Alfred Einstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Alfred Einstein was born in Munich on the 30th of December 1880, and he would spend his life navigating two worlds: the careful, evidence-bound discipline of musicology and the sweeping ambition of popular history. He died on the 13th of February 1952, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped how scholars and listeners understood Mozart, the Italian madrigal, and the arc of Western music. But his legacy came tangled with controversy. After his death, critics would dismantle two of his central claims about Mozart with hard evidence he never possessed. How did a man trained as a lawyer become one of the foremost music historians of the twentieth century? And why did his most celebrated achievement, a meticulous catalogue of Mozart's works published in 1936, end up revealing the limits of a method he trusted completely?

• 2. From Law to Lore

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  Einstein originally enrolled to study law, not music. The shift came quickly once he recognized where his real interest lay, and he pursued a doctorate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen, concentrating on instrumental music of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. His particular focus was music for the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument that fell largely out of fashion after the Baroque period. That specialized early training gave him a historical depth that would shape everything he wrote afterward.

  By 1918 he had become the first editor of the Zeitschrift fur Musikwissenschaft, a scholarly journal devoted to musicology. The post placed him at the center of German academic music life at a pivotal moment. He later moved into the more public-facing role of music critic, first for the Munchner Post and then, from 1927, for the Berliner Tageblatt. During these years in Munich and later Berlin, he was also a friend of the composer Heinrich Kaspar Schmid, who worked in both Munich and Augsburg. Those two cities bookended a career still rooted in German-speaking musical culture.

• 3. Flight and Reinvention

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  Hitler's rise to power in 1933 put Einstein in immediate danger. He was Jewish, and the threat was not abstract. He left Germany, moving first to London and then to Italy before finally arriving in the United States in 1939. The journey lasted six years and crossed three countries before he found a stable base.

  Once in America, Einstein held teaching positions at a succession of universities: Smith College, Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. The variety of institutions reflects both the demand for his expertise and the itinerant nature of academic life for emigre scholars in that era. He wrote some of his most significant books during these American years, including his 1945 study Mozart: His Character, His Work and the three-volume The Italian Madrigal, published in 1949.

• 4. The Kochel Catalogue

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  The Kochel catalogue is the exhaustive listing of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's compositions, organized by Ludwig von Kochel in the nineteenth century. Einstein's revision of it, published in 1936, was the first major overhaul of that catalogue. It became the work for which he is most widely remembered.

  The revision required Einstein to make judgments about when Mozart wrote individual pieces, and he placed heavy confidence in stylistic analysis: the idea that careful study of a work's musical character could reveal its approximate date of composition. This method seemed reasonable at the time, but it carried a structural vulnerability. Style alone, without corroborating physical evidence, could mislead a scholar who already had strong interpretive convictions about the composer. Those convictions would prove costly.

• 5. A Romanticized Mozart

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  Einstein's view of Mozart leaned toward the romantic. He suggested that Mozart wrote his works as a form of self-expression, or possibly in hopes of building a posthumous reputation rather than for the practical demands of employment and patronage. His most striking claim was that Mozart's last three symphonies were never performed during the composer's lifetime. Einstein described them as perhaps an "appeal to eternity".

  Neal Zaslaw challenged this picture directly in a 1994 essay titled "Mozart As a Working Stiff," published in a volume called On Mozart by Cambridge University Press. Zaslaw assembled extensive evidence that the symphonies were in fact performed, and argued that Mozart was a pragmatic, hard-working person doing his best to earn a living under difficult conditions. The portrait that emerged from Zaslaw's research was almost the opposite of Einstein's: not a misunderstood artist writing for the ages, but a working professional navigating the economic realities of eighteenth-century musical life.

• 6. Dating by Style

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  The second line of posthumous criticism struck at Einstein's methodology itself. His willingness to treat stylistic conjecture as established dating proved harder to defend once two scholars introduced more concrete forms of evidence.

  Wolfgang Plath applied handwriting analysis to Mozart's manuscripts, and Alan Tyson used watermark studies on the paper Mozart wrote on. Both approaches offered physical, dateable evidence that bypassed the interpretive subjectivity of stylistic judgment. Their findings revealed serious errors in Einstein's datings. The problem was not that Einstein lacked rigor; it was that the tool he trusted most, musical style, could not carry the evidentiary weight he placed on it. The work he had built his reputation on remained important, but subsequent scholars had to read it knowing that its chronological scaffold needed revision.

• 7. A Broader Reach

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  Einstein's output extended well beyond Mozart. His Short History of Music appeared in 1917 and was aimed at a general audience rather than specialists. Greatness in Music followed in 1941, and Music in the Romantic Era, a history of musical thought in the nineteenth century, appeared in 1947. These popular histories gave him a readership well beyond academic circles.

  His three-volume The Italian Madrigal, published by Princeton University Press in 1949, was the first detailed study of the secular Italian vocal form. The translation involved three scholars: Alexander H. Krappe, Roger H. Sessions, and Oliver Strunk. That scale of collaborative translation speaks to the ambition of the project. His 1951 book Schubert, translated by David Ascoli and published by Cassell and Co., appeared just a year before his death and showed that his scholarly appetite had not narrowed with age.

• 8. The Einstein Connection

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  Alfred Einstein shared his surname with a more famous contemporary, and the question of whether they were related produced decades of conflicting answers. One source from 1980 listed Alfred as a cousin of the physicist Albert Einstein. A source from 1993 found no verified relationship. Websites proposed that both men descended from a Moyses Einstein seven generations back, which would make them sixth cousins.

  Alfred's daughter Eva added to the confusion rather than resolving it. In 1991 she stated that the two men were not related at all. Then in 2003 she wrote, citing research by George Arnstein, that they were fifth cousins on one side and fifth cousins once removed on the other. The two men were photographed together in 1947 when Albert Einstein received an honorary doctorate from Princeton. At the time of that photograph, neither of them knew they were distantly related.