‘It is no accident that people love her so’

Few men could resist Alma Mahler – as Walter Gropius discovered to his cost, says Fiona MacCarthy

Walter Gropius’s momentous first meeting with Alma Mahler took place at the Wildbad Sanatorium, a fashionable clinic in the Austrian Alps. As Alma, a reluctant resident, recalled: “Barefoot, clothed in a horrible nightgown, I meekly took the outdoor exercise in rain and wind that was the hallmark of the therapeutic faith adhered to at this institution.”

When Alma fainted in the hot springs and had to be carried back to bed, her doctor prescribed her sociability and ballroom dancing, then fashionable, as an alternative cure. In her memoirs, she writes: “Worried about my dependency and loneliness, he introduced young men to me; one was an extraordinarily handsome German who would have been well cast as Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger. We danced. Gliding slowly around the room with the youth, I heard that he was an architect…”

It was June 4 1910. Gropius, future founder of the Bauhaus, was 27 and exhausted from the stresses of setting up his own architectural practice. Alma was 30, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler and the femme fatale of avant-garde Vienna. It seems that, within minutes, they were totally in love.

Alma’s memoirs (1959 and

1960) are famously self-serving and she baulks at admitting to her physical unfaithfulness to Mahler. But her diary entries and correspondence with

Gropius tell another story, of amorous meanderings along the stream after dinner on the night of their first meeting at Wildbad, and later, passionate sexual entwinings.

It is obvious from the tone of Gropius’s letters that his six weeks at Wildbad with Alma took him into new realms of sexual experience. She was the voluptuous, slightly older woman with a considerable amatory back catalogue. Alma’s first suitor, when she was 17, had been Max Burckhard, distinguished director of the Vienna Burgtheater, then in his early 40s. Burckhard had wooed her with vintage champagne, partridges and pineapples; he had deluged her with books, which arrived packed in laundry baskets borne by two porters.

Another of the young Alma’s serious pursuers had been Gustav Klimt, the secessionist painter, then 35 and “strikingly goodlooking”. In 1897, he pursued Alma to Italy – even as a teenager she exerted a magnetic effect on men – but before they reached Genoa, Alma’s mother had read the entry in her daughter’s diary revealing that Klimt had kissed her, and put a stop to the liaison.

Alma’s next love had been her music teacher, Alexander Zemlinsky, the composer, whom Alma described as “a hideous gnome. Short, chinless, toothless, always with the coffee-house smell on him, unwashed – and yet the keenness and strength of his mind made him tremendously attractive”. It was when Zemlinsky was playing Wagner’s Tristan that the moment of truth struck them: “I leaned on the piano,” wrote Alma, “my knees buckled, we sank into each other’s arms.”

In fact, Alma never gave herself completely to Zemlinsky but sex-teased and tormented him until she was introduced to Mahler at a dinner in the autumn of 1901. There, according to Alma, she and Mahler “stood in the kind of vacuum that instantly envelops people who have found each other”. In March 1902, they were married. Alma, already pregnant, was 22, Mahler was 41. It had been a rainy morning and Mahler arrived on foot at the magnificent baroque church of St Charles Borromeo wearing galoshes. This unromantic footwear seemed to encapsulate the age difference between them. It was hardly a propitious sign.

Burckhard, Klimt, Zemlinsky, Mahler: all were in their way celebrities. And the pattern continued when Alma met Gropius. Even if he was not famous quite yet, Alma had seen convincing signs. She wrote to him that summer: “I love in you – your intellect – your artistry – which I knew – before I have seen a stroke of your drawings – your talents – in regard to living – your charm – and last but not least your beauty – to say nothing of your nobility and kindness??” She added that “there is not one spot on your body that I would not like to caress with my tongue”.

Alma’s marriage with Mahler had begun with high intentions. Nine years later, such zealous hopes were dwindling into an onerous and deadening routine. Everything was programmed to the egocentric Mahler’s work schedule. In spite of his early reputation as a rake, about which her mother had warned her, Mahler had seemed to Alma almost virginal on marriage. She could not help lamenting to her diary that she felt as if her wings had been clipped, when she was by nature such a colourful, free-flying bird. By 1910, her doctors decided she was heading for a breakdown. “I was really sick,” she wrote, “utterly worn out by the perpetual motion necessitated by a giant engine such as Mahler’s mind.” To help her recover, Mahler deposited Alma at Wildbad, then left her, anxious to continue working on his

Tenth Symphony.

When Alma finally left the clinic six weeks later, Mahler seemed to her suddenly more amorous. In her memoirs, she speculates as to whether “the young stranger’s infatuation” had restored her self-confidence. As the desperate post-Wildbad messages and letters between Gropius and Alma started winging their way to the arranged poste restante address two miles from the Mahler home, where

Alma had to travel to receive and send them, she reassured her lover: “I feel dreadfully sorry for G [Gustav] – he must feel that I have absolutely no desire to make love to him – on the contrary, that I keep him away from me – which I have so far completely succeeded in doing.”

Gropius, returning to Berlin, evidently felt a rather arrogant younger man’s impatience with Alma’s prevarications and it seems he now decided to bring matters to a head. On July 29 1910 a letter arrived addressed in Gropius’s handwriting to “Herr Direktor Mahler”. According to Alma’s account of a scene that has now entered legend, “Mahler was seated at the piano when he opened the letter. ‘What is this?’ he asked in a choking voice and handed it to me.”

Alma was appalled and mystified, writing back to Gropius: “Just think – the letter in which you openly write about the secret of our nights of love was addressed to: Herr Gustav Mahler – Toblach – Tirol. Did you really want this to happen?”

What is certain is that the

Alma married Mahler when she was 22 and he 41. He arrived at the church in galoshes