1854–1925 · Poland, France
Moritz Moszkowski (1854–1925) was a German pianist and composer of Polish descent who enjoyed great popularity as a composer and teacher in Berlin and Paris in the late nineteenth century; his pupils included Josef Hofmann and Wanda Landowska. His virtuoso piano pieces still feature in the repertoire of pianists today.
Moritz Moszkowski was born on 23 August 1854 in Breslau, into a well-off Jewish family. His parents, Isaac Moszkowski and Salomea Hirschberg, had moved to the city from the small Polish town of Pilica shortly after the birth of their elder son — the future Berlin satirist and writer Alexander Moszkowski. His father, Isaac (Itzik-Israel) Moszkowski, was originally from Kielce, while his mother, Salomea Hirschberg, came from Ratibor. Three more, still older, children from his father's first marriage were also growing up in the household. The younger boy's musical gift showed itself very early, and he took his first lessons at home.
The family moved to Dresden in 1865, and it was there that young Moritz began his studies at the conservatory — his first attempts at composing date from this time too, and at thirteen he wrote a piano quintet. Four years on, his training continued in Berlin: to begin with at the Stern Conservatory, where Eduard Franck taught him piano and Friedrich Kiel taught him composition, and afterwards at Theodor Kullak's New Academy of Musical Art, where other teachers there gave him further grounding in composition and orchestration. There he grew close to the brothers Xaver and Philipp Scharwenka, a friendship that lasted his whole life. A capable violinist too, he would sometimes take the first violin desk in the academy orchestra.
At seventeen, Moszkowski accepted Kullak's offer to begin teaching at the academy himself, a post he kept for more than twenty-five years. In 1873 he gave his first solo concert as a pianist in Berlin, and soon began touring nearby towns to gain experience and build his reputation as a virtuoso.
From this same period came his Piano Concerto No. 1: it premiered in Berlin in 1874 and won high praise from Franz Liszt.
Touring across Europe, Moszkowski earned a reputation as a first-rate pianist and a gifted composer; his work as a conductor was noted as well. In 1884 he married Henriette Chaminade, the younger sister of the French composer Cécile Chaminade. The marriage produced a son, Marcel, born in 1887, and a daughter, Sylvia, born in 1889.
During the 1880s Moszkowski developed a nervous disorder and gradually wound down his career as a performer, turning his attention to composing. In 1885, at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Society, he visited England for the first time and appeared there as a conductor.
Later Moszkowski was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. By then he enjoyed great popularity as both composer and teacher; his pupils included Wojciech Gawroński, Josef Hofmann, Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Turina.
In 1897, already famous and well-off, Moszkowski moved to Paris, settling on the rue Nouvelle with his son and daughter. Aspiring musicians there sought him out eagerly as a teacher, and he was generous with his time. On André Messager's advice, Thomas Beecham began taking private lessons in orchestration from him in 1904.
Among his Parisian students were Vlado Perlemuter and, informally, Gaby Casadesus. Each summer Moszkowski rented a villa near Montigny-sur-Loing that had once belonged to the French writer Henri Murger. Of Josef Hofmann he used to say there was nothing left for anyone to teach him.
From the early 1910s, interest in Moszkowski's music gradually waned. Earlier, in 1906, the composer's seventeen-year-old daughter Sylvia had died; the deaths of his wife and daughter left his already fragile health permanently undermined. He withdrew into himself and stopped performing in public altogether. Musical tastes were changing, but Moszkowski himself remained faithful to the traditions of the nineteenth century.
He was helped by two former pupils, Josef Hofmann and Bernhard Pollack. Pollack arranged with the Peters publishing house in Leipzig for a new piano arrangement of the opera Boabdil, through which Moszkowski received a further ten thousand francs in royalties, plus a separate gift of ten thousand marks from Hofmann and five thousand marks from Pollack himself.
He spent his last years in poverty: the money he had invested in German, Polish and Russian securities lost all value once the war broke out. In December 1921 one of his American acquaintances organised a large benefit concert in his honour, with fifteen grand pianos on stage. Frank Damrosch conducted that evening, Ignacy Jan Paderewski sent a telegram of apology for being unable to attend, and among those who took the stage were Elly Ney, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Harold Bauer, Josef Lhévinne, Wilhelm Backhaus and Percy Grainger; the proceeds were used to buy Moszkowski a lifetime annual annuity, but the gravely ill composer never had the chance to use it — the money went instead toward his funeral. He died of stomach cancer in Paris on 4 March 1925.
Moszkowski's early orchestral works left little trace, and it was his piano music that brought him real fame — ranging from virtuoso concert études to salon miniatures meant for playing at home. His earliest opuses show the influence of Chopin, Mendelssohn and, above all, Schumann, but over time he developed a recognisable style of his own: without being especially innovative in language, Moszkowski had a fine feel for what the instrument could do — as the pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski put it, few composers understood piano writing as well as Moszkowski did. For a long time his music was rarely heard in concert, and only in recent years has interest in it begun to return. One exception was the Quinze études de virtuosité, Op. 72: they went on being widely used in teaching even when the rest of Moszkowski's music had been largely forgotten.
His output includes the opera Boabdil der letzte Maurenkönig, the symphonic poem Jeanne d'Arc, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, several pieces for violin and piano, and songs to poems by Heine and Chamisso. But it was his cycles of piano pieces that won the widest fame: Spanish dances and other pieces for piano duet, character pieces, waltzes and études, down to études for the left hand alone.
The site brings together Moszkowski editions catalogued from Op. 2 to Op. 95: the Album Espagnol for piano duet, Op. 21; pieces from the Op. 36 cycle, including Étincelles, which Vladimir Horowitz, Arcadi Volodos and Mikhail Pletnev have all played as encores; piano arrangements of numbers from the opera Boabdil; and waltzes, études and mazurkas from later opuses. The editions on the site are mostly graded 'Intermediate+' — repertoire for pianists who already have a confident command of the instrument. A good place to start with Moszkowski is the miniatures of Op. 31, the duet pieces of Op. 33, and Op. 34.