In Memory of Dr. Gerald Florian Messner (22 February 1937–2 June 2026)
A personal tribute to a musician, scholar, and friend
When my then-girlfriend told me she wanted to introduce me to a couple called “Florian and Lala,” I almost declined. The names conjured images of hippies — airy-fairy, crystals-in-the-water-jug types I have no patience for.
Florian did keep crystals in his water jug.
He also stocked his guest bathroom with gag toilet paper bearing George W. Bush’s face on every sheet. He produced a taro-root fish curry unlike anything with an identifiable nationality. He served nothing but imperial-grade matcha and gyokuro (Japan’s most luxurious loose-leaf green tea) — genuine connoisseurship, held in permanent tension with an unfiltered, scatological sense of humour that treated pretension as an open invitation. He invariably told stories of the “wise fool” Mullah Nasruddin, then laughed his Schadenfreude snicker — an impish, fricative “ch-ch-ch” — before he had quite finished the punchline.
The man who admitted me to his Sydney home in the late-2000s was tall and broad-shouldered; handsome in his youth, which photographs from his acting years confirm; still, in his late sixties, a charmer and a hugger. His messages invariably closed with “A big hug and lots of love” — and he meant it. His name was Dr. Gerald Florian Messner, and he died on 2 June 2026, aged 89.
He was one of the most genuinely learned, wise, and deeply kind people I have ever known.
The man
Born on 22 February 1937 in Bad Eisenkappel, in the bilingual Carinthian region of Austria, Messner accumulated credentials over the course of his life that resist summary without sounding like a parody of polymathic overachievement. He trained as an actor and director at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna. He took a doctorate in comparative musicology at the University of Vienna in 1975, his dissertation addressing the vocal polyphony of the Bulgarian village of Bistritsa. As an actor performing under the name Gerald Florian, he debuted in 1961 in a production of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot at the Volkstheater Wien, and went on to appear on the stages of the Burgtheater Wien, the Volksoper, the Theater am Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, and in ORF television productions and Austrian feature films. He subsequently held academic posts in Vienna, at Deakin University in Australia, and as a guest professor at UCLA’s Department for World Arts and Cultures. He broadcast, composed, painted, and exhibited internationally — in Austria, Australia, China, the UAE, Kazakhstan — well into his late eighties.
In May 2026, he received a letter informing him that the Senate of the University of Vienna, on the recommendation of the Musicology Institute, had resolved to award him the Golden Doctorate — a ceremonial renewal of his original degree on its 50th anniversary, in recognition of exceptional scholarly achievement and continued connection to the university. The ceremony was scheduled for 29 June 2026. Travel was already a concern. He died on 2 June, nearly a month before he could have attended.
His wife, Lala, wrote to me to share the news of the honour a few days before his death. “Before,” she said, “they used to ridicule him because of his theatre background, but now they are guilding him.”
Florian, she reported, was laughing about it.
I can hear that laugh exactly.
The scholar
Messner’s most enduring scientific contribution is the concept of interferential diaphony — in German, Schwebungsdiaphonie — which he coined to describe a specific multi-part vocal style he documented in the Bulgarian village of Bistritsa. The tradition involves singers performing polyphonically in extremely close intervals, producing microtonal friction and acoustic beating phenomena. Outsiders describe the sound as “maximally rough”; the singers themselves experience it as smooth, beautiful, and pleasant. Observers at greater remove tended to describe the result as sounding either like ringing bells or like the howling of wolves.
His 2013 study, published through Peter Lang, runs to 419 pages and engages the psychoacoustics, audiophysiology, and sonography of the tradition. His fieldwork on behalf of the Bistriza Babi — the choir of elderly Bulgarian women from Bistritsa — contributed directly to their inscription on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2005.
His ethnomusicological reach extended to Papua New Guinea, the island of Flores in Indonesia, Manus Island, and Mexico. In Papua New Guinea, he documented the shark-calling rituals of New Ireland — ceremonies in which specific songs and movements were believed to summon sharks from the sea. He composed a piece for me, for ten-string guitar, based on that fieldwork: The Echo of the Shark Caller. He also wrote Mnemosyne for me, named for the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the Muses. Both pieces are characteristic of how Florian’s mind worked: scholarship and art were not separate territories but expressions of the same curiosity.
He once told me, with that “ch-ch-ch” barely suppressed, that when he submitted a composition under a pseudonym he had won a prize that would have been denied to him under his own name, due to institutional prejudice against him. He found this more amusing than embittering.
