CANR
WORK TITLE: PASSIONATE SPIRIT
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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PERSONAL
Female.
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CAREER
Journalist, biographer, documentary filmmaker, and writer. Has produced and directed documentaries for major television networks in Britain.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Cate Haste is a British journalist, biographer, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She has produced and directed documentary films for major television networks in Britain. Aside from writing numerous biographies of notable individuals, she has also penned more general histories, such as Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War, Rules of Desire: Sex in Britain: World War I to the Present, and Nazi Women: Hitler’s Seduction of a Nation.
With coauthor Cherie Booth, Haste published The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997 in 2005. Booth, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, reflects on the lives of her predecessors, the spouses of British prime ministers. Starting with Clarissa Churchill Eden in the 1950s, she moves across the decades, covering their personal political observations and scandals by drawing on public material and interviews.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews suggested that readers “interested in architecture and interior design” may enjoy the descriptions on “the alterations in the two residences over the decades.” Overall, the same reviewer found The Goldfish Bowl to be “an uneven mix of reverence and irreverence, scholarship and gossip, but, overall, a bracing informal history.” A Contemporary Review contributor noted that readers who are “accustomed to the more strident tones of modern Prime Ministers’ wives” may find some of the profile to be “a refreshing change.”
In 2008 Haste edited Clarissa Eden A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden. The memoir centers on the political views and observations of Clarissa Churchill Eden, who was the Countess of Avon, niece of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and wife of her uncle’s successor, Anthony Eden. Her writings offer insight into the Suez crisis of 1956 and with her relationships with those around her. A Contemporary Review contributor pointed out that Haste “provides little balance” in the partisan nature of Eden’s diary, suggesting that readers who are looking for a more balanced account “should turn to D.R. Thorpe’s excellent biography of Eden.”
Haste published the biography Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint in 2011. Cumbrian landscape painter Sheila Fell (1931-79) serves as the subject of Haste’s next biography. Haste notes that her natural beauty and glamorous style often eclipsed her artistic talent. The biography shows that she was well connected in London’s arts scene, particularly with L.S. Lowry.
Reviewing the biography in Spectator, Andrew Lambirth stated: “Although elegantly and deftly put together, it does not engage deeply with Fell’s work; reading it is an oddly distancing experience.” Because of the lack of biographies published on Fell, though, Lambirth conceded that Haste’s account “may help the uninitiated to discover a distinctly worthwhile mid-20th-century British artist.”
In 2019 Haste published Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler. The biography of composer Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964) emphasizes her love life, something that made her infamous due to the many husbands and lovers she had. Haste uses Alma’s many diaries to retrace her relationships—including with first husband Gustav Mahler—and her many musician and artist lovers. Widowed at the age of thirty-two, she became an attractive option for her many suitors. Haste indicates that her love of composing was surpassed only by her need for the affection of others.
A Publishers Weekly contributor found the biography to be both “engrossing” and “sympathetic.” The same reviewer concluded that “Haste beautifully reprises the life of this force of nature.” A contributor to the Economist commented that “this biography captures the turmoil of Alma’s affairs, her artistic disappointments, visceral appetites and the tragic deaths of three of her four children. She emerges as a tough, lively, cultured, and wilful woman.” The same reviewer reasoned that “this portrait of Alma is compelling; the feminist gloss, less so.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews claimed that “Haste is cleareyed about Alma’s emotional neediness, her ‘occasional intransigence,’ and her ‘deeply conservative, anti-Semitic’ political views.” The same critic found Passionate Spirit to be “a well-rounded portrait of an imperious woman and her eventful life.” Writing in Theartsdesk.com, David Nice mentioned that “the narrative is racy, with clear fill-ins on the historical background, but a few German names are misspelt (about a dozen), suggesting a lack of engagement with the language (and Haste uses mostly secondary sources). A good popular biography, though, and beautifully presented.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Contemporary Review, April 1, 2005, review of The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997, p. 251; September 22, 2008, review of Clarissa Eden A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden, p. 400.
Economist, June 15, 2019, review of Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler, p. 78.
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2005, review of The Goldfish Bowl, p. 28; July 1, 2019, review of Passionate Spirit.
Publishers Weekly, May 20, 2019, review of Passionate Spirit, p. 71.
Spectator, January 8, 2011, Andrew Lambirth, review of Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint, p. 33.
ONLINE
Peters Fraser + Dunlop, https://petersfraserdunlop.com/ (August 21, 2019), author profile.
