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Karl Geiringer


Karl Geiringer (April 26, 1899 – January 10, 1989) was an Austrian American musicologist, educator, and biographer of composers. He was educated in Vienna but at the beginning of the Nazi years he emigrated to England and ultimately the United States, where he had a lengthy and distinguished career at several universities. He was a noted authority on Brahms, Haydn, and the Bach family, and a prolific author.

Geiringer was born in Vienna, the son of Louis and Martha (nee Wertheimer) Geiringer. He studied music history at the University of Vienna under Guido Adler and Curt Sachs, and studied composition under Hans Gál. He also studied at the University of Berlin under Curt Sachs. He received his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Vienna in 1923. The topic of his doctoral thesis was the musical instruments appearing in Renaissance painting. Following his degree he worked as an editor for Adler's journal Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich; he remained on the editorial board of this publication for the rest of his life.

In 1930 he won a top position in the musicological field, as the curator of the archives at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, a position previously held by his mentor Eusebius Mandyczewski and other distinguished scholars. The job gave Geiringer access to much valuable primary source material on Western music, which he used extensively in his scholarship. An unusual responsibility Geiringer bore at the Gesellschaft archives was the curatorship of Joseph Haydn's skull, which had been stolen from his grave in 1809. In the first English edition of his Haydn biography (1946), Geiringer reminisced about bringing forth the skull to show to visitors; see Haydn's head.


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