Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  Who knows? The world is different in 2013 as well, and a new taste (and capacity to buy) such treasures may well be found – who understands such things? – amongst the Russian oligarchs who eat Fabergé eggs for breakfast, Indian mega-businessmen who spend tens of millions marrying off their daughters, Arab oil sheiks tired of buying football clubs or Chinese entrepreneurs who already own Shanghai. Such people are now the most active clientele of the major auction houses, with bejewelled wives and mistresses, fancy mansions, helicopters and yachts, and their demand for expensive gewgaws seems limitless. Bling-seekers enter the world of books?

  It’s not merely members of the press and public who have such stereotyped fantasies of the fabulous wealth, vulgarity and limitless appetites of the billionaires of the emerging nations; we book dealers have them as well. A few years ago I was approached by a representative of a Russian oligarch, and requested – required might be more accurate – that I find him ‘Lolita with inscription to wife’. I presumed he meant Vera, Vladimir’s wife, though I did harbour the suspicion that he wanted me to get the long-dead Nabokov to do one specially for his Missus, maybe as a Valentine’s Day gift. Presuming the former, within two weeks I had a copy to put in front of him, consisting of the first American edition, published by Putnam’s in 1958, inscribed to Vera (to whom the book is dedicated) with a lovely example of one of the coloured butterfly drawings with which Nabokov adorned inscriptions to his closest friends and relations.

  I had the book on consignment, for a period of three weeks only, from the late Dmitri Nabokov, the author’s son, heir and literary executor. It was, to be frank, a most unprepossessing volume, a sad example of the low standards of American book design and production in the 1950s. The dust wrapper was dowdy, dull and slightly fraying, the typography lifeless, the total effect a direct contradiction of the extraordinary vivacity and power of the contents. My Russian oligarch, shown the book by his representative, was not exactly overwhelmed. The book without the inscription was worth $50, and I was asking £250,000. A big premium for a few lines, however fond, to the wife, and a drawing of a pretty insect?

  I had, of course, anticipated this perfectly reasonable response, and before showing the book to my oligarch, had obtained a letter from Sotheby’s confirming that, if they were to offer the book at auction, it would be estimated at between £200,000 and £300,000. My putative customer was unimpressed by this as well. After some complex negotiations, though, I bought the book myself, and did indeed enter it into the next ‘Russian Sale’ at Sotheby’s. I was by then wary of the ‘it may be desirable, but it looks like shit’ response. Oligarchs presumably need something that appeals to the eye. The answer: commission a bindery to make a drop-dead fancy leather box to put the book in. Head for Sangorski and Sutcliffe!

  True to their origins, the firm came up with an opulent, eye-catching design for the box, with multicoloured leather inlays of butterflies all over it, each trailing streams of (real) gold dust. I had no idea if the price of £5,200 was reasonable or not, but I paid it. The Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the sale made as much fuss of the box as they did of the book. A superb association copy in a fabulous box! Fit for a king, or an oligarch!

  Wrong. On the day, as my wife, Belinda, and I sat in the audience crossing our fingers, there was not a single bid for the book. After some months it ended up, at a lower price, with an American collector who had no interest in the box at all. Presumably he now keeps matches in it. So even the services of the fabled Sangorski bindery could not drum up a customer for my book. It led me to wonder how many people really do buy bling bindings and boxes. How does the market in jewelled bindings work, if it does at all?

  The answer, according to Peter Selley, of Sotheby’s Book Department in London, is a small but active number of English, American and continental collectors – not wily Orientals or bloated oligarchs – whose interests are relatively similar. They tend to look, first, at what the text is – a collected poems of a major poet, an important novel, a famous private press book and (of course) an Omar Khayyam. The choices are, in general, obvious: it would be an odd person who wanted a jewelled binding on a Penguin original, or a copy of the latest Man Booker Prize winner. If you are investing heavily in the cover, you have to make sure that the contents are worth it.

