Henry Charles Litolff was born in London on 6 February 1818 to a Scottish mother and an Alsatian father, a violinist who had been taken prisoner while serving as a band musician in Napoleon’s army during the Peninsular War. His father taught him the rudiments, and in 1830, at twelve, he played for Moscheles, who was impressed enough to teach him free of charge; he began concertising at fourteen. The lessons ended in 1835 when at seventeen he abruptly married the sixteen-year-old Elisabeth Etherington. He separated from her in 1839 and moved to Brussels, then around 1841 to Warsaw, where he is believed to have conducted the National Theatre orchestra, and in 1844 to Germany, where he taught the young Hans von Bülow. A return to England in 1845 to obtain a divorce went badly: he was heavily fined and imprisoned, and escaped to the Netherlands, reportedly with the help of the jailer’s daughter. He married three more times and died at Bois-Colombes near Paris on 5 August 1891.

He befriended the Brunswick publisher Gottfried Meyer and, after Meyer’s death, married his widow Julie in 1851, having finally obtained his divorce as a new citizen of Brunswick; under them the firm G. M. Meyer grew substantially and became the Collection Litolff, an imprint of cheap, well-made classical editions that is now part of Edition Peters. He divorced Julie in 1858 and left the business to his adoptive son Theodor. He composed a great deal, chiefly the five Concertos symphoniques for piano and orchestra, and is known today for a single movement — the scherzo of the Fourth, in D minor.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Litolff
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q383853