Joseph Jongen was born in Liège on December 14, 1873 and died in Sart-lez-Spa on July 12, 1953. He began his study of music at the Royal Conservatory of Liège in October 1881, for which some official rules needed bending—he was not even eight years old.
But he was an exceptionally gifted student, of music theory as well as keyboard playing. He finished with a first prize in fugue with the equivalent of a summa cum laude in 1991 and with a gilded silver medal (equivalent to a magna cum laude) for piano in 1892; in 1896 he obtained the same medal for organ. He began composing at the age of 13, strongly encouraged by his father, who had given him his first music lessons, and stopped only in 1951, two years before his death. He was a candidate for the national composition “Grand Concours” in 1895 and came in second, but when he again participated in the next Concours, in 1897, he won with his cantata Comala. He composed music in nearly all forms, but he was an especially prolific writer of music for organ and piano, as well as chamber music