Theartsdesk.com, https://theartsdesk.com/ (June 16, 2019), David Nice, review of Passionate Spirit.
Cate Haste is a biographer, historian, and filmmaker. She is the author of a number of books, including Nazi Women and the award-winning biography Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint. Haste lives in London.
Cate Haste
Author
Cate Haste is an author, biographer and documentary film maker, whose recent biography of the artist Craigie Aitchison: A Life in Colour [Lund Humphries 2015] follows her award-winning biography/ monograph of Cumbrian landscape painter Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint. [Lund Humphries 2010]. She published with Cherie Blair a group biography of British Prime Ministers’ spouses, The Goldfish Bowl, [2004] and the Memoir of Clarissa Eden, Winston Churchill’s niece and Anthony Eden’s widow [2007]. Previous works include Nazi Women [2001] – about women in Nazi Germany, Rules of Desire -on sexual mores in the 20th century, and Keep the Home Fires Burning, an exploration of British propaganda in the First World War.
As documentary director -producer for the major networks she made films for CNN’s award-winning series, Cold War and Millennium, and for BBC, Channel 4 , and ITV she directed documentaries on Nazi Women, the Munich Crisis of 1938, and End of Empire and the biography of Winston Churchill, among others.
Booth, Cherie & Cate Haste THE GOLDFISH BOWL: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997 Chatto & Windus/Trafalgar (321 pp.) $30.00 Mar. 15, 2005 ISBN: 0-7011-7676-8
An intermingling of serious history and chatty anecdotes about the spouses of British prime ministers, conceived by the wife of the current one.
Booth, a lawyer, is married to Tony Blair. A career woman much like Hillary Clinton, Booth had received no training about how to comport herself when thrust into the role of Britain's first lady seven years ago. "Them is no job description for the prime minister's spouse because there is no job," Booth comments. She decided to learn how her predecessors had handled their roles, and so she teamed up with journalist Haste to research and write accounts of their lives. Those accounts grew into a book, with each predecessor back to 1955 covered in a separate chapter: Clarissa Eden, Dorothy Macmillan, Elizabeth Home, Mary Wilson, Audrey Callaghan, Denis Thatcher, and Norma Major. Four of the living spouses--Eden, Wilson, Thatcher, and Major granted interviews. The biographical accounts, meantime, aren't all whitewash--Dorothy Macmillan's extramarital affair with Robert Boothby is included--and Booth, further, explores lifestyle and policy disagreements as well as concordances within each marriage. Life inside Number 10 Downing Street (a combination office/home) and Chequers (an Elizabethan manor house about an hour's drive from the city, used primarily on the weekends) is a mix of work and play, but the emphasis is definitely on work. For those interested in architecture and interior design, Booth describes the alterations in the two residences over the decades, explaining why some of the features are sacrosanct. In her last chapter, she generalizes with insights about the shifting social class of the spouses, the role of religious faith while in a supporting role, the increasing difficulty of protecting family privacy in an era of pervasive media, and the varying ways of wielding political influence behind the scenes.
An uneven mix of reverence and irreverence, scholarship and gossip, but, overall, a bracing informal history. (For comparison, see The Blairs and Their Court, above.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Booth, Cherie & Cate Haste: The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2005, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A127194147/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7ffddead. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A127194147
The Goldfish Bowl: Married to the Prime Minister 1955-1997. Cherie Booth and Cate Haste. Chatto and Windus. [pounds sterling]18.99. 256 pages. ISBN 0-7011-7676-8. This survey covers the period from Clarissa, Lady Eden to Norma Major. Cherie Booth, a.k.a. Mrs Blair is a human rights lawyer, landlady, lecturer on lucrative foreign speaking tours and New Labour's 'First Lady'. Cate Haste, is in real life Lady Bragg and her husband is one of the leading figures in the new Blairite Establishment. Those now accustomed to the more strident tones of modern Prime Ministers' wives might find the lives of ladies such as Lady Eden, Mary Wilson or Lady Home a refreshing change. Sir Dennis Thatcher, of course, stood apart in every way. The authors put their own Labour politics aside and are quite fair in their treatment of people such as Sir Dennis with whom they would have had little in common. The book is based on published materials and a wide range of interviews and appears to have been mainly written by Lady Bragg with Mrs Blair penning the conclusion. (E.B.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Goldfish Bowl." Contemporary Review, Apr. 2005, p. 251. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A133016656/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4af3feae. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A133016656
