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.

Life

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. Geiringer, although he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, was the child of Jewish parents; He taught first for a year as a visiting professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. 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.

Scholarship Geiringer served twice as president of the American Musicological Society. In 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His last university, UC Santa Barbara, established a lecture program in his name in 1994 and named a concert hall in his honor.

As Crutchfield notes, "It was Mr. Geiringer's habit to take on the largest topics".

Notable works (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. .