  But the binding is the key, and collectors are most sensitive to the quality and nature of the binding itself. According to Selley

  I would say generally that there are some dedicated collectors in this area … and they intend to be selective about which bindings they buy. It is not like earlier periods, when Sangorski or other binders could put a nice binding on any work, and expect to be able to sell it handsomely.

  Thus, in recent years, two different copies of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press Works of Geoffrey Chaucer have come under the hammer. One of the fabled press books of the nineteenth century, and worth some £30,000 in its original binding, the jewelled copies fetched between two and four times that, depending on the opulence (that word again!) of the binding. Numerous Omars have also passed through the auction rooms in the last ten years, most of them bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe, who have more or less cornered the market.

  The Great Omar, and Sangorski’s fascination with the glories of the East, have left a telling legacy in the regular examples of jewelled copies that still flow out of his bindery. He was a great and visionary bookbinder, whose taste may now seem antique, but who continues to have his devoted, wealthy followers.

  I wish they collected Nabokov.

  11

  Lost to the World: The Library of Guido Adler

  There are too many easy assumptions about the improving qualities of art. Many of us have been encouraged to believe that literature (for example) can provide us with moral guidance. Latterly, it is widely claimed that reading is in itself good for us. Reading, we are told, enables us to determine the difference if not between right and wrong, at least between the serious and the frivolous. An analogous claim is frequently made about music. In listening well, one learns to refine one’s judgements and deepen one’s emotional responses, and in so doing is oneself refined. It sounds great, but unfortunately it’s nonsense. That’s clear enough when we remember those stressed-out Nazis, relaxing after a hard day, playing Wagner to soothe their savage breasts. When even that most moving of hymns to the brotherhood of man, Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, was appropriated by Hitler.

  Let me begin by citing a song, not in the hope that it will improve you, but because it is the basis, and the cause, of much that is to follow. Widely regarded as one of Mahler’s finest lieder, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (‘I am Lost to the World’) is a setting of a poem by Friedrich Rückert:

  I am lost to the world

  With which I used to waste so much time,

  It has heard nothing from me for so long,

  That it may very well believe me dead!

  It is of no importance to me,

  Whether it thinks me dead;

  I cannot deny it,

  For I really am dead to the world.

  I have died to the world’s tumult

  And rest in the realm of quiet.

  I live alone in my own heaven,

  In my love, in my song.

  Mahler later observed that the song has an ‘unusually concentrated and restrained style, is brim-full with emotion but does not overflow’. It was, he proclaimed, ‘my very self!’

  The orchestral version was first performed in Vienna in late January 1905, and on 1 November Mahler presented its manuscript to the eminent musicologist Guido Adler, with the warm inscription ‘To my dear friend Guido Adler (who will certainly never be lost to me) as a memento of his fiftieth birthday’. Adler was overwhelmed by the gift, as the song cycle from which it came had particular meaning for him. The songs, he observed, ‘embrace nature, the world of children and adults in the most diverse moods of love, profane and sacred, the most complete devotion descending by degrees to resi
gnation, which achieves expression in the most luminous manner in the incomparable Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’.

  It is not clear what the monetary value of the manuscript would have been at the time, but Mahler was recognised as a composer of the first rank (he had already completed seven symphonies), and it was certain to be of substantial value in the future. Rather than putting it in a drawer in his magnificent library, Adler put it in the safe where his greatest treasures were held, which included one of only three known copies of Beethoven’s death mask, as well as letters by Brahms and Bruckner.

  A Nazi officer superintends the loading of looted Jewish artworks.

  Guido Adler began life as one of those precocious children that were so common in nineteenth century mittel-European culture. As a student at the Conservatory in Vienna, this earnest, aspirational boy once had the honour of introducing a recital by Franz Liszt, who kindly kissed him on the forehead while holding his hands. Guido, overcome, preserved the gloves he wore that night, regarding them as ‘precious relics’.

