Otto Gombosi

Otto Johannes Gombosi (born October 23, 1902 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died February 17, 1955 in Lexington , Massachusetts ) was a Hungarian-American musicologist and music critic .

Life

Otto Gombosi's father Joseph was a merchant, his mother Elisabeth Bógyó was a pianist. Gombosi received piano lessons from his mother and from 1915–20 with Sándor Kovács at the Fodor Conservatory in Budapest. From 1919 to 1921 he studied music theory and composition at the Budapest Music Academy with Leo Weiner and Albert Siklós . From 1921 he studied in Berlin with Curt Sachs and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and in 1925 he was with Johannes Wolfwith a dissertation on "Jacob Obrecht, a style-critical study". In Budapest in 1926 he founded the short-lived music magazine "Crescendo" and wrote music reviews. From 1929 he lived in Berlin again to prepare for his habilitation. After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, he went to the Collegium Hungaricum in Rome and during this time published the book “The Lutenist Valentin Bakfark, Life and Works” in Budapest in two languages. In 1936 he became an employee of the music historian Jacques Handschin at the University of Basel . In 1937 he married the violinist Anna Tschopp from Basel. When the war broke out in 1939, they were in the United States and stayed there despite great economic uncertainties. His parents were victims of the Holocaust in Hungary , as was his brother György. Gombosi married a second time in 1954.

From 1940 to 1946 he was a lecturer at the University of Washington , 1946 to 1948 Assistant Professor at Michigan State University . In 1948 he received a Guggenheim scholarship for Europe and after the death of Ernst Kurth he took the chair in musicology at the University of Bern . He was then an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and was appointed to the chair of musicology at Harvard University in 1951 . In 1952 he was elected Vice President of the American Musicological Society .

Gombosi researched the difference between the immanent structure of the musical work of art and its notation in a musical notation.

Fonts

• Jacob Obrecht: A Stylistic Study. With a note attachment. Contains 31 previously unpublished compositions from the period between 1460-1510 . Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1925, Diss. Phil. Berlin
• Hungarian contemporary music , in: Melos , 6, 1927, pp. 231–235.
• Bakfark Bálint élete és muvei (1507-1576) . Bilingual. Budapest: Az országos széchenyi Könyvtár kiadása, 1935
  • Zoltán Falvy (ed.): The lutenist Valentin Bakfark's life and works (1570-1576) . Reprint of the German part. Kassel,: Bärenreiter, 1967
• Keys and moods of ancient music . Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1939

literature

• Ernst Waeltner:  Gombosi, Otto Johannes. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 638 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Péter Halász: Gombosi, Ottó, Otto, János, Johannes . In: Ludwig Finscher (Ed.): MGG . tape 7 . Bärenreiter Verlag, 2002, Sp. 1305-1306 .
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 2 Munich: Saur 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 401

Web links

• Literature by and about Otto Gombosi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Otto Gombosi in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Daniel-Frédéric Lebon:  Otto Gombosi in the dictionary of persecuted musicians of the Nazi era (LexM)