DHere was what might be called a large, chaotic life, and then there was the life of Alma Mahler. After his first kiss with her, Gustav Klimt as a young man dreamed of a career in composing passionate love affairs with a dizzyingly confident genius of the early 20th century.
Men including composer Gustav Mahler, author Franz Werfel and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius bed, marry and become enthralled by “the most beautiful woman in Vienna” Alma. At the end of the century. The subject of endless fascination over the past 150 years, the charismatic diarist and muse, alternately described as a monster and the greatest femme fatale of her age, is now receiving a new appreciation in an opera that will have its world premiere. Hometown at the end of this month.
Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff's Alma in Vienna's Volksoper focuses on the protagonist's tragic experiences with motherhood after a series of miscarriages and fatal childhood illnesses, as well as her thwarted creative identity, slippery relationship with truth, and shame.
The story unfolds in retrospect, with Alma beginning as a depressed alcoholic in his fifties, still mourning the loss of several children, lovers, and his own musical talent. He is survived by his only surviving daughter, Anna, who was with Gustav. Anna appears as a 30-year-old woman, a female chorus of sorts. “Are you an artist? No Did you sleep with him?” she asks her mother curiously after holding her once more.
Milch-Sheriff said she saw Alma's dead children haunting her on stage during the production, a lasting trauma and a metaphor for her stillborn artistic aspirations. Children's funerals.
Gustav Mahler, 19 years her senior and already head of the Viennese court, wooed the operatic young Alma, but gave her a fateful ultimatum when she tried to pursue her own compositions in his shadow.
“Of course, she's attracted to him and his condition and his mind – maybe not so much to his body, but that's another story. He is definitely attracted to her,” Milch-Sherif said by video call from his apartment in Tel Aviv.
“But he asked her to drop his music. So this decision she made changed her life. For me, that was the beginning and end of her life.
Milch-Sherif, known in Israel and the German-speaking world for works including The Banality of Love, about the affair between philosopher Hannah Arendt and her mentor Martin Heidegger, said she had her own experiences of being almost eclipsed by her husband. Composer Noam Sherif, who died in 2018.
For me as a 21st century female composer, married to a 20-year-old composer and conductor who is famous both in Israel and outside Israel – I'm 28, he's 48 – I know that I'm paralyzed by this older man. Character and personality,” he said. “But luckily my husband didn't ask me to give up my music.”
Alma, by contrast, “felt like Medea had killed her own children,” he said. “She did it not with her hands, but by giving up her soul. She killed her ability to love and care for her children.
While painting a sympathetic portrait, Milch-Sheriff did not remove Alma's strong anti-Semitic sentiments, despite her love of the Jews, Mahler and Werfel.
“This time in Vienna, it was like eating wiener schnitzel,” said Milch-Sheriff, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. “It's a common practice in Vienna, so she's no different in that respect.”
However, he noted that Alma was also instrumental in helping Werfel escape Nazi occupation. Years later both Europe admired Adolf Hitler and supported his efforts to “revive German culture”.
Annette Dash, the soprano who plays Alma from middle age to the first blushes of womanhood, said it was difficult to contend with such hateful dialogue in the libretto by Israeli writer Ido Riklin.
“There are sentences like 'the Jews poisoned my life' – especially for me as a German, I found it very difficult to say them, and I could only do it because it was written by an Israeli. But every time, if I'm honest, it takes a lot out of me.
Milch-Sherif said his fellow Israeli, Omar Meir Welber, the opera's conductor and longtime collaborator, made sure the show premiered in Vienna and said it belonged.
Dasch and Vienna-based director Ruth Brauer-Kvam said the current success of extremist forces in Germany and Austria, where the far-right FPÖ came first in a national election during rehearsals, created a troubling backdrop for the event.
“We're back in the 20s now, and of course you can't compare the two [decades] But there are parallels in the sense that wars and other conflicts and people feel more insecure,” Brauer-Kvam said. Alma's era was “the most exciting, but also the most terrible times”.
Milch-Sherif, who calls herself a peace activist and political opponent of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, says it is the “disintegration” of Israeli society that shaped her writing about Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
7 October 2023 At the time of the attack in Israel, “I was in the middle of composing an opera and I couldn't work for two months, I couldn't even hear the music. It all seemed so pointless to me.
Now, there's a big divide between the ”half or maybe More than half of Israelis can be said to be extreme right and liberal, center and left. I don't know if that will ever be resolved.
All three women said they clearly observed Alma's many faults, but felt protective of her and her prodigious talents, noting the role her flourishing libido played in casting suspicion against her to this day.
“People still think that when a woman fully expresses her sexuality, she has to be insulted or put into some kind of box, and that's been accepted by many great male artists over the centuries,” Dash said.
“I already imagine that relatively explicit sexual scenes in this opera will be a scandal, and then I think: look, they put on Don Giovanni. [nearly] For 300 years, no one got hot under the collar.
Milch-Sheriff said she hopes that moving back in time can help viewers identify points of no return in Alma's brave, broken life.
“Will the audience love or hate her at the end of the opera? My answer is that I don't care as long as they have more perspective and understanding of her,” she said. “That's why she still likes so many people around the world, because it's not something you can say yes or no to. It is a question mark and will remain so.
