grrrr....alma mahler take two

I was writing all this interesting stuff about Alma Mahler and the Web suddenly quit on me.

I'm trying to decide if I should take a book arts course or the Gustav Mahler and Fin de siecle Vienna course that I really wanted to take. I should probably take the Mahler course since he's unbelievable.

I was telling someone today about Alma, his wife. There was a movie made a few years back about her called Bride of the Wind. Alma really got around Vienna. She was involved with Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka (the "Master of Expressionism"), the poet Franz Werfel, the conductor and composer Alexander Zemlinsky, and the famous architect Walter Gropius. They said she was the most beautiful girl in Vienna, but I think she looks like a linebacker in the pictures of her. She was a big woman at a young-ish age. Not enough can be said for pheromones, eh?

She supposedly once said,"Nothing tastes better than the sperm from a genius."

Clearly I have been hanging in the wrong circles.

Here's a song by Tom Lehrer about her. I can't get it to work on my browser, though.

My father never listened to Mahler when I was growing up. I saw all his symphonies for sale when I sold classical CDs for awhile in college. Then I took a course on aesthetics called "Portraits of the Artist" and we studied Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and also watched the movie, in which the director, Vischonti, made the leading actor (Dirk Bogarde) look just like Mahler. Music from Mahler's 2, 3, and 5th symphonies are used for the score. I fell in love with the fourth movement of the fifth symphoy, "Sehr langsam," which Mahler supposedly wrote for Alma. It's a great first thing to hear by Mahler to understand how intense his music is. Hmm. That was the semester when my friend and I were completely obsessed with the German professor who taught it and we followed him all over campus and turned bright red every time he came into the classroom.