OLIVER HILMES has written a number of best-selling biographies. His second work appeared in English as Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth.
Oliver Hilmes’s Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler is a
stylishly dispiriting biography of the woman who had early
ambitions to become a composer but who won fame for a remarkable
series of marriages and affairs—to and with, variously, Gustav
Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. Hilmes,
who earlier wrote a fine life of Cosima Wagner, emphasizes the
extent of Mahler-Werfel’s anti-Semitism, which remained
disturbingly strong even during the Second World War: in exile in
Los Angeles, she told Werfel that the Nazis had done “a great many
praiseworthy things.””
*New Yorker*
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