Masterpieces Of Vienna (4 of 38)

Masterpieces Of Vienna

In the 1960s, Alma's adventurous love life was celebrated in a ditty by the American songwriter Tom Lehrer.
The loveliest girl in Vienna Was Alma, the smartest as well.
Once you picked her up on your antenna You'd never be free of her spell Her lovers were many and varied From the day she began her beguine There were three famous ones whom she married And God knows how many between Alma...Oskar Kokoschka was, in Tom Lehrer's words, one of the men "between".
He and Alma first met less than a year after Gustav Mahler's premature death in 1911.

As he approached this house in a suburb of Vienna on the evening of the 12th of April 1912, the young Oskar Kokoschka could not have known that within a few hours, his life would be turned upside down.
It was here that Oskar and Alma were introduced.
She was intrigued, and to break the ice, she asked if he'd like her to play the piano for him and she sat down at the piano and played Wagner's Liebestod.
And Kokoschka was instantly...struck.
While she seduced him with her playing of Liebestod from Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, Kokoschka made a little sketch of her.
The affair started almost instantaneously.
It was quite unusual, I think, even for Alma to be so...
I think they were lovers within three or four days.
It was a white-hot attraction.
At first sight, Oskar and Alma must have seemed an odd couple.