Carl Friedberg
Carl Friedberg was a German-American pianist and music teacher; the article also identifies him as a composer and musician. He was born in Bingen am Rhein on September 18, 1872. He studied piano with James Kwast at the Hoch Conservatory, graduating in 1887, and then studied for two years with Clara Schumann.
Friedberg made his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1892, conducted by Gustav Mahler. He taught at the Hoch Conservatory from 1893 to 1904 and at the Cologne Conservatory from 1904 to 1914. After touring the United States and making his Carnegie Hall debut in 1914, he led a piano master class at the Institute of Musical Art, later the Juilliard School, in 1916. He returned to Europe in 1918, settled in Munich, and performed as a soloist and in a piano trio with violinist Carl Flesch and cellist Hugo Becker.
From 1923 until his retirement in 1946, Friedberg spent much of his time in New York as head of Juilliard’s piano department. He continued to give master classes in American cities after retiring, performed frequently in a duo with Fritz Kreisler, and played for a time in a piano trio with Daniil Karpilovsky and Felix Salmond. In 1954, after a fifteen-year absence, he returned to Europe. The following year he traveled to Munich to give a master class, but caught a cold and died in Trieste on September 9, 1955.
Friedberg disliked making recordings and released his only studio recording in 1953. It featured Robert Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood and three pieces by Johannes Brahms. A substantially expanded edition appeared thirty years later, with additional recordings that had not been used at the time, including Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 10, and Friedberg’s own improvisations. His students in Germany included Karin Dayas, Edith Weiss-Mann, Erwin Schulhoff, Gerard Hengeveld, Ilse Fromm-Michaels, and Paul Otto Möckel; in the United States they included Yasha Seide, Sergius Kagen, Joseph Banowetz, Yaltah Menuhin, Malcolm Frager, Haddy Johnson, Helen Johnson, William Masselos, and Jeanne Therrien.