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