In 1932, Tatiana Goldfarb completed her studies at the Odesa Conservatory. Over the next nine years she studied in Kyiv and Moscow, entered the 1937 Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and worked with three teachers whose connections to her are established even though their lessons are only partly documented.
Her musical lineage runs back through Berta Reingbald, Abram Lufer and Heinrich Neuhaus. It runs forward to Elena Dzamashvili, who entered her class at the Tbilisi Conservatory in 1961. The surviving records say most about Fryderyk Chopin: the F-minor Concerto in Warsaw, the B-minor Sonata in a masterclass with Heinrich Neuhaus, and competition programmes chosen for Elena Dzamashvili.
Berta Reingbald and the Odesa Conservatory
Berta Reingbald taught in the piano department of the Odesa Conservatory from 1921 to 1944. The conservatory’s institutional history places Tatiana Goldfarb among its notable students of the 1930s, and the Saint Petersburg Conservatory’s biographical catalogue names her as one of Berta Reingbald’s pupils.
Tatiana Goldfarb completed her Odesa studies in 1932. This fixes the first stage of the teaching line, but the accessible documents do not show what happened during individual lessons. No class register, examination sheet or student file naming her in Berta Reingbald’s class was found in the conservatory’s publicly searchable material. No surviving programme identifies a work that they prepared together.
Berta Reingbald published an account of her teaching of Emil Gilels, but that evidence applies to Gilels. Without lesson books, letters or marked scores, the methods described there cannot safely be assigned to her work with Tatiana Goldfarb.
The Odesa evidence therefore establishes a formal teacher–student relationship and a completion date. It does not identify a repertory, an approach to technique or a particular interpretation that passed from one pianist to the other.
Abram Lufer and the 1937 Chopin Competition
From 1935 to 1938, Tatiana Goldfarb undertook postgraduate work with Abram Lufer at the Kyiv Conservatory. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine and the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia’s historical archive both give these dates and identify Abram Lufer as the teacher who prepared her for the 1937 Chopin Competition.
That preparation can be tied to a named work. In the Warsaw final, Tatiana Goldfarb played part of Chopin’s Piano Concerto in F minor. Contemporary coverage in The Warsaw Weekly described her performance as technically brilliant and temperamental, with direct emotional expression.
This is firmer evidence than a later claim about a general piano school, meaning a tradition associated with a teacher or institution. The sources show Abram Lufer preparing Tatiana Goldfarb for a large Chopin competition programme that culminated in the F-minor Concerto. They do not describe his lessons or assign particular technical decisions to him.
No Kyiv Conservatory admission order, postgraduate register or class list naming Tatiana Goldfarb was found on the publicly accessible site of the National Music Academy of Ukraine. The chronology rests on reference works and concert institutions rather than a located Kyiv student file.
Ninth prize, with one conflicting result
The official Chopin Competition archive records Tatiana Goldfarb as the ninth-prize winner of the Third International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition. A Polish National Digital Archive caption identifies her in the same way, and The Warsaw Weekly also placed her ninth.
A later review of the laureates’ concert again drew attention to her temperament and feeling. These contemporary reports provide the most specific descriptions of her playing at the competition. The digitised competition brochure has also survived, but its catalogue description does not give her individual programme. The F-minor Concerto is known from the newspaper coverage instead.
One contemporary source disagrees with the others. A 1937 summary in Muzyka Polska places Tatiana Goldfarb tenth and includes her among four recipients of a divided audience award. The consulted documents do not explain whether this resulted from an early tabulation, an editorial mistake or a different way of presenting the prizes.
The official competition archive, the National Digital Archive and Warsaw reporting support ninth place. The tenth-place listing remains part of the contemporary record.
Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow
Tatiana Goldfarb studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory from 1938 to 1941. This sequence follows her work with Berta Reingbald in Odesa and Abram Lufer in Kyiv. Heinrich Neuhaus had also served on the jury of the 1937 Warsaw competition.
