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 referred to as The Flying Dutchman due to his Dutch heritage and extremely flighty nature. At the peak of his career, he was pronounced by the New York and Boston critics as one of the four greatest living pianists of that time along with Ignace Paderewski, Moriz Rosenthal and Rafael Joseffy. He was also an inventor of both musical and non-musical devices that he had patented in various countries. Early life Sieveking came from an old and aristocratic family, which dated its ancestry back to the fifteenth century. He grew up in a musical atmosphere, as his mother Johanna De Jong was a well-known opera singer and his father, also named Martinus, was 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 fo