Helmut Brauss

The Pianist's Breviary

The late Helmut Brauss was born in 1930 and became one of the leading concert pianists of the post war era. He developed a passion for the piano as a child, and later studied at the Händel Music School in Munich, where he was the only private student of legendary German pianist, Elly Ney for seven years. Later he taught piano at Lübeck Musik Hochschule while he developed his career to become a soloist and chamber musician. In 1966 he moved to Canada, first to Regina, then to Edmonton, where he taught and gave concerts all over North America and Europe. in 1974 he visited Budapest to study Bartok's piano music, and in 1982 he visited Tokyo where he stayed for two years as a guest professor at the Musashino music school in Tokyo. He was a professor of music at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and moved to Victoria when he retired. Helmut enjoyed making music with his many musical friends until his death in 2017. Besides a number of CDs, he published several books, including “Max Reger’s Music for Solo Piano” and “The Singing Piano Tone or The Artistry of Pedaling” which is translated also into German and Japanese.

Kuniko Brauss

The Breviary

Helmut's last work; The Pianist's Breviary, is a multi-media document intended for piano students who want to play the Chopin etudes. Helmut had a passion for teaching and was particuarly interested in helping his students gain skills that would serve them well in learning highly complex works such as these etudes. To this end, Helmut developed a set of exercises he called "Motion Patterns," which are explained in the book. I was fortunate enough to learn much from Helmut, and to help out by editing and type setting the book in Latex. This enables the electronic document, a pdf file, to contain embedded videos of Helmut playing the motion exercises, as well as a large number of informative illustrations.

Brian Wyvill

To view the videos you will need the Adobe flash player