He was educated in Vienna but at the beginning of the Nazi years he emigrated to England and ultimately the United States, where he had a lengthy and distinguished career at several universities.
[1] Following his degree he worked as an editor for Adler's journal Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich; he remained on the editorial board of this publication for the rest of his life.
[3] The job gave Geiringer access to much valuable primary source material on Western music, which he used extensively in his scholarship.
An unusual responsibility Geiringer bore at the Gesellschaft archives was the curatorship of Joseph Haydn's skull, which had been stolen from his grave in 1809.
[4] Geiringer, although he had been baptized a Roman Catholic, was the child of Jewish parents;[4] hence he and his family were in grave danger, and they fled the country.
[3] His final academic appointment began in 1962, when he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, in order to establish the graduate program in musicology.
Following his death, his colleagues assessed his research as follows: [His] prolific scholarly output, when viewed in its totality, is remarkable for its great scope and depth.
His writings and editions span practically the complete range of music history and all carry the mark of a discipline he must have possessed as a student and an excellence we know he had as a teacher.