Carl Filtsch


Carl Filtsch was a Transylvanian pianist and composer. He was a child prodigy, and student of Frédéric Chopin.

Life and education

Filtsch was born in Mühlbach in present-day Romania. His father Joseph Filtsch, a Lutheran church pastor in Mühlbach, was his first piano teacher. His first public success came at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Carl and his brother Joseph, also a child pianist, arrived in Paris on November 29, 1841, and immediately sought out Chopin to be Carl's teacher. Though Chopin almost never taught children, and rarely gave a student more than one lesson per week, he agreed to teach Carl, and gave him three lessons per week.
Considered Chopin's most talented pupil, Filtsch received high praise from Franz Liszt, Friedrich Wieck, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Ignaz Moscheles, the music critic Ludwig Rellstab, and fellow child prodigy, Anton Rubinstein. Filtsch began touring Europe on concert tours at the age of 13. After triumphant concerts in Paris, London, and Vienna, his promising career was cut short by an early death in Venice from tuberculosis. He is buried in the Protestant section of the San Michele cemetery.

Quality of playing

According to numerous letters from Chopin and his acquaintances, Chopin considered Filtsch the most worthy interpreter of his music. A friend of Chopin, Ferdinand Denis, reported in an article in Vienna's Der Humorist in February 1843 that on one occasion after listening to Filtsch, Chopin exclaimed, "My God! What a child! Nobody has ever understood me as this child has...It is not imitation, it is the same sentiment, an instinct that makes him play without thinking as if it could not have been any other way. He plays almost all my compositions without having heard me, without being shown the smallest thing - not exactly like me, but certainly not less well."

Recordings