Elisabeth Waterhouse

Waterhouse initiated a memorial concert for her husband close to his 80th birthday, held on 16 April 2011 at Wigmore Hall and titled The Proud Bassoon. Among the players were their children, Gervase de Peyer and Timothy Brown as former members of the Melos Ensemble, players who succeeded him such as Roger Birnstingl (Orchestre de la Suisse Romande) and Julie Price (BBC Symphony Orchestra), bassoonists from around the world, such as Jim Kopp, Lyndon Watts and Takashi Yamakami, his students and a bassoon quartet from the RNCM, led by Stefano Canuti. All the music played related to him.

She is an honoured member of the British Double Reed Society (BDRS). In 2011, she donated the papers of her husband, including his correspondence and a collection of program books, to the collections of the Royal Northern College of Music, where they were titled The Proud Bassoon.

Ritchie studied piano at the Royal College of Music. She met her future husband, William Waterhouse, there, and again later at a competition in Munich. They married, and had three children. Their daughter Celia Milner became a violinist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, their daughter Lucy Waterhouse became a freelance violinist and teacher, and their son Graham Waterhouse a cellist and composer. Her husband died in 2007.

She taught violin and Alexander Technique at the 1997 Pan-Pacific Suzuki Conference in Australia.

In 1992, she was the pianist in the world premiere of the Chamber Concerto V by Elliott Schwartz in Amsterdam, with her husband as the bassoonist and the Utrecht String Quartet.

In 1974, Waterhouse and her husband founded two summer camps for music which she directed, the National Chamber Music Course, a summer school for young string players, held for a week in August with international instructors, and for smaller children who come with their parents the Temple Dinsley Summer School, based on the Suzuki method. In 1985, both schools moved to Princess Helena College. When it was closed in 2021, they moved to the Oratory School near Reading in Chilterns. She has managed the schools from the beginning.

In the 1960s, she was an early supporter of what became the London Suzuki Group, transferring the Suzuki method method of violin teaching from the U.S. to England. She taught Alexander Technique at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Elisabeth Waterhouse (née Ritchie; born 28 February 1933) is an English pianist and music pedagogue. She founded the National Chamber Music Course, a summer school for young string players, in 1974, and has managed it since. She was the wife of the bassoonist and musicologist William Waterhouse.