Forensic musicologists race to rescue works lost after the Holocaust
The Exilarte Center in Vienna is the world's leading research institution devoted to preserving the work of composers such as Walter Arlen and others, who were exiled or killed during the Holocaust.
There's something elfin and even a little mischievous about the 102-year-old man who goes by Walter Arlen. The composer lives in a house near the ocean in Santa Monica, Calif., with his husband of 65 years. But he was born in Austria, in 1920, as Walter Aptowitzer. He grew up in a cosmopolitan cradle of music and high culture: Vienna before the war.
"I grew up in an atmosphere of great joy, as far as I was concerned," says Arlen, whose grandfather founded a large department store — the Warenhaus Dicther — in 1890. "And it grew and grew, because he was a very good businessman. And there was always music, because my grandfather believed in having music in the store. And
