Vienna, 1917 – 1999, Halifax, Canada
Tinter was born into Jewish upper-middle class family in Vienna. He began playing the piano at the age of six and from the age of nine to thirteen, he was the first Jewish student to be admitted as a member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. He studied at the Music Academy, (today the mdw) with Felix Weingartner and Joseph Marx. This was a time when musical life in Vienna was starting to acknowledge the importance of Anton Bruckner. This composer, together with the Vienna Philharmonic’s individual sound remained Tintner’s musical inspiration for the rest of his professional life. At the age of nineteen, he was engaged as conductor and repetiteur at Vienna’s Volksoper. Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Tintner immigrated to New Zealand, helped by his former pupil Richard Hoffmann. In 1946, he became a New Zealand citizen and began a life as conductor, having lost any opportunity of making a living as a composer. Over the next years, he took on orchestras in Australia, South Africa, England and ultimately in 1987, Canada where he became music director of the Symphony Nova Scotia. Tintner is remembered today by a small but remarkable legacy of compositions and his devotion and documentation of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner.
