Karl Geiringer; Musicologist, Bach Authority

Karl Geiringer, the eminent musicologist who contributed vast amounts of erudition to the world’s knowledge of the Bach family, Haydn and Brahms, has died in Santa Barbara where he had taught for nearly three decades.

Geiringer, who fled his native Vienna after the Nazi invasion in 1938, was 89 when he died at Cottage Hospital on Tuesday of injuries suffered in a fall.

The author of “Brahms: His Life and Works,” published in 1936 but still considered one of the most authoritative sources on the German composer, Geiringer took his doctorate degree from the University of Vienna in 1922 with a thesis on musical instruments depicted in Renaissance art. In 1979 the thesis was republished in book form.

In 1930 he became museum curator and librarian of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of Friends of Music) in Vienna where he was able to devote himself to his love for 17th, 18th and 19th Century music and composers. After the Anschluss in 1938, Geiringer took his family to London where he taught at the Royal College of Music.

He came to the United States in 1940 and became head of graduate studies in music at Boston University. He stayed there 20 years working on his studies of Johannes Brahms and in 1946 publishing a definitive study of Joseph Haydn. A study of the Bach family followed in 1954 and led to an anthology of their music.

In 1962 he went to UC Santa Barbara, retiring 10 years later but continuing in an emeritus capacity. He was to have taught a course in J. S. Bach’s cantatas this spring, a school spokesman said. During his tenure at UC Santa Barbara, Geiringer published “Johann Sebastian Bach: The Culmination of an Era.”

In 1970 “Studies in Eighteenth-Century Music: a Tribute to Karl Geiringer” was printed in his honor.

Geiringer, survived by his wife, pianist Bernice Geiringer, two sons and four grandchildren, twice was president of the American Musicological Society