Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries, 1898-1902 Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries, 1898-1902 Book

Alma Mahler was born in Vienna in 1879. As the daughter of the landscape painter Emile Schindler, she was afforded easy entrance into the cultural life of the city; it seems that by the time these diaries open there was no part of the artistic, musical, literary, and theatrical life in fin-de-siècle Vienna with which Alma was not intimately connected. Before marrying the composer Gustav Mahler in 1902, Alma had already been a pupil and lover of Zemlinsky, Klimt, and Burckhard. (And after Mahler died she married Walter Gropius, had an affair with Oskar Kokoschka, and then married Franz Werfel.) In combining the naiveté of a teenager on the cusp of womanhood with a wonderfully frank account of a remarkable time and place, Alma has left a priceless and unique record of personal and artistic history. The editor and translator Antony Beaumont rightly comments that reading the diaries is like "raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty. So close that you can almost reach out and touch it". --Nick Wroe Read More

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  • Product Description

    The manuscript of Alma Mahler's Diaries, a pile of old exercise books, lay unread and seemingly illegible in the library of an American university. In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them--and found what he was looking for. But he found far more: the authentic saga of one of the century's most charismatic personalities. The Diaries depict in intimate detail the four years during which Alma grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Gustav Klimt, they break off shortly before her marriage to Gustav Mahler. "To me," writes Beaumont, "reading The Diaries is like raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty, and so close that one can almost reach out and touch it. The vitality of everyday life, eye-witness accounts of significant artistic events, unique insights into the behavioral patterns and linguistic conventions of homo austriacus--all these serve to make the book unique." Having come to grips with Alma's handwriting, Beaumont and his coeditor for the German edition, Susanne Rode-Breymann, added meticulously researched commentaries and annotations. The German edition was published in the autumn of 1997.

  • 0801486645
  • 9780801486647
  • Alma Mahler-Werfel
  • 10 May 2000
  • Cornell University Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 494
  • illustrated edition
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