Adolph Baller

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Adolph Baller (July 30, 1909, Brody, Austrian Galicia (now Ukraine) - January 23, 1994, Palo Alto, California) was an Austrian-American pianist. Baller was born in 1909 in Brody, Galicia, then part of Poland. At age 8, he went to Vienna to study piano with a former student of Franz Liszt and at 13 he performed with the Vienna Philharmonic. In March 1938, Nazi soldiers learned that he was a pianist and a Jew, and arrested him, beat him and crushed his hands. Baller's fiancée, Edith Strauss-Neustadt, interceded on his behalf with the Polish Consul in Vienna and helped to restore his hands so that he could resume his career. The couple escaped to Budapest, where they were married before coming to the United States in 1938.