
Mahler-Werfel's postcard to Leonard Bernstein, Dec. 1960.
Femme Vitale. The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2025.
Because this article involved a fair amount of archival research, I thought it might be helpful to append some endnotes, for the benefit of anyone wishing to know the sources of various quotations. I'm grateful to John Pollack and the staff at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, for facilitating my visits to the Mahler-Werfel Collection (MWC in the notes below). "Alma Maria Tagebuch" refers to the typewritten transcription of Mahler-Werfel's post-1902 diaries, which she used as the basis for the two versions of her memoirs, And the Bridge Is Love and Mein Leben. (The typescript is bound in red covers stamped "Das Tagebuch der Alma Maria.") References to the 1898-1902 diaries are given by date; all can be found in the published German edition, Tagebuch-Suiten 1898–1902, ed. Antony Beaumont and Susanne Rode-Breymann (Fischer, 1997), and most in the abridged English translation, The Diaries 1898–1902, trans. Antony Beaumont (Faber & Faber, 2000). Translations are my own. Much thanks to Jane Bua, who fact-checked the piece, and Daniel Zalewski and Leo Carey, who edited it.