Karl Klindworth
Karl Klindworth (25 September 1830 – 27 July 1916) was a German pianist, conductor, musicologist, and music teacher. He was born in Hanover into a prominent family that produced several distinguished engineers, and was the grandson on his mother's side of Johann Thomas Lamminger, court printer in Hanover.
Klindworth studied the violin in his youth and, from the age of seventeen, conducted small opera companies. In 1850 he became director of an amateur choir in Hamburg. Having decided to concentrate on the piano, he studied with Franz Liszt in Weimar from 1852 to 1854.
From 1854 to 1868, Klindworth lived and worked in London, chiefly pursuing musicological research. He then served as professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatory from 1868 to 1881. His pupils there included Sergei Lyapunov and Georgy Catoire. In Russia, he was among the earliest advocates of Richard Wagner's music and inspired his Moscow Conservatory colleague Pyotr Tchaikovsky to take an interest in Wagner's work.
In 1883 Klindworth opened a piano school in Berlin. It merged in 1893 with Xaver Scharwenka's conservatory to form the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. Klindworth subsequently retired and settled in Potsdam, where he gave private lessons. His adopted daughter was Winifred Williams, later the wife of Siegfried Wagner.
Klindworth produced numerous piano arrangements, including those of Mikhail Glinka's Spanish overtures, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem, and Wagner's operatic tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. The latter arrangement was made with Wagner's approval and partly at his request; Klindworth completed it while in Moscow and sent the sections to Wagner in Germany. He also orchestrated Charles-Valentin Alkan's Op. 39 concerto, originally written for solo piano. As an editor, he published editions of Frédéric Chopin's collected works, praised by Liszt and Hans von Bülow, as well as Ludwig van Beethoven's piano sonatas.