Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Mahler’s Muse)

“Now, all of Alma's husbands, a collection of a long lifetime including Mahler, Walter Gropius, Franz Werfel— and Oskar Kokoschka, the painter, made it a fourth if you counted in the man she hadn’t married, whom Alma conceived to be her most astonishing (if most difficult) lover— they were all artists of unusual merit and accomplishment; yet Alma seemed to favor Mahler, even if she had trouble during her lifetime caring deeply for his music.”— Bernard Malamud, “Alma Redeemed,“ in The Complete Stories (1997)

Gustav Mahler was as cultured a man as you could find, as you might expect from a composer and conductor. You’d think, given that, he would have seen Moliere farces or read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter— not to mention other plays or stories stretching back a millennium or even more— and realized that the union of an aging mare with a beautiful young filly could only bring him trouble. But the Viennese maestro disregarded all danger signals, and on this date in 1902 he wed Alma Schindler, a 22-year-old beauty nearly half his age.

In the nine years of life that Mahler had left, marriage left both spouses deeply unhappy. Musically accomplished herself, Alma Mahler (pictured here) resented Gustav’s insistence that she forsake her ambitions to look after her husband’s needs so he could concentrate on his career, and increasingly he revolted her physically as well. For his part, Gustav grew increasingly anxious— and rightly so— that he might be cuckolded (it turned out to be by the architect Gropius). Their lives together weren’t helped, either, by the death of daughter Maria from scarlet fever in 1907.

The agony of life with Alma, especially after the discovery of the affair with Gropius, led Gustav to some of his most impassioned, melancholy late works. In an attempt to heal the wounds in their relationship, he dedicated his Eighth Symphony to Alma, and in the final movement of his uncompleted Tenth Symphony he ended up scrawling, in German, “To live for you! To die for you!”

One writer who became fascinated by Alma Mahler’s story was, oddly enough, Bernard Malamud, best known to readers in the postwar era for memorable short stories and novels about ordinary, often suffering Jews in works such as “Take Pity,” The Assistant, and The Fixer.

But, as evidenced by Dubin’s Lives (1979), Malamud was also fascinated by the biography genre, and within a few years he was experimenting, in the short-story form, with what he called “fictive biographies” or “biographed stories.” One such tale concerned Virginia Woolf; another, “Alma Redeemed,” was published in Commentary two years before his death.

Malamud and his wife Ann loved opera, and his own work interested several composers in this genre (notably Marc Blitzstein and Leonard Lehrman), so it was natural that he would become interested in Gustav Mahler, the head of the Vienna Court Opera (the Hofoper). The composer’s relationship with a younger woman would have intrigued Malamud, as he carried on an adulterous affair with one of his own Bennington College students.

“Through the medium of fiction, Malamud commented on the details of Alma’s life without the constraints of formal biography,” musicologist James L. Zychowicz has written in the essay “Mahler/Mahlered/Mahlered: Images of Mahler in Popular Culture.” “He created Alma as though she were a character of his own imagination.”

In Malamud’s “biographed story,” Gustav appears as a ghost to Alma. In the wider musical world, the composer also has come to be remembered (especially through his champion Leonard Bernstein), confirming his prediction that posterity would eventually honor him.