German pianist and conductor.

Klindworth was a pupil of Franz Liszt, and his career as a concert artist extended from 1848 to 1910. In 1868, he was appointed a piano professor at the Moscow Conservatory; in 1884 he moved to Berlin, where he was for a time the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and where he founded his own piano school, which in 1893 merged with the Scharwenka Institute to form the Konservatorium Klindworth-Scharwenka. He was an advocate of the "modern" musical trends of his time, notably the music of Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, Brahms, and Bruckner. He wrote many instructional manuals for the piano.

As a friend of Wagner, Klindworth created the vocal scores for the latter's music dramas from Rienzi to Parsifal. He also edited or arranged the keyboard works of numerous composers, including J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Mainz: Schott, 1894), the complete works of Chopin and the piano sonatas of Beethoven (both Berlin: Bote & Bock, no dates), and many of these editions remain in use today.

Klindworth and Schenker

Schenker criticized Klindworth's editions for their failure to understand the composer's intentions, as for example in Chopin's in B-flat major, Op. 71, No. 2: "[Klindworth] does not grasp the genuine gist of the voice-leading [...] What arrogance he shows toward Chopin!" (Der Tonwille, Heft 3 (1922), p. 25; Eng. trans., vol. I, p. 120). Of Beethoven's sonata Op. 109, for example, he included Klindworth's edition when commenting: "You will be utterly astonished at the discrepancy between the editor and Beethoven in light of his original autograph manuscript." (letter to Emil Hertzka, WSLB 144, January 22, 1913).