Born in Prague, May 23, 1794
Died in Leipzig, March 10, 1870
- Ignaz Moscheles began piano lessons at an early age. During his childhood, the director of the Prague Conservatory, B.D. Weber taught him for a time.
- After moving to Vienna in 1808, Moscheles studied composition with Salieri.
- The wider public first knew Moscheles as a concert pianist rather than as a composer.
- Fun fact: in 1824, Moscheles met a teenage Felix Mendelssohn in Berlin and gave him piano lessons.
- Much of Moscheles’s life was spent teaching. In 1825, the composer and his wife moved to London, where he taught piano at the Royal Academy of Music.
- In 1847, he became principal professor of piano at the Leipzig Conservatory, where he remained for the rest of his life. Among his students were Edvard Grieg and Arthur Sullivan.
- As a composer, the majority of Moscheles’s works were for piano. Schumann considered Moscheles to be one of the best sonata composers of his generation.1
- Historical context: “Born in 1794, three years after the death of Mozart, he met Beethoven, survived Mendelssohn, Chopin and Berlioz, and lived into the age of Liszt and Wagner.”2
Learn More
Biography via Naxos
Sources
- Jerome Roche and Henry Roche, “Moscheles, Ignaz,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed September 1, 2026, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000019185.
- “Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870),” Naxos, accessed September 1, 2026, https://www.naxos.com/Bio/Person/Ignaz_Moscheles/19607.