The Evidence

Altogether, the collection spanned some 500 years, including a first edition of the Petrus Canisius – Summa  doctrinae et institutionis christianae (The High Doctrines and Institutions of Christianity) from 1554, a mere century after Gutenberg, a 1498 Memorial Book of personal messages from the Vienna Choir Boys, a gift to the Emperor Maximilian, and an authorization from Lower Austria to the Spanish Riding School from 1572. Closer to our time were a 1900 first edition of Freud’s Traumdeutung and Max Reinhardt’s hand annotated director’s script for Hoffmannstahl’s Jederman from 1911.

Along with Strauss and Mahler was a page of Mozart’s rapid script for the 40th Symphony in G Minor,  Schubert’s tidier score for the "Unfinished" and one of Beethoven’s shorthand sketches for 9th  Symphony, along with the Maestro’s hearing horn. The score for Stille Nacht attributed to Joseph Mohr and Franz Xavier Gruber, looked like an unsteady page from a music school copy book.

Another case held Ludwig Wittgenstein’s own annotated typescript of his seminal work the Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus,  and yet another Theodore Herzel’s Der Judenstaat, along with first editions of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, and works by Austrian Nobel Prize winners Elias Canetti (1981), The Masses and Power, and Elfriede Jelinek (2005), The Piano Player.