Josef Krips: Austrian conductor and violinist

Early life and education

Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Krips studied composition and conducting with respected teachers including Eusebius Mandyczewski and Felix Weingartner (Mandyczewski and Weingartner). He began his professional life at the Vienna Volksoper, where from 1921 to 1924 he worked as a repetiteur and chorus master under Weingartner's supervision. These formative years provided practical experience in opera production and orchestral rehearsal techniques that informed his later conducting career.

Pre-war appointments and development

Krips moved through a sequence of conducting posts in central Europe. In 1926 he became conductor of the orchestra in Karlsruhe, a post he held from 1926 until 1933. He returned to Vienna to conduct at the Volksoper and to take up academic teaching. During the mid-1930s he began appearing regularly at the Salzburg Festival, participating in productions and concerts up to 1938. His repertory at this time emphasized Austrian classics, especially Mozart and the Austro-German symphonic tradition.

Exile and wartime years

The political events of 1938 (the Anschluss) forced Krips to leave Austria because of his Jewish background. He relocated to Belgrade and worked in Yugoslavia until the country was drawn into the turmoil of Yugoslavia's wartime crisis and the wider conflict of World War II. During the war years he was unable to continue a typical conducting career and for a period worked outside music in a food factory to survive. This interruption meant that, unlike some contemporaries who remained in Axis-controlled institutions, Krips had an uninterrupted moral and professional distance from the Nazi cultural apparatus.

Return to Austria and early postwar leadership

After liberation in 1945 Krips was among the small group of conductors permitted to resume public musical life in Austria because he had not collaborated with the Nazi regime (postwar clearance). He was the first conductor to lead the Vienna Philharmonic in the immediate postwar period (Vienna Philharmonic) and reopened the Salzburg Festival with a production of Mozart's Don Giovanni (Don Giovanni), signaling a cultural recovery centered on canonical repertory.

International career and principal posts

Krips built a significant international résumé in the 1950s and 1960s. He served as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1950 to 1954, and later held posts in North America with the Buffalo Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony (1963–1970). He made his Covent Garden debut in 1963 (Covent Garden) and regularly appeared at the Metropolitan Opera from 1966 onward. In 1970 he accepted the musical directorship of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin and between 1970 and 1973 served as principal conductor of the Vienna Symphony.

• Selected appointments:
  1. Vienna Volksoper (repetiteur/chorus master and later conductor) — Vienna
  2. Orchestra in Karlsruhe (1926–1933) — 1926, 1933
  3. London Symphony Orchestra (principal conductor, 1950–1954)
  4. San Francisco Symphony (1963–1970)
  5. Deutsche Oper, Berlin (from 1970)

Style, recordings and legacy

Krips was known for lucid textures, measured tempi and fidelity to scores; critics have noted the clarity he brought especially to Mozart, Haydn and early Beethoven. He made numerous recordings that helped disseminate a traditional, text-focused approach to mid-20th-century listeners. His career also illustrates larger historical patterns: the displacement of Jewish and politically vulnerable musicians in the 1930s, postwar cultural rehabilitation in Austria, and the transatlantic exchange of conductors in the postwar decades. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1974.

Family and notable facts

Krips's younger brother Henry was also a professional musician (Henry Krips). Henry emigrated to Australia, where he led the orchestra in Adelaide, before returning to London where he became associated with Viennese light music (Viennese light music). Josef Krips's particular combination of operatic experience and symphonic clarity continues to be studied by conductors and listeners interested in historically informed performance practice and mid-century interpretive traditions.

For archival materials, recordings and more detailed studies, consult specialist music libraries and publishers; online and institutional resources may provide digitized scores, program notes and recorded performances (Vienna sources, Geneva archives, Salzburg Festival records).