When he was ten, his father, pensioned by the Potocka, took his family to live in Vienna, where they were already accustomed to spend the winter. Joseph Leschetizky's post in the Potocka household had given him the opportunity of meeting all the great artists of the time who frequented their salon; and in this way Theodore had been able to hear the best music from his earliest boyhood. For a year the boy continued to study at home with his father, after which he went to the great Czerny, whose school was so famous in those days, and to which many of the greatest artists, such as Liszt, Thalberg, Döhler, Kullak, and Hiller, had belonged.
Himself a fine pianist, Czerny had been a pupil of Clementi and an intimate friend and pupil of Beethoven; "a fact of which he was very proud," says Leschetizky. "So often, indeed, did he speak of him to me that I always felt as if I had known him myself." In the same indirect way he became spiritually acquainted with Chopin, whose pupil Filtsch was his great friend. A little older than Leschetizky, Filtsch was already a beautiful player, whom Chopin loved, of whom he thought highly, and who would assuredly have become famous had he lived. Leschetizky's readings of the lighter compositions of Chopin are for the most part inspired by the remembrance of what he assimilated from this gifted boy, and he has changed his rendering very little since those days. Czerny cared little for Chopin, either as pianist or composer, nor did he willingly teach his music. His mind was too limited to understand subtlety, and he felt for it the contempt the plain man always feels for what he cannot grasp.
At fourteen Leschetizky began to take pupils himself, and seems to have been a prodigy in teaching as well as in playing, for he had soon so much to do that his time was quite filled up. His father took two rooms for him next door, so that he might carry on his musical work without disturbing the household. He was very busy, for, besides the teaching and his own practice, there were lessons from Sechter in counterpoint and, until his voice broke, he sang in a church choir two or three times a week. He played everywhere. He was known in Metternich's salon, to Thalberg, to the great Liszt, whom he worshipped, to the Court, to Donizetti, who encouraged his early attempts at composition, in fact to all the great artists who passed through Vienna.
It was at this time that he heard Schulhoff play one evening at Dessauer's house. It was a new experience. Hitherto he had heard nothing like it. To phenomenal technique he was quite accustomed—fireworks could no longer disturb his equanimity—but the poetry, exquisite finish and simplicity of Schulhoff's playing touched something within him that till then had lain dormant, and he recognised at once the incompleteness of his own work.
Schulhoff, though not a pupil of Chopin, knew him well in Paris, and had caught something of his manner; yet it was not this—already familiar to Leschetizky through Filtsch—but his marvellous power of making the piano "sing" that brought to the boy the vision of a new world. The public did not understand Schulhoff at first. They rather despised this pianist, who played to them in a perfectly simple way. They missed their runs and trills and surging octave passages, and found him dull. Not so Leschetizky. Here was a pianist who had gone further, and attained to something higher than the rest. He too must reach the same plane. For months he worked, refusing to play in public till he had gained what he had been searching for, and when he emerged from his exile, not only his playing, but his point of view had entirely altered.
Up to this time, in spite of Filtsch's influence, he had, like others, been satisfied that "the perfect finger" was the desirable thing; now he recognised a finer ideal. The change in him was to be of farther reaching influence than he dreamt of at the time, for it filtered through him to his pupils and created in them the germ of what developed later into the famous Leschetizky School. Schulhoff's visit marked an epoch in Leschetizky's life.
In the same year he took a course in law at the University; and this together with his pupils kept him so busy that he was obliged to read hard into the early morning hours to get through the double work.
When the Revolution of 1848 came—putting an end to all music in the city for the time being—he was ready for a holiday. Having also hurt his arm in a duel, therefore unable to practise, he decided to take this opportunity of seeing something of the world. He did not see much of it, for he went to Italy, and promptly fell so deeply in love with everything—and everybody—there, that he had to be removed from the source of danger; and a faithful friend hastily took him back to the Austrian mountains and kept him there, till both his mind and his city were calm enough to permit a safe return to ordinary life.
For four years he worked away steadily at his teaching, playing much besides, and leading the gay social life his genial nature loved. He also composed his first opera, "Die Bruder von San Marco." Meyerbeer, to whom he played it, thought it showed great promise, and urged him to finish it, but this he never cared to do, and the work still remains as he left it then.