Alfred Grünfeld

Alfred Grünfeld (4 July 1852 in Prague – 4 January 1924 in Vienna) was an Austrian pianist and composer. Life Alfred Grünfeld was born as the second of eight children to Jewish leather merchant Moritz Grünfeld (born 1817 Kolín nad Labem) and his wife Regina, nee Pick (born 1826 Osek), in Prague – New Town. Moritz Grünfeld was a leather merchant, and Grünfeld grew up in a middle-class, musical Jewish family. His siblings included: the cellist Heinrich Grünfeld; Ludwig Grünfeld, who worked for Deutsche Grammophon, and Siegmund Grünfeld, répétiteur at the Vienna Hofoper. The family lived at Zeltnergasse 38. He gave his first public concert on 12 April 1865 in the Konviktsaal in Prague. Grünfeld then studied under Josef Krejčí and Bedřich Smetana at the Prague Conservatory, and later at Theodor Kullak’s Neue Akademie der Tonkunst in Berlin. In the winter of 1871, Gustav Mahler was sent by his father to school in Prague, and boarded with the Grünfeld family. This proved to be an unpleasant experience for the eleven-year-old Mahler, and his wife Alma Mahler reported that his “clothes and shoes were taken from him and worn by others and he had to go barefoot and hungry also”. She also wro