Who was this Alma Schindler really?

What can you expect at the world premiere of the opera Alma? What inspired the composer? We asked Ella Milch-Sheriff for an interview. 

Ella Milch-Sheriff was born in Haifa in 1954 and studied composition at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University. Her oeuvre includes symphonic music as well as chamber music compositions and includes five music theater works to date, including the chamber opera Baruch's Silence (libretto by Yael Ronen), which premiered at the Staatstheater Braunschweig in 2010, and the opera The Banality of Love, which premiered at the Staatstheater Regensburg in 2018 and is thematically dedicated to the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.

In the following short interview, the composer talks about the creation of her latest opera Alma.

“This biography is a veritable tragedy and therefore perfect for a grand opera,” she says, among other things.

Alma Mahler-Werfel has been on your mind for many years ... How has your artistic journey with this extraordinary woman been so far?

It was a dream of mine for years to write an opera about Alma. She is often described as a malicious woman, but if I may say so, the vast majority of biographies about Alma have been written by men. I have often wondered why she is not only fervently revered, but also passionately hated. Who was this Alma Schindler really, who wrote “I want to compose a really good opera” in her diary at the age of 19? What happened that it never came to pass? I explored all these questions together with the Israeli author Ido Ricklin, who wrote a highly exciting libretto. 

To what extent does the aspect of motherhood play a special role in the opera?

Of Alma's four children, only one daughter - Anna Mahler - survived childhood; in my opera, she is the second protagonist alongside Alma. Alma never went to the funerals of her children. Why? Because it didn't fit in with her dazzling self-image as “the most beautiful woman in Vienna”? Or was it rather because she couldn't bear the pain? I think that when Gustav Mahler forced his wife to give up composing, much more died in her than “just” her artistic ambition. 

What developments and changes of course are you confronted with when composing an opera?

Sometimes I changed my musical-dramatic concept during the process. For example, I first thought of doing the Kokoschka act in a kind of rock style with electric guitar in the orchestra. It took me more than a month of experimentation to realize that this did not suit this opera, so I abandoned the idea. In any case, Kokoschka will be an extremely eccentric, obsessive and demonic figure, a kind of Mephistopheles, in keeping with his historical model. What was clear from the outset, however, was the antichronological narrative: my opera begins with the end, so to speak - it starts with the funeral of Manon Gropius - and runs backwards to the moment when Alma gives up her soul as an artist. This biography is a veritable tragedy and therefore perfect for a grand opera.  

Alma