There are big, messy lives that can be called operatic and then there was Alma Mahler’s. After her first kiss with Gustav Klimt as a teenager and dreams of a career in composing, passionate love affairs with a dizzying array of bona fide geniuses of the early 20th century came in quick and overlapping succession.
Men including the composer Gustav Mahler, the writer Franz Werfel and the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius were bedded, wedded and inspired by Alma, “the most beautiful woman in Vienna” at the fin de siècle. A subject of endless fascination for most of the last 150 years, the charismatic diarist and muse, alternatively described as a monster and the greatest femme fatale of her age, is now getting a fresh appraisal in an opera that will have its world premiere in her home town later this month.
