Alma Mahler meets Gustav Klimt just one moment before becoming the charming and tentacular muse of the Secession, to whom almost nobody will be able to resist. She is the one who’ll marry one after the other Mahler-Gropius-Werfel concentrating around her the creative forces of her century; and at the time of that meeting she is still the young daughter of Austrian landscapist Emil Schindler, well-liked by the Absburgic monarchy. She is an utterly precocious composer, totally dedicated to music, and lives in a permanent condition of romantic trance. Klimt is a thirty-five-years-old painter with a touchy character, who brought gold back to the centre of art and lives in the isolation of an obsessed ordinariness, wandering about with Goethe’s Faust in his pockets. The meeting takes place under the sign of the most unlimited fate and will accompany their life renewing itself with time, never ending, like most of love enchantments to which Alma is subject.

Es- Abscondita publishers have recently published an anthology which gives evidence of this troubled love story:Gustav Klimt “Letters and testimonies”- edited by Elena Pontiggia. In a letter to Carl Moll, a friend of him and Alma’s stepfather, (dated 19 May 1899) Klimt reveals his overwhelming dismay regarding that passion, telling it in a way that he seems to try to block it off or to exorcize it. He incidentally sees Alma for the first time in a park in Wien, at the inauguration of the monument to her father’s memory. He almost justifies himself by using dots for the fact of noticing her just from a pictorial point of view “in the way painters admire a beautiful child”, surprised by the fact that Moll hadn’t portrayed her yet. Then he is absorbed by the relentnessness of that attraction:”Alma and me were often close; she told me about her love for Wagner, Tristano, music, dance (…) she is beautiful, intelligent, full of character, in a word, she has plenty of what a demanding man can desire in a woman”. Alma confirms the perfect match of musical inclination and sensibility with that “refined byzantine painter” in her autobiography (Rusconi, 1985) referring to him with passionate words in many passages: “ (…) he was the most talented. At the age of thirty-five he was in the flower of his strenght, beautiful in every aspect and already famous”. The right premises to begin an affair. It is during the trip to Italy at the end of 1800 that the story speeds up. Klimt follows his beloved in the many stops of her education route along the peninsula. In Genoa, Alma incautiously writes in her diary about a kiss and when her mother “breaking the word of honour” reads it, there is the end of their affair. The two unfortunate lovers will be forbidden to speak to each other: “our love was harshly opposed by my mother” Venice will serve as a crossing for those two adverse and adversed destinies: “We could finally meet again only in Venice, in the confusion of San Marco square: we were in the middle of a crowd, he swore that he would have got rid of everything and would have come back to take me, and he urgently begged me to wait for him... it was like a secret engagement”. There will be an escape, but of the one from the other. He is full of doubts, she is conditioned by her family “the so-called good breeding I have been given destroyed my first love”. They went on looking for each other and stumbling all life long, and they never found each other again. When they meet, Gustav doesn’t let go and says important words: “Your charme hasn’t ceased to capture me, it becomes stronger and stronger”; Alma is enigmatic: “He was the first great love of my life, but then I was just a child, dipped in music and apart from the world...”. drawing the conclusions, she will say: “I owe Gustav Klimt many tears, but also my awakening”. Venice remains a crucial point in the ascending road that constituted Alma Mahler’s sentimental life, a sort of greedy desire to love and be loved. She will continue to come back to Venice, as she will continue to unravel stormy love plots all the time: “Yesterday I arrived here, in Venice! It is my house the one in which I am now living. My place... mine, I created it from nothing...”. here she will repeatedly arrange meetings with the stormy assaults of young Oskar Kokoschka. Here, with her third husband, the poet Franz Werfel, she buys a house “for a ridiculously low price”, but then she regrets it and resells it. In Venice she writes, on 2 April 1928: “I feel a tormented restlessness. I yearn for a deep feeling. Maybe, it is the reaction to my mortal fear... I would like to get together all what I have loved, or what I could love – with no compulsion or ties”.