[2] His father, who had a job with the Austrian government, took the family to Prague during the Brabant Revolution (1789–1790).
[3] The young Blumenthal and his two brothers, Casimir and Léopold, learned to play the violin and studied composition with Abbé Vogler.
When Vogler went to Vienna in 1803 to produce his opera Samori, he recommended his students to the director of the Theater an der Wien, and on his testimony, they were accepted into the theatre orchestra, Joseph on viola, his siblings on violin.
[4] During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Joseph von Blumenthal wrote a great deal of dramatic music, of which a part was attributed to his brothers.
Blumenthal also wrote a considerable amount of music for violin: many concert pieces and instructive works, including a Violin Method (published Vienna, 1805) and a treatise on harmonics (published Vienna, 1829).