Anna Justine von Zsolnay

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Mahler

Anna Justine Mahler (15 June 1904 – 3 June 1988) was an Austrian sculptor.

[edit]Biography

Born in Vienna, she was the daughter of the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Schindler. They nicknamed her 'Gucki' on account of her big blue eyes (Gucken is German for 'peek' or 'peep'). Her illustrious father died when she was only seven, and her mother immediately sought to make up for the time when her own artistic and emotional ambitions had been suppressed by her marriage. The house became a centre for intellectual and cultural life in Vienna, and Anna, stifled, may have been driven into an early marriage at the age of sixteen just to get away.

The marriage, on 2 November 1920, to a musician, Rupert Koller, ended within months, and soon Anna moved to Berlin and fell in love with Ernst Krenek the composer, who later was asked by Alma to finish Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. Anna married him on 15 January 1924, but that marriage too failed, and she left Krenek for good in November 1924. During this time, Krenek was completing his Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 29. The Australian violinist Alma Moodie assisted Krenek with getting financial assistance from her Swiss patron Werner Reinhart (at whose instigation Krenek and Mahler were living in Zürich) and, in gratitude, Krenek dedicated the concerto to Moodie, and she premiered it on 5 January 1925, in Dessau. Krenek’s divorce from Anna Mahler became final a few days after the premiere.[1] Krenek did not attend the premiere, but he did have an affair with Moodie[2] which has been described as "short-lived and complicated".[3]

She married (2 December 1929) the publisher Paul Zsolnay, and they had a daughter, Alma (born 4 August 1930). Again the marriage failed (1934).

Anna Mahler discovered at the age of twenty-six that sculpture was the medium in which she could best express her creativity. Having taken lessons in sculpting in Vienna in 1930, she became an established sculptress there, and was awarded the Grand Prix in Paris in 1937. April 1939 found her living in Hampstead in London and advertising in the newspaper for pupils, having fled Nazi Austria. On 3 March 1943 she married the conductor Anatole Fistoulari with whom she had another daughter, Marina (born 1 August 1943).

After the War, she travelled to California and lived there for some years. In the mid-1950s, while married to Fistoulari, she appeared on the radio quiz show "You Bet Your Life." It is probably at this point in her life that she married (in 1970) her fifth husband, Albrecht Joseph (1901-1991), a Hollywood film editor and writer of screenplays. After her mother died in 1964, Anna, now financially independent, returned to London for a while before finally deciding to live in Spoleto in Italy in 1969. In 1988 she died in Hampstead, while visiting her daughter Marina there. She is buried at Highgate Cemetery.

Mahler once said that she had found true love with her last husband but had left him at the age of seventy-five in order that they might both progress, since they spent too much time looking after each other.

As well as sculpting successfully in stone, Anna Mahler produced bronze heads of many of the musical giants of the 20th century including Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, Artur Schnabel, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Rudolf Serkin and Eileen Joyce.[4]

Residence registration: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSYH-JQDL-Z?i=2945...

• Updated from MyHeritage Family Trees via ex-husband Ernest Krenek by SmartCopy: Apr 7 2015, 8:08:24 UTC