Genesis of the play

Alma in Vienna

The play, first performed in 1996 at the Vienna Festival Week and made into a film in 1999, has long since been a cult among connoisseurs. There are fans who have seen the performance a dozen times; indeed the biggest "Almaniac" boasts a total of 73 performances. Six summers long, the famous Sanatorium Purkersdorf outside Vienna served as a venue for the show, an empty Jugendstil building whose rooms had been fitted out in turn-of-the-century style. One hundred and forty performances took place there, all of them sell-outs, and in the process 23,044 candles and 2,736 torches were burnt, and at the funeral banquet in honour of Gustav Mahler the audience was treated to a vast quantity of baked chicken wings, boiled fillet of beef and Viennese apple cake, as well as 3,762 bottles of wine.

Alma a Venezia

In its seventh year, the production found itself looking for a new venue, and set off on tour. The first stop was Venice, the city in which the young Alma once received her first kiss from Gustav Klimt, and the place where she later travelled with Oskar Kokoschka. In 1922, she bought a house there with Franz Werfel, which she named Casa Alma. It was also in Venice that, in 1934, her daughter Manon, born of her marriage with Walter Gropius, fell ill. The girl, who was considered a stunning beauty, died of polio just one year later, at the age of thirteen. Alban Berg composed his Violin Concerto in her honour, dedicating it to "the memory of an angel"; and naturally, besides Mahler's symphonies, the audience hears this work too as they trace the path of Alma's life.

On the Italian tour, English was the main language spoken, though the scenes with Werfel were in Italian, some others also in German. The beautiful Palazzo Zenobio on the Fondamenta del Soccorso was rented for the show, a building dating from the late 17th century. As in Vienna, here too, all interior and exterior spaces were used for the performance, from a splendid hall of mirrors on the first floor to the rooms leading into the courtyard and the neighbouring garden. The rooms were decorated in the style of the period, faithful down to the smallest detail, and using exquisite furniture, old carpets and paintings, music manuscripts, documents and letters. There was a luxurious bathing hall and a steaming kitchen, an Alma memorial and an Italian cafe. Everywhere were chandeliers, burning candles, and all the props had been brought over from Vienna - a process of "Almafication".

The atmosphere along the narrow canals of the Dorsoduro district were ghostly, and the flames of torches burnt in the streets around the magnificent Palazzo Zenobio. Through the arched windows of the Palace shined, sumptuously decorated, shimmering gold stuccoed ceilings. A funeral march by Gustav Mahler resounded through the night. Death in Venice: in a gondola Mahler's corpse was taken away for burial ...

Alma in Lisbon

In the summer of 2003, the production went to Lisbon, where Alma spent challenging and decisive months of her life. The Werfels flew Vienna in 1938 for France when Austria fell to the German army. In 1940, the Werfels along with Heinrich Mann and his nephew Golo Mann flew by foot over the rugged Pyrenees to Spain, ultimately leaving Europe for the United States on board the Nea Hellas, the last regular ship from Lisbon. Lisbon meant rescue for them. "There's no country which helped as many refugees as Portugal in those days." The small country became a transition for many well-known refugees such as Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel.

An important part in the Portuguese version was given to Consul-General Aristides de Sousa Mendes who was in charge of the Portuguese Consulate in Bordeaux, in 1940. When history catapulted him overnight to the position of custodian of human lives hanging in the balance, he proved that he was far more. He issued transit visas for entry into Portugal to an astounding 30.000 refugees, and opened up a refugee escape route where none had existed. He rebelled against service orders and used his office to overturn them, on behalf of humanity.

In her autobiography, Alma wrote: "I can never forget those days of paradisiacal peace in a paradisiacal country, after the torment of the previous months!" She is said to have held court there like a fallen queen. And indeed this is what she was: the queen among artists' muses. Lisbon was a stage as if designed to tell of love and death and the depths of desire, to tell the story of the last femme fatale to whom this evening of theatre is dedicated: Alma Mahler-Werfel.

Archive
Vienna 1996 – 2001
Venice 2002
Lisbon 2003