Clarissa Eden A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden. Cate Haste, editor. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [pounds sterling]20.00. xvi + 288 pages. ISBN 978-0-297-85193-6. Few people have had a better view of twentieth century British politics at the top than Clarissa Churchill Eden, Countess of Avon, as the niece of Churchill and the wife of his successor, Anthony Eden. This memoir contains some amusing anecdotes, especially about her early life among the Oxford literary and artistic set and a useful diary of her time as the wife of an unfortunate Prime Minister. This is all the more topical as the current Prime Minister resembles Eden in so many ways: as the second figure in his predecessor's administration and as the possessor of a prickly personality. Those fascinated with the Suez crisis of 1956 will find that her diary provides a day by day commentary of her husband's views. The great villains are Dulles, the doctrinaire and dreary American Secretary of State and, even more, Eden's colleague and successor, Harold Macmillan. The diary is, of course partisan and the editor provides little balance. Those who want that should turn to D.R. Thorpe's excellent biography of Eden. (R.M.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Clarissa Eden A Memoir: From Churchill to Eden." Contemporary Review, Autumn 2008, p. 400+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A189797562/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b565f58. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A189797562
Sheila Fell
by Cate Haste
Lund Humphries, 35 [pounds sterling], pp. 136, ISBN 9780853319795
The legend of the glamorous artist Sheila Fell (1931-79), with her striking looks--black hair, white skin, large eyes--who died young, has tended to obscure the real achievement of her art. She was part of a talented generation which included her friends Frank Auerbach, Jeffery Camp and Craigie Aitchison, and was given her first solo exhibition at the age of 24 by Helen Lessore at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London.
Fell came from Cumberland and painted its landscape. At that first show, L.S. Lowry was so impressed he sought Fell out and they became great friends, though anyone who thinks Lowry had no artistic influence on his young protegée should compare his use of flake white with Fell's snowscapes of the 1970s. Lowry also offered material help, making Fell an allowance (arranged with great delicacy through her parents), and buying her pictures. His support was crucial, enabling Fell to maintain a working equilibrium despite her convoluted personal life.
But where did her art fit? More exploration of the artistic context is needed: Fell's relationship with Neo-Romanticism and Expressionism, with artists such as Dora Carrington, Joan Eardley and Josef Herman. As Fell noted: 'Cumberland is very dark, but being dark it is also brilliant.'
It's difficult to capture that brilliance in photographs of the paintings, which often look simply dull. The superbly potent charcoal drawings carry it better, but her work needs to be seen, and another museum show (the last one was 20 years ago) would be more than welcome.
This handsome slim volume is somewhat marred by two very poor quality reproductions (numbers 27 and 65) and various misprints (Michael Robertson for Richardson, Nina Herman for Nini, Cyril Connelly for Connolly, Lucien Freud for Lucian). Cate Haste, who is married to Melvyn Bragg and thus has a personal connection to Cumbria, is a writer of political memoirs and historical non-fiction. This is her first art book, and it is too much of a patchwork of exhibition reviews and quotations from the artist. Although elegantly and deftly put together, it does not engage deeply with Fell's work; reading it is an oddly distancing experience. However, it is the only publication in print on Fell and may help the uninitiated to discover a distinctly worthwhile mid-20th-century British artist.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lambirth, Andrew. "A Cumberland legend." Spectator, 8 Jan. 2011, p. 33. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A246101374/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf11c8a1. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A246101374
* Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler
Cate Haste. Basic, $32 (368p) ISBN 978-0-465-09671-8
In this sympathetic, engrossing biography of Viennese socialite and composer Alma Mahler (1879-1964), Haste (Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint) traces Mahler's struggle to find equilibrium among the men in her life (all creative geniuses), her erotic desires, and her own musical ambition. Haste mines Mahler's diaries and memoirs, and interviews her granddaughter to uncover her complexities and contradictions (she had many close Jewish friends, but nevertheless spouted anti-Semitic remarks). Ever excited by brilliant minds, Mahler married three men; each relationship began as an affair: composer Gustav Mahler; architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement; and the bestselling Jewish novelist and poet Franz Werfel (whom she escorted over the Pyrenees mountains by foot and across the Atlantic by ship to protect him from Nazi persecution). One lover--the eccentric artist Oskar Kokoschka, who "satisfied her yearning to be loved and worshipped"--commissioned a life-size Alma doll to dote on after their split. Mahler hosted legendary salons throughout Europe and the U.S., as Haste enthusiastically details ("What drives me around the world--like a flame in too much wind. I am forever yearning!"), but also suffered hardship (three of her four children died tragically). Haste beautifully reprises the life of this force of nature. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler." Publishers Weekly, 20 May 2019, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A587765515/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cdb2ad03. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A587765515
ALMA MAHLER was the supreme femme fatale of early-20th-century Vienna. From composers to priests, artists to architects, scientists to writers, she conquered hearts--and broke them. Her first kiss was with Gustav Klimt; her first husband was Gustav Mahler. Her second was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement; her third, the writer Franz Werfel. Her lovers included Oskar Kokoschka, a daring artist who commissioned a fetishistic, life-size doll of Alma after she ditched him. A century on, she has become the subject of feminist revisionism. Was she a capricious muse--or victim of chauvinist oppression?
