Heinrich Neuhaus

Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus was a Russian and Soviet pianist of German origin, born on 12 April 1888 in Elisavetgrad, then part of the Russian Empire. The son of Gustav Neuhaus, director of a private music school, he was raised in a highly musical family and developed largely as a self-taught musician, in part because he resisted his father's pedagogical methods and pianistic principles. Early in his life he was strongly influenced by composer Karol Szymanowski and especially by his uncle, the distinguished pianist and pedagogue Felix Blumenfeld.

Neuhaus made his first solo appearance in 1897 in his native city and continued to perform actively during his youth, including a 1902 concert with the eleven-year-old violinist Misha Elman. In 1904 he toured with his older sister Natalia in Dortmund, Bonn, Cologne, and Berlin, and later pursued advanced studies with Karl Heinrich Barth and Leopold Godowsky in Berlin. From 1909 until the outbreak of World War I, he studied with Godowsky at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts.

Returning to Russia in 1914, Neuhaus completed his studies externally at the Petrograd Conservatory the following year and soon began teaching. He worked for a time in Tiflis, then at the Kyiv Conservatory between 1919 and 1922. From 1922 onward he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where he became professor and served as director from 1935 to 1937. A bout of typhoid fever severely affected his right-hand little finger, leaving it almost unusable for the rest of his life; for a time he was unable to play at all, a setback that limited his performing career but deepened his commitment to teaching.

In 1941 Neuhaus was arrested for refusing evacuation during World War II and spent eight and a half months in the internal prison at the Lubyanka. Thanks to the intervention of his former student Emil Gilels, he was released and sent into exile beyond the Urals, but managed to remain in Sverdlovsk, where he taught at the local conservatory. After a collective petition by leading cultural figures, he was allowed to return to Moscow in July 1944.

Over the decades Neuhaus became one of the most influential piano pedagogues of the twentieth century, mentoring a long list of pianists who would become major figures. Among his students were Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, Yakov Zak, Lev Naumov, Vera Gornostayeva, Evgeny Malinin, Radu Lupu, Vladimir Krainev, Eliso Virsaladze, Alexei Lyubimov, Alexei Nasedkin, Igor Zhukov, Evgeny Mogilevsky, Theodor Gutmann, Nathan Perelman, Anatoly Vedernikov, Alexander Slobodyanik, Oleg Boshniakovich, Margarita Fyodorova, Leonid Brumberg, Evgeny Liberman, Anna Baron, Albert Tarakanov, and Tikhon Khrennikov. He is remembered as one of the foremost interpreters of Alexander Scriabin's music and as a central figure in the formation of the Soviet piano school.

Neuhaus was named People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1956 and also received major state distinctions including the Order of Lenin, awarded on 23 January 1954, and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, awarded on 27 April 1937 for his outstanding services in training musical cadres. His legacy includes not only his students but also important pedagogical writings such as On the Art of Piano Playing, first published in 1959, and collections of reflections, diaries, and letters. In 1931 Osip Mandelstam dedicated the poem "The Piano" to him, a sign of the esteem he commanded beyond the musical world.

Neuhaus died in Moscow on 10 October 1964 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery. His family also remained closely connected with culture and scholarship: his son Stanislav became a noted pianist, his daughter Militsa a mathematician, while his elder son Adrian died of tuberculosis in 1945 at the age of twenty. His life and work continued to attract attention long after his death, including the 2008 documentary film Master Heinrich, directed by Nikita Tikhonov.

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This figure has 46 connections in the Music Lineage catalog.