By Naomi Louisa O’Connell
How much of a person can one ever really know? Our language struggles to grasp it: “I know you inside and out, backwards and forwards, tell me everything, I love every inch of you… All of me, why not take all me?”
As a child, I suppose the first image that the word “muse” conjured for me was of some hovering, half-nude female floating in a shell. I don’t remember where I might have seen it—possibly a Monty Python cartoon. I do remember the first time I learned what the word actually meant; I remember the struck-between-the-eyes obsession of it when it happened to me. A muse is like a new love. Bring to mind the endlessly fascinating conversations we have at the beginning of getting to know somebody and the remarkable thing it is to feel yourself suddenly recognized, reflected, and enlarged by looking into another person’s eyes… the desire to know everything, the itch to do something, make something, to shout about it. Think of that strange almost-mirror effect when we recognize ourselves and others in the broader strokes of stories, horoscopes, archetypes, characters…
In researching the life of Alma Mahler and the characters in Bluebeard, this is what strikes me as the strongest link that binds the two—the nature of the strength of a muse, like the nature of a new love—an obsessive need to know it all. Judith has to learn what lies behind each door in Bluebeard’s castle. Bluebeard needs her to ask. There is an irresistible pull towards the grisly end, the two characters entwined in their co-dependent isolation. As for Alma? Acting as a muse was almost her profession.
In Alma’s autobiography, she begins with a strong focus on her father, and quickly skips through memories of her childhood, moving almost directly from her father’s early death to reminiscences of her first crushes. Her first kiss was with the artist Gustav Klimt, who followed her on a family trip to Italy when she was seventeen. She writes:
“Gustav Klimt was the first great love of my life, but I was a clueless child at the time, drowning in music and far removed from real life. The more I suffered from this love, the more I sank into my own music—thus my unhappiness became the source of my greatest joys.”
Later, at the ripe old age of twenty-one, and frustrated with two songs she was composing at the time, she wrote in her diary
“Have just played through my earlier pieces. – Where did I find all that feeling at that time? Yes – that time – Klimt… I set my hopes on the spring.”
Her love of music as a teenager is clear, and the intense swings of her diary entries from depressive to ecstatic seem in line with most artists I have met. (Also, most teenagers.) There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground in her. Both Alma’s diaries and her songs—these Vier Lieder were written in 1901 and 1911, though published in 1915—have an adolescent quality to their outpourings. You almost feel the need to excuse her for it—the brash, all-in quality of both writings. But why make an excuse? The hormonal cry of teenage love is valid. Her compositions scratch the surface of what she considers her deepest, truest self; if she had continued to compose, we would likely have seen them mature. This was not to be.
Most singing students know the story of Gustav Mahler’s letter to Alma during their courtship in December 1901, when he told her that if their marriage was to work, she must give up composing. He wrote to her:
“One thing is certain and that is that you must become ‘what I need’ if we are to be happy together, i.e. my wife, not my colleague. Would it mean the destruction of your life and would you feel you were having to forego an indispensable highlight of your existence if you were to give up your music in order to possess and also to be mine instead?
…
The role of ‘composer’, the “worker’s” world, falls to me—yours is that of the loving companion and understanding partner! Are you satisfied with it? I am asking a great deal, a very great deal — and I can and may do so because I know what I have to give and will give in exchange.”
I know, I know… it’s enough to make those of us with the benefit of a hundred years hindsight throw the book across the room! More frustrating than that though, is the swift turnaround in Alma in just three days—from initial outrage to acceptance of the stipulated conditions. On Dec 19, the day before she receives the letter, she writes:
“If it ever comes to marrying him, I must do everything now to stake my rightful claim…particularly in artistic questions. He thinks nothing of my art – and much of his own. And I think nothing of his art and much of my own. – That’s how it is!”
She receives the letter on the morning of Dec 20th, and writes:
“Give up my music—abandon what has until now been my life? My first reaction was – to pass him up. I had to weep – for then I understood that I loved him. Half-crazed with grief, I got into my finery and drove to ‘Siegfried’ – in tears!”
Admittedly, that last sentence is kind of hilarious; yet even more revealing of her personality is how swiftly she makes peace with the idea. The very next day, she writes:
“This morning I reread his letter – and suddenly I felt such warmth. What if I were to renounce [my music] out of love for him? Just forget all about it! I must admit that scarcely any music now interests me except his.”
Alma was a product of her time: the limits she perceives in her society lock her into a very specific role and—important to note—she embraces it. In her wealthy position, she could have made the choice not to do so. It’s also important to remember that a few years later, after an affair (Alma’s) and a brief interlude on Freud’s couch (Gustav’s), Alma did in fact have the option of returning to her music seriously, this time with the encouragement and support of her husband, but she didn’t. We can wish it differently. It would be nice to hop back in time and shake her by the shoulder to tell her there is another way open to her. But without the benefit of a time machine, we have instead these beautiful songs left to us as a small window into her passion as a composer. We also have a mass of works by the men who lived in her orbit—works which, one could argue, would not exist without her.
Alma the professional muse! Even in her own words, she sees her life through the achievements and greatness of the men who were with her. Though she often flip-flops in her diary entries and cries out for something of her own, it is clear that she loved to be near genius. She kept her men hungry. In her marriage to the writer Franz Werfel, she consistently sent him away to work in isolation until he finished his next big project. But perhaps the most striking of the co-dependent muse relationships in Alma’s life is that with visual artist Oskar Kokoschka. In Oskar’s early letters to Alma, he would sign off with an amalgamation of both their names and (if we are to believe Alma’s version of history) wanted her entirely to himself. Oskar wrote:
“I want you very much when you find your own being, your peace and your freedom in my existence… I warn you to decide whether you want to be free from me, or in me. I would have loved you incredibly strongly Alma Oskar Kokoschka”
Their relationship lasted three years. Alma told him she would not marry him until he created a masterpiece. Die Windsbraut is the result—an image that has long been pinned to the mood board of the creatives of this project. In 1913, Alma wrote to her diary, “The stronger a man is, the more he wants to reach out and possess everything. And I too am very strong…” In my research of the pieces, this struck me as a prominent feature of the Bluebeard story. Possession. Sublimation.
The poetry of the Vier Lieder plays on the themes of light and dark, which also pervade Bluebeard: dawn, the breaking through from darkness to light. “Muss es heraus—ans Licht, ans Licht! / It must burst forth—to the light, to the light!” The passion of a young composer shines through the songs—eager, impulsive—an easy link to Judith’s character. How much these pieces will play for and against each other remains to be seen on the stage. I am fascinated by the prospect.
References:
Alma Mahler-Werfel, ‘Mein Leben’, S. Fischer Verlag, 1960.
Antony Beaumont, ‘Alma Mahler-Werfel Diaries 1898 – 1902’, Faber and Faber, 1997.
Karen Monson, ‘Alma Mahler Muse to Genius’, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983.
Naomi Louisa O’Connell, Irish-German mezzo-soprano, performing BLO’s production of Bluebeard | Four Songs, is a versatile artist who delights in bringing compelling stories to life on stage. www.naomilouisaoconnell.com