Alma Schindler, better known as Alma Mahler, was very much the femme fatale for Viennese artistic society in the first decades of the 20th century. Beginning when she was still a teenager with Gustav Klimt, her list of conquests included the composers Alexander von Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler and Franz Schreker, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the writer Franz Werfel.
She married three of them – Mahler, of course, Gropius and Werfel – but left much emotional damage behind her, too. Zemlinsky’s tragic one-act opera, Der Zwerg, is thought to be a self-lacerating portrait of their failed romance, while Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony is permeated by his despair over his wife’s affair with Gropius. Kokoschka was so devastated by their separation that at the end of the first world war he commissioned a Parisian puppet maker to build him a lifesize doll of Alma, which he sketched and photographed before eventually beheading and abandoning it.
That’s the creepy story behind Kokoschka’s Doll, John Casken’s “melodrama” for narrator and ensemble, which John Tomlinson and the ensemble Counterpoise premiered at the Cheltenham festival. The protagonist is the painter himself in old age, reliving his times with Alma, his experiences of war and the aftermath of all of it. The text is woven together from Kokoschka’s autobiography and his letters to Alma, and delivered in a mixture of speech, song and Sprechgesang. The musical material for the ensemble – violin, saxophone, trumpet, piano – is haunted by Wagner’s Liebestod, which Kokoschka remembers Alma singing to him, and other references to songs by Mahler and by Alma are incorporated, too.
It’s a tidy enough piece, and Tomlinson is, of course, a compelling dramatic presence, even if he has little to do other than deliver his words. The deeper, more macabre undercurrents of the story are avoided, however, and what could have been a truly unsettling piece of music theatre turns out just a bit too neutral.
Before it, the mezzo Rozanna Madylus and the ensemble presented the other side of the story in The Art of Love, a musical portrait of Alma devised by Barry Millington, which follows her life from her first encounter with Zemlinsky, through to her affair with Kokoschka. There is music by all the usual suspects, often in typically imaginative arrangements by David Matthews, and even a real rarity, in the shape of a movement of a trio for clarinet, trumpet and violin from 1919 by Anton Webern, one of the few Viennese composers of that era who seems to have been immune to Alma’s charms.
•At the Buxton international festival on 19 July. The Cheltenham music festival continues until 16 July.
