Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
For decades, music scholars had lost hope that an original manuscript of Gustav Mahler’s song of isolation "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" would ever be found.

Yet two years ago in Vienna, an original score, signed and dated by Mahler himself, showed up at Sotheby’s Auction House. As the Austrian media celebrated the discovery, the question arose: Had the manuscript been stolen from a Jewish family during World War II?

The new book Lost to the World by Tom Adler with Anika Scott answers just that. Tom Adler, grandson of pioneering Austrian musicologist Guido Adler, traced the story of the manuscript from the day in 1905 when Mahler gave it to Guido as a gift, through the trials of his Jewish family in Nazi Austria, to the controversy surrounding the manuscript today.

Lost to the World is a historical mystery with a dash of memoir, a story of wartime betrayal and greed that noted Mahler scholar Henry-Louis de la Grange has called "a horrifying tale of Austria’s darkest years… Intensely absorbing!"

More detailed information, chapter samples, photographs, links and more may be found at the official Lost to the World site.

Rating : - Once lost; now found. Not yet in its rightful owner's hands
Guido Adler, famed Viennese musicologist (and, for that matter, the original developer of the science of musicology) and Gustav Mahler were friends for 30 years, beginning with their early-adult years at the Vienna Conservatory. (They might well have been friends for 45 years or more. Adler - 5 years Mahler's senior - spent his early years in the same Bohemian village, Iglau, that Mahler did, but then Adler's family relocated to Vienna.)

Adler celebrated his 50th birthday on November 1, 1905. As a very personal gift from one close friend to another, Mahler presented Adler with the autograph score to his famous song, "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" ("I am lost to the world"), part of his Rückert-Lieder song cycle. The score, Mahler's original manuscript, contained his inscription, "To my faithful friend Guido Adler (may he never become lost to me), on his fiftieth birthday." While a personal gift, it had not been a secret. Some seventy-odd years later, Edward Reilly, in his book "Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship," mentioned the gift. But as recently as 1999, Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler's famous biographer, continued to note, in the English version of Volume III of his Mahler biography, that "The manuscript which was probably the draft orchestral score, has disappeared."

The very next year, 2000, nearly 95 years after Adler's 50th birthday, the manuscript surfaced in the Vienna office of Sotheby's. The story of the score and its history, and as well the history of the Adler family and their efforts to save Guido Adler's voluminous musical library - not to mention their lives - from the Nazis beginning with the Anschluss of Austria by Germany on March 13, 1938 begins here, with the Sotheby's discovery. The story is told - in a flashback from Sotheby's in 2000 to the early history of the Adler family and from there back to the present day - by Tom Adler, the grandson of Guido Adler and his nearest surviving direct descendant.

This is a story that is gripping, full of duplicity, betrayals and treachery by those in Vienna and the German Third Reich before and during the war, and in a "liberated" Austria after the war, to whom members of the Adler family turned for help time and again, without success, often with frustration and always with delay and foot-dragging. In the case of Adler's paternal aunt (Guido Adler's daughter, Melanie), these actions and inactions were to have their fatal consequences; she eventually became a Holocaust victim.

Tom Adler tells his family's story in a straightforward chronological way that only heighten its chilling reality. There is an opening chapter setting out the friendship between Guido Adler and Mahler, as well as a relating of the esteem in which Adler had been held in Vienna music circles. The rest of the narrative is given over to the Adlers' efforts - successful in the case of Tom Adler, his parents and his sister - to escape from Austria after the Anschluss while preserving what they could of Guido Adler's property from confiscation by the Nazis.

Guido Adler chose to remain behind. He died of natural causes (at age 86) three years later, in 1941. Melanie Adler also chose to remain behind, at least for the time being, thinking that she had the resources and the connections that would enable her to emigrate if necessary. A large part of the center of the story is about this enigmatic and rather naive woman and her attempts to salvage what she could of both her father's estate and her own safety. In the end, she lost both.

The story is populated with many villains and few heroes. The provenance of how it was that the Mahler score ended up at Sotheby's, given up for auction by a Viennese lawyer, himself the son of the duplicitous lawyer who had ostensibly been working in Melanie's interests but in reality lining his own pockets with Guido Adler's library treasure, is well-documented by Tom Adler.

Along the way, Adler paints a very graphic picture of the utter baseness of the Third Reich; while this is "old news," it serves as yet another reminder of a time in history we should never be permitted to forget. More chilling, perhaps, is the post-war behavior of Austria in the whole affair. For people not familiar with this aspect of post-war denazification, rehabilitation and reparations, Austria considered itself "first victim" of the Anschluss and thus not responsible for reparations to Third Reich victims. Only over time, and with persistent international pressure, did Austria, in 1998, concede that its comportment during the post-war years was something far less than honorable, and take additional steps to redress crimes against its victims.

Lest one think that this was sufficient progress on the part of the Austrian government for Adler to be awarded the Mahler score that had been a gift from Mahler to his grandfather in 1905, the case he brought against the Viennese lawyer who "inherited" it from his father, who had stolen it from Adler's library safe, is still pending.

There needs to be an epilogue - a final chapter not yet written - to this story. Tom Adler is, without question in normal jurisprudence terms, the rightful heir to the Mahler score. As yet, he is not. But his book shines a very public light on a rather dark and not very pretty place - post-war Austrian jurisprudence as it relates to Holocaust victim compensation. The fact that nearly 60 years have passed since the end of the war, yet the Austrian government has not yet seen fit to relinquish this family treasure to its rightful owner, can only be characterized as shameful.

"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" always did have a very special resonance with me. Now, when I listen to it, I think of Tom Adler and his as-yet unfinished quest.

Bob Zeidler