It is impossible to imagine the Russian piano school without Alexander Goldenweiser. His activities made an epoch in the musical art in Russia. A brilliant pianist, he belonged to the golden galaxy of Russian musicians of the XX century; he was a great pedagogue and an interesting composer. Among his pupils were hundreds of excellent performers. Even those who did not work with him directly or belong to his "musical heirs" were involved one way or another in his activities and felt the impact of his personality. The music school he had founded - the Central Music School under the Moscow Conservatory - became one of the best centers of children's musical education in the world. Many beautiful musicians - pianists as well as performers of other specialties - came out of it. Central Music School became a model for many other schools of the same kind all over the world.
Many generations of Russian pianists use his editions of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert, as well as other composers.
Alexander Goldenweiser was born in 1875. He studied with Pavel Pabst and Alexander Ziloti as a pianist, with Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov as a composer. He also took lessons from Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky. Sergei Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner and Lev Tolstoy, whose friend he was in the last years of Tolstoy’s life, also had important impact on him.
He dedicated all his life to the Moscow Conservatory. Since 1906 until his death in 1961, he was a professor of the Conservatory (he was a director two times: in 1922-24 and in 1939-42).
Among his pupils were Samuil Feinberg, Grigori Ginsburg, Rosa Tamarkina, Tatiana Nikolaeva, Dmitri Bashkirov, Lev Roysman, Dmitri Kabalevsky, and many others.
Alexander Goldenweiser died in 1961.
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