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Meet the Composers
Ignace Moscheles (1794-1870)
Ignace [Ignaz] Moscheles, born in Prague, was a Bohemian Jewish composer and piano virtuoso. At a very early age he had leaned to play the piano to a level where he was able to “perform” the Sonata pathetique Op. 13 by his lifetime hero Beethoven.
At the age of seven, he was taken to see Dionys Weber, for whom he “made a hash of playing” the Beethoven sonata. Weber said that he showed talent but was on the wrong road to true ability. He was accepted as a pupil on the understanding that he would spend a year each, learning only Mozart, Clementi and Bach.
Soon after his father died in 1808, he was sent to Vienna where he studied the theory of music with Albrechtsberger and compostion with Salieri, whose deputy KapellMeister he was for three years. While in Vienna he became friendly with Meyerbeer and Hummel.
At this time he was commissioned by the publisher Artaria to arrange a piano score of the opera Fidelio, and it was then that he met Beethoven and discussed at least part of his piano arrangement with the master. In February 1815, he gave the first performance of his lifelong virtuoso war-horse – The Alexander variations Op. 32. In the spring of 1816, he returned to Prague to visit his family, teacher and friends before embarking on a series of concert tours throughout Europe.
He lived in London from the mid-1820s to 1846, teaching piano at the Royal Academy of Music. As pianist, conductor ('at the piano' claims a late 19th century source, Myles Birket Foster) and composer (he wrote a symphony and eight concertos between 1819 and 1838), he was closely associated with the Philharmonic Society from 1821 to 1861, becoming co-director in 1832. In that year he conducted the British premier of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. In 1846 Mendelssohn, a close family friend and pupil, invited him to become first professor of piano at the recently founded Leipzig Conservatory. Here he remained for the rest of his life, becoming renowed for his teaching and his piano improvisation.
An intellectual classicist fired by Beethoven, graced by romantically elegant bravura and bewitched by Schumannesque Geist, he was the Schnabel, the Arrau of his day. As pianist-turned-conductor, the Barenboim, the Ashkenazy, the Eschenbach. As teacher, the Godowsky, the Hofmann, the Lhevinne, the Goldenweiser...'... a virtuoso who transcended virtuosity ... guided only by the nobility of his art ...' (Harold C. Schonberg), paternalistic, amiable and self-effacing, Moscheles edited Beethoven's piano concertos, piano trios, piano sonatas and piano variations, as well as the violin and cello sonatas. Under Beethoven's supervision ('he gave me many instructive hints, and even played to me such parts as he wished to have arranged in a particular manner for the piano-forte'), he famously undertook the first published vocal score and (textless) piano arrangement of Fidelio (Vienna, August 1814). He was just twenty. He also arranged the Egmont Overture for piano, violin, flute and cello ( London, 1824). Later, around 1845/46, he published a first movement cadenza for Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, subsequently misattributed to Brahms.
Moscheles died in Leipzig on March 10, 1870, nine days after attending his last rehearsal with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. It was to Moscheles, March 18th 1827, that Beethoven, eight days before his death, sent a list of metronome marks relating to the Ninth Symphony.