Karl Geiringer

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 in Vienna, 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. In 1938, Austria was incorporated into Nazi Germany in the Anschluss. With the Nazi occupation, the Gesellschaft was closed. Geiringer, although he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, was the child of Jewish parents; hence he and his family were in grave danger, and they fled the country. He first went to London, where he taught at the Royal College of Music and served as a broadcaster for the BBC. He also worked extensively as an editor for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians; according to his later colleagues he was "in all but name a co-editor". In 1940, Geiringer moved to America, becoming an American citizen in 1945. He taught first for a year as a visiting professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. The following year he took up a professorial appointment at Boston University, where he directed the graduate program and remained for 21 years. Among his students was H. C. Robbins Landon. His final academic appointment began in 1962, when he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, in order to establish the graduate program in musicology. Throughout this time, he continued to publish extensively. In 1973 he became an emeritus professor, but continued to be very active: his colleagues said of him, "His 'retirement'... proved to be more of a technicality than a reality—his teaching and research continued unabatedly and were interrupted only by death itself." He died in Santa Barbara at the age of 89 of complications from injuries sustained in a fall. Geiringer was twice married. His first wife, and longtime coauthor, was Irene Geiringer (1899–1983). He was later married to Bernice Geiringer (née Abrams, 1918–2001), a concert pianist and student of Arnold Schoenberg. He had twin sons, Martin and Ludwig.

• (1936) Brahms: His Life and Work, Houghton Mifflin. • (1945) Musical Instruments, Their History in Western Culture from the Stone Age to the Present, Oxford University Press.. • (1946 (1st ed.), 3rd and final edition 1984 with Irene Geiringer) Haydn: A Creative Life in Music, W. W. Norton. • (1954) The Bach Family: Seven Generations of Creative Genius, Oxford University Press. • (1966) Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of an Era, Oxford University Press.. • (1981) with Irene Geiringer, Stephen and Nancy Storace in Vienna, in Essays on the Music of J.S. Bach and other divers subjects: a tribute to Gerhard Herz, pages 235–244. Edited by Eobert L. Weaver. University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. • (1993) This I Remember. Santa Barbara, CA: Fithian Press. • (2002) Joseph Haydn and the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Karl Geiringer. Edited by Robert N. Freeman. Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press.. • (2006) with George S. Bozarth, On Brahms and his circle: Essays and documentary studies, revised and enlarged by George S. Bozarth with a foreword by Walter Frisch. Sterling Heights, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press..

He was employed by University of California, Santa Barbara. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Karl Geiringer is recorded as musicologist, music historian, composer, biographer and editor.