Alfred Einstein (December 30, 1880 – February 13, 1952) was a German-American musicologist and music editor. He was born in Munich and fled Nazi Germany after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, arriving in the United States by 1939. He is best known for being the editor of the first major revision of the Köchel catalogue, which was published in the year 1936. The Köchel catalogue is the extensive catalogue of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Alfred Einstein (December 30, 1880 – February 13, 1952) was a German-American musicologist and music editor. He was born in Munich and fled Nazi Germany after Hitler’s Machtergreifung, arriving in the United States by 1939. He is best known for living thing the editor of the first major revision of the Köchel catalogue, which was published in the year 1936. The Köchel catalogue is the extensive catalogue of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Einstein was born in Munich. Though he originally studied law, he speedily realized his principal love was music, and he acquired a doctorate at Munich University, focusing on instrumental music of the late Renaissance and in advance Baroque eras, in particular music for the viola da gamba. In 1918 he became the first editor of the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft; slightly progressive he became music critic for the Münchner Post; and in 1927 became music critic for the Berliner Tageblatt. In this grow old he was moreover a buddy of the composer Heinrich Kaspar Schmid in Munich and Augsburg. In 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power, he left Nazi Germany, moving first to London, then to Italy, and finally to the United States in 1939, where he held a taking over of teaching posts at universities including Smith College, Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut.
Einstein not without help researched and wrote detailed works on specific topics, but wrote popular histories of music, including the Short History of Music (1917), and Greatness in Music (1941). In particular, due to his height of familiarity following Mozart, he published an important and extensive revision of the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s music (1936). It is this act out for which Einstein is most capably known. Einstein plus published a comprehensive, three-volume set The Italian Madrigal (1949) on the secular Italian form, the first detailed psychiatry of the subject. His 1945 volume Mozart: His Character, His Work was an influential laboratory analysis of Mozart and is perhaps his best known book.