Lost to the World
by Tom Adler and Anika Scott (Xlibris, 2003)
“...a horrifying tale of Austria’s darkest years… Intensely absorbing!”
Vienna 2000. The son of a wartime Nazi lawyer tried to sell the Mahler manuscript at Sotheby’s Auction House. The Austrian media lauded the Mahler’s reappearance and the Austrian government declared the score a national treasure. Yet jubilation soon turned to suspicion: Had the manuscript been stolen from the Adler family during the war?
Lost to the World weaves the tale of the Mahler manuscript from its composition in the Austrian countryside to the controversy it spawned in today’s Vienna. Author Tom Adler, grandson of pioneering musicologist Guido Adler, scoured archives across Europe and the United States to reconstruct the events in Lost to the World. With co-author Anika Scott, he uncovered a story of betrayal and greed that Mahler scholar Henry-Louis de la Grange has called “a horrifying tale of Austria’s darkest years… Intensely absorbing!”
Much of Lost to the World centers on the bravery of the eccentric Melanie Adler, a homeopathic physician who struggled against Austrian Nazis to preserve the inheritance of her father Guido. Her tale intersected with the lives of many people well known in music and history including the composer Egon Wellesz, Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek, musicologist Rudolf von Ficker, music scholar Carl Engel, and the Nazis Winifred Wagner and Adolf Eichmann.
Lost to the World uses never-before-published archival material, including intimate letters from the Adler family, making it the first and only full account of this modern day historical mystery.
Lost to the World is available on amazon.com.
