When Alfred Einstein began studying the violin, at nine, he soon realized he was no prodigy—"I only made a lot of noise." Later, as a student at the University of Munich, he tried his hand at composing the usual sonatas and fugues, soon found "I was not a Beethoven." But young Alfred, who had a distant, science-minded cousin named Albert Einstein, made music his career anyway.
Last week Smith College in Northampton, Mass. honored 69-year-old Alfred Einstein as one of the world's outstanding music historians and critics. In a three-day celebration, fellow members of the Smith faculty and students played and sang some of the music they thought would please him most. It ranged from 16th and 17th Century Italian madrigals that Musicologist Einstein himself had unearthed and edited, to Mozart and Schubert quartets and compositions by 20th Century Composers Roger Sessions and Benjamin Britten. Old and new, the music was done to Scholar Einstein's taste.
Mozart & Museums. Einstein's taste was an arduously cultivated and exacting one. After getting his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1903, he had begun prowling through Europe's museums and libraries ferreting out and copying old music manuscripts, digging up little-known facts about music and musicians. Gradually building up his store of musical knowledge, he gained a reputation first as an independent scholar, then as one of Europe's ranking music critics. Writing in the Munich Post and the Berlin Tageblatt, he was on hand to give encouragement and advice to his friends, including contemporary Composer Paul Hindemith, during what he refers to as one of the great periods in Germany's musical history.
At the same time he was working on the back-breaking job of revising the voluminous 19th Century Köchel catalogue which attempted to date Mozart's 600-odd works. He examined hundreds of Mozart scores and letters, discovered some 20 new Mozart compositions in the process, proved an additional dozen spurious. For this and his book, Mozart: His Character, His Work, he is now rated, with French Musicologist Georges de Saint-Foix, as one of the two foremost Mozart authorities in the world.
Nonentities in Brown. In 1933, as the music critic of the Berlin Tageblatt, Einstein was obliged to attend the Wagner Festival at Bayreuth held in honor of Adolf Hitler. When he found his German colleagues had become nonentities in brown uniforms, he decided he "couldn't stand it any longer." He shipped his priceless collection of music-manuscript copies to England and then followed them. Now Einstein looks on his years as a music critic as a "nightmare" when he had time to be "only a bricklayer in musicology." By chasing him out of this rut and back to work as a master mason in music scholarship, Adolf Hitler, he says, became "my greatest benefactor."