It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.
It is a sobering thought, for instance, that when he was my age, Mozart had been dead for two years.
Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-educated mathematician and composer of dark satiric songs, was 37 years old when he said that. He was performing onstage at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco in July 1965. The hungry i was a hot spot for up and coming performers. Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Bill Cosby, and the Kingston Trio, among others, had been on that stage. Lehrer’s performance was recorded and marketed as That was the Week that Was.
The line was from the introduction to his song “Alma”, inspired, he said, by his reading in the New York Times “the juiciest, spiciest, raciest obituary it has ever been my pleasure to read.” It was that of Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel. He went on to explain that “she had managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men of Central Europe. Among these there three that she went so far as to marry – composer Gustav Mahler, composer of Das Lied van der Erde and other light classics, architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School of Design, and writer Fraz Werfel, author of Song of Bernadotte”.
The obituary Lehrer was referring to was undoubtedly the one appearing in the Sunday New York Times for December 13, 1964. Alma had died on the preceding Friday in her apartment at 120 East 73rd street in Manhattan at the age of 85. It observed that she had written in her autobiography that “she had always been attracted to genius,” and had confided to her first husband that “what she really loved in a man were his achievements.”
That attraction went beyond the bounds of marriage. As Lehrer observed, her lovers were listed in the obituary, which is what made it such a hot item. She had an affair with painter Oskar Kokoscha, biologist Paul Kammerer, and pianist/conductor Osip Gabrilowitsch. She was also friends with (although apparently not a lover of) artist Paul Klimt, and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. Later, in Los Angeles, she was friends with (but not romantically involved with) Arnold Schoenburg, Thomas Mann, and Igor Stravinsky.
“Attracted to genius,” indeed!
Tom Lehrer, even at the ripe old age of 37, had no need to denigrate himself. He’d graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, then taught at Harvard, MIT, Wellesley and UC Santa Cruz, worked at Los Alamos Laboratory and for the National Security Agency, and invented (he claimed) the Jello Shot (an expedient to circumvent the naval base’s strictures on alcohol consumption).
He had also recorded five albums of songs and done quite a lot of performing. He was the song writer for the US version of the show That was the Week that Was that ran on NBC from 1963 to 1965, although he did not personally perform his topical songs on the show.
One wonders what Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel would have made of Lehrer. As a composer herself, she might have been entranced. Although maybe she would have a dim view of such popular fare. In any event, Lehrer himself presents a daunting view to the rest of us, making us reflect on how little we’ve accomplished.
