—AN UNLIKELY PAIRING

In March of 1881, Béla Viktor János

Bartók was born into a noble family, in what is now Romania, but then was the Kingdom of Hungary, part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. A year and a half earlier, in August of 1879, in that same empire, but in Vienna, Alma Maria Schindler was born to a famous painter. Both showed an early talent and interest in music and became composers surrounded by their contemporaries; each suffered the loss of their father while they were still a child; both lived through two World Wars and a pandemic, and both emigrated to the United States from Lisbon arriving the same month, October 1940. And yet, the two may have never actually crossed paths.

Béla Bartók earned admission to the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest, after learning piano from his mother and performing his first composition when he was eleven. He was inspired by the music of Liszt, Strauss, Brahams, and Debussy. In school, Zoltán Kodály became his dear friend and collaborator.

Kodály is known today for his music education technique. Together Bartók and Kodály worked as ethnomusicologists studying the various folk music traditions across the Austria-Hungarian Empire. They even used the early invention of Thomas Edison’s phonograph to collect recordings of Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian and even Turkish folk music traditions to later transcribe and classify.

Alma Schindler, meanwhile, was educated mostly at home through self-study and mentors. She focused her study on music and was very proficient at the piano. She began composing at age nine. At 17, she was introduced to Gustav Klimt through her stepfather, also a painter, and the two had a brief liaison, yet remained life-long friends. Soon after, she fell in love with her composition teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky, an affair she kept secret. Alma met Gustav Mahler, who was 19 years her senior, at a salon in Vienna and began a relationship with him. The two were even engaged before she broke it off with Zemlinsky. At Gustav Mahler’s request, Alma gave up composing when they married in 1902 to focus on being a wife and mother. In the 14 years of her life as an active composer, she wrote over 50 pieces, although only 17 of them have survived to this day. Gustav later did encourage Alma to return to her compositions and even edited some for publication, yet in 1911, Gustav Mahler fell ill and soon died.

Bartók married Márta Ziegler in 1909, she twelve years his junior. They had one son together, born the following year. In 1911, Bartók wrote his only opera, Bluebeard’s Castle, for a contest. He dedicated the work to his wife Márta. He did not win the contest, and the opera was reworked and premiered in 1918 at the Royal Hungarian Opera House after a ballet Bartók wrote was a success. Béla Balázs wrote and published the libretto—based on a French fairytale—as a serial playscript in 1910 with Kodály in mind to compose the opera, but he dedicated it to both Kodály and Bartók. The opera was banned soon after its premiere as Balázs was exiled to Vienna due to his Jewish heritage. Bartók divorced Márta in 1923 to marry his piano student, Ditta Pásztory. Together they had a son. to France in 1938. By 1940, France was no longer safe, and the couple emigrated to New York City from Lisbon in October. Béla Bartók, a staunch anti-fascist, and his wife also emigrated in October of 1940 to New York City from Lisbon. While Bartók stayed on the East Coast, Mahler-Werfel settled in Los Angeles, joining other artists who’d fled Europe, including Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. She later moved to New York City, after the death of her husband, where she lived until her death in 1964. Bartók passed in 1945 from leukemia.

Did You Know?

Alma Mahler’s life has inspired many fictional retellings including a play, a few films, a mini-series, a song by American satirist Tom Lehrer, and a novel by Mary Sharratt entitled Esctasy (2019).

Alma Mahler began an affair with architect Walter Gropius while still married to Gustav Mahler. After Gustav Mahler died in 1911, she fell passionately for artist Oskar Kokoschka. Both Kokoschka and Gropius fought in the Austro-Hungarian Army in The Great War, and Alma ultimately chose and married Walter Gropius in 1915 in Berlin. Yet, as the war kept Gropius away, Alma began an affair with poet Franz Werfel in 1917, and finally divorced Gropius in 1920. Alma and Franz Werfel were married in 1929, and together until his death in 1945.

Due to the passing of fascist, Anti-Jewish laws in Hungry, Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel, a Jewish man, fled

Both Bartók and Alma Mahler’s music were more widely acclaimed and performed after their lives ended. Though Bartók had a career trajectory more typical of his counterparts, he was known more while living for his ethnomusicology work. Alma lived as a muse to many male artists, sidelining her own work as a composer in service of their creations, and still her work has lived on, too, an artist in her own right.

Reflect:

Given the parallel lives of these two composers, how do you think their music will sound performed in the same evening?

Will there be similarities?

What do you expect will sound different?