It Had to Be Her. Cathleen Sheen. The New York Review of Books

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both. Trailing a legacy of innuendo, anecdotes, and off-color jokes, she steers any biographer, however serious, to the enjoyable, lascivious path of the gossipy celebrity biography—but with better gossip and much better celebrities. She married or had affairs with so many important figures of early modernism that she has become, herself, a figure in the history of twentieth-century music (through her relationship with Gustav Mahler), art (Oskar Kokoschka), architecture (Walter Gropius), and literature (Franz Werfel). Born in Vienna in 1879, during the last hurrah of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she died in New York City in the 1960s. Because she was an ambitious young woman who longed to be a great com- poser but became instead a great muse to great men, there is a temptation to view her as yet another female victim of cultural oppression. Because she was anti-Semitic, narcissistic, boastful, and untruthful, there is a temptation to dismiss her altogether.

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