Though once considered the hope of Russian music, Steinberg is far less well known today than his mentor (and father-in-law) Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, his rival Igor Stravinsky, or his student protege Dmitri Shostakovich.

While writing it, Steinberg transformed the Medieval Znamenny chants used to relate the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ during Holy Week by composing sometimes as many as twelve different harmonies at once.

Steinberg's decision to write a work of overtly Christian music during the Second Soviet Anti-Religious Campaign was an act that could have had serious consequences for himself and his family.

Steinberg scholar Oksana Lukonina believes that his decision to compose a work of religious music was motivated in part by the events of 1921.

Lukonina also sees Steinberg's turn to chant-based choral music as a manifestation of renewed interest in the religious heritage of Russian culture shown by such other artists of the early Soviet period as the painter Mikhail Nesterov and, eventually, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist Boris Pasternak.

In 1923, midway through the composition of Passion Week, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union banned the performance of all music with religious undertones.

In the vain hope that choirs in the West might be interested, Steinberg arranged in 1927 for the score to be published by a White emigre firm in Paris.

Hoping that Passion Week might have wider appeal than just among the Russian diaspora, Steinberg arranged for the Paris edition to include translations of the sung text from Old Church Slavonic into both Latin and English.

As Stalinism tightened its grip, Steinberg drew also on the folk music of the Soviet Union's ethnic minorities, particularly those from Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

Steinberg played an important role in Soviet music life as the teacher of composers Dmitri Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Lyubov Streicher, and Yuri Shaporin.

[5] In preparation for the premiere, Cappella Romana's director, Alexander Lingas, had traveled to St. Petersburg to examine Steinberg's diary and manuscripts.

Steinberg's style, with its contrapuntal complexities and its enriched harmonies, is slightly advanced over that of Rachmaninoff, excerpts from whose Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom filled out the Clarion program in lovely fashion.

In the fall of 2016, Clarion Choir and its director, Stephen Fox, gave Passion Week its Russian premiere, with performances in both Moscow and St.