Alma Mahler-Werfel, wife of Franz Werfel author of the song of Bernadette.

 

 Arful intelligent and quietly powerful... Evokes the life of the maenad-muse Alma mahler Gropius Werfel, who was born Alma Schindler near Vienna in 1879, died in New York city in 1964, and in between the ages of 16 and 50 made just about very heterosexual male who came within sniffing distance of her go wild with a combination of diffuse longing and specific lust. Coming of age in the horthouse of fin de siècle Vienna; Ingenue temptress of Max Burckard and Gustav Klimt; piano pupil and foreplay-partner of alexander von Zemlinsky; skeptical caryatid on the monument of Gustav Mahler; lover of love-mad Oskar Kokoschka; bored war bride Walter Gropius, surrogate mother of lazy-boy Franz Werfel; serial adulterer; merry deflowerer in middle age, of roman Catholic priest; refugee of the Nazi