Christoph Eschenbach was born Christoph Ringmann in Breslau on 20 February 1940, the son of the singer and piano teacher Margarethe Jaross, who died giving birth to him, and the musicologist and conductor Heribert Ringmann, who was conscripted into a punishment battalion as an anti-Nazi and killed on the Eastern Front. His grandmother took him in and died in a refugee camp in Mecklenburg in the winter of 1945–46; he did not speak for a year, until his adoptive mother asked whether he would like to play music. Adopted in 1946 by his mother’s cousin Wallydore Eschenbach, who taught him the piano from 1948, he entered the Cologne Musikhochschule in 1955 and continued in Hamburg with Eliza Hansen.

He won the ARD Piano Competition in 1962, signed with Deutsche Grammophon and recorded Mozart for the label in 1964, took the Clara Haskil Competition in 1963, and made his debut as a pianist with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1972; his Schubert and Mozart, including four-hand recordings with Justus Frantz, are the core of that side of his work. Having studied conducting with George Szell for more than three years and counted Karajan as a mentor, he moved to the podium, directing the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, the Houston Symphony from 1988 to 1999, the NDR Symphony in Hamburg, the Orchestre de Paris from 2000 to 2010, the Philadelphia Orchestra from 2003 to 2008 and the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington until 2017. He won a Grammy in 2014 for an album of Hindemith and received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2015.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Eschenbach
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q60814