Pianist. From his long career he shall probably be remembered for interpreting the late 19th. century masters. The child of a distinguished musical family he received his initial piano lessons from his mother at around three, learned to sight-read as a toddler, and gave his first public performance at eight. Thrown into a concentration camp he and his mother were allowed to escape by a guard who liked his playing of Schubert on the accordion; after surviving the war in Turkey he went to Israel in 1945 where he studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and performed with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Maestro Leonard Bernstein. In 1946 Weissenberg traveled to New York where he studied at Juilliard with Olga Samaroff and Artur Schnabel then in 1947 he captured the Leventritt Award and made his New York debut performing the Third Piano Concerto of Sergei Rachmaninov with George Szell and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Though well respected in the United States he relocated to Paris in 1956 where he eventually took French citizenship; between 1957 and 1966 he ceased performing in order to concentrate on teaching and composing, then gave a much acclaimed comeback playing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 under the baton of Herbert von Karajan. Weissenberg remained active with concert performances, teaching, and leading master classes until well along in years, also producing a number of compositions with his musical "Nostalgie" receiving its October 17, 1992, world premiere at the State Theatre of Darmstadt. He died following a protracted illness leaving a massive recorded legacy which includes Bach's "Goldberg Variations", a highly praised reading of Franz Liszt's Sonata in B-minor, Igor Stravinsky's "Three Movements from Petrushka", and virtually the entire piano output of Chopin and Rachmaninov.