Natalie Bauer-Lechner
Natalie [Natalia Anna Juliana] Bauer-Lechner (Penzing, Vienna, 9 May 1858 – Vienna, 8 June 1921) was an Austrian
Biography
Bauer-Lechner was the eldest child of five children (four girls and a boy) born to the Viennese bookshop owner and publisher Rudolf Lechner (1822–1895) and his wife Julie, née von Winiwarter (1831–1905). She was educated privately, and from 1866 to 1872 she and her sister Ellen (28 July 1859 – 24 March 1940) studied at the
Marriage and divorce
Most surprisingly and inexplicably, Natalie, only 17½ years old, married in Vienna on 27 December 1875 the 39-year-old widower, Professor, Dr. ph. Alexander Bauer (1836–1921), whose first wife (Emilie, born Russell) had died from pneumonia on 22 March 1874, only one day after she had given birth to her third daughter (cf. Wiener Zeitung, 26 March 1874, p. 8). The two other children were eleven and eight years old, respectively. It has therefore been speculated by Danish Mahler-scholar, Knud Martner, that the last-born daughter, christened in a Protestant church (though both parents were Catholics), on 7 April 1874 and named Minnie Emilie Forster Bauer (she died on 31 July 1956), was in fact the illegitimate child of young Natalie. (By comparing photographs of Bauer-Lechner and the young Minnie Bauer, their features look strikingly similar, and she looks quite different from her two older sisters.)
Her marriage, however, childless as it appears to have been, was dissolved ten years later, on 19 June 1885. Nothing is known about Bauer-Lechner's life between 1885 and 1890. Apparently she did not take an active part in the Viennese musical life during this period, at least not according to the daily newspapers. Not even her whereabouts is known.
The Soldat-Roeger String Quartet
In March 1895 Bauer-Lechner became the violist of the newly formed all-female
Later years
In her later years, Bauer-Lechner became an outspoken
Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler
The publication history of her principal work is complicated. The source is a bulky collection of notes entitled Mahleriana, apparently deriving from some thirty diaries which no longer exist. During her life, brief extracts were published in two Viennese journals: anonymously in Der Merker (March 1912, pp. 182–88), and under her own name in Musikblätter des Anbruch (1920, pp. 306–9). Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler was published in January 1923, and represents an edited selection from the available materials — as does the later English volume Recollections of Gustav Mahler (1980). The first German edition was republished in Hamburg 1984 (slightly altered and with additional materials, edited by Herbert Killian (Vienna), and with footnotes and commentaries by Knud Martner (Copenhagen)).
Recently owned by the late Mahler-scholar
A collection of notes recording conversations with Mahler's long-standing friend Siegfried Lipiner is understood to have once existed among her papers. Its current whereabouts are unknown.
Publications
- Bauer-Lechner, Natalie: Fragmente: Gelerntes und Gelebtes (Vienna, 1907).
- Bauer-Lechner, Natalie: Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Vienna-Leipzig, 1923)
- Bauer-Lechner, Natalie: Recollections of Gustav Mahler (tr. Dika Newlin, ed. Peter Franklin; London, 1980)
- Bauer-Lechner, Natalie: Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (ed. Herbert Killian und Knud Martner; Hamburg, 1984)
In fiction
The director Beate Thalberg achieved a docudrama based on her diary: My time will come.
References
- ^ Allan Kozinn (2013-07-27). "Chaste Ascetic? A Letter Details Mahler's Love Life". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-12-11.