This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

They’ve dug up poor old Alma again. You’d have thought the Head Muse (and succubus) of old Vienna had enough on her plate without also being the amazing composer we are now told she is — despite the technicality of not writing anything you might want to hear more than once, and not so much of that. But hey, there are loads of composers you could say that about.

The latest exhumation is at the Volksoper in Vienna, in a new opera by the Israeli composer Ella Milch-Sheriff that proposes a grim trajectory in budding musico Alma’s life from the moment Gustav Mahler insisted that there was room for only one composer in their marriage, otherwise who would be making breakfast etc.

Alma was a jolly, malicious posh girl who liked winding people up and was a world-class shit-stirrer: her great triumph was turning a minor spat between Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg (over Mann’s use of a Schoenberg-like figure in Dr Faustus) into a conflagration. But Alma’s main, curiously specific, pleasure seems to have been in ruining the lives of stumpy Jewish men. The first was her composition teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, whom she refused to marry for fear of “bringing ugly degenerate Jew-children into the world”, and then e-dumped a few days after she got engaged to Gustav Mahler (who she’d been jazzing on the side).

When Gustav started ailing she took up with the architect Walter Gropius (“the true Aryan type — the only man who was racially suited to me”), but when Mahler got round to actually dying she dumped Walter too, in favour of Oskar Kokoschka. Und so weiter, including the surprise move of going back and marrying Gropius when Kokoschka signed up to serve in WWI. It was all a great lark, and she inevitably wound up a bitchy old soak in Manhattan, whacking down a bottle of Benedictine a day, before dying in 1964 aged 85 and getting that terrific obit song from Tom Lehrer.

Well, opera’s never been much cop for documentary realism, and this Alma is a well-wrought conjecture, attributing her poor record as a mother to the initial “child-murder” of strangling her own creativity. Nice excuse, anyway. The feminist rehab of one of the world’s least victimy women is great, of course, but one wonders whether the unsisterly Alma — whose dealings with other women mostly involved sleeping with their husbands — is the right candidate.

Had Alma got round to actually doing any proper composing, as a woman she would simply (as we now know) have got better and better the longer she went on, unlike those male saps who dried up so feebly after early promise. The case, so well put by Tracey Emin, seems to me incontrovertible. Look at Schubert, Keats, Hendrix: the stuff they came up with from their thirties was simply pitiful. Whereas — well, need I say more than “Pam Ayres”.

But — missing masterpieces aside — probably the greatest mystery about Alma is: how come she didn’t sleep with the composer Leoš Janáček? Sure, he wasn’t Jewish, but he was pretty small and no oil painting, which ought to have helped, and he was about the only creative genius in the Austro-Hungarian Empire who didn’t get a go. He wouldn’t have minded a crack at her, too — he always had a thing about slightly squashy younger women, who reminded him of the bread dumplings (delicious with any sauce) that are such a speciality of his native Moravia.

Janáček hit his stride in his dotage, celebrating his bus-pass years by producing five operas

But perhaps there was something suspiciously feminine about him? Like all women, Janáček hit his stride in his dotage, celebrating his bus-pass years by producing five operas between 1920 and his death in 1928 aged 74 that sketched out a plausible alternative future (ignored by everyone) for an artform that, with Puccini’s later works and its contemporaries, was busy going down in flames in an amusingly hysterical way — imagine RuPaul’s Drag Race being filmed on a doomed airliner. One of the great pleasures of present-day opera (he’s really only taken off in the last 30 years) is that they’re always on: The Cunning Little Vixen in Paris, Berlin and Prague in December, Jenůfa in January at Covent Garden, and The Makropoulos Case at Scottish Opera in February.

This schoolmaster from the sticks had an imagination of the sort that produced the freaky Czech cinema of the sixties, a delight in peculiarly humdrum kinds of weirdness. He chose his subjects, and wrote his music, so strangely you might easily think he’d never actually seen another opera. The jovially boring adventures of the small-minded drunk Brouček who finds himself teleported to the moon (and subsequently to the fifteenth century), the wearisome existence of 337-year-old Emilia Marty, the insect life of the local woods … But Janáček’s true calling card is an ecstatic vision of redemption that makes his contemporaries — those Italians; Richard Strauss — look tawdry and gloating, and his style of odd rhythms and repeated motifs rising to ecstatic climaxes generates an extreme dramatic and emotional voltage.

In the end I suppose life in the rural wilds of newly non-Austrian Czecho wouldn’t really have suited Alma, but it’s nice to imagine her settling down there with Leoš and peacefully kneading those knedlíky. He could even have given her lessons in composition.