Moritz Moszkowski was born on 23 August 1854 in Breslau, then in Prussia and now Wrocław, into a wealthy Polish-Jewish family that had arrived from Pilica that year; he was openly and firmly Jewish at a time when many were not. He was taught at home until 1865, when the family moved to Dresden and he entered the conservatory, and went to Berlin in 1869 — first to the Julius Stern Conservatory, for piano with Eduard Franck and composition with Friedrich Kiel, then to Theodor Kullak’s Neue Akademie der Tonkunst for composition with Richard Wüerst and orchestration with Heinrich Dorn — where he became close to the Scharwenka brothers. He accepted a teaching post from Kullak in 1871 and, being a capable violinist, sometimes led the academy orchestra. He married Cécile Chaminade’s younger sister Henriette in 1884; she left him for the poet Ludwig Fulda in 1890. He died on 4 March 1925.

He first played in public to real success in 1873, and two years later performed his own piano concerto in a two-piano arrangement with Liszt, before an audience Liszt had invited himself. He taught at the Berlin conservatory from 1875, with Joaquín Turina, Joaquín Nin, Frank Damrosch, Ernest Schelling and Carl Lachmund among his pupils, toured Europe as a pianist and conductor, and was made an honorary member of the Royal Philharmonic Society when he introduced his orchestral works in London in 1887. A neurological problem in his arm from the mid-1880s pushed him from the platform toward composing, teaching and conducting. Paderewski’s verdict was that after Chopin nobody better understood how to write for the piano, and that his writing covered the whole range of its technique.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moritz_Moszkowski
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q322427