Johann Friedrich Franz Burgmüller was born at Regensburg on 4 December 1806 into a musical family — his father Friedrich August and his younger brother Norbert were both composers, and his mother Therese von Zandt was a pianist and singer. He moved to Kassel in 1829 to study with Louis Spohr and Moritz Hauptmann, and gave his first concert there as a pianist on 14 January 1830. In 1832, at twenty-six, he moved to Paris and stayed for the rest of his life. Norbert planned to join him there in 1835 but drowned during an epileptic seizure at a spa in Aachen the following year. Friedrich died in Paris on 13 February 1874.

In Paris he took on the local idiom and developed the light manner that became his signature, publishing a great deal of salon music for the piano — waltzes, nocturnes, polonaises, operatic fantasies and character albums. He is best known for three collections of teaching studies, above all the 25 Études faciles et progressives, Op. 100, for early intermediate pupils, with the more demanding Op. 105 and Op. 109 beside them; they have never gone out of use. He also wrote two ballets, and his Peasant Pas de Deux — originally called Souvenirs de Ratisbonne — was inserted into Adam’s Giselle for its 1841 premiere and has stayed in the score.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Burgm%C3%BCller
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q62075