Manon Gropius

Alma Manon Anna Justina Carolina Gropius (5 October 1916 – 22 April 1935) was the Austrian-born daughter of the German architect Walter Gropius and the Austrian composer and diarist Alma Mahler and the stepdaughter of the novelist and poet Franz Werfel. She is a Randfigur (peripheral person) whose importance lies in her relationships to major figures: a muse who inspired the composer Alban Berg, as well as Werfel and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti. Manon Gropius is most often cited as the "angel" and dedicatee of Berg's Violin Concerto.

Life Manon Gropius, christened in a Lutheran church as Alma Manon Anna Justina Carolina, was born in Vienna during the height of World War I, on 5 October 1916, the third child of Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, and wife of the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

Like other children of her background and parentage, Manon, called "Mutzi" by family and friends (she was childhood friends with Maria Altmann, also called "Mutzi" later in life), was raised by her nanny, a former Austro-Hungarian Army nurse, Ida Gebauer (whom Manon called "Schulli"). There, the precocious five-year-old saw the rehearsals and began to "perform" the roles of the heroine as well as declaim lines. From that time on, her mother, Werfel, and others in their milieu cultivated the girl's interest in the theater.

During the early 1920s, Walter Gropius gave Alma the legal grounds to divorce him for infidelity, by arranging to be discovered in flagrante delicto with a prostitute. His cooperation came with the understanding that Manon would be allowed to stay with him and his new wife, Ise Gropius, at Dessau, where the Bauhaus had relocated. Walter Gropius enjoyed only one more extended visit in 1932.

Manon was educated at home by Schulli and various tutors. Like her older half-sister, Anna Mahler, she was given piano lessons, but did not distinguish herself as a musician. She attended the same progressive girls' school that her mother attended, Institut Hanausek, in Vienna's First District.

The teenage Manon was used by her aging mother to attract the kind of sensual male attention that she had readily enjoyed in her youth. With her dark long hair and beauty, she so impressed the theater director Max Reinhardt that he offered the part of First Angel in a revival of his and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Calderón's The Great Theater of the World for the 1934 Salzburg Festival. Her father and stepmother traveled from England to Germany, which placed strictures on its citizens as well as punitive fees for crossing its border with Austria.

Werfel planned a novel about a fictional Catholic saint's life in late-17th-century Venice, Legends, with various subtitles: The Intercessoress of Animals, of Snakes, and of the Dead.

Manon's half-sister, the sculptor Anna Mahler, produced a marker for her grave—a young woman holding an hourglass—but the Anschluss prevented it from being installed. The statue was later destroyed in an air raid. Manon's grave lacked a permanent marker until the 1950s, when Walter Gropius designed the flat, triangular marker and landscaping.