Gustav Neuhaus

Gustav Wilhelm Neuhaus (German: Gustav Neuhaus; 10 May 1847 – 1938) was a Russian music pedagogue and methodologist, as well as an instrument constructor. Born in Kalkar in the Rhine Province, he later became an important figure in music education in the Russian Empire and is remembered as the father of the pianist and teacher Heinrich Neuhaus.

He came from a family connected with piano making: his father was a piano maker of Dutch origin. Neuhaus graduated from the Cologne Conservatory in 1870 as a pianist, studying with Ernst Rudorff and with the conservatory’s director Ferdinand Hiller.

After completing his studies he moved to Russia, initially working as a music teacher in the household of Princess A. A. Shirinskaya-Shikhmatova. In 1899, supported by recommendations from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Glazunov, and Felix Blumenfeld, he founded his own music school in Elisavetgrad (Kherson Governorate; today Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine) and served as its director.

The Neuhaus school became a notable center of musical training. Among those associated with it were members of his family—his son Heinrich Neuhaus, his daughter Natalia Steinbach-Neuhaus, and his granddaughter Astrid Schmidt-Neuhaus—as well as many pupils including Felix Blumenfeld, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Karol Szymanowski, Yuliy Meitus, and others.

Contemporaries described Neuhaus as having a typically German character, marked by stubbornness and pedantry, and an extreme passion for order. After his wife’s death, and unable to bear the separation, he attempted suicide at about ninety years of age by cutting his veins with a garden hatchet, but he was saved in time.

Neuhaus died in Moscow and was buried there at the Old German Cemetery.

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