  It’s a common enough process and feeling. After all, people do the same today, though with regard to the by-products of rock stars or football players rather than classical composers. The possession of the ‘precious relic’ – whether it is the Lisztified glove or Napoleonic relic, John Lennon’s guitar or Pelé’s number 10 football shirt – conveys to the recipient, in an alchemical transfer, some of the power and authority of the donor. One can imagine the boy Guido pressing the gloves to his lips, and feeling himself instantly transformed into something, and someone, bigger and better.

  This is simultaneously funny, and sad, and ominous. Perhaps it is because so many of these swooning Teutonic wannabe geniuses were soon to swell the ranks of the Third Reich, a sure sign that high culture, whatever it is and does, does not necessarily humanise. Some thirty-odd years later poor Guido Adler, so like his fellow students and scholars, with such commonality of interest, was to become a victim of his musicological colleagues, because (unlike many of them) he was a Jew.

  Guido had wanted to become a composer, and though competent by professional standards, he had to acknowledge that he was untouched by any genius – other than Liszt – and became a scholar instead. It was, he later remarked, the hardest decision of his life: ‘I was and am of the opinion that those who cannot contribute something new had better stay silent.’

  But this modest disclaimer masks the fact that Guido Adler certainly did contribute ‘something new’, and was far from silent. He is frequently regarded as the first musicologist, and his ground-breaking article of 1885 ‘The Scope, Method and Goals of Musicology’ set the method and aims of this new subject. In it, Adler distinguishes between the historical and systematic study of music, and his contributions to the ensuing development of the subject have been described as the work of a ‘firebrand, bringing to the world of scholarship a vision of a new field’.

  By the time he retired, in 1927, Guido Adler was among the foremost modern musicologists, and the luminary of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna. The author or editor of a number of seminal books, including the eighty volumes of Monuments of Music in Austria, Herr Hofrat Professor Doktor Adler had every reason to look forward to a happy and productive retirement.

  But by the time of the publication of his memoirs, in 1935, the shadows were deeply cast, and many Jews were leaving Austria. As the pressures on Viennese Jews intensified, Guido encouraged his son, daughter-in-law and their children to depart for America, but continued to hope for the best, and made no plans to get out. American friends offered to pay his fare, and that of his eccentric and dutiful daughter Melanie, who, dressed as a man, frequently went missing on mysterious assignations, accumulated a curiously large amount of money (considering she never worked) and was prone to her own bouts of anti-Semitism. She was something of a puzzle and an embarrassment to her own family, and her mother’s wry remark – ‘she does certain things we’re not talking about’ – hints, perhaps, at a covert lesbian life, enacted far from home, in the licentious hot spots of Berlin and Munich.

  As things worsened in Vienna, Guido and his daughter applied for, and were eventually granted, exit visas, but when the moment came, he found he simply could not leave. ‘The old Adler,’ he remarked – ‘Adler’ means ‘eagle’ in German – ‘the old Adler has grown tired of flying.’ He had an understandable unwillingness, at the age of eighty-two, to relocate himself in a trying new life in America. Of course, he did not know what was to come, however ominous the signs, and even at the time of his death was blessedly unaware of the full scope of the unfolding tragedy.

  Melanie remained in Austria out of daughterly devotion to her father, Guido out of attachment to his library. He had spent most of a lifetime building it, and aside from the remarkable depth of the book collection, it had in it those ‘precious relics’, such as the Mahler manuscript, through which he had, since boyhood, partly defined himself. It is, as many contemporary Jews found to their cost, a dangerous process to bind oneself to one’s objects.

  Guido Adler died of natural causes in 1941, at the age of eighty-six. He was lucky. He had hardly been laid to rest when the cultured vultures moved in. Though the library now belonged to Melanie, and represented her only bargaining chip in avoiding the Gestapo, she was powerless to avoid its systematic looting. One of Guido’s former students, the Director of the Music Collection of the City of Vienna, confiscated a large number of rare volumes on behalf of that happy institution. A second famous musicologist, Guido’s former colleague Professor Erich Schenk, an ardent Nazi posing as a family friend, offered Melanie an exit visa to Italy in exchange for the contents of the library. She demurred, seeking both a better and a more secure deal, in spite of the counsel of her appointed lawyer, Richard Heiserer, who urged her to accept Schenk’s offer.

