Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke was born on 23 June 1824 in Altona, now part of Hamburg but then under Danish rule, so that he was technically born a Dane. All his training came from his father, a music teacher and writer on music; he began with the violin, moved to the piano, was composing at seven and appeared in public at twelve. He made his first concert tour through Denmark and Sweden at nineteen in 1843, then settled for a long period in Leipzig, where he studied with Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt and became a friend of the first two. He was court pianist to Christian VIII in Copenhagen from 1846 to 1848, went to Paris, and in 1851 became a professor at the Cologne Conservatory, later holding posts at Barmen and Breslau. He died in Leipzig on 10 March 1910, aged eighty-five.

From 1860 he directed the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra for more than three decades, until 1895, and was professor of composition and piano at the conservatory; he conducted the premiere of the complete seven-movement version of Brahms’s A German Requiem in 1869. He taught for thirty-five years, until 1902, and his pupils included Grieg, Janáček, Albéniz, Stanford, Sinding, Svendsen, Max Bruch, Weingartner, Čiurlionis and Mykola Lysenko. He wrote four piano concertos and concertos for violin, cello, harp and flute, several operas and, in retirement, enough further music to bring his published output to nearly three hundred works; the flute sonata Undine is the piece that stayed in the repertoire. In 1904, at eighty, he cut seven Welte-Mignon piano rolls, which makes him the earliest-born pianist whose playing survives in any form.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Reinecke
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q159569