Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries, 1898-1902

by Antony Beaumont (Editor), Alma Mahler - Werfel (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $3.31

  The original manuscript of these diaries, which present an eye-witness record of historical events in the worlds of art and music at the turn of the century, lay unread in the library of an American university until Antony Beaumont read it in search of the truth about Mahler-Werfel and Zemlinsky. But he found more: an account, in intimate detail, of the four years during which Mahler-Werfel grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Klimt, the diaries break off shortly before her marriage to Mahler. They portray the vitality of everyday life, descriptions of significant artistic events, and insights into the behavioural patterns and linguistic conventions of the Vienna of 1900.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $20.21

  Born in 1879 in Vienna, Alma Mahler-Werfel was the daughter of the popular landscape painter, Emil J. Schindler. Her stepfather, Carl Moll, was instrumental in forming the Secession movement and she became the pupil, friend and lover of many famous men, including Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Klimt and Max Burckhard. In 1902 she married Gustav Mahler. After his death she married Walter Gropius, had a liaison with Oskar Kokoschka, and later married Franz Werfel. As a young girl she began writing a diary. This selection from four years of that diary gives a breathtaking (and breathless) account of cultural life in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. With their mixture of beady-eyed observation and impassioned confession, the pages of Alma Mahler-Werfel's diary make for gripping reading.