Josef Paul Labor (29 June 184226 April 1924) was an Austrian pianist, organist, and composer of the late Romantic era. Labor was an influential music teacher. As a friend of some key figures in Vienna, his importance was enhanced.
Labor was born in the town of Hořovice in Bohemia to Josef Labor, an administrator of ironworks, and his wife Josefa Wallner, who came from a family of doctors.[1] Both of his parents came from Viennese families. His father belonged to the circle of Schubert-Friends and had been in his younger years a composer himself.[2] At the age of three, he was left blind due to contracting smallpox. He attended the Institute for the Blind in Vienna and the Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Conservatory of the Society of Friends of Music) where he studied composition with Simon Sechter (teacher of Bruckner), and piano with (student of and Czerny).[3]
He toured Europe as a pianist and, in the process, formed lasting friendships with King George V of Hanover, who was also blind, and with Joseph Joachim, whom he met at Hanover. George named him Royal Chamber Pianist in 1865. The following year, Labor followed the king's exile and settled in Vienna, where he became a piano teacher, while continuing to compose and perform. In 1875 he also took organ lessons with and became a distinguished organist himself. In 1904, Labor received the title Kaiserlich und Königlich Hoforganist (Royal and Imperial Court Organist) and is today best known for his organ works. Labor took a serious interest in early music and wrote continuo elaborations for Heinrich Biber's sonatas.
Labor gave piano lessons to many notable musical personalities including Alma Schindler (who married Gustav Mahler and others), Paul Wittgenstein, and Arnold Schoenberg. Alma Schindler studied with Labor for six years, beginning when she was 14, and her diaries contain numerous references to her esteemed teacher.
Labor was very close to Paul Wittgenstein's family. He attended many musical evenings at the Wittgenstein home with such Viennese musicians of the day as Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Bruno Walter, and Richard Strauss. As a compositional teacher he gave private lessons to Julius Bittner and Rudolf Braun.
When Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in World War I, Josef Labor was the first person he asked to write a piece for piano left hand. They settled on a concerto for piano left hand and orchestra, something for which there was no precedent.[4] The ground-breaking work was premiered on 12 December 1916 in the Musikverein, Vienna, with the Wiener Tonkünstler-Orchester conducted by Oskar Nedbal.[5] Wittgenstein later commissioned works for the left hand from other composers including Strauss, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokofiev, Benjamin Britten, and Franz Schmidt (the finale of Schmidt's A major Clarinet Quintetthe last of his Wittgenstein commissionsis a set of variations on a theme from Labor's own clarinet and piano quintet, Op. 11, published in 1901).
Paul's brother, the philosopher and writer Ludwig Wittgenstein, praised Josef Labor as one of "the six truly great composers" along with Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms.[6]