  As Jews were no longer allowed to practise law, Heiserer specialised in dealing with the property of Jewish clients, a lucrative field for a lawyer who was a member in particularly good standing of the Nazi party. A Nazi Party district report gave him good marks: his ‘conduct toward the party and the state is impeccable. He spent a lot for the party, and eagerly. His personal assets are very substantial. He behaves socially to the other party comrades.’

  This risible claptrap makes it clear why Heiserer was valued, and there can be no doubt that his ‘personal assets’ were accumulated as a result of unscrupulous practice. Demanding the only set of keys to her father’s library from the grieving Melanie, Heiserer effectively took complete control of its contents. Frightened but fighting back, Melanie tried instead to sell the books to the Munich City Library. When this fell through, she made a desperate final appeal to Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law Winifred, who was born in England but had moved to Germany as a child, and was both an ardent admirer and personal friend of Hitler. The Führer – whom she called ‘Wolf’ – was close to Winifred’s children, and there was some gossip of a relationship between the pair. Nevertheless, she opposed the brutality of the rise to power of the Nazis – for which she did not hold Hitler personally responsible, though she challenged him on the subject – and was well known for her acts of charity.

  Melanie’s letter to Winifred, who knew the family slightly, is desperately painful and grovelling, as if made by a peasant supplicant to an empress, begging for her life to be spared (which is more or less what it is). It begins ‘Most revered, merciful Lady’ and thanks Winifred (who had previously helped her to continue residence in the family home, when most Jews had been moved out of theirs and into a ghetto): ‘what remains is only my large, large gratitude and reverence for you, honourable and merciful lady!’

  Offering Guido’s entire library in exchange for the chance to move to Munich (why she regarded that city as safe is unclear), Melanie Adler had made her final plea. Her attorney, she noted, was ‘threatening me with the Gestapo in order to intimidate me’. But Winifred was unwilling or unable to help her, naïvely unaware of how bad things rea
lly were, and nothing came of this final appeal.

  Heiserer wasn’t bluffing. Melanie tried to fire him, but it was too late. She was repeatedly ‘interviewed’ by the Gestapo, and the contents of the library were systematically pillaged. In May 1942 Melanie Adler was transported to Minsk, and thence to a lonely pine forest outside Maly Trostinec. Of the 9,000 people sent to that killing ground, only seventeen survived. The rest were shot, and buried in mass graves.

  Most of what was most valuable in Guido’s library had disappeared, though after the war the remnants were inherited by his son, who had relocated to America with his family and sold them to the University of Georgia in 1951. No one knew what had happened to the most valuable items from of the library of Guido Adler. No one could locate the manuscript of I am Lost to the World.

  Some fifty years later, in September 2000, Tom Adler, a California lawyer who was Guido’s grandson, received an email informing him that the lost Mahler manuscript, with its dedication to Guido Adler, had been located, and was presently being appraised at Sotheby’s office in Vienna. Ironically, Tom Adler, who had recently retired, had been devoting more and more of his time to trying to find out what had happened to his grandfather’s possessions, in the hope that by tracking the things the history of his family might also become clearer (a compelling recent example of this very process can be found in Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes).

  That this was a particularly significant moment – not merely in terms of the value of the manuscript – was clear when Adler was told the name of its consignor: Richard Heiserer, the son of the lawyer who had ‘represented’ Melanie Adler. Heiserer had no doubt that he had title to the disputed manuscript: his father, he claimed, ‘got Mahler’s musical piece in a legal way probably as compensation for the work he did as appointed lawyer to Dr Guido Adler’.