Lost to the World

About the Book

"The tragic family saga of one of Gustav Mahler´s best friends... A horrifying tale of Austria´s darkest years... Intensely absorbing!"-Henry-Louis de La Grange, biographer of Gustav Mahler

"...an important work which tells a story that is both riveting and very disturbing" - Edward R. Reilly, author of Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Record of a Friendship

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 at www.losttotheworld.com, or click below:

About the Author

Tom Adler is a retired civil rights lawyer and the grandson of Guido Adler, one of the founding fathers of musicology. He has spent several years researching the disappearance and subsequent discovery of the manuscript given to his grandfather by Gustav Mahler and a mask of Beethoven which has never been recovered. Born in Vienna, he currently lives in California. Anika Scott is a freelance journalist based in Germany and a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer.