He learned at Lwów’s PTM Conservatoire and studied with Joseph Marx and Alban Berg in Vienna. In 1920–23 he played the viola in the orchestra of Lwów Municipal Theatre. In 1931 he obtained a doctorate in musicology from the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. He was a Polish Radio speaker and music reviewer, contributing to Warsaw’s Kwartalnik Muzyczny (excerpts from his PhD dissertation on Edvard Grieg’s harmony) as well as Lwów’s Lwowskie Wiadomości Muzyczne i Literackie, the monthly Szopen, and Koffler’s Orkiestra (1932–36, including two texts about the radio).
In a 1934 issue of Warsaw’s Muzyka Polska, Freiheiter published an extensive review of Koffler’s cantata Die Liebe, Op. 14. He praised the technique and wrote: ‘[W]hat one admires in Koffler is the deep-felt moods, which paint the mystical background of the work’. He described the cantata as one of ‘the most valuable works by a serious composer’ (J. Freiheiter, ‘Józef Koffler, “Love”. A Cantata for Voice, Clarinet, Viola, and Cello’,Muzyka Polska 1 (1934), 74–75). In 1935 Freiheiter reviewed Koffler’s String Trio, Op. 10 in the same journal, and later – his 15 Variations, Op. 9a.
In Warsaw’s Muzyka (1936), Freiheiter printed a survey of Koffler’s life and ouevre (the third such a review text in the Polish press). Since the two Lwów-based musicologists maintained close relations, we can assume that this article was written with Koffler’s knowledge and support. Freiheiter begins by saying that, since Koffler has been pigeonholed as a dodecaphonic composer, ‘the enigmatic nature of this label can be a sufficient deterrent’. He described Koffler’s path as a composer as follows:
Having completed his studies, which gave him a thorough mastery of the craft, Koffler realised that he should look for a new way or principle to replace functional harmony, whose possibilities have been exhausted.
Freiheiter was the only author to recognise the link between Koffler’s music and Neo-Classical aesthetic (it was an isolated view at that time, cf. Maciej Gołąb, ‘Józef Koffler i Szkoła Wiedeńska’ [Józef Koffler and the Viennese School], Muzyka 2 (1996), 5). Freiheiter concludes: ‘Koffler’s hitherto style has been characterised by the following elements: polyphonic textures, succinct language, and a compact muscular form' (J. Freiheiter, ‘Józef Koffler’, Muzyka 7/12 (1936), 85–86).