Josef Labor

Labor gave piano lessons to many notable musical personalities including Alma Schindler (who married Gustav Mahler and others), Paul Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg.

He attended many musical evenings at the Wittgenstein home with such Viennese musicians of the day as Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, and Richard Strauss.

When Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in World War I, Josef Labor was the first person he asked to write a piece for piano left hand.

[5] Wittgenstein later commissioned works for the left hand from other composers including Strauss, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, and Franz Schmidt (the finale of Schmidt's A major Clarinet Quintet – the last of his Wittgenstein commissions – is a set of variations on a theme from Labor's own clarinet and piano quintet, Op.

Paul's brother, the philosopher and writer Ludwig Wittgenstein, praised Josef Labor as one of "the six truly great composers" along with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.