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Born in Vienna to Rudolf and Selma Cohen, Carner was educated at the Vienna Conservatory and at the University of Vienna, where he studied musicology under Guido Adler. He received his doctorate there in 1928, with a dissertation on the sonata form in the works of Robert Schumann. He then worked as an opera conductor in Opava (now in the Czech Republic) from 1929 to 1930 and in the Free City of Danzig from 1930 to 1933. In 1933, he settled in London, where he was to live for the rest of his life. In London, he initially worked as a guest conductor for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and London Symphony Orchestra and as a free-lance music correspondent for several continental European papers. He went on to become the music critic for the British magazine Time and Tide (1949—1962) and the London Evening News (1957 to 1961). He was also a frequent contributor to The Times and the Daily Telegraph.

Carner became a naturalised British subject in 1940 and in 1944 married the composer and pianist, Helen Lucas Pyke. In the 1940s he also began publishing scholarly articles and monographs, most notably Volume 2 of A Study of Twentieth-Century Harmony in 1944 (Volume 1 was written by René Lenormand). In 1958, he published one of his most important works, Puccini: a Critical Biography. The book was dedicated to the memory of his wife, Helen, who had died in 1954. Translated into several languages, and published in multiple editions (the last revised edition was published posthumously in 1992), it was described by Stanley Sadie in the 2001 edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as having "long stood as the most important book on Puccini in English." Carner also edited a volume of Puccini's letters as well as writing two volumes on Puccini's operas for the Cambridge Opera Handbooks series, Madame Butterfly (1979), and Tosca (1985). Another key work by Carner was his 1975 Alban Berg: the Man and his Work. Carner also published two collections of essays and reviews, Of Men and Music (1944) and Major and Minor (1980).

Mosco Carner died of a heart attack at the age of 80 while on vacation in Stratton, Cornwall. He was survived by his second wife, Hazel Carner (née Sebag-Montefiore), whom he had married in 1976. Hazel Carner wrote the preface to and helped prepare the third edition of Puccini: a Critical Biography which contains the revisions and additions that Carner had left at the time of his death.