Ferdinand Hiller was born on 24 October 1811 in Frankfurt am Main into a wealthy Jewish family; his father, born Isaac Hildesheim, had changed the name to conceal his origins and dealt in English textiles. He was taught piano by Alois Schmitt, violin by Jörg Hofmann and harmony and counterpoint by Georg Jacob Vollweiler, played a Mozart concerto in public at ten and produced his first composition at twelve. He met the thirteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn when the family passed through Frankfurt in 1822; the acquaintance was renewed in 1825 and became a close friendship that lasted until 1843. From 1825 to 1827 he studied with Hummel in Weimar, and was in Vienna at Beethoven’s death; he and Hummel heard Vogl and Schubert perform Winterreise there, and Hiller recorded that his teacher wept. He died on 11 May 1885.

He was based in Paris from 1828 to 1835, teaching composition at Choron’s School of Music before giving the post up to concentrate on his own playing and writing, and became close to Chopin, Liszt and — most durably — Berlioz, whose fight for recognition he supported despite their differing aesthetics. He succeeded Mendelssohn as director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1843, which appears to be what ended the friendship; Hiller himself put the break down to “social, and not personal susceptibilities”. A lock of hair long said to have been cut from Beethoven’s corpse by Hiller on 27 March 1827 and given to his son Paul in 1883 was shown by DNA analysis published in 2023 to have come from a woman of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and Hiller’s own diaries and reminiscences never mention taking or owning it.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Hiller
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q213530