Carl Filtsch was a pianist and composer from Transylvania. He started playing the piano since he was a child. Renowned composer Frédéric Chopin took him as a student.

Life and education

Filtsch was born in Mühlbach Sebeș in present-day Romania. His father, a Lutheran church pastor in Mühlbach, was his first piano teacher. It was his first public success 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.

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 , but certainly not less well."

Recordings

• Filtsch, Talberg, Liszt, Chopin: Piano music - Leonhard Westermayr CD MMS 2616
• 2010 Mikuli, Teffelsen, Filtsch, Gutmann: Piano music - Hubert Rutkowski Naxos 8.572344
• 2011 Mikuli, Teffelsen, Filtsch: Violin & piano music - Voytek Proniewicz, Alexander Jakobidze-Gitman Naxos 8.572460
• 2012 Tellefsen and Filtsch: Piano Concerto, Concert Piece, Overture - Hubert Rutkowski, Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lukasz Borowicz Accord 177 2
• 2016 Carl Filtsch Piano Solo Pieces - Chiyo Hagiwara ALCD-9161