Alma Mahler. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
In December 1901 Gustav Mahler, forty-one, director of the Vienna Opera, writes to twenty-two-year-old Alma Schindler, his fiancée of a few weeks, a letter of some twenty pages that ranks among the most chilling documents in the history of music. Alma composes: songs, studied with Alexander Zemlinsky, with a talent that those who have heard them judge genuine. Gustav sets things straight before the wedding: in the house there will be only one composer. Her role will be another, and he spells it out in so many words: from now on you have only one profession, to make me happy. He asks her to hand him her answer in writing.
Alma notes in her diary that she wept all night. Then she accepted. They married in March 1902, and for eight years the most sought-after woman in Vienna was her husband’s copyist, a mother, the mistress of the house through the silent summers of his work. Her songs stayed in the drawer.
The bill came due in the summer of 1910, and it was steep. Alma, taking a cure at a spa, met a young architect, Walter Gropius; the affair came to light in the most novelistic way, with a love letter from him delivered by mistake, or by a slip, to the husband. Mahler fell into a crisis so severe that he did something unheard of for the time: he asked Sigmund Freud for a consultation, and got it, one August afternoon, walking for four hours through the streets of Leiden, in Holland. The meeting is documented in both men’s correspondence. Something, in those four hours, shifted: Mahler went home, took up his wife’s songs again, declared he had got everything wrong, chose five of them and had them published by his own publisher. On the manuscript of the unfinished Tenth Symphony, written in those months, invocations to Alma remain, scrawled in pencil, that no biographer can quote without embarrassment.
He died nine months later, in May 1911. Of Alma Mahler the composer, seventeen published songs remain in all: the rest of the catalogue is the most famous silence in twentieth-century music, and it was not the only one: half a century earlier Clara Schumann had written that she believed a woman should not presume to compose, and she too had stopped. The seventeen surviving songs are now performed and recorded, and each time the question is the same, simple and unanswerable: how many are missing. It is the only case in which a composer’s most important catalogue is the one that does not exist.