Alberto Jonás

King Alfonso XII of Spain received the young child in a private audience at the Royal Palace of Madrid in 1880 and Jonás was immediately hailed as a prodigy.

For the next six years he travelled and lived in Belgium, England, Germany, and France studying business, in accordance to his parents' desires for a career in finance, and also giving some public performances.

In 1886, at the age of 18 and against the will of his parents, who kept trying to dissuade him from pursuing a career as a concert pianist, he entered the Brussels Conservatory, where he studied for four years with noted Franz Liszt pupil Arthur De Greef and composition with François-Auguste Gevaert.

Even though he did not win the coveted First Prize in piano (it went to Nikolay Dubasov), he nevertheless made an extraordinary impression on Anton Rubinstein, who immediately invited him to be one the handful of pianists who had the privilege of being his students.

During his sojourn there, he became a recognized pianist and teacher, and soon befriended fellow Rubinstein students Josef Hofmann, Felix Blumenfeld, and Teresa Carreño, who all held his playing in high esteem.

The pianists even agreed to write their own technical exercises specifically for Jonás's book, as well as sharing their own ideas on technique, pedalling, fingering, practicing methods, phrasing, memorizing, etc., and also taking exclusive photographs of themselves and their hands playing in order to illustrate some points.

In the early 1920s he started putting together all the material he had amassed from the correspondence and began writing what he would later title Master School of Modern Piano Playing and Virtuosity, in seven volumes.

The final contributors were Arthur Friedheim, Ignaz Friedman, Vasily Safonov, Ferruccio Busoni, Katharine Goodson, Leopold Godowsky, Alfred Cortot, Rudolph Ganz, Wilhelm Backhaus, Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler, Ernst von Dohnányi, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Josef Lhévinne, Isidor Philipp, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer, Leopold Schmidt, and Zygmunt Stojowski, and included excerpts from more than one thousand examples drawn from the entire piano literature in order to illustrate specific points.

However, the first two volumes were reissued starting in 2011, with the goal of eventually reprinting the entire series: https://www.amazon.com/Master-School-Virtuoso-Piano-Playing/dp/0486483339 Alberto Jonás's piano students include Pepito Arriola, Ellen Ballon, Annie Dove Denmark, Anis Fuleihan, Eugenia Buxton, Vincent Persichetti, Eloise Wood, Daniel Jones, Lewis L. Richards, David Earl Moyer, Leonard Heaton, Alfred Lucien Calzi, Elizabeth Zug, Reah Sadowsky, and Louis Loth.