In 1900 he left Saint Petersburg and travelled to Leipzig, where he became a student of Alfred Reisenauer and Salomon Jadassohn, both pupils of Franz Liszt.

The latter years of the war saw the beginning of the Russian Revolution, which forced the composer and his family to flee their estate at Artiomovka due to occupation by the Bolsheviks.

In June 1919, the Bolsheviks fled before the White Army and Bortkiewicz was able to return and help rebuild the family estate, which had been completely plundered.

While Bortkiewicz traveled to Yalta with his wife, Kharkov fell to the Red Army, which meant that he and his family could not return to Artiomovka.

With the area now surrounded by the Red Army, the composer watched his mother and the husband of his sister Vera fall ill with typhus, both dying in the chaos at Novorossiysk.

Bortkiewicz sought to escape from Yalta and succeeded in obtaining passage on the steamer Konstantin, which brought them safe, but impoverished, to Constantinople in November 1919.

In Constantinople, with the help of the court pianist to the Sultan, Ilen Ilegey, Bortkiewicz began to give concerts and started teaching again.

He became well known throughout a number of embassies and made the acquaintance of the wife of the Yugoslavian ambassador Natalie Chaponitsch, to whom he dedicated his Trois Morceaux, Op.

These letters were published as Die seltsame Liebe Peter Tschaikowsky's und der Nadjeschda von Meck (Köhler & Amelang, Leipzig 1938).

Van Dalen adapted Bortkiewicz's book for a Dutch readership and published it as Rondom Tschaikovsky's vierde symphonie (De Residentiebode, 1938).

At the end of the war he described in a letter dated 8 December 1945 to his friend Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven how he still lived: I'm writing to you from my bathroom where we have crawled in because it is small and can be warmed on and off with a gas light.

Most of his printed compositions were held by his German publishers Rahter & Litolff; they were destroyed in Allied bombing, resulting in the loss of all his income from the sale of his music.

The health of Bortkiewicz and his wife declined to the point that they were admitted for treatment at the Franz Joseph Hospital in Vienna by its chief physician Dr. Walter Zdrahal, a friend of the couple.

In the autumn of 1945 Bortkiewicz was appointed director of a master class at the Vienna City Conservatory, which helped to give the composer some of the financial security he so sought.

[citation needed] On 26 February 1952 the Bortkiewicz Society along with the Ravag Orchestra celebrated the 75th birthday of the composer at a concert in the Musikverein Hall in Vienna.

[citation needed]Bortkiewicz had been suffering for some time from a stomach ailment and, on the advice of his physician, he decided to undergo an operation in October 1952.

[7] However some other modern authors regard Bortkiewicz as either a Ukrainian composer (particularly Yi Jing Chen;[8] Y. O. Levkulych[9]), or as Ukrainian-born (Emma Scanlon).

[10] Bortkiewicz's piano style was influenced by Franz Liszt, Frédéric Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin, Wagner, and Ukrainian folklore.

[11] When van Dalen died in 1967, he bequeathed to his family manuscripts of several Bortkiewicz compositions and an autobiography Erinnerungen (published in German in Musik des Ostens, 1971, pp.