About the Author

OLIVER HILMES has written a number of best-selling biographies. His second work appeared in English as Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth.

Reviews

Oliver Hilmes’s Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler is a stylishly dispiriting biography of the woman who had early ambitions to become a composer but who won fame for a remarkable series of marriages and affairs—to and with, variously, Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. Hilmes, who earlier wrote a fine life of Cosima Wagner, emphasizes the extent of Mahler-Werfel’s anti-Semitism, which remained disturbingly strong even during the Second World War: in exile in Los Angeles, she told Werfel that the Nazis had done “a great many praiseworthy things.””
*New Yorker*