Rudolf Maria Breithaupt

He studied jurisprudence, then philosophy, psychology and art and musicology at the universities of Jena, Leipzig and Berlin.

At the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, Breithaupt was a student of Robert Teichmüller, Salomon Jadassohn and Oscar Paul since 1897.

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.

The "new" natural technique - new only as a theoretical formulation, because the great pianists have always played in this way - supports instead the need to adequately exploit the inertial weight of the whole arm from the shoulder down to the hand.

Steinhausen's criticism, corrected on a physiological level, did not grasp the specific piano problem intuited and not solved by Breithaupt: how to understand the digital game avoiding stiffenings and contractions of the hand and arm, i.e. the typical drawbacks of the traditional finger technique.