The Unpopular Genius: Gustav Mahler by Alma Mahler-Werfel
As beautiful, highly educated and endowed for the arts as Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879-1964) was, she could have achieved a lot in the world, but during most of her life she remained in the shadows of her famous husbands and lovers. She had the bad luck to have been born at a time, when women only made their first tentative steps to claim their rights and their own place in society. Although her family and the circles that they frequented were among the most liberal of the fin de siècle, young and shy Alma quite naturally obeyed the command of her much older first husband Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) to give up for good all her own musical ambitions and activities. In 1939, when the Nazi regime defamed his work because he had been a Jew converted to Protestantism and refused him his place in the world of music, she brought out her very personal tribute to him under the title Gustav Mahler. Memories and Letters.Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)
I went and read the rest of your review. I too gave up my musical goals when I married my first husband and that was in 1969! Seven years later I left him, but then he wasn't a genius or a musician.
ReplyDeleteI think that when we're younger we all - men and women alike - tend to believe that love is more important than anything and that it's worth to give up any dream or plan for the one we choose. Of course, it's still more common that a woman accepts a role in the background or in the shadow of a man than the other way round.
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