Anton Rubinstein

Touring Europe as a prodigy, with Chopin and Liszt among those who heard him, Anton Rubinstein became a touring pianist whose programmes included the historical recital cycles in which he surveyed the keyboard literature from the virginalists to his own contemporaries across seven recitals. He helped found the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and opened the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 — the first professional conservatoire in the country, on a Western European model, offering professional musical training. Tchaikovsky was in its first graduating class. His compositions include operas, six symphonies, five numbered piano concertos, chamber music and songs, of which the opera The Demon and the Fourth Piano Concerto have kept their place in performance. His cosmopolitan, German-leaning sympathies set him against the nationalist circle around Balakirev. He died in 1894. He was the elder brother of Nikolai Rubinstein, who founded the conservatory in Moscow, and he presented historical recitals in the United States and later in Russia and western Europe.