In 1902 Vienna, Alma Schindler meets Gustav Mahler. She's young and beautiful and music is her life: she plays and composes music. She becomes Mahler's lover, then he marries her, asking that she give up composing. She has two children, works as his assistant, does his books, saves him from debt, and feels stifled. In 1910, after the death of a child, she retreats to a spa where she falls in love with Walter Gropius. Will she go with him or stay with Mahler? She conducts an affair with the tempestuous Oskar Kokoschka and is stifled in another way. Then she marries Gropius, who proves imperious. She leaves him for Franz Werfel: he finds her compositions and insists that the public hear them.