Manon Gropius
Manon Gropius | |
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Muse | |
Parents | Walter Gropius, Alma Mahler |
Alma Manon Anna Justina Carolina Gropius (5 October 1916 – 22 April 1935) was the Austrian-born daughter of the German architect Walter Gropius and the Austrian composer and diarist Alma Mahler and the stepdaughter of the novelist and poet Franz Werfel.[1] She is a Randfigur (peripheral person) whose importance lies in her relationships to major figures: a muse who inspired the composer Alban Berg, as well as Werfel and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti. Manon Gropius is most often cited as the "angel" and dedicatee of Berg's Violin Concerto.[2]
Life
Manon Gropius, christened in a Lutheran church as Alma Manon Anna Justina Carolina,[3] was born in Vienna during the height of World War I, on 5 October 1916, the third child of Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, and wife of the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.[2] Her parents separated soon after Gropius discovered Alma's affair with the writer Franz Werfel in the summer of 1918 and the true paternity of her fourth child, Martin Johannes Gropius.[4]
Like other children of her background and parentage, Manon, called "Mutzi" by family and friends (she was childhood friends with
During the early 1920s, Walter Gropius gave Alma the legal grounds to divorce him for infidelity, by arranging to be discovered
Manon was educated at home by Schulli and various tutors. Like her older half-sister, Anna Mahler, she was given piano lessons, but did not distinguish herself as a musician. She attended the same progressive girls' school that her mother attended, Institut Hanausek, in Vienna's First District.[7] But her irascible behavior, owing much to her free-spirited early childhood—Alma let her go about naked ("stripped") as much as possible—led Manon to eventually leave the school, and her education continued at home.[1] Although she wanted to be an actress, her mother wanted her to have a practical education, too, and Manon, who had become fluent in French and Italian, prepared for the Austrian state exam as a language teacher and translator.[7]
During the 1930s, she became more tractable, even serene. She had a way with animals and was often followed by cats and dogs. She could approach and feed wild
Hardly a moment later a gazelle came tripping into the room, a light-footed, brown-haired creature disguised as a young girl, untouched by the splendor into which she had been summoned, younger in her innocence than her probable sixteen years. She radiated timidity even more than beauty, an angelic gazelle, not from the ark but from heaven. I jumped up, thinking to bar her entrance into this alcove of vice or at least to cut off her view of the poisoner on the wall, but Lucrezia, who never stopped playing her part, had irrepressibly taken the floor:
"Beautiful, isn't she? This is my daughter Manon. By Gropius. In a class by herself. You don't mind my saying so, do you, Annerl [diminutive for Anna Mahler]? What's wrong with having a beautiful sister? Like father, like daughter. Did you ever see Gropius? A big handsome man. The true Aryan type. The only man who was racially suited to me. All the others who fell in love with me were little Jews. Like Mahler. The fact is, I go for both kinds. You can run along now, pussycat. Wait, go and see if Franzl [diminutive for Franz Werfel] is writing poetry. If he is, don't bother him. If he isn't, tell him I want him."
With this commission Manon, the third trophy, slipped out of the room, as untouched as she had come; her errand didn't seem to trouble her. I was greatly relieved at the thought that nothing could touch her, that she would always remain as she was and never become like her mother, the poisoner on the wall, the glassy, blubbery old woman on the sofa.[8]
The teenage Manon was used by her aging mother to attract the kind of sensual male attention that she had readily enjoyed in her youth.
Manon never let go of her desire to act. She even wrote the famous Burgtheater actor Raoul Aslan a letter and a poem in which she expressed her desire to one day perform on the same stage.[9] With her dark long hair and beauty, she so impressed the theater director Max Reinhardt that he offered the part of First Angel in a revival of his and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Calderón's The Great Theater of the World for the 1934 Salzburg Festival.[6] But Werfel did not think Manon had the training for such an important role, having only performed in a few theater productions that he had directed himself to entertain her mother and their friends on the back porch of Haus Mahler in Breitenstein, a porch her father designed in 1916.[6][5] So, as her stepfather, Werfel refused to allow Manon the opportunity.[6]
In March 1934, Manon and her mother traveled to Venice for the Easter holiday.[1] There, Manon contracted polio, which left her totally paralyzed.[2] She returned to Vienna, where she recovered some use of her arms and hands. She was still determined to act; teachers from the famous Reinhardt-Seminar made house calls.[6] Alma also encouraged visitors, including a younger Austrofascist, a bureaucrat named Erich Cyhlar, to court Manon, in the hopes that pending nuptials would compel her to walk again.[1]
In mid-April, Manon gave her mother and stepfather a private performance in their home. Then, over Holy Week, she suffered breathing problems and organ failure. She had been receiving an aggressive form of diathermy that employed X-ray machines, which can induce iatrogenic complications.[7]
Manon Gropius died on 22 April 1935, and was buried in Grinzing Cemetery in a ceremony that Canetti also described in great detail.[10] Her father and stepmother traveled from England to Germany, which placed strictures on its citizens as well as punitive fees for crossing its border with Austria.[5]
Legacy
In the weeks after her funeral, two attendees, Franz Werfel and Alban Berg, both planned to honor Manon's memory as well as console her mother Alma, who had not attended the funeral.[4][7] Berg had already started his Violin Concerto before Manon's death. He and his wife, Helene, considered Manon a daughter; the childless Helene Berg kept a photograph of Manon by her bed. Berg soon adapted and finished the concerto, which included programmatic allusions to Manon and, according to some musicologists, Berg's illegitimate daughter, Albine, in much the same way his Lyric Suite (1926) alludes to its secret dedicatee, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, Werfel's sister, with whom Berg had an affair in the 1920s.[11]
Werfel planned a novel about a fictional Catholic saint's life in late-17th-century Venice, Legends, with various subtitles: The Intercessoress of Animals, of Snakes, and of the Dead.
Manon's half-sister, the sculptor Anna Mahler, produced a marker for her grave—a young woman holding an hourglass—but the Anschluss prevented it from being installed.[13] The statue was later destroyed in an air raid. Manon's grave lacked a permanent marker until the 1950s, when Walter Gropius designed the flat, triangular marker and landscaping.[7]
References
- ^ ISBN 9783442734115.
- ^ ISBN 9783596205455.
- ^ Taufbuch Lutherische Stadtkirche [Baptism book Lutheran City Church]. Vol. 73. Vienna-Innere Stadt. 1916. p. 103.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Manon Gropius was the 150th infant christened. - ^ ISBN 9783100910264.
- ^ a b c d Reginald R. Isaacs (1983). Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk [Walter Gropius: The Man and his Work] (in German). Berlin: Gebrüder Mann.
- ^ a b c d e f g Franz Werfel, "Manon," The Commonweal, 1 May 1942.
- ^ .
- ^ Elias Canetti, "Trophies," The Play of the Eyes (Der Augenspiel), translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).
- ^ Erich Rietenauer, Alma, meine Liebe (Alma, my Dear) (Vienna: Amalthea, 2008).
- ^ Canetti, "Funeral of an Angel", The Play of the Eyes.
- ^ Douglas Jarman, "Alban Berg", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy.
- ^ Max Phillips, The Artist's Wife (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
- ^ Barbara Weidle and Ursula Seeber (eds.), Anna Mahler: Ich bin in mir selbst zu Hause (Anna Mahler: I am at home within myself) (Bonn: Weidle, 2004)
Further reading
- Reidel, James (2021). Manon's World: A Hauntology of a Daughter in the Triangle of Alma Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel. Seagull Books. ISBN 978-0-85742-749-6.