The accessible Moscow Conservatory database does not supply a student page, class list or examination programme for Tatiana Goldfarb. No correspondence, lesson notes or marked editions were found that connect Heinrich Neuhaus’s teaching to one of her interpretations. The evidence supports formal study, but it does not show which works they studied or how he changed her playing.
Concert programmes document her repertory after the Moscow period. In 1943 she played Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with Evgeny Mravinsky. They performed it again in Leningrad in 1946, followed by Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in 1947.
These dates establish a working partnership between Tatiana Goldfarb and Mravinsky. They do not establish that Heinrich Neuhaus chose the concertos or shaped those performances. A concert programme records what was played and by whom; without lesson records or correspondence, it cannot identify the source of an interpretation.
Elena Dzamashvili enters the lineage
In 1961, Elena Dzamashvili entered Tatiana Goldfarb’s class at the Tbilisi Conservatory. No class register or student-concert programme confirming the enrolment was found in the publicly searchable holdings of the Tbilisi State Conservatoire or the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia.
The surviving first-person account is more detailed than the institutional record. Elena Dzamashvili recalled studying in Tatiana Goldfarb’s class and described her teacher’s ability to choose programmes for individual students. She also named one particular event: Tatiana Goldfarb arranged for her to play Chopin’s B-minor Sonata in a masterclass with Heinrich Neuhaus. A masterclass is a lesson in which a teacher works with a performer before other students or listeners.
This episode shows how the teaching connection worked. Tatiana Goldfarb selected repertory, prepared Elena Dzamashvili for competitions and brought her into direct contact with her own Moscow teacher. According to Elena Dzamashvili, the centre of that work was Chopin.
“gave me Chopin.”
Elena Dzamashvili later reported performing Chopin’s études, preludes, scherzos, ballades, waltzes, sonatas and both piano concertos. Her account supports a direct Chopin connection to Tatiana Goldfarb, though it does not show that every one of those later works was studied in her class.
The mentorship was short. Tatiana Goldfarb died in Tbilisi in 1964, and Elena Dzamashvili completed the final stage of her conservatory education with Tengiz Amirejibi. Her mature work therefore cannot be assigned to Tatiana Goldfarb alone. What the testimony does establish is that Tatiana Goldfarb prepared her Chopin competition repertory and arranged the B-minor Sonata masterclass with Heinrich Neuhaus.
Moisei Grinberg and the limits of biographical evidence
MusicLineage records Tatiana Goldfarb as related to Moisei Grinberg. Published biographical records identify Moisei Grinberg as her first husband and Maria Moiseyevna Grinberg (Мария Моисеевна Гринберг) as their daughter.
No marriage registration, household record, correspondence or family archive was located for the research report. The relationship is therefore supported by converging biographies rather than a consulted civil document.
Moisei Grinberg worked as a Soviet music critic and editor, but the material examined does not show him shaping a programme, recording or interpretation by Tatiana Goldfarb. The marriage cannot be treated as an artistic collaboration without further evidence.
What the documents leave open
The teaching chronology is established: Berta Reingbald taught Tatiana Goldfarb in Odesa through 1932; Abram Lufer taught her in Kyiv from 1935 to 1938; and Heinrich Neuhaus taught her in Moscow from 1938 to 1941. Tatiana Goldfarb later taught Elena Dzamashvili, beginning in Tbilisi in 1961.
The surviving documents are uneven. The Warsaw press names the F-minor Concerto and describes its reception. Elena Dzamashvili names the B-minor Sonata and explains how Tatiana Goldfarb chose competition repertory. For the Odesa and Moscow periods, the accessible record confirms study but supplies no comparable lesson document.
Even the clearest public result contains an unresolved detail: the official Chopin Competition archive and several contemporary records place Tatiana Goldfarb ninth in 1937, while Muzyka Polska places her tenth.
