Theophil Antonicek

Theophil Antonicek (Vienna, 22 November 1937) is an Austrian musicologist whose career was pursued almost entirely within the scholarly and publishing institutions of his native city. He is chiefly associated with research into the musical history of Austria, and of Vienna in particular, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as with the relationship between Italian and Austrian music during those same centuries.

He trained at the University of Vienna under Schenk and Wessely, and received his doctorate in 1962 with a dissertation on Ignaz von Mosel. In 1967 he spent a year studying with Remo Giazotto in Italy. Between 1963 and 1999 he worked as a research musicologist at the Musikhistorische Kommission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, while carrying out parallel editorial duties: he served as secretary of the Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe der Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich from 1963 to 1974, and later as director of publications from 1998. His association with the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musikwissenschaft was equally long-standing: secretary-general from 1973, vice-president from 1984 and president from 1990 to 1996, during the early years of a society that had only recently been founded.

In academic life, he was appointed Reader at the University of Vienna in 1979. The Austrian Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member in 1984 and, later, a full member in 1995. Since 1976 he has co-edited the Musicologica Austriaca series with C. Harten, and he chairs the editorial board of the Österreichisches Biographisches Lexikon. He is also director of the Anton Bruckner-Institut in Linz.

His bibliography includes studies on Cavalieri, Cesti, Monteverdi and Beethoven, as well as works on the Viennese imperial court, the Hofmusikkapelle and the figure of Anton Bruckner. His legacy lies above all in this combined work of research, editing and institutional management, which helped shape Austrian musicology in the second half of the twentieth century.