Einsamer Gang
The tale of a lonely song
In 1899 Alma, aged 20, wrote Einsamer Gang after a passionate but unconsummated affair with the artist Gustav Klimt (pictured right). A known philanderer, Klimt was warned off by Alma’s stepfather Carl Moll (below). His response, that the ‘affair’ was not in any case serious on his side, deeply hurt Alma. ‘Now I know what it is to be betrayed,’ she wrote under a black cross in her diary on 15 May. But such expressions of sadness are interwoven with exclamations on the beauty of nature in which she takes solace: ‘Everything glimmered and shimmered in the light, and I was overcome with longing’ (22 July).
Her diary describes walks, either alone or feeling lonely, in the consoling moonlight.
Meanwhile, her mother Anna was giving attention to her new baby with Moll – a rival half-sister to
Alma. Another sister, Gretl, now thought to be also a half-sister, was about to announce her engagement without confiding in Alma. It was also the seventh anniversary of her beloved father’s death: ‘I’m so sad, I just can’t stop myself crying.’ A month later, the tears are still flowing: ‘I asked everyone to keep to the road, and took the footpath across the fields. I found a bench, sat down and cried as I had never cried before’ (6 September).
Feeling betrayed and abandoned by her mother, stepfather, sister Gretl and of course Klimt, Alma copied into her diary, on 15 September 1899, a poem by Leo Greiner. Einsamer Gang expressed her loneliness, and she set it to music. ‘I consider the poem very fine,’ she wrote, ‘and I have, I believe, caught its atmosphere pretty well.’ Indeed she had. Greiner’s Symbolist poem paints a picture of a starlit night with fields of corn rocking gently in the breeze. The title, Lonely Walk, implies a person experiencing the sensations of that still evening, either sharing it with a lover or perhaps imagining sharing it.
Though Einsamer Gang is less adventurous harmonically than some of Alma’s other songs, it is in no way derivative. It also displays an impressive response to the mood of the text, carefully chosen to express the composer’s emotional preoccupations. This evocative setting was admired by some of Alma’s most discerning friends, and she too was pleased with it, describing it as ‘perhaps my best song’.