Biography (read more)
Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek was born on 11 May 1791 at Vamberk in Bohemia, where his father was schoolmaster, choirmaster and organist and taught him music; a prodigy, he was playing in public around Bohemian towns at nine. His father helped him to a scholarship at the University of Prague, where he read philosophy while taking piano and composition with Václav Tomášek. Unable to find enough musical work in Prague, he moved to Vienna in 1813 at twenty-two to study law and in the hope of meeting Beethoven — which he did in 1814, along with Spohr, Moscheles, Hummel, under whom he sharpened his piano playing, and Schubert, who became a close friend. He finished his law studies in 1821 and worked as a barrister drafting documents for the Court Military Privy Councillor, but in 1822 was appointed second court organist and gave the law up, becoming first organist in 1824. Tuberculosis took hold in 1820, and he died in Vienna on 19 November 1825, aged thirty-four.
He was drawn less to Mozart’s classicism than to the Romanticism beginning in Beethoven, and became conductor of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna in 1818. He wrote a single symphony, in D major, in 1821, and a Mass in B flat as court organist; both have been recorded along with some of the piano music and the Violin Sonata in G, Op. 5. The word impromptu was first used of music in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1817, and his Impromptus, Op. 7, published in 1822, were known to Schubert, who took the title over for his own sets, as Chopin and many others did after him. In 1823–24 he was, like Schubert, one of the fifty composers who contributed a variation on Diabelli’s waltz.
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