Carl Heinrich Carsten Reinecke (23 June 1824 – 10 March 1910) was a German composer, conductor, and pianist in the mid-Romantic era.

At the age of 19, he undertook his first concert tour as a pianist in 1843, through Denmark and Sweden, after which he lived for a long time in Leipzig,[1] where he studied under Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt; he entered into friendly relations with the former two.

After the stay in Leipzig, Reinecke went on tour with Königslöw and Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski (later Schumann's biographer), in North Germany and Denmark.

His students included Edvard Grieg, Basil Harwood, Charles Villiers Stanford, Christian Sinding, Leoš Janáček, Isaac Albéniz, August Max Fiedler, Walter Niemann, Johan Svendsen, Richard Franck, Felix Weingartner, Max Bruch, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Anna Diller Starbuck, Ernest Hutcheson, Felix Fox, Sofie Rohnstock, August Winding, Elisabeth Wintzer, Mykola Lysenko, and many others.

After retirement from the conservatory, Reinecke devoted his time to composition, resulting in almost three hundred published works.

His piano playing belonged to a school in which grace and neatness were characteristic, and at one time he was probably unrivaled as a Mozart player and an accompanist.