The songs of Alma Schindler-Mahler-Werfel, as the booklet to this disc calls her (I suppose it would be pedantic to refer to her as Schindler-Krenek-Mahler-Gropius-Werfel) would be of interest even if they were bad. Bad they are not: her teacher Zemlinsky (who longed for hyphenation with her but stood no chance once Mahler arrived) found “very much talent but little skill” in the compositions she showed him. He taught her skill, as these 14 songs show; they are all that survive of a once voluminous portfolio of works, virtually all of them written before, at the age of 22, she married Mahler on condition that she give up composing. He relented eventually, and she wrote two or three more songs, but seems to have composed nothing after 1916, when she was in her mid-thirties.
For the most part they are likeable rather than impressive, providing incidental pleasures rather than consistent ones. Her ideas themselves are often excellent but she cannot always sustain them. Her melody for Hartleben’s In my father’s garden, for example, is both a good tune and a shrewd response to the fact that each verse contains pairs of repeated phrases. But the poem does have six verses and her setting seems protracted at six minutes. Much the same is true of Falke’s Harvest Song, but at its very end she writes a beautiful, bold melisma which is arresting. There are signs of her range expanding in the later songs, most of which call for big gestures, and she can provide them even for such difficult texts as two Hymns by Novalis and (perhaps her finest song) Bierbaum’s Ecstasy.
It probably seemed a good idea to couple them with Zemlinsky’s Op. 7, which he dedicated to her. In their restraint and control, however, the Zemlinsky settings exemplify those qualities that Alma seldom achieved. The most moving piece in the recital is his gentle reproof to her, a setting of Jacobsen’s Irmelin Rose: “But Princess Steel-Heart chased all her lovers away, finding some blemish [Alma had never hidden the fact that she found Zemlinsky ugly] in all of them”. But we would not listening to this recital if she had not acquired all those hyphens; even merely talented songs are fascinating from such a woman as she was. They are admirably sung and accompanied, and the recording is excellent.'