"Passionate Spirit", Cate Haste's seductively accessible biography, offers a sympathetic interpretation of Alma's life. Written in elegant, lucid prose, her book is a treasure trove of European cultural riches and scandalous intrigue. She uses Alma's diaries to capture her subject's inner world.
Alma was born in 1879, the daughter of the painter Emil Schindler. She worshipped her father, which may help explain the magnetism that talented men exerted on her throughout her eventful life. Yet as Ms Haste emphasises, Alma was creative herself, pursuing both musical composition and piano.
Her first serious fling was with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. She jettisoned him after meeting Mahler, whose fiancee she soon became. Sternly he decreed that there was room for only one artist in their relationship. Devastated, Alma nevertheless gave up her music for the sake of love. Theirs at first seemed a happy marriage, but, increasingly frustrated, she began an affair with Gropius. Gustav sought advice from Sigmund Freud, but Alma continued the dalliance until his death. Ms Haste thinks she took the only way out of an oppressive marriage. Others claim that she as good as killed her husband.
This biography captures the turmoil of Alma's affairs, her artistic disappointments, visceral appetites and the tragic deaths of three of her four children. She emerges as a tough, lively, cultured and wilful woman, who also composed highly regarded songs that were characteristic of her era; a modern performer describes them as "sensual, charming and surprising". As Ms Haste says, these works have been overshadowed by Gustav's genius.
This portrait of Alma is compelling; the feminist gloss, less so. Alma is known to have edited her diaries (and Gustav's correspondence), making them unreliable records of her travails. His dominant streak does not account for her later behaviour. They were married for only nine years; Alma lived to be 85.
Did she have the tenacity and discipline to have been as prolific a composer as Gustav? She seems generally to have preferred more immediate forms of gratification. The sad truth, from a feminist perspective, is that, if Alma had actually led the life of a dedicated composer and forgone her sensational flings, she might now be a much less famous figure.
Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler.
By Cate Haste.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A muse's burden; Art and love." The Economist, 15 June 2019, p. 78(US). Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A588876773/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2c4ae68f. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A588876773
Haste, Cate PASSIONATE SPIRIT Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $32.00 9, 10 ISBN: 978-0-465-09671-8
Biography of a woman of "powerful allure" who attracted men of genius.
Biographer, historian, and filmmaker Haste (Craigie Aitchinson: A Life in Colour, 2014, etc.) creates a sharp, sympathetic portrait of the sexually and emotionally voracious Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964), whose three husbands and many lovers brought her both prestige and notoriety. A gifted composer, she gave up a career in music to devote herself to her first husband, Gustav Mahler, who swept her off her feet while at the same time stringently delineating the terms of their marriage: "It's not so simple to marry a person like me," he told her. "I am free and must be free. I cannot be bound, or tied to one spot." He was 41 and she 22 when they married, and although both had doubts, Alma was convinced that she could not live without him. "I felt that only he could shape my life," she recalled. "I sensed his true worth and significance, which placed him streets ahead of every other man I had met." There was no lack of men--artists, musicians, and other creative types--in pursuit of the beautiful Alma, and Haste draws largely on Alma's sometimes self-serving diaries and memoirs to recount her affairs before, after, and during her several marriages. Life with Mahler proved difficult. He was demanding, and without her own music to sustain her, Alma felt bored, suffocated, and subject to "nervous torments." After Mahler's death, "a series of suitors" lavished attention on the 32-year-old widow, "a statuesque beauty with a magnetic charisma." As much as she longed to return to composing, she longed, even more, to be worshiped. She married handsome young architect Walter Gropius, had a passionate affair with "the provocative, savage, eccentric artist" Oscar Koskoschka, divorced Gropius, and eventually married poet Franz Werfel. Haste is cleareyed about Alma's emotional neediness, her "occasional intransigence," and her "deeply conservative, anti-Semitic" political views.
