Manon Gropius
| Manon Gropius | |
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| Born | Alma Manon Gropius October 5, 1916 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | April 22, 1935 (aged 18) Vienna, Austria |
| Occupation | Muse |
| Nationality | Austria |
Alma Manon Gropius (October 5, 1916 – April 22, 1935) was the daughter of the architect Walter Gropius and the 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 key 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 (1935).
Manon Gropius was born in Vienna during the height of World War I, on October 5, 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. Her parents separated soon after Gropius discovered Alma's affair with the writer Franz Werfel in the summer of 1918 and the true paternity of her fourth child, Martin Johannes 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 as well), was raised by her nanny, a former Austro-Hungarian Army nurse, Ida Gebauer (whom Manon called "Schulli"), Her early life was spent traveling with her mother between Alma's three homes in Vienna, Breitenstein am Semmering, and Venice, as well as at Weimar, the site of the first Bauhaus school. Her travels also included many German cities, including Leipzig, where Franz Werfel's play Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man) premiered in 1921. 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.
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