Passionate Spirit by Cate Haste

Author:Cate Haste
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

11

Conflict, 1921–31

Franz Werfel was overjoyed and relieved at the news of Alma’s divorce: ‘I could just weep incessantly,’1 he told her, and took Alma to meet his parents, Rudolf and Albine Werfel, in Prague. Given Alma’s track record with her lovers’ parents, it was an unexpected success: ‘You left a wealth of enthusiasm behind … My parents love you … they obviously adore you!’ Werfel wrote enthusiastically. To his mother, Albine, Alma was ‘the sole true queen or monarch of our time’.2 From Prague they went on to stay in a hotel on the Grand Canal in Venice, a city that would assume increasing importance in their lives.

Anna married Rupert Koller in November 1920, and they moved to Elberfeld in the Ruhr, where Koller was a conductor with the Municipal State Opera. Alma’s hopes for her happiness were short-lived, for Anna soon tired of the marriage and in late August 1921 she retreated to Breitenstein where she spent a healing month with Alma: ‘I was so happy with her. And now everything is empty,’ Alma wrote when she left. ‘I love her passionately and this is why I was so desperate last summer. She is unhappy – suffering … If she would leave him and come back to me I would be happy beyond belief. My heart is aching with love for her.’3

Anna did not come back, but went to Berlin to study painting: ‘My soul is quiet and my heart is not yearning for her,’4 Alma wrote in February 1922. In the red room at Elizabethstrasse she maintained a lively social life. Olga Schnitzler stayed with her while deciding whether she should divorce her playwright husband, Arthur Schnitzler. Alma held regular musical evenings; at one, a small orchestra performed two versions of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, each with separate singers, one conducted by Schoenberg, the other by Darius Milhaud, before an audience of eighty people who ‘listened intently to the brittle wonders of atonality’.5 The composers Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Alban Berg, Eduard Steuermann and Cyril Scott spent a spirited afternoon together discussing and comparing their works.

Alma had meanwhile decided to buy a house in Venice. In March 1922 she found a small palazzo with a garden beside a canal near the Basilica dei Frari in San Tomà. ‘Casa Mahler’ required extensive renovation – the addition of several bathrooms and an enlarged room for Werfel – and she had to take out a lawsuit when the tenants refused to vacate the property. While there, she bumped into Oskar Kokoschka, who was exhibiting at the International Exhibition – the Venice Biennale. They went to the Café Florian in St Mark’s Square: ‘We were strangely close to each other and far away,’ Alma recalled. ‘His face has become that of a child. Dorian Gray. His vices have been etched somewhere outside of him.’ His presence made her so anxious that she ‘cried continuously’,6 until her mother interrupted them and took her away. But he would continue to haunt her.

News now reached her that

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