The friend
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When I knew Florian in Sydney, between 2006 and 2010, he was working on the English translation of his landmark Bulgarian study. An older friend of ours named Marlene was helping him with the translation of his doctoral thesis from German. When Marlene died in 2010, he forwarded the following to her friends, including me:
“Marlene has gone on her final trip on this planet — last night at 1.30 she took her last breath. Her last few weeks were very peaceful. She felt she had done everything she needed to do and she was happy to go. Once, a while ago, when I asked her whether she was afraid of death she told me: ‘I have had a very full and rich life. And, you know: I am so curious! / Und weißt Du, ich bin ja so neugierig!’ So I hope and trust she has enjoyed the trip and has gone to a good place.”
I returned to that message when Florian died. Those weren’t his words — but I found myself thinking of the resonance between Marlene’s attitude and his own: the unsentimental warmth towards the dead, the genuine curiosity about what follows, the “I hope and trust” offered without irony or the embarrassed qualification that secular academics tend to append to such language.
Our Friday afternoons followed a ritual. I would arrive with my guitar after he had finished recording his German arts programme for SBS Radio. We would prepare lunch together — I scrubbed the vegetables with Veggie Wash, multiple passes, in the precise way he expected. He would cook. Whatever he produced belonged to no particular culinary tradition; it was its own thing. I remember his purple taro mash, and a fish curry with taro root that had no right to be as good as it was. Always the gyokuro, always the matcha, always something outrageously irreverent — unfiltered in the way that only the genuinely learned and the genuinely kind can get away with — followed by that impish snicker.
We talked through lunch and well into the afternoon/evening about anything: The Mahabharata and Hildegard von Bingen; isorhythmic motets of the fourteenth century and J.M. Coetzee; Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (one of his favourite books, and the proposed subject of a collaborative opera that never materialised as our lives diverged after 2010); Sufi poetry; Rumi; the wise-fool tales of Mullah Nasruddin; medieval proportionality in music; quantum mechanics; cinema... His knowledge of music history (especially “early music”) put to shame every oxygen-thieving occupant of institutional musicology I have since encountered. He had, in passing, studied voice with the last student of Luisa Tetrazzini. He practised Tai Chi Chen-style under Grandmaster Chen Xiaowang for over a decade. He had survived a heart attack as a young man, and a gas explosion that destroyed his Austrian home and most of his compositions.
Florian had strong musical opinions and was not shy with them; his criticism could be scathing. With me, it never was. His role in my musical formation was not to correct or instruct but to confirm: that my interpretive intuitions were legitimate, that I did not need to second-guess them.
He wrote, in an academic reference letter:
“Viktor van Niekerk is an exceedingly gifted, sensitive and intelligent musician, artist and extremely talented and promising scholar who has been conducting valuable research in all the disciplines of his specialisations.”
I am not certain I have lived up to it. But I carry it.
What he gave
Florian was there during the most difficult period of my life. In 2009, when I was in a very dark place, he was simply there — with his time, his knowledge, his warmth, his conversation, his cooking, his presence. It is not an exaggeration to say he saved my life.
I left Sydney in 2010. On my last day, I left him my art supplies. I like to think they played some small part in the extraordinary late flourishing of his visual practice: the paintings, dense with mythological content and the vivid, saturated palette of someone who heard colour and painted sound, that would go on to be exhibited in Austria, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, and Astana (Kazakhstan) where he spent his last years. Reviewers in Abu Dhabi described his 2013 solo exhibition as the “main event” of the day. He was seventy-six.
In one of his last filmed appearances, he told The Astana Times: “My advice is follow your intuition and be consistent and don’t give up. And if you can’t do that, then don’t touch the arts at all.”
On 2 June 2026, Lala wrote to me from Florian’s instant messaging account:
“Hello Victor, this is Lala. I have very sad news: Florian passed away today. Please pray for him 🙏”
And, shortly after:
“Yes, it is devastating for me and all of us, but he was ready to go, he told me on Sunday that death was calling him. He was not very well. We will discuss this later. 🙏 Love and hugs, L”
He was ready. Like Marlene before him — “Und weißt Du, ich bin ja so neugierig!” — I am certain he was curious, too.
Florian often quoted a stanza from Sir Richard Francis Burton’s Sufi-inspired philosophical poem The Kasidah (1880):
Cease, Man, to mourn, to weep, to wail;
Enjoy thy shining hour of sun;
We dance along Death’s icy brink,
But is the dance less full of fun?
A big hug and lots of love, dearest Florian. I hope and trust you have enjoyed the dance.
Dr. Gerald Florian Messner is survived by his wife, Lala. The University of Vienna had intended to award him the Golden Doctorate on 29 June 2026, in recognition of fifty years of exceptional contribution to ethnomusicology.
