Photo: Olga Šteinberg with Veronika Vitaitė, from Veronika Vitaitė’s collection

The Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theater will mark the milestone 100th anniversary of the birth of pianist, professor and Lithuanian musical giant Olga Aleksandrovna Šteinberg at 6:00 P.M. on September 9 in the main hall there. The event was postponed from April 20 of last year due to health concerns. Her students will perform and share their memories and a film about her life will be shown.

Olga Šteinberg was born in Roston-on-Don on April 20, 1920. Her first teacher was her aunt Sara Kan, a concert pianist, who taught her at home. Her family moved to Odessa where she studied music at the school located inside Piotr Stoliarky’s home. Even then she performed with her future husband Shaya (Alexander) Livont. She began studies at the Odessa Conservatory in 1939 but when the war broke out she was forced to quit classes. She and her mother first fled to Udmurtia where she gained much work experience reading musical notation and working with artists at the Musical Comedy Theater in Izhevsk. Later she matriculated at the Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) Conservatory in 1942 under Heinrich Niehaux. From 1943 to 1947 she studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow under Yakav Zak, matriculating with a recommendation from Livont.

She was graduated in 1947. She and her husband were offered excellent jobs in Moscow, but they chose instead to take up an offer made by Juozas Banaitis, head of the Art Affairs Committee, and went to Lithuania instead. He had become a head teacher at the Kaunas Conservatory back on April 1, 1945. She joined him there in 1947, taking her mother with her.

Initially she worked as a soloist anc concert master in the Kaunas philharmonic. In 1948 she began teaching at the Kaunas Conservatory, then in 1949 at the Lithuanian State Conservatory in Vilnius where she taught piano. She began working in two jobs in 1959 when she began teaching at the Tenth Musical School in Vilnius, now known as the M. K. Čiurlionis Art School. In 1975 she was made head of department and in 1985 given the title of pedagogue professor.

Olga Šteinberg wasn’t just a teacher. She was a popular performing pianist. Her repertoire included works by Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Franck, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.

She was presented the Order of Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas for her efforts furthering musical culture in Lithuania in 2000. She passed away in 2005.

More information in Lithuanian here.