Unlearning Tension - The Piano Pedagogy of Peter Feuchtwanger

This paper introduces the pedagogical system of Peter Feuchtwanger (1930–2016), a German-born pianist, composer and teacher based for most of his career in London, and considers its relevance to contemporary piano teaching practice. The presentation on which it is based was delivered as the first General Session of the SIMPeF Pedagogy Conference 2026, directly following Dr Barbara Fast's opening keynote on practice efficiency and motorlearning research in sport and music. That sequencing was not incidental: Feuchtwanger's pedagogy, developed over five decades of one-to-one teaching and only sporadically entered into the academic literature, arrived independently at conclusions that current motor-learning research is now beginning to formalise - namely, that efficient, low-tension movement is teachable, diagnosable, and largely independent of raw physical strength or years of repetition. In the following, we trace the biographical origins of his approach, the process by which he distilled decades of individualised problem-solving into a transferable system, and the core principles that remain most directly applicable to classroom and studio teaching today.