Welcome to the life of Alma Mahler, literally enslaved by Gustav Mahler who did not realize it, but Alma could not cope with it, just submit and suffer. Then she had a passion for Walter Gropius with whom she will eventually marry but the passion will vanish as soon as the wedding will be consumed, or nearly. She will have some liaison with Oskar Kokoschka, before and after Gropius, but that will only lead to drama, even melodrama. Finally she will fall for Franz Werfel who did not come out of the drabness of the setting too much and more or less kept up with appearances. Alma Mahler may have had some potential but we will never know. She never really performed as a performer, a pianist it could have been, and it is not some seven or so songs published quite later that can tell us what she could have done in music if she had not been stifled by the fame of her husband and then the grandiose vision of her next two men. But the film does not show well enough how she was the real inspirer of Gustav Mahler, the woman who gave him the courage to renege his religion to capture the director's position at the Vienna opera. He will never survive this killing of not only his God, but of God altogether, and when he found out he had killed God he discovered in the wake of this realization that life was dead and that death had invaded life completely and that only the earth was left, the earth on which we tread before being buried in it. Earth the perpetual and eternal shroud. The death of their younger daughter, Maria, was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. He had to accept the call from the earth, from death and go into total darkness now the gate of light that does not cast a shadow was dead, had been killed along with God. That feeling of death, of absolute voidness and vacuum in the world, is so Jewish and yet so beyond Jewishness. That's probably what Alma could not stand up to, the constant contact with death that is so typical of Mahler's music. And now we have re-discovered the music of the Old testament, the Hebraic music codified and organized by King David, we can compare and we can discover its main accents are the same as some of the darkest music pieces Gustav Mahler composed. His wife was just fascinated by this morbidity she felt in the music and could not identify, and that fascination became a sense of duty after she had fallen into the snare and then, when the snare released her, she could never free herself from that call from the bottom of the grave of life itself. This particular film sets the emphasis on the fragile uncertainty of Alma's successive passions that lead to some kind of melodramatic approach and that does not satisfy my real curiosity and consciousness about this world in which Mahler committed the worst crime possible, to kill his own people's God. And God knows history was going to make his people pay for that assassination, which was not only Gustav Mahler's. Maybe it was a crime committed by a whole civilization and imposed in a cathartic way onto the Jews by this civilization turned materialistic.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines