RCMI co-founder Emanuel Winternitz established the fields of scholarly research in musical iconology and organology through a distinguished career as a musicologist, art historian, museum curator, author, and educator. Born in Vienna, Winternitz acquired an early and thorough music education, studying piano with his mother, music history with his uncle, Oscar Kapp, and composition with Franz Schmidt. Accomplished as a pianist, organist, and cellist, Winternitz graduated from the Vienna Humanistisches Gymnasium in 1916. During the First World War, Winternitz enlisted in the Alpine troops of the Austrian Army and served for three years in the mountains of Tyrol. Upon his discharge, he entered the University of Vienna and took his doctorate in law and political science in 1922. After his graduation, Winternitz gave lectures on aesthetics and philosophy at the famous Volkshochschule — the first venture in adult education in Europe and one which he helped to establish. Between 1924 and 1936, Winternitz spent several weeks or months each year in Italy studying late Renaissance and Baroque art and photographing Palladian architecture. He was admitted to the Vienna bar in 1929 and had a successful career as a corporate lawyer. He maintained his active interest in music, however, and continued his music avocation as a member of the Vienna Bachgemeinde, the Vienna Madrigalvereinigung and the Mozartgemeinde Dr. Winternitz’ life-long campaign against academic over-specialization, his concern with finding the common patterns between seemingly separate branches of cultural history, crystallized during a year’s teaching fellowship at the University of Hamburg in 1923. In the course of that year, while lecturing on the philosophy of law, he participated in a seminar on epistemology conducted by the noted philosopher, Ernst Cassier. During that seminar, Dr. Winternitz’ ideas of "integrating the realms of the eye and the ear" were reinforced, and these ideas were to give impetus to his future studies and form the basis of what was to prove his unique contribution to the combined fields of art and music history. After a dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, where he was prosecuting the anti-Semitic assassin of mathematician Moritz von Schlick, Winternitz emigrated to the United States in 1938, devoting himself exclusively to art education. He immediately undertook many lecture trips, sponsored first by the College Art Association and later as Peripatetic Professor for the Carnegie Foundation, teaching seminars on subjects as far-ranging as "Palladio and Palestrina: Proportion Theory in Renaissance Architecture and Music" to "The Funnies Taken Seriously: An Aesthetic And Psychological Interpretation Of The American Comic Strip." Francis Henry Taylor, then director of the Worcester Museum in Massachusetts, heard Winternitz lecture at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and the two subsequently became fast friends. Not long after Taylor assumed the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he invited Winternitz to join the Museum’s staff as a lecturer in 1941. A year later, Winternitz was appointed Keeper of Musical Instruments and he embarked upon the systematic reorganization and rehabilitation of the Crosby Brown Collection of Musical Instruments of All Nations. He was made Curator in 1949 when the Metropolitan was finally able to make the Musical Instrument Collection an official department of the Museum. Fearing that New York City might come under attack in the Second World War, the Metropolitan Museum moved the majority of its masterpieces to Whitemarsh Hall, a secure estate near Philadelphia, in 1942. Arguing that the musical instruments were too fragile to survive the changes in climate if moved, Winternitz endeavored to put as much of the collection as possible in playing condition and organized a series of concerts for members. Eventually entitled "Music Forgotten and Remembered," the concert series featured little-known music of the Baroque and Renaissance played on the instruments for which they were written. From their inception these concerts commanded the services of such distinguished performers as Paul Hindemith, Adolf Busch, Elizabeth Schumann, Alexander Kipnis, Wanda Landowska, Joseph Fuchs, George Szell, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and Rudolf Serkin. These concerts played no small part in the renewed interest in the study of early music. For some eighteen years Winternitz produced and wrote elaborate program notes for these concerts, praised by Virgil Thomson as "The most distinguished notes now being written in America; the most penetrating, informative and accomplished." Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Bollingen Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society, Winternitz pursued his scholarly interests in musical autographs, the history of musical instruments, musical iconology, comparative history of the arts, and Leonardo da Vinci as a musician, publishing numerous articles on all these subjects in various learned journals. Among his books are Musical Autographs from Monteverdi to Hindemith (1955); Keyboard Instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1961); Musical Instruments of the Western World (1967); Gaudenzio Ferrari, His School, and the Early History of the Violin (1967); Musical Instruments and Their Symbolism in Western Art (1967); and Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (1982). Winternitz served as Chairman of the New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society in 1960, and served as President of the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Musical Instruments (CIMCIM) of the International Council of Museums from 1965 to 1968. He was a contributor to Rendiconti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, a member of the Raccolta Vinciana, Milan, and several other learned societies. Winternitz was elected Curator Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973. In 1976, Winternitz was made an honorary member of the Österreich Gesellschaft für Musikforschung; in the same year, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, for outstanding achievement in his field. In addition to his Museum activities, Winternitz taught music history at several universities, among them Yale from 1949 to 1960, and City University of New York Graduate Center from 1971 until his death in 1983. Leslie Hansen Kopp
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