du bist mir kunst: The correspondence between Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius 1910–1914

an exciting journey through time, a great love, a cultural history in letters.

In the summer of 1910, Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius met at a spa: it was the beginning of a liaison that began as a passionate affair and became a complex relationship with ups and downs. Around 400 letters tell the life of the young woman and the architect. Until the death of her husband Gustav in May 1911, Alma Mahler was torn between her engagement with his music, her own composing work and her desire for freedom. At that time, Walter Gropius had little more to show than his idealistic visions. The book, knowledgeably commented, makes the entire correspondence from the years 1910-1914 accessible for the first time and provides completely new insights into the dramatic lives and work of three central protagonists of modernity.

authors

Annemarie Jaeggi (ed.), has been director of the Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design in Berlin since 2003. The work of Walter Gropius is a focus of her work.

Jörg Rothkamm (ed.), is a professor of musicology at the University of Tübingen. He has been publishing on Alma and Gustav Mahler since the 1990s.

Alma Mahler - born in Vienna in 1879. She enjoyed musical training and several songs from her compositional work have been handed down. The wife of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler and, after Mahler's death, the architect Walter Gropius and then the poet Franz Werfel had personal contact with the Secessionists, the painter Gustav Klimt and with the composer (her teacher) Alexander von Zemlinksy in her youth. At times she was the lover of the painter Oskar Kokoschka. As a host of artistic salons in Vienna, then after 1938 in Los Angeles and New York, she gathered artists and celebrities around her. She died in New York in 1964.

Walter Gropius - born in Berlin in 1883, was a German (American since 1944) architect and founder of the Bauhaus. Alongside Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, he is considered a pioneer of international modernist architecture. In 1915 he married Alma Mahler, and after the divorce he married the journalist Ise Frank in 1923. He died in Boston in 1969.

Hardcover - October 23, 2023 - 784 pages - in german
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