Leonid Kreutzer was a classical pianist.

Kreutzer was born to a family of German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 Jewish parents. He was a highly influential piano teacher at the Berlin Academy of Music (Berliner Hochschule für Musik), together with Egon Petri

Egon Petri

Egon Petri was a classical pianist.-Biography:Petri's family was Dutch and he was born a Dutch citizen, but he was born in Hanover in Germany and was brought up in Dresden. His father was a professional violinist who taught his son that instrument. Petri played in the Dresden Court Orchestra and...

. Amongst Kreutzer's students were Władysław Szpilman, Hans-Erich Riebensahm, Karl-Ulrich Schnabel, Franz Osborn, Ignace Strasfogel and Grete Sultan

Grete Sultan

Grete Sultan was a German-American pianist.Born in Berlin into a musical family, she studied piano from an early age with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer...

. Leonid Kreutzer also gave musically and technically demanding solo recitals, mostly dedicated to specific composers or themes. At some of these, notably in June 1925, he performed works of contemporaries or modern, avant-garde

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

 composers of his time or of the recent past such as César Franck

César Franck

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life....

, Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

, Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was a German composer, violist, violinist, teacher, music theorist and conductor.- Biography :Born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child...

, and Paul Juon

Paul Juon

Paul Juon was a Germanised Russian composerHe was born in Moscow, where his father was an insurance official. His mother was German, and he went to a German school in Moscow. He entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1889, where he studied violin with Jan Hřímalý and composition with Anton Arensky...

.

The Nazi

Nazism

Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

 targeted him prominently as a cultural enemy: Together with Frieda Loebenstein he is the one of two pianists whose name appears in a list of "tidy-up tasks" ("Aufräumungsarbeiten") compiled by Rosenberg

Alfred Rosenberg

' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...

's "Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur" (Battle-Union for German Culture). He emigrated in 1933 to Tokyo, Japan. He is also known as editor of Chopin's works at the Ullstein-Verlag

Ullstein-Verlag

The Ullstein Verlag was founded by Leopold Ullstein in 1877 at Berlin and is one of the largest publishing companies of Germany. It published newspapers like B.Z. and Berliner Morgenpost and books through its subsidiaries Ullstein Buchverlage and Propyläen.The newspaper publishing branch was taken...

. He wrote one of the first works on systematic use of the piano pedal ("Das normale Klavierpedal vom akustischen und ästhetischen Standpunkt", 1915).

There are pianos which are built under his name in Japan.

Source

• Wolfgang Rathert and Dietmar Schenk (eds.). Pianisten in Berlin: Klavierspiel und Klavierausbildung seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Hochschule der Künste Berlin Archiv, vol. 3. Berlin, 1999.