Constantin Floros

Constantin Floros (Thessaloniki, 4 January 1930) is a musicologist of Greek origin who spent much of his career in Germany. His output covers Byzantine music, the history of notation, nineteenth-century symphonism and the Second Viennese School, and he is counted among the leading German musicologists of his generation.

Before devoting himself fully to music, he studied law at the University of Thessaloniki between 1947 and 1951. He then moved to the Vienna Academy of Music, where he studied composition with Alfred Uhl and conducting with Hans Swarowsky and Gottfried Kassowitz, graduating in both disciplines in 1953. In parallel, he studied musicology with Erich Schenk at the University of Vienna, as well as art history, philosophy and psychology. In 1955 he obtained his doctorate in Vienna with a dissertation on Carlo Antonio Campioni. He later continued his training at the University of Hamburg with Husmann (1957–1960), where in 1961 he presented his habilitation with a work on the Byzantine kontakion. His teaching career in Hamburg advanced from supernumerary professor in 1967 to full professor of musicology in 1972, and he retired as professor emeritus in 1995. The University of Athens awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1999.

Floros was also a driving force behind institutions and publications: he co-edits the Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft and in 1988 founded the Gustav Mahler Vereinigung in Hamburg, of which he is president. In 1992 he was admitted as a member of the Academy of Useful Sciences in Erfurt and in 1999 he was named honorary member of the Richard Wagner-Verband.

His legacy spans several fronts. In Universale Neumenkunde (1970), in three volumes, he challenged earlier theories on the origin of Gregorian neumes. In his studies of Mahler and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century symphonism, he analysed the semantic meaning of the symphony against theories of absolute music. He was also a pioneer in research on the Second Viennese School, particularly Alban Berg: he uncovered the hidden programme of the Lyric Suite before the corresponding sources were located. His idea of 'music as autobiography', developed in his books on Berg (1993) and Ligeti (1996), links musical aesthetics with the everyday circumstances of the composer.