Thalberg asserted that he was the illegitimate son of Moritz, Prince of Dietrichstein and Maria Julia Bydeskuty von Ipp, from a Hungarian family of lower nobility.

In 1820, Julia married Baron Alexander Ludwig Wetzlar von Plankerstern [de] (from an ennobled Jewish Viennese family[2]).

Baroness von Wetzlar, his putative mother, who according to Wurzbach was occupied with his education during his childhood and early youth, was a brilliant amateur pianist.

Moscheles, according to a letter to Felix Mendelssohn dated 14 August 1836, had the impression that Thalberg had already reached a level at which no further help would be needed in order to become a great artist.

He's younger than I and pleases the ladies—makes potpourris on La Muette—produces his piano and forte with the pedal, not the hand—takes tenths as I do octaves and wears diamond shirt studs.

[12] Le Ménestrel of 13 March 1836 wrote:Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Chopin, Liszt and Herz are and will always be for me great artists, but Thalberg is the creator of a new art which I do not know how to compare to anything that existed before him .

[21] After Thalberg's stay in London in May 1837, he made a first, short tour, giving concerts in several towns in Great Britain, but he became ill and soon returned to Vienna.

Thalberg left Paris on 18 April 1838, travelling to Vienna, the very same day that Liszt gave there a charity concert for the benefit of the victims of a flood in Hungary.

According to Schumann's diary, Thalberg played from memory études by Chopin, Joseph Christoph Kessler, and Ferdinand Hiller.

He also played with great skill and inspiration works by Beethoven, Schubert, and Dussek, as well sight-reading Schumann's Kreisleriana, Op.

[25] On 27 November 1838, Thalberg took part in a charity concert, playing his new Fantasia on Rossini's 'La Donna del Lago', Op.

In the Revue et Gazette musicale of 9 May 1841,[32] an essay by Fétis appeared—Études d'exécution transcendente—in which he praised Liszt for a new composing style which had been stimulated by Thalberg's challenge.

In Frankfurt, he only took part in a charity concert on 15 January 1841, playing his fantasies on La Donna del Lago and Les Huguenots.

[35] He was busily composing new works; his Grande fantaisie sur la Sérénade et le Menuet de 'Don Juan', Op.

In the second half of January 1841, Thalberg travelled from Frankfurt to Weimar, where he performed three times at the Grand Duke's court and also in the Theatre.

Clara Schumann (née Wieck) noted in her diary:On Monday Thalberg visited us and played to the delightment beautiful on my piano.

At the close there are several runs of Chromatique Octaves, which at that time had not previously heard, and of which peculiar passages Thalberg was undoubtedly the inventor.

I waited for at least half an hour listening in wonderment to the facility with which he applied his own thoughts to the cleverness of Thalberg's mechanism, and then went into the room.

In March 1843, Heinrich Heine wrote about Thalberg:His performance is so gentlemanly, so entirely without any forced acting the genius, so entirely without that well-known brashness that makes a poor cover for inner insecurity.

According to an account by his pupil Johann Nepomuk Dunkl [hu], Liszt was sitting on the stage, carefully listening, and loudly applauding.

On 22 July 1843, Thalberg married Francesca ("Cecchina"), the eldest daughter of Luigi Lablache, first bass at the Théâtre des Italiens in Paris.

On Sundays, concerts were generally only allowed if they presented "sacred music", but several times Thalberg performed anyhow, playing pieces like his Op.

[50] A large part of his appeal on these tours was his unpretentious and unassuming personality; he did not resort to advertising gimmicks or cheap crowd-pleasing tricks—instead, he offered superbly polished renditions of his own compositions, which had already been well known in America.

quite unexpectedly closed what has been a most brilliant career—completely successful, musically, giving to the talented and genial artist abundance of both fame and money.

[53]The unexpected close referred to the announcement in June 1858 in Chicago that Thalberg would make only one of three scheduled appearances before immediately returning to Europe.

A further possibility is that there may have been consideration of legitimizing Thalberg to enable him to succeed his natural father, Prince Franz Joseph von Dietrichstein.

[59] When Thalberg died on 27 April 1871, he left behind a collection of several hundred autographs by famous composers, among them J. S. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and others; even Liszt.

[63]Ten years later, on 13 June 1862, a London correspondent of the Revue et gazette musicale[64] wrote:Thalberg was indeed imitated like no other; his manner was parodied, exaggerated, turned upside down, tortured, and it may have happened to all of us to curse more than once this Thalbergian school which brought us this avalanche of notes, these arpeggios up and down, with, or more often than not without the slightest song in the middle.

[65] In the late 19th century, Thalberg's fame had come to depend on his association with a single piano technique: the "three-hand effect".

Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, in his Geschichte des Klavierspiels (1879), wrote:His bravura pieces, fantasies on melodies from Rossini's Mosè and La donna del lago, on motifs from Bellini's Norma and on Russian folk-songs, became extraordinarily popular through his own, brilliant execution; however, they treat their subjects always in one and the same way, [namely] .