Background
He was born in Elisavetgrad (known since 1939 as Kirovohrad), in present-day Ukraine.
He was born in Elisavetgrad (known since 1939 as Kirovohrad), in present-day Ukraine.
Subsequently he studied with Leopold Godowsky in Berlin and from 1909 until the outbreak of World War I at his master classes in Vienna Academy of Music.
He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964. He was made a People"s Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1956. His pedagogic book The Art of Piano Playing (1958) is regarded as one of the most authoritative and most widely used treatments on the subject.
He died in Moscow in 1964.
He also received some lessons from Aleksander Michałowski. In 1902 he gave a recital in Elisavetgrad with the 11-year-old Mischa Elman and in 1904 gave concerts in Dortmund, Bonn, Cologne and Berlin.
In 1912, Neuhaus attempted suicide by cutting a wrist. Szymanowski and Rubinstein hastily followed Neuhaus to Florence and tracked him down to a hospital, where he was recovering.
In 1914 Neuhaus started teaching in Elisavetgrad and later Tbilisi (Tiflis) and Kiev (where he befriended Vladimir Horowitz).
After having been temporarily paralyzed, Neuhaus was forced to halt his concert career in the interests of his pedagogical activities. In 1922 he began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory where he was also director between 1935 and 1937. When the Germans approached Moscow in 1941, he was imprisoned on suspicion of being a German spy, but released eight months later under pressure from Dmitri Shostakovich, Emil Gilels and others
His pupils there included Yakov Zak, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Anatoly Vedernikov, Tikhon Khrennikov, Galina Melikhova, Yevgeny Malinin, Lev Naumov, Tamara Guseva, Ryszard Bakst, Teodor Gutman, Vera Gornostayeva, Alexander Slobodyanik, Leonid Brumberg, Igor Zhukov, Oleg Boshniakovich, Anton Ginsburg, Valery Kastelsky, Gérard Frémy, Zdeněk Hnát, Eliso Virsaladze, Alexei Lubimov, Aleksey Nasedkin, Vladimir Krainev, Berta Maranz, Evgeny Mogilevsky, Amalya Baiburtyan, Radu Lupu, Valentina Kameníková, Victor Derevianko, Vera Razumovskaya and Nina Svetlanova.
Neuhaus was renowned for the poetic magnetism of his playing and for his artistic refinement.