Martin Hughes was Professor of Solo Piano at Berlin University of the Arts before moving to the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria, where he is now Emeritus Professor. He has given concerts, lectures and masterclasses around the world and has performed complete cycles of both the Beethoven and the Schubert piano sonatas.
He first wrote about Beethoven interpretation in 1994, as a contributor to Robin Stowell's "Performing Beethoven", one of the Cambridge Studies in Performance Practice (Cambridge University Press). His chapter "Beethoven's piano music: contemporary performance issues" prompted Paul Badura-Skoda to write:
"Every pianist who is seriously interested in rendering the spirit of a Beethoven piano work ought to read it".