Alma Mahler-Werfel

(1879 - 1964)

Growing up in an artistic household in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Alma Mahler-Werfel participated in student recitals during the 1890s but initially hated performing. A condition of her marriage to composer Gustav Mahler at the age of twenty-two was that she would abandon her own career as a composer, though he—who was nineteen years her senior—later encouraged her to resume the work. Fewer than twenty of her compositions have survived. After Gustav’s death in 1911, she married architect Walter Gropius and, in 1929, writer Franz Werfel.