Martinus Sieveking

Martinus Sieveking (March 24, 1867 – November 26, 1950) was a Dutch virtuoso pianist, composer, teacher and inventor born in Amsterdam. Also known as Martin Sieveking, he performed as a soloist around Europe and the United States during his active career and taught in France and the U.S. after he retired from performing. He is sometimes known as The Flying Dutchman, coming from the Netherlands and for his volatile disposition. At the peak of his career, he was pronounced by the New York and Boston critics as one of the quartet of the greatest living pianists of that time, together with Ignace Paderewski, Moriz Rosenthal and Rafael Joseffy.

Sieveking was an advocate of The Dead-Weight Principle of playing, devising his own system, and wrote articles about the subject for several publications. He was also an inventor and made mechanical devices of various kinds that he had patented in different countries.

Sieveking came from an old and aristocratic family, which dates its ancestry back to the fifteenth century. He grew up in a musical atmosphere, his mother Johanna De Jong, was a well-known opera singer and his father, also named Martinus, is a trained musician, choral conductor and a composer with published works in the Netherlands. He was the second in a family of four; his older sibling was named Johanna like his mother, and Martinus was followed by Charles, then Rosa.

From his earliest infancy he showed characteristics indicative of his future career. His father gave Martinus his very first piano lessons at an early age till he was ten when his family sent him to the Leipzig Conservatory. Martinus also started composing at an early age and played the organ in a church by age twelve. At the conservatory, he studied piano for eight years under Julius Röntgen, a famous German-Dutch pianist-composer and spent six years of musical education in composition and orchestration, under Franz Coenen of the Netherlands.

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