Ignaz Friedman was a Polish pianist, composer, and music teacher. He was born into a Jewish family in Podgórze, now part of Kraków. He began studying music at an early age with his father, a violinist and clarinetist in a theater orchestra, and later studied piano with the Kraków teacher Flora Grzywińska.
In 1900, Friedman went to Leipzig to study composition with Hugo Riemann. From 1901, he continued his piano studies in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky and Leschetizky’s assistant Malwine Brée, while also studying music theory and history with Guido Adler. He made his Vienna debut in November 1904, performing piano concertos by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Liszt in a single evening.
Friedman lived in Berlin for several years, then moved to Denmark and later Italy while touring internationally. In 1927, he took part in a Vienna festival marking the centenary of Beethoven’s death, performing piano works and a trio with Bronisław Huberman and Pablo Casals. In 1940, he began a concert tour of Australia. He gave his last concert in Sydney on July 24, 1943, and stopped performing because of an illness affecting his hand.
Known for his technique, Friedman gave more than 2,800 concerts around the world. He composed piano transcriptions, salon miniatures, and chamber works, and edited piano music by Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann. His surviving recordings fill six discs; recordings of Chopin’s music and Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words received particularly high praise from specialists.