindler was born in Vienna, Austria (then Austria-Hungary), to the landscape painter Emil Jakob Schindler and his wife Anna Bergen (1857–1938), on August 31st, 1879. Although later in life Mahler characterized her upbringing as privileged, the family is said to have been only moderately successful. After her father's death (1892), her mother married her late husband's former pupil, Carl Moll, who was a co-founder of the Vienna Secession. Mahler began her piano training under Adele Ranitzky-Mandlick as a young girl and eventually trained under Zemlinsky. Her father died when she was 13 years old.

Marriage to Mahler

On 9 March 1902 she married Gustav Mahler, who was nineteen years her senior and the director of the Vienna Court Opera. With him she had two daughters, Maria Anna (1902–1907), who died of scarlet fever or diphtheria, and Anna (1904–1988), who became a sculptor. The terms of Alma's marriage with Gustav were that she would abandon her own interest in composing. Artistically stifled herself, she embraced her role as a loving wife and supporter of Gustav's music, together regularly attending the salon of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I).

Later in their marriage, after becoming severely depressed in the wake of Maria's death, she began an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius (later head of the Bauhaus), whom she met during a rest at a spa. On seeking advice from Sigmund Freud, who cited Mahler's curtailing of Alma's musical career as a major marital obstacle, and following the emotional crisis in their marriage after Gustav's discovery of the affair, Gustav began to take a serious interest in Alma's musical compositions, regretting his earlier dismissive attitude and taking promotional actions, including editing and re-orchestrating some (Die stille Stadt, In meines Vaters Garten, Laue Sommernacht, Bei dir ist es traut, Ich wandle unter Blumen) of her works. Upon his urging, and under his guidance, she prepared five of her songs for publication (they were issued in 1910, by Gustav's own publisher, Universal Edition). After this turbulent period in their marriage, Alma and Gustav travelled to New York, where Gustav was seasonally engaged as a conductor. In February, 1911, he fell severely ill with an infection related to a heart defect that had been diagnosed several years earlier. He died on May 18th, shortly after their return to Vienna.

Marriage to Gropius

After Mahler's death, she did not immediately resume contact with Gropius. Between 1912 and 1914 she had a tumultuous affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who created works inspired by his relationship with her, including his painting The Bride of the Wind. Kokoschka's possessiveness wore on Alma, and the emotional vicissitudes of the relationship tired them both.

With the coming of World War I, Kokoschka enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and she subsequently distanced herself from him and resumed contact with Gropius, who was also serving in combat at that time. She and Gropius married in 1915 during one of his military leaves. They had a daughter together, Manon Gropius (1916–1935), who grew up being friends with Maria Altmann. After Manon died of polio at the age of 18, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her.

She became pregnant and gave birth to a son, Martin Carl Johannes Gropius (1918–1919). Gropius at first believed that the child was his, but Alma's ongoing affair with Werfel was common knowledge in Vienna by this time, and she was soon exposed (see below).

Within a year, they agreed to a divorce. In the meantime, Martin, who had been born prematurely, developed hydrocephalus and died at the age of ten months. Her divorce from Gropius became final in 1920.

Marriage to Werfel

House of Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler in Sanary-sur-Mer

While Gropius's military duties were still keeping him absent, she met and began an affair with Prague-born poet and writer Franz Werfel in the fall of 1917. She and Werfel began openly living together from that point on. However, she postponed marrying Werfel until 1929, after which she took the name "Alma Mahler-Werfel".

In 1938, following the Anschluss, Alma and Werfel, who was Jewish, were forced to flee Austria for France; they maintained a household in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, from summer 1938 until spring 1940. With the German invasion and occupation of France during World War II, and the deportation of Jews and political adversaries to Nazi concentration camps, the couple were no longer safe in France and frantically sought to secure their emigration to the United States. In Marseille, they were contacted by Varian Fry, an American journalist and emissary of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private American relief organization that came to the aid of refugee intellectuals and artists at that time.

As exit visas could not be obtained, Fry arranged for the Werfels to journey on foot across the Pyrenees into Spain, to evade the Vichy French border officials. From Spain, Alma and Franz travelled on to Portugal and then boarded a ship for New York City. Eventually they settled in Los Angeles, where Werfel, who had already enjoyed moderate renown in the U.S. as an author, achieved popular success with his novel The Song of Bernadette, which was made into a film in 1943, and the science fiction novel, Star of the Unborn, published after his death. Werfel, who had experienced serious heart problems throughout their exile, died of a heart attack in California in 1945.