A well-rounded portrait of an imperious woman and her eventful life.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Haste, Cate: PASSIONATE SPIRIT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591278904/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9b4ad2b7. Accessed 11 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591278904
Cate Haste: Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler review - a racy life pacily narrated
The creative Viennese soclalite who obsessively nurtured masterpieces by others
by David NiceSunday, 16 June 2019
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Alma with her daughters by Mahler Maria and Anna
Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel née Schindler can never be subject to a boring biography. A child of her fin de siècle time, torn between the need to be free and the will to inspire great figures, she was all too often gauged by the men who loved and tried to dominate her. Cate Haste gives us their verdicts, but the picture drawn from Alma's diaries and autobiographies only confirms the general portrait.
There's little new here, despite Haste's claims of "deep delving" (somewhat undermined by immediate acknowledgment of help from researchers and translators - inevitably disdained by those of us compelled to be lone-wolf biographers). It's good to read around the years with Gustav Mahler, who all too typically told his new wife that there wasn't room for two composers in the marriage but in his desperation to keep Alma from her new love Walter Gropius finally gave encouragement to her song-writing just before he died.
Gustav Klimt, her first great love, told her she was "spoilt by too much attention, conceited and superficial". In him, Zemlinsky and Mahler she obviously sought a replacement for the artist father she revered, who died when she was 13 years old (one revelation here, drawn from Marie Bonaparte's unpublished diary manuscript as reproduced in Stuart Feder's Gustav Mahler: A Year in Crisis, tells us more about Mahler's meeting with Freud and the great psychonalyst - rather than "psychotherapist," as Haste puts it - enlightening him about his mother-fixation).
After Mahler's death, Alma went for younger men: the terrifying and sado-masochistic Oscar Kokoschka, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and the most popular Austrian-based author of his time, Franz Werfel, with whom she stayed as her charms faded and for whom she made practical moves of self-sacrifice, showing remarkable fortitude in their escape from the Nazis through France - including some time in Lourdes, which gave Werfel inspiration for The Song of Bernadette - to Spain, Portugal and on to America.
The language of Alma's diaries and her exchanges with many of her lovers show a gushing romantic delusion that never gave way to real self-knowledge. She is refreshingly, occasionally embarrassingly, frank about her sexual experiences, dangerously ignorant of the political sphere - which led to huge clashes with the politically engaged left-winger Werfel - and sometimes risibly egotistical about it (of the First World War: "I sometimes imagine that I was the one who ignited this whole world conflagration in order to experience some kind of development or enrichment - even if it be only death"). She later repented her admiration of "genius" Hitler and tried to airbrush it out of her reminiscences and collection of letters, but for all that she never estranged most of the members of the Jewish circle in which she mixed, both in Vienna and Los Angeles.
Something of her flightiness is captured in Tom Lehrer's masterful song "Alma":
While married to Gus she met Gropius
And soon she was swinging with Walter.
Gus died and her teardrops were copious
She cried all the way to the altar.
Perhaps the most devastating verdict on Alma's ability to move on came from her daughter by Gropius, Manon - the same "angel" to whom Berg dedicated his Violin Concerto - as unflinchingly recorded by the mother in her diary: " 'Let me die in peace...You'll get over it, the way you get over everything', and as if to correct herself, 'like everyone gets over everything' ". It can't have been easy: Manon was the third child she lost. And who are we to judge?
As for Alma's work as a composer, Haste offers no guidance on the surviving songs - much was destroyed in the Second World War - until the end, where she concludes rather weakly with "her own music is her lasting, and living, legacy". In fact the songs are good, but inevitably not on the level of her first husband's work (what is?) They have found their place in performance, and their level: worth hearing, but hardly genius. Had Alma been a born creator, she would have persisted with her work. Clearly she was an excellent pianist, even if it's unlikely that, as Haste claims, she played entire Wagner operas from memory - only of the composer Enescu, a phenomenal intelligence, can that be true. In all else she was, as one observer commented, a generalist with a vague grasp of facts.
The narrative is racy, with clear fill-ins on the historical background, but a few German names are misspelt (about a dozen), suggesting a lack of engagement with the language (and Haste uses mostly secondary sources). A good popular biography, though, and beautifully presented, as usual, by Bloomsbury Publishing.
Passionate Spirit - The Life of Alma Mahler by Kate Haste (Bloomsbury Publishing, £26)
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