Peter Elkus (born in 1939 in San Francisco, California) is a voice teacher giving master classes for both singers and instrumentalists.
His classes have been presented in institutions in ten countries, including the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, the Munich State Opera, the Accademia Musicale Ottorino Respighi in Assisi and Rome, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris and the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires.
Elkus was asked to fill the vacancy created by the death of his teacher, Sebastian Engelberg, at the Mannes College of Music, where he was listed on the faculty for over a decade.
He has authored the well received book The Telling of Our Truths - The Magic in Great Musical Performance (published in 2007; revised in 2009) with comments by Gerald Ginsberg (Composer and poet), Dr Charles Kaufman (former President of the Mannes College of Music), Dalton Baldwin (pianist, accompanist, coach, educator and recording artist), Jean Luc Vannier (psychoanalyst, music critic and lecturer), Mut Asheru (Editor in Chief Unsigned, The Magazine) and Shinji Eshima (instrumentalist and composer with affiliations with the San Francisco Ballet and Opera Orchestras, San Francisco State University and San Francisco Conservatory of Music).
In the Opera News article "Flicka in ¾ time",[2] Donald Spoto referred to Elkus’s influence on von Stade as having …"guided her through the thickets of an expanding repertory and a demanding worldwide schedule."