|
Alma's sacrifice for Mahler
Paulus Manker
Alma was called the most beautiful girl in the city of Vienna,
very famous at that time around 1900, at the age of nineteen
or twenty. When she went out, she was a star. She was coming
out of a famous family, she was always surrounded by all the
celebrities of society and the fine arts, and so on. And Mahler
was famous, too, but he was shy. And one of the few times
he left his home or the opera he went to the Zuckerkandl´s,
and there it happened.
With Mahler the most surprising is that he was athletic,
he was not a fat, ugly guy, but he was not very convenient
in his appearance. But that girl of twenty years fell in love,
or decided to fall in love ? I don´t know, if she really
fell in love - she decided to fall in love against all odds,
against every advise of her friends, and of her mother. Everybody
said:"Don´t do it!" - and she probably might
have regret it later. But she decided to go together with
this lugubrious strange man, that weird guy of forty, so the
double of her life at that time, and to give up everything,
not only composing but her social life, her ambitions, her
friends, in fact everything she appreciated, and she really
had a hard time then.
Joshua Sobol
She had a hard time with Mahler, that´s right. We know
that she was confined to her appartement, she had to deal
with the babies, she was not buying or getting new dresses
- she later complained about all this, while Mahler was buying
for himself new suits for the premieres of his symphonies.
And when he had to conduct in other towns, she was there,
stuck at home. She had a very, a very hard time. I think after
six or seven months after the marriage she already realized
that she had fallen into a trap. And started to develop her
depressions, which repeated themselves, bad moods, etc. But
I think that she decided to marry him. It was not a coup d´etetes,
it was a very deliberate decision. And the prove is, that
when Mahler has put to her his very strict conditions for
the marriage, and made the demand that she give up her music,
she had a whole night to consider it. We know that her mother
tried to convince her by all means to give up the idea of
marrying Mahler. And against her influential mother, and against
everything that young girl - twenty one - makes her very bold
decision, saying: "I am going to sacrifice my career,
and marry this man. This is more important. I am going to
sacrifice myself for him".
I think that Alma had a very clear scale of values. And probably
greatness - human greatness, spiritual greatness - weighed
more than anything for her. It excited her. And it made her
sacrifice all other profits or all other values for the sake
of spiritual greatness.
< Love at first sight: Alma's men
> An epitomy of the 20th century
|
