Rudolf Maria Breithaupt

Rudolf Maria Breithaupt (11 August 1873 – 2 April 1945) was a German composer and music educator (piano). Life Born in Braunschweig, Breithaupt attended the grammar school in Braunschweig. He studied jurisprudence, then philosophy, psychology and art and musicology at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Berlin. His teachers were the musicologists Hugo Riemann and Hermann Kretzschmar. At the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, Breithaupt was a student of Robert Teichmüller, Salomon Jadassohn and Oscar Paul since 1897. Between 1904 and 1911 Breithaupt worked at the Humboldt University of Berlin and later, at least from 1919 to 1929, as piano teacher at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. Breithaupt died in Ballenstedt at age 71. The “natural piano technique” In its physiological foundations, Breithaupt’s “natural piano technique” depends, in its explicit recognition, on the almost contemporary work of the physician and physiologist Friedrich Adolf Steinhausen. Breithaupt’s formula “don’t think about your fingers, don’t want to play with your fingers” effectively summarizes the fundamental principle of the weight technique in antithesis to the digital technique. The latter prescr