In 1973, while a doctoral student at Indiana University, Henry I. Schvey, Ph.D., struck up a friendship with eminent Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Now chair of the Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences, Schvey has written an original drama about a notorious incident from Kokoschka’s youth: his torrid affair with Alma Mahler, the beautiful widow of composer Gustav Mahler.
“Kokoschka: A Love Story” will receive its world premiere at 8 p.m. Feb. 8 in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre. Performances, featuring a student cast, continue at 8 p.m. Feb. 9-10 and at 2 p.m. Feb. 10-11.
“Alma was the great love of Kokoschka’s life,” said Schvey.
The couple met in 1912, a year after Gustav Mahler’s death. Though Alma was already famous, and several years older than Kokoschka, she and the young painter quickly became inseparable.
“Kokoschka felt that Alma was almost his female half, his ‘Anima,’ and that he could not create without her,” Schvey said. “He liked to wear her red blouse while working and for a time even signed his name ‘Alma Oskar Kokoschka.'”
Mahler lived with Kokoschka for three increasingly tumultuous years until 1915, when Kokoschka destroyed a death mask of Gustav Mahler, and Alma ended the affair. Kokoschka enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army and was seriously wounded at Galicia, receiving a bullet to the head and a bayonet wound in his side. When newspapers mistakenly reported him dead, a distraught Mahler ransacked his studio and destroyed their correspondence.
“Kokoschka: A Love Story” juxtaposes the history of their affair, which unfolds in flashback, with the equally riveting story of the artist’s convalescence. Set in 1918 in a small boarding house outside Dresden, the play finds Kokoschka on the verge of madness, scarred both physically and emotionally yet still obsessed by his memories of Alma. In desperation, he begins corresponding with a doll-maker in Stuttgart and eventually commissions a life-size recreation of his beloved.
“There are various accounts of how the doll was received,” Schvey said. “It’s said that Kokoschka took the doll to the opera and that he hired a servant to act as the doll’s handmaiden, dressing her in expensive Parisian fashion. But at some point, during a lavish party, the doll was destroyed, thrown from a window and buried in the backyard. And finally, he was able to move on and resume his career.”
Kokoschka’s career flourished throughout the 1920s while Mahler eventually left her second husband, Walter Gropius, for the novelist Franz Werfel.
By the late 1930s, Kokoschka had fled Germany for Britain and, after the war, Switzerland, where Schvey met him.
Schvey first contacted Kokoschka while researching the painter’s early forays into playwriting. “Kokoschka’s plays are historically important because they’re the first examples of German Expressionism in theater,” Schvey said. “He was very, very rebellious and basically made it up as he went along. His apocalyptic one-act ‘Murderer Hope of Women’ caused a huge scandal when it was first performed, with fistfights breaking out in the audience.”
Schvey eventually wrote the 1982 book “Oskar Kokoschka: The Painter as Playwright” and translated one of Kokoschka’s major poems, “The Dreaming Youths,” the first example of stream-of-consciousness technique in German. Schvey continued to visit the artist in Switzerland while teaching at Leiden University in the Netherlands. During one trip, Kokoschka gave him a portfolio of 13 lithographs illustrating his anti-fascist play “Comenius.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Schvey found the artist and his wife, Olda, more than willing to discuss his extraordinary relationship with Mahler. Olda even showed him photographs of the doll.
“I was a little reticent to raise the subject,” Schvey said. “But I think Kokoschka felt I understood his work, and even in his late ’80s, those years with Alma remained very much in the present tense for him. Alma was the great love of his life. He never got over her.”
Tickets are $15; $9 for students, seniors, and faculty and staff. For more information, call 935-6543.
In addition, Schvey will lecture on “Kokoschka: Painter and Playwright” at 6:30 p.m. Feb. 2 in the Kemper Art Museum, Room 103. The talk will explore the intersection between visual arts and drama. For more information, call 935-4523 or visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.