Josef Weiss was a German pianist and composer of Jewish origin. He was born in 1864 in Košice, then part of the Austrian Empire, to a family whose father owned the city mill.
Weiss studied piano with Ferenc Erkel and composition with Robert Volkmann at the Budapest Academy of Music. He also studied privately with Franz Liszt from 1880 to 1882. In 1877 he made his debut at a student concert with his own Introduction and March; in 1882, the year he graduated, he performed a scherzo from his First Symphony in D minor, arranged for two pianos.
After graduating, Weiss settled in Berlin at the invitation of impresario Hermann Wolff and may also have studied with Moritz Moszkowski. From 1884 he toured in Europe. In 1891 he performed his Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 13, in Weimar, with Richard Strauss conducting. He taught at the New Academy of Music until it closed in 1890, and at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1891–92. His students included Samuil Maykapar, Leonid Shchedrin, and Alexandra Snetkova.
Weiss returned to Germany in 1893 and resumed touring as a soloist. He spent the 1899–1900 season in New York, giving seven concerts whose programs featured Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms. In 1910 Gustav Mahler invited him to perform Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, but Weiss left a rehearsal after objecting to the orchestra’s tempos and did not perform. Weiss later gave a Liszt concert in Schwerin, and his earliest recordings date from this period.
In 1913 Weiss wrote the music for the film The Student of Prague and performed it at the film’s Berlin premiere. From 1914 he taught at the Stern Conservatory. He continued to perform during the 1920s; his last recordings, including Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 18 and 23, date from 1924. He died in Budapest in 1945; the exact date of his death is unknown.