Anton Grigoryevich Rubinstein was born on 28 November 1829 to Jewish parents at Vikhvatinets in the Podolia Governorate, about 150 kilometres northwest of Odessa; before he was five his paternal grandfather ordered the whole family to convert to Russian Orthodoxy. His mother taught him the piano from the age of five until Alexander Villoing took him on as a non-paying pupil, and he first played in public at nine. In December 1840 he played at the Salle Érard in Paris before an audience that included Chopin and Liszt, and in 1844 went to Berlin, where Mendelssohn told him he needed no further piano study and Meyerbeer sent him to Siegfried Dehn for composition. Liszt refused to take him as a pupil in Vienna in 1846 — “a talented man must win the goal of his ambition by his own unassisted efforts” — and he spent a year there in acute poverty before the revolution of 1848 drove him back to Russia. He married Vera de Tschikouanov in 1865 and died on 20 November 1894.

He founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where Tchaikovsky was among his composition pupils, and his younger brother Nikolai founded the Moscow Conservatory in turn. As a pianist he was known above all for his historical recitals, a series of seven consecutive full-length concerts tracing the history of keyboard music, which he gave across Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States. He composed prolifically alongside all of it: twenty operas, of which The Demon is the best known, six symphonies, five piano concertos, a large quantity of chamber music and a substantial body of solo piano works.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Rubinstein
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q87567