Passionate Spirit
The Life of Alma Mahler
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- 49,99 zł
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- 49,99 zł
Publisher Description
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'Fascinating ... Haste paints a portrait of a woman who was born to triumph, not surrender' - Harper's Bazaar
'Written in elegant, lucid prose ... a treasure trove of European cultural riches and scandalous intrigue … Compelling' - Economist
'Lively, well illustrated and enjoyably juicy' - Miranda Seymour, Financial Times
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The life of an extraordinary artist and intellect: the composer, author and socialite Alma Mahler, whose life spanned one of the most captivating and dramatic periods in history
Alma Mahler was once at the epicentre of Vienna's artistic and intellectual life. A talented composer in her own right, she was open, generous, remarkably creative, curious, challenging and zealous in her pursuit of love. Artists, architects, musicians and writers jostled to join her coterie. Gustav Klimt was her first kiss; Gustav Mahler her first husband. But her life was haunted by tragedy, and the support and inspiration that Alma gave to the men she loved came at the heavy price of her own artistic fulfilment.
Drawing extensively on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Cate Haste illuminates the passionate spirit of one of history's most complex and charismatic muses, a modern woman with an elemental vitality that could scarcely be contained by her century – who will live forever in the art she created and inspired.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sympathetic, engrossing biography of Viennese socialite and composer Alma Mahler (1879 1964), Haste (Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint) traces Mahler's struggle to find equilibrium among her men (all creative geniuses), her erotic desires, and her own musical ambition. Haste mines Mahler's diaries and memoirs, and interviews her granddaughter to uncover her complexities and contradictions (she had many close Jewish friends, but nevertheless spouted anti-Semitic remarks). Ever excited by brilliant minds, Mahler married three men; each relationship began as an affair: composer Gustav Mahler; architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement; and the bestselling Jewish novelist and poet Franz Werfel (whom she escorted over the Pyrenees mountains by foot and across the Atlantic by ship to protect him from Nazi persecution). One lover the eccentric artist Oskar Kokoschka, who "satisfied her yearning to be loved and worshipped" commissioned a life-size Alma doll to dote on after their split. Mahler hosted legendary salons throughout Europe and the U.S., as Haste enthusiastically details ("What drives me around the world like a flame in too much wind. I am forever yearning!"), but also suffered hardship (three of her four children died tragically). Haste beautifully reprises the life of this force of nature.
