Tobias Matthay

[1] He entered London's Royal Academy of Music in 1871 and eight months later he received the first scholarship given to honour the knighthood of its principal, Sir William Sterndale Bennett.

In 1903, after over a decade of observation, analysis, and experimentation, he published The Act of Touch, an encyclopedic volume that influenced piano pedagogy throughout the English-speaking world.

However, whilst acknowledging its importance, a later interpreter of Matthay's writing criticized its lack of clarity:[5]The interminable repetitions, recapitulations, summaries, footnotes, all with a change of emphasis and as often as not with new names for the same thing, led enquirers into a maze from which only the clearest brain equipped with a dogged perseverance, could extricate itself.Many of his pupils went on to define a school of 20th century English pianism, including Arthur Alexander, York Bowen, Hilda Dederich, Norman Fraser, Myra Hess, Denise Lasimonne, Clifford Curzon, Harold Craxton, Moura Lympany, Gertrude Peppercorn, Irene Scharrer, Lilias Mackinnon, Guy Jonson, Vivian Langrish, Hope Squire, Eileen Joyce, jazz "syncopated" pianist Raie Da Costa, Harriet Cohen, Dorothy Howell, and the duo Bartlett and Robertson.

They were all forgotten for many years, resurfacing at a Sotheby's manuscript auction on 30 November 2006, won by the Royal Academy of Music.

[10][11] Only the symphonic overture In May (1883) and the one movement Concert Piece in A minor for piano and orchestra (begun about 1883 and revised till about 1908) gained much contemporary attention.

The Concert Piece became his most popular large scale work, although its London premiere at the Proms had to wait 25 years before its first performance, on 28 August 1909.

[13] His 31 Variations and Derivations on an Original Theme for piano, written in 1891 and revised till 1918, was one of his last important early period works.