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The Art of Love: Alma Mahler's Life and Music/Kokoschka's Doll, Cheltenham Music Festival, review: capturing the fascinating Alma Mahler in music

Two works about composer Alma Mahler, and the trail of broken-hearted famous men she left in her wake, prove as compelling as their subject

Cara Chanteau
Monday 10 July 2017 16:15 BST
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Composer Alma Mahler was considered the "most beautiful woman in Vienna"
Composer Alma Mahler was considered the "most beautiful woman in Vienna"

“The most beautiful woman in Vienna,” Alma Mahler tore through the famous men surrounding her, marrying first Mahler (19 years her senior), then architect Walter Gropius, then novelist Franz Werfel, plus numerous other liaisons. She left artist Oscar Kokoschka so inconsolable at the end of their affair that he rather creepily commissioned a life-size doll of her to accompany him, until it was finally found decapitated after one of his wild parties.

Composer John Casken and librettist Barry Millington have fashioned a compelling 35-minute monodrama, Kokoschka's Doll, from his writings and letters, with the incomparable John Tomlinson as the aged artist reliving his abject, all-consuming passion for the young widow. Accompanied by Counterpoise's ceaselessly versatile and intriguing combination of piano, violin, trumpet and clarinet/saxophone, Tomlinson's resonant bass vividly conjured Kokoschka's tangled yearning and thwarted jealousy.

A superb, unmissable introduction was the companion piece, The Art of Love: Alma Mahler's Life and Music, focusing on Alma herself and her own compositions and writings, evoking the musical ferment of the fin de siècle Vienna which formed her, with contributions from Zemlinsky (who taught her and stopped her composing instrumental works), husband Mahler (who only eventually backed her composing efforts), Webern, and, inevitably, Wagner. Embodied by fine mezzo Rozanna Madylus, Alma – truculent, pert, maddening – was glimpsed as the part-siren, part-monster she must have been.

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