Carl Lachmund

Carl V. Lachmund (27 March 1853 – 20 February 1928) was an American classical pianist, teacher, conductor, composer and diarist. He was a student of Franz Liszt for three years, and his detailed diaries of his time with Liszt provide an invaluable insight into that composer’s teaching methods and some aspects of his character. He founded the Lachmund Conservatory in New York and ran it for 22 years, and he founded the Women's String Orchestra, conducting it for 12 seasons.

Carl Valentine Lachmund was born in Boonville, Missouri in 1853, but spent most of his early life in Iowa. His parents Gustav Otto Lachmund and Sophia née Schmidt were immigrants from Germany.

His musical talent was recognised early. He went to Europe at the age of 16 and studied for six years, graduating in 1875 from the Cologne Conservatory, where his teachers were Ferdinand Hiller, Adolf Jensen, Friedrich Gernsheim and Isidor Seiss. He continued his studies in Berlin with Moritz Moszkowski, Friedrich Kiel (Paderewski was a fellow student), and Xaver and Philipp Scharwenka.

In 1877 he founded the German Conservatory of Music in Clinton, Iowa. He accompanied the violinist August Wilhelmj on his 1880 European tour.

In 1882 Lachmund went to Weimar to study under Franz Liszt, with whom he remained until 1884. His wife Carrie studied the harp in Weimar during this time. Lachmund kept a diary that eventually ran to some 750 pages, and it gives one of the most exhaustive accounts of Liszt's keyboard instruction. It is the single most valuable English-language source of information on Liszt's pedagogical style. After World War I, Lachmund decided to turn his diary into a book. He approached more than 200 people who had been in contact with Liszt to share their memories, to obtain more background information. Many did so, but the book was not published in Lachmund's lifetime. On his death, all of these and other papers were deposited in the New York Public Library. The Liszt scholar Alan Walker has edited, annotated and drawn extensively on the Lachmund papers in his research for his 3-volume biography of Liszt.

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