Profession: teacher

Goethe became a lifelong friend after Zelter, rather nervously, wrote to him; they met only 14 times, but in 30 years exchanged over 900 letters. Hegel was an old Berlin friend. The bristly and conservative Zelter taught both Mendelssohns, influentially: he introduced the 12-year-old Felix to Goethe, who was enchanted by his playing. Meyerbeer was another of his students; Zelter introduced him to the then-unfashionable music of J. S. Bach. The exceptionally well-travelled Neukomm visited him in Berlin, on the way back from Russia to France, and was glad to find their friendship still alive.

Berger is today half-forgotten, best-known for those he taught. He himself was taught by Clementi, whose staunch supporter he remained, and by Field. Runge and he struck up a close friendship when he went to Dresden in order to study with Johann Gottlieb Naumann, who unfortunately had just died. In London, he met up again with Clementi, and also got to know Clementi’s student Cramer. Back in Berlin salon society, he got to know Müller – both of them, and the poet Brentano, were unrequitedly in love with Luise Hensel, Fanny Mendelssohn’s sister-in-law. The Mendelssohns were his best-known students.

Bigot is now best-known for having been piano-teacher to both Mendelssohns, brother and sister, when they were living in Paris. But she was also a close friend of Beethoven, who admired her pianistic skills when she lived in Vienna (as a married woman, she caused a scandal by riding unchaperoned with him in a buggy). She also knew Haydn, and enthusiastically promoted the works of both of them to French audiences. In Paris she studied composition with Cherubini, and also knew the composers Clementi, Cramer and Dussek. Of her own compositions, few survive.