 She describes her father as coming "from old patrician stock", and her mother as having been sent to Vienna to take voice-lessons with a highly regarded teacher at a private academy.It is now known, however, that Alma's father was the great-grandson of a scythe-smith from the Steyr Valley — and that her mother became a singer only after an early life that had seen her family flee to escape bankruptcy and the young girl herself working as a ballet dancer (at the age of eleven), a nanny, an au pair girl, and a cashier at the public baths.Alma's story of her 'first meeting' with Mahler (in November 1901, at a dinner party given by Berta Zuckerkandl and attended by other glittering personalities such as Gustav Klimt and Max Burckhard) is one of her most famous, but it departs from the truth in at least one major respect