Rainer Josef Schwob

Rainer J. Schwob was born in Innsbruck and received his early musical training in piano and organ/church music. He studied musicology and ancient history in Graz and Vienna and completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 2004 under the supervision of Gernot Gruber. His dissertation examined the 20th-century reception of Claudio Monteverdi’s L'incoronazione di Poppea.

From 2003 onwards, he worked on two externally funded research projects on early Mozart reception, the results of which were published as Mozart im Spiegel des frühen Musikjournalismus. He subsequently taught extensively at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Vienna and worked there as a research assistant from 2013 to 2014.

Since February 2014, he has held a postdoctoral position at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, where he teaches musicology, including seminars on academic presentation skills, and supervises bachelor’s and master’s theses. He also serves as Deputy Head of the Institute for the History of Musical Reception and Interpretation.

His research interests include interpretation research and analysis, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his contemporaries, early Mozart reception, canon formation and repertoire development, the reception of Claudio Monteverdi, music databases, as well as 20th-century composers such as Alban Berg and Ernst Krenek. Further areas of interest include arrangement techniques and the history of the piano reduction.