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The Alma Problem is an issue of concern to musicologists, historians and biographers who deal with the lives and works of Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma. Alma Mahler (ultimately Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel) was not only an articulate, well-connected and influential woman, but she also went on to outlive her first husband by more than 50 years. For half a century, therefore, she was the principal authority on the mature Mahler's values, character and day-to-day behaviour, and her two books quickly became the central source material for Mahler scholars and music-lovers alike. Unfortunately, as scholarship has investigated the picture she sought to paint of Mahler and her relationship with him, her accounts have increasingly been revealed as unreliable, false, and misleading, and evidence of deliberate manipulation and falsification can no longer be ignored. The fact that these deeply flawed accounts have nevertheless had a massive influence — leaving their mark upon several generations of scholars, interpreters and music-lovers, and becoming a foundation of the critical and popular literature on Mahler — constitutes the 'Alma Problem'. == Letters == The 'Alma Problem' manifests itself in several dimensions. To begin with, there is her treatment of the couple's correspondence. Of the more than 350 written communications Mahler is known to have written to her, Alma suppressed almost 200 — and of the 159 that she did choose to publish, she is now known to have made unacknowledged alterations to no fewer than 122. On three occasions Alma even manufactured items by joining together separate letters. She also appears to have systematically destroyed everything that she wrote to her husband: the text of only a single one of her own letters, written before they were married, is known to survive. As for the changes she secretly made in his letters before publication, a clear pattern can be discerned: Alma seems determined to present herself as a powerful, potent person whose tremendous gifts and personal allure placed her at the very centre of events — at the same time as insisting that her selfless devotion to her husband made her the powerless, guiltless victim of his unreasonableness. Thus her deletion of Mahler's references to the presents he bought or offered her protected her claims that he hardly ever gave her gifts; while her deletion of his references to the plentiful sums of money he handed over to her allowed her to maintain that he had kept her short of housekeeping money. Her deletion of references to people close to Mahler but not liked by her permitted her to minimise their apparent role in his life, compared to hers. And on other occasions she seems to have been anxious to create the impression that Mahler thought she might be merely unwilling to do or be something, rather than actually unable: his "Answer ... if you are able to follow me" is secretly modified to "Answer ... if you are willing to follow me". On this subject, Jonathan Carr has noted: "If the text (a letter ) offended Alma's self-esteem or predilections then it had to be 'corrected' with some judicious deletion or insertion before the world could be allowed to see it". In some cases her deletions have actually proved impossible to correct: her distinctive violet ink has obliterated the original word, line or passage. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Alma Problem」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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