Emil (Samuil) Grigoryevich Gilels was a legendary Soviet pianist and pedagogue, widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He was born on October 19, 1916, in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family. His father, Grigory Gilels, a native of Vilnius, worked as an accountant at a sugar factory, and his mother, Gesa Gilels, was a homemaker