A pupil of the eminent pedagogue Pyotr Stolyarsky,[1] he won the national competition for young performers in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) at the age of 15.

Everyone else had to be content with crumbs; the Belgian violin school, though still a source of pride, failed, and its absence at the final was much commented on; Arthur Grumiaux and Carlo Van Neste, both young and inexperienced, were not able to convince the jury.

During the height of Joseph Stalin's regime (Great Purge), Mikhail married the daughter of a high-ranking government official, who subsequently was executed as an "enemy of the people".

Fikhtengoltz started making arrangements of popular piano and orchestral pieces, working in the studio, where he could always take a break and endure the pain.

Picking up where her father left off, Natalya Fikhtengoltz, a violinist and a talented teacher as well, is bringing up her students in the grand traditions bequeathed by the late Pyotr Stolyarsky.