Ignaz Moscheles
Moscheles taught his adopted country how to write enchanting music for decades to come.
1794-1870
Moscheles taught his adopted country how to write enchanting music for decades to come.
1794-1870
Ignaz Moscheles (1794-1870) was a Czech composer who came to England in the 1820s and instantly felt at home. England warmed just as quickly to him, and he became a kind of godfather to a generation of Victorian composers writing particularly tuneful music.
IGNAZ Moscheles was born in Prague, and studied at the Conservatory there. He was soon in demand, and his first concert in England came in 1822.
The British countryside charmed him, and he admitted that “I feel more and more at home in England”. After his marriage in 1825, Moscheles settled in London, where his reputation grew.
He championed the then-unfashionable music of Beethoven, and used his good offices with the Philharmonic Society to help Beethoven financially in his last illness.
As a talent-scout for the Society, in 1829 he secured an invitation for his former pupil Felix Mendelssohn to visit London. Mendelssohn instantly fell in love with England, and England with Mendelssohn.
A steady stream of promising composers, including Arthur Sullivan, William Sterndale Bennett and Charles Villiers Stanford, studied at Mendelssohn’s Conservatory in Germany (which Moscheles ran from 1847), and returned to make Victorian music some of the most enchanting and tuneful in the world.