On December 14, 1919, Margarethe Hammerschlag married Felix Ungar. On the occasion of her wedding, she received an extraordinary gift. Her friend Alma Mahler, the composer's widow, gave her an oversized page of sketches in ink for the Auferstehungssymphonie ! Fifty years later, Frau Ungar showed me those very same sketches. I remember seeing the words O Glaube in Mahler’s thickly scratched black ink. I also remember that the manuscript was so large that it protruded from the corners of the frame! It was interesting for me to see that Mahler "sketched" in ink and not pencil. The Mahler Foundation has the following to say about this page of sketches: The victory at the end of Mahler's Second Symphony is hard-won, and this manuscript shows the complicated process of achieving it. The sketch sheet contains sketches of many famous passages, not least the O glaube section, with its searching melody and harmonies, as well as the soaring violin passages that precede the Auferstehen passages. A letter from Alma Mahler about this manuscript is enclosed in the lot, which was offered to Margarethe, eldest daughter of Mahler's friend, the banker Dr. Paul Hammerschlag, on the occasion of her wedding. It later came into the possession of the pianist Martin Isepp 4 . In 1938, the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany shattered Margarethe's comfortable world. I found the continuation of her story in the online archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC: 'Felix Ungar (1887-1970) was imprisoned as a result of the annexation of Austria in 1938 and was only released after he had handed over his company.'
This was a period in Margarethe's life that she never spoke to me about. She only alluded to it and said, 'That was a difficult time.'
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