Georg August von Griesinger (8 January 1769 – 9 April 1845) was a tutor and diplomat resident in Vienna during the late 18th and 19th centuries.
[3] In 1799, he moved to Vienna, in order to work as the tutor of the son of Count Johann Hilmar Adolph Schönfeld, the ambassador of Saxony to Austria.
These negotiations were fully successful, and resulted in Breitkopf & Härtel producing a "complete works" edition of Haydn's compositions.
Griesinger eventually conceived the idea of writing a biography of Haydn, and when he came home from his visits to the composer, he wrote down the words he remembered, in hopes of increasing the accuracy of his work.
The book appeared first as a sequence of eight installments in the Breitkopf & Härtel journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, then, after revisions, as an independent work in 1810 (Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn, Leipzig).
In 1802 the Breitkopf & Härtel firm asked Griesinger to negotiate for them with the newly-prominent composer Ludwig van Beethoven.