Georg Martin Adolf Henselt was born at Schwabach in Bavaria on 9 May 1814, began the violin at three and the piano at five with Josepha von Fladt, who had studied composition with Danzi, Vogler and Graetz and piano with Franz Lauska. He made his debut at the Odeon in Munich with the opening movement of a Mozart C major concerto, a fantasy on a theme from Der Freischütz and a Kalkbrenner rondo. Fladt’s influence with Ludwig I of Bavaria paid for some months with Hummel at Weimar in 1832, after which he went to Vienna to study composition with Simon Sechter — later Bruckner’s teacher — and succeeded there as a concert pianist. He toured Germany in 1836 for his health, settled at Breslau in 1837 where he married Rosalie Vogel, and moved to Saint Petersburg the following year. He died of heart disease at Warmbrunn on 10 October 1889.

In Saint Petersburg he became court pianist to the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and inspector of musical studies at the Smolny Institute, and was ennobled in 1876; Heinrich Ehrlich, Nikolai Zverev, Ingeborg Bronsart von Schellendorf and Vladimir Stasov were among his pupils. His Douze Études caractéristiques, notorious for their difficulty, and the Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 16, were his best-known works. His playing was said to combine Liszt’s sonority with Hummel’s evenness, and rested on extended chord positions and a celebrated cantabile; Liszt told his own pupils to find out the secret of Henselt’s hands, and remarked that he could have had velvet paws like that himself had he wanted them. His teaching shaped the Russian piano school growing from what John Field had planted, and Rachmaninoff counted him among his most important influences.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_von_Henselt
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q362139