Twenty legendary pianists from the 19th century captured on video!

Happy New Years, everyone!

I started making this because I thought it would be good to get a little more video editing experience. It has since turned (seemingly behind my back) into a monstrous devourer of my free time, the likes of which no other project I've ever worked on has even come close to approaching. After much hard work, I can finally present my new video: captured footage* showing twenty of the 19th century's greatest pianists, supplemented with information about them, their teachers and students, as well as their historical ties!

As you'll probably notice the further you go in the video, my focus was definitely on this - each individual pianist's ties to history. I find one of the most fascinating things about older musical recordings to be their historical connections, and believe thoroughly that the two can never be properly separated. This is why I chose to include each pianist's own teachers and students; it's an essential component in understanding how they relate to today's pianistic landscape, and to the history of the piano as a whole. I want to express my infinite appreciation for Christian Johanneson and his unfathomably great website devoted to the instrument (classical-pianists.net) which I'll link down below. I would say that around 50-75% of the information in this video was taken directly from that site in one form or another, particularly the teacher/student sections and quotes. I'd also like to thank the channels Caleb Hu and RachManJohn, whose videos inspired me somewhat in my formatting choices.

I'm excited to be done with this project and proud to share with anyone who might be interested, but just a little fun fact: the video could easily have been twice as long as this. My initial idea was to feature more than THIRTY pianists, but once I started getting more into writing and editing all of the little info blurbs it became very clear that I'd never be able to hit my goal of January 1st, 2026 (actually, I still missed it!) unless I did some cutting. If you'd like to see twenty more 19th century artists compiled into some sort of sequel video, then let me know in the comments. Likewise, if you have any ideas for similar videos that might be fun to make, feel free to suggest them! I might complain about how much time it takes, but I really did enjoy making this. To anyone reading, I hope that your 2026 is wonderful!

1. Camille Saint-Saëns (0:22)
2. Francis Planté (1:28)
3. Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1:52)
4. Arthur de Greef (3:51)
5. Harold Bauer (5:48)
6. Alexander Goldenweiser (6:42)
7. Josef Hofmann (9:28)
8. Ernst von Dohnányi (11:47)
9. Alfred Cortot (14:08)
10. Mark Hambourg (15:58)
11. Belá Bártok (18:42)
12. Elly Ney (19:17)
13. Percy Grainger (20:27)
14. Wilhelm Backhaus (22:27)
15. Arthur Rubinstein (24:26)
16. Cella Delavrancea (25:46)
17. Heinrich Neuhaus (28:07)
18. Paul Loyonnet (29:11)
19. Myra Hess (30:27)
20. Benno Moiseiwitsch (31:48)

*Two of the videos shown here, namely Saint-Saëns' and Bartok's, are actually silent film footage combined with a pre-existing recording of them playing the same piece. Saint-Saëns and Bartok were both known as extremely conscientious interpreters, famous for always playing a piece the same way every time. Because of that, I deemed it acceptable to include them both in this video even though the audio won't be 100% accurate. Big thanks to Jack Gibbons for his overlay work - it really is remarkable how well the two sync up in both cases. Even when paying close attention, it's very hard to notice anything strange about them!