František Zagiba

František Zagiba was a Slovak musicologist, music historian, and Slavicist. He belonged to the first generation of music scholars who studied under Dobroslav Orel, the founder of the Institute for the History of Music (today the Department of Musicology) at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava. He also received education in Hungarian and Slavic studies. During his lifetime, he held several leadership positions.

Since 1937, he had been a member of the newly established commission and working group for the research of the Hungarian ethnic group and Slovak-Hungarian relations in the spirit of modern linguistics, within the framework of the Hungarian seminar at Comenius University and the Šafárik Learned Society.

In 1943, he was appointed the first director of the Institute of Musicology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Arts in Bratislava. Beginning in 1946, he worked in Vienna, where he published his musicological studies in German under the name Franz Zagiba. As Jana Lengová (2012) observes: “Through both his scholarly work and professional activity, Zagiba stands as a representative figure of both Slovak and Austrian musicology.”

František Zagiba contributed to the development of the institutional foundation of Slovak musicology as well as the field itself.

His scholarly interests were broad, ranging from the study of folk traditions and regional music history to Slavic studies, where he focused on early Slavic music history in the Central European context and on prominent figures of 19th-century Slavic music. Zagiba’s key synthetic work is Dejiny slovenskej hudby od najstarších čias až do reformácie (The History of Slovak Music from the Earliest Times to the Reformation, 1943), served as the basis for his habilitation, which he completed in Vienna in 1944.

Zagiba participated in numerous research projects, such as Das tschechische und slowakische Musikschaffen zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (The Development of Czech and Slovak Music between the Two World Wars, 1955) and Die Anfänge der Christianisierung in Mähren und der Slowakei (The Beginnings of Christianity in Moravia and Slovakia, 1962). In addition, he worked on a microfilm collection of the most important early musical monuments from the territory of present-day Austria.

From 1971 to 1973, he served as President of the Austrian Chopin Society (later the International Chopin Society in Vienna), which he had co-founded, and he was also editor of the Chopin-Jahrbücher series.
He was a member of the Vienna Catholic Academy, and as founder and secretary general, he was actively involved in the activities of the Institutum Salisburgo-Ratisbonense Slavicum. In 1963 and 1967, he organized the Congressus historiae Slavicae Salisburgensis, a congress dedicated to the history of Slavic studies.

František Zagiba received numerous honors and decorations, including: the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Papal Order of Saint Sylvester (Ordo Sanctus Silvestri Papae), the Ordre du Mérite en faveur de la Culture Polonaise, and the Silver Medal of the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations.