She was the most beautiful in Vienna. Witty muse for artists of all genres. Man-destroying femme fatale. But now Alma Mahler is sitting in Toblach. A boring mountain idyll. Farmers, cows, inn smell. And her husband? A driven man, obsessed with his late work: "The Song of the Earth." The Ninth Symphony. A Tenth! He wants to compose all this at the same time, while age and illness are already gnawing at him. "He looked like an old, emaciated deer in winter, surrounded by hunters."
So ruthless is the wife’s gaze on the composer titan. "Alma's Summer," referring to July and August in the year 1910. Alma and Gustav Mahler are at the usual "summer retreat" in the South Tyrolean village of Toblach. Alma is pining for her lover: the young architect and later Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. During a spa stay, she had begun an affair with him. Mahler suspects nothing. He composes. Wants absolute peace, lavender scent, his books. No noise, no draft, and certainly no moody Alma must disturb him in the process.
With great irony, the South Tyrolean author Lenz Koppelstätter portrays Mahler’s quirks, occasionally making the love frenzy and compositional stress into a caricature of himself. Just when the great symphonist has a brilliant high, Koppelstätter mercilessly brings him back down to earth – literally: "His butt slammed onto the wet meadow, he slipped off, landed in the mud, wiped the brown dirt from his pants. He looked around shamefully. It seemed to him that the cows were smirking. Then they mooed. Wildly and out of tune, like out-of-tune tubas. In three-quarter time, as it seemed to him."
At least: The Toblach cattle have a sense of waltz. Mahler fanatics should be warned: This is not a Künstlerroman that aims to represent the current state of research on Alma and Gustav Mahler. Koppelstätter also refrains from making statements about Mahler's music. So far, he has made a name for himself primarily as an author of crime novels with South Tyrolean local color. With "Alma's Summer," he ventures into the artist milieu for the first time, and he apparently cannot take the legendary toxic relationship of the celebrity couple too seriously. With satirical delight, Koppelstätter sharpens the already dime-novel-like situation. Alma's lover Walter Gropius has indeed addressed one of his flowery letters to Gustav Mahler. Probably a Freudian slip that really occurred. Gropius follows Alma to Toblach. And in Koppelstätter's version, the village is so excited about the scandal that it demands a duel, which Mahler narrowly escapes. In addition, Koppelstätter plays with the charming fantasy that Alma might not have entirely given up her compositional ambition? So she sneaks into Mahler's composing hut at night and "optimizes" his work with caring megalomania. However, without any lasting effects for posterity, because: "When Mahler looked at the compositional attempts of the past days, he immediately saw that they must have been there at some point while he was asleep. It amused him a little. Yes, she could copy his notation quite well by now, but not so well that he wouldn't notice."
Alternatingly, Lenz Koppelstätter tells from the perspective of both spouses and also illuminates earlier moments of their lives through time jumps: The first encounter between Gustav and Alma. The death of a shared daughter. The anti-Semitic hostilities against Mahler. Also, the recorded encounter with Sigmund Freud, who after a several-hour conversation laughingly explains: "Don't be so hysterical, Mahler – the hysterical, that's what wears you out."
Koppelstätter's novel "Alma's Summer" is not a profound musician's portrait. But rather an anecdotal homage to a love affair in the artist milieu. And who knows what music history would miss if an explosive Alma hadn't made her Gustav's life hell.
Text: Nicole Strecker, Lenz Koppelstätter: Alma's Summer. Novel. Kindler Verlag 2022. 208 pages. 20.00 Euro
