Moszkowski, Moritz

Moszkowski was born into a wealthy Jewish family. His parents, Isaac (Itzik Isruel) Moszkowski (1820, Kielce -?) And Salome Hirschberg (1829, Ratibor -?), Moved to Breslau from Pilica shortly after the birth of their eldest son, the future famous satirist writer Alexander Moshkovsky . The family also grew up with three older children from their father’s first marriage. Moritz showed early musical abilities and received his first music lessons at home. In 1865, the family moved to Dresden , where Moszkowski entered the conservatory. Four years later, he continued his studies at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin with Eduard Frank (piano) and Friedrich Kiel (composition), and then at Theodor Kullack's New Academy of Musical Art . At the age of 17, Moshkovsky accepted Kullak’s offer to begin teaching himself, and remained in this position for more than 25 years. In 1873, he first performed a solo concert as a pianist in Berlin and soon quickly became famous as a virtuoso performer. Moszkowski was also a good violinist and sometimes played the part of the first violin in the orchestra of the academy. His first compositions belong to the same time, among which the Piano Concerto, first performed in Berlin in 1875 and highly praised by Franz Liszt , is the most famous.

In 1884, he married Henriette Chaminade, sister of the French woman composer Cecile Chaminade . In the marriage, a son Marcel (1887-1971) and a daughter Sylvia (1889-1906) were born.

In the 1880s, due to the onset of a nervous breakdown, Moszkowski almost ended his pianistic career and focused on composition. In 1885, at the invitation of the Royal Philharmonic Society, he visited England for the first time, where he performed as a conductor. In 1893, he was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and four years later he settled in Paris and married his sister Cecile Chaminade . During this period, Moshkovsky was very popular as a composer and teacher: among his students were Voitech Gavronsky , Joseph Hoffmann , Wanda Landowska , Joaquin Turin . In 1904, on the advice of Andre Message, Thomas Beecham began to take private orchestration lessons from Moszkowski.

Since the early 1910s, interest in Moshkovsky’s music began to decline gradually. The death of his wife and daughter severely undermined his already shaky health. The composer began to lead the life of a recluse and finally stopped performing. In recent years, Moshkovsky spent in poverty. In 1921 , one of his American friends arranged a big concert in Carnegie Hall in his honor, but Moskowski did not use the proceeds during his life, being seriously ill - they went to his funeral.

Moshkovsky’s early orchestral works had a certain resonance, but compositions for the piano — virtuoso plays, concert sketches, etc., up to the salon pieces intended for home music-making — brought him real fame.

In the early works of Moshkovsky, the influence of Chopin , Mendelssohn and, in particular, Schumann can be traced, but later the composer formed his own style, which, not distinguished by special originality, nevertheless, clearly showed a subtle authorial sense of the instrument and its capabilities. Ignacy Paderevsky wrote later: "Moshkovsky, perhaps better than other composers, except Chopin, understands how to compose for piano." For many years, Moshkovsky’s works were forgotten (with the exception of “15 virtuoso Etudes op. 72, widely used in teaching practice), they were practically not performed, and only in recent years there has been a revival of interest in the composer's work.

• The opera Boabdil , the Last King of the Moors (1892)
• Ballet Laurin (1896)

Compositions for orchestra and for solo instruments with orchestra

• Overture D-dur (1871-1872)
• Symphony d-moll (1873)
• Symphonic poem "Joan of Arc" (1875-1876)
• Three orchestral suites
• “Dance with Torches" (1893)
• Prelude and Fugue for Strings (1911)
• Concert for piano and orchestra No. 1 h-moll (1874)
• Concert for piano and orchestra No. 2 E-dur (1898)
• Ballad for violin and orchestra
• Concert Pieces for Violin and Orchestra
• Concert for violin and orchestra C-dur (1885)

Chamber ensembles

• Two Concert Pieces for Violin and Piano
• Four Pieces for Violin and Piano (1909)
• Suite for Two Violins and Piano
• Three Pieces for Cello and Piano

Vocal compositions

• Songs and romances to verses by Heine , Chamisso , etc.

Compositions for Piano

• Waltzes, concert sketches, plays, musical moments , Polonaise, Tarantella, Waltz, Suite and others.

• Zaleski G. Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin. - New York, 1949, pp. 123-124

• (German) Boyan Asenov's dissertation, containing a complete list of Moszkowski’s works

• Moszkowski, Moritz: sheet music at International Music Score Library Project
• D-moll Symphony score (stored at the French National Library )
• Moritz Moszkowski (English) on the Allmusic website