He was a professor of music history at the University of Heidelberg from 1981 to 1995 and editor of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Born in Kassel, the youngest of five siblings,[2] Finscher studied musicology, English, German and philosophy at the University of Göttingen from 1949 to 1954.

[1] Finscher contributed to the complete editions of the works of Christoph Willibald Gluck, W. A. Mozart, and Paul Hindemith.

His writings always place the subject and the description of the sources in the foreground; his personal interpretation remains in the background, thus showing his great modesty.

For Finscher, music history is part of the greater cultural, social and historical milieu, and he explains facts by their spiritual dependence on the philosophical developments in European thought.