A major influence on his early artistic development came from Karol Szymanowski, his neighbour and cousin through his mother, Olga, "Marta" née Blumenfeld.

Subsequently, he studied with Leopold Godowsky in Berlin and from 1909 until the outbreak of World War I took part in his master classes at the Vienna Academy of Music.

2, and left a suicide note saying that the concert had made clear to him that he would never be successful as a composer or a pianist and that he could not go on living, and was going to Florence in Italy to die.

[5] When Nazi Germany approached Moscow in 1941, he was imprisoned on suspicion of being a German spy, but released eight months later under pressure from Dmitri Shostakovich, Emil Gilels and others.

His pupils there included Sviatoslav Richter, Leonid Brumberg, Emil Gilels, Yakov Zak, Lev Naumov, Vera Gornostayeva, Eliso Virsaladze, Radu Lupu, Margarita Fyodorova, Victor Eresko, Anatoly Vedernikov, Tikhon Khrennikov, Galina Melikhova, Yevgeny Malinin, Alexander Edelmann, Tamara Guseva, Ryszard Bakst, Teodor Gutman, Alexander Slobodyanik, Nathan Perelman, Leonid Brumberg, Igor Zhukov, Oleg Boshniakovich, Anton Ginsburg, Valery Kastelsky, Gérard Frémy, Zdeněk Hnát, Alexei Lubimov, Aleksey Nasedkin, Vladimir Krainev, Maria Kardas, Berta Maranz, Evgeny Mogilevsky, Amalya Baiburtyan, Valentina Kameníková, Victor Derevianko, Vera Razumovskaya, Nina Svetlanova, Boris Petrushansky and Yuri Krechkovsky.