Berta Mikhailovna Reingbald was a distinguished Ukrainian Soviet pianist and music pedagogue, born on 2 November 1897 in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, into the family of electrical engineer Moisey (Mikhail) Abramovich Reingbald, a native of Simferopol and a graduate of the metalworking department of the Trud Jewish vocational school and the Dresden Polytechnic, and Gitl Sherman, a native of Odessa. The family lived at 7, later 9, Uspenskaya Street, and after her father’s serious illness Berta, her brother, and her sisters were brought up in the household of their uncle, the artist Vulf Abramovich Reingbald, a graduate of the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and a noted drawing teacher in Odessa.
She studied at the Odessa Conservatory under Bronislawa Dronsejko-Mironowicz and Esfir Chernetskaya-Geshelin. Although she occasionally appeared in piano concerts in Odessa, she achieved her greatest renown through her exceptional teaching career, becoming one of the central figures of the Odessa piano school. Reingbald taught simultaneously at the famous Stolyarsky School of Music and at the Odessa Conservatory, where she became a professor in 1933 and head of the special piano department in 1938. She is best known as the primary mentor and discoverer of the legendary pianist Emil Gilels. Her class also produced numerous other prominent musicians, including Oscar Feltsman, Isidore Zak, Berta Marantz, Maria Grinberg, Zara Levina, Lyudmila Vaverko, Berta Kozel, Tatyana Goldfarb, Henrietta Mirvis, Vera Khoroshina, Lyudmila Finkelstein, later Sosina, Rika Minkus, and Mary Lebenzon. For her outstanding achievements in training musical professionals, she was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor on 3 June 1937. She also took part in organizing the Moldovan Conservatory in Chișinău in 1940 and served as a deputy of the Odessa City Council for three convocations as well as a deputy of the Odessa Regional Council in 1939.
During World War II, Reingbald was evacuated to Tashkent, where she taught at the relocated Leningrad Conservatory. During this period, she survived epidemic typhus, while her son Alex, known as Alik Rubinstein, after graduating from the Tomsk Artillery School, was sent to the front and suffered a severe concussion. After the liberation of Odessa, she immediately returned to her hometown to help rebuild its musical institutions, despite receiving invitations from the Leningrad Conservatory and the Gnessin Institute in Moscow. She was appointed director of the Stolyarsky School.
Her personal life was closely connected with the musical world. Her first husband was a physician. From 1935 she was married to the music pedagogue Witold Platonovich Portugalov. Her son, Alex Rubinstein, born in Odessa in 1922 and later deceased in Los Angeles in 1993, became a cellist, graduated from the Gnessin Musical Pedagogical Institute in the class of Semyon Kozolupov, performed with the State Cinematography Symphony Orchestra and Eddie Rosner’s orchestra, and emigrated to the United States in 1978. Reingbald had three sisters—Antonina, Sofia, and Henrietta—and a brother, Naum Reingbald, a violinist who was repressed in 1935.
Tragically, Reingbald’s devotion to Odessa was met with bureaucratic indifference. Unable to secure housing after her return, she took her own life on 19 October 1944 in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, by throwing herself from the fourth-floor stairwell of a municipal housing administration building. She was buried at the Second Christian Cemetery in Odessa. Decades later, her legacy was honored by her most famous student, Emil Gilels, who gave a special memorial concert in Odessa in 1974 to mark the 30th anniversary of her death.
Connections
This figure has 11 connections in the Music Lineage catalog.