Few women have aroused as much adoration or approbation as Alma Mahler, or possessed as potent an allure for men of outstanding talent. In the course of her long, turbulent life, she married the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the novelist Franz Werfel; conducted a love affair with the painter Oskar Kokoschka; and befriended Alban Berg, Thomas Mann, Gustav Klimt, and Arnold Schonberg. Born in Habsburg Austria in 1879, she saw her native Vienna decline from the peak of its glory, weathered World War I and the Weimar years, survived three children, and made a hairbreadth escape from the Nazis by fleeing to America, where she died at the age of eighty-five in 1964.This outstanding biography - the result of ten years' research - captures both the grandeur and the ambiguity of Alma Mahler's life. It gives us not only the femme fatale, but also the gifted musician who sublimated her own talent, and the anti-Semite who married two Jews and became a refugee from Hitler. The Bride of the Wind explores the nature of Alma Mahler's considerable mystique and her role in the creative ferment of her time. It belongs in the company of the classic biographies of such powerful and charismatic women as Zelda Fitzgerald, Eva Peron, and Sarah Bernhardt. Read Less