Soloist, chamber musician and violin pedagogue from Salzburg, Michael Frischenschlager is a descendant of a well-known family of musicians with longstanding traditions. He studied violin, conducting, and musicology at academies and universities in Salzburg, Cologne, Vienna, and Rome. His violin teachers included Theodor Müller, André Gertler, Franz Samohyl and Yehudi Menuhin.

After several years of experience with major orchestras (Wiener Solisten, Vienna Philharmonic), Frischenschlager entered into a period of intensive concert activity as a soloist and a chamber musician, performing in almost every European country, as well as in North America and Asia.

In 1971, he began to teach and is still teaching at the University of Music and Performing Arts of Vienna, where he was appointed Head of the string department in 1984, vice-chancellor in 1989, and where he served as chancellor from 1992 to 1996. He is in demand all over the world as a teacher for master classes, and has sat on the jury of many renowned violin and chamber music competitions.

President of the International Fritz Kreisler Competition in Vienna since 1989, Frischenschlager founded the Prague-Vienna-Budapest Summer Academy in 1990, of which he was the director for 14 years before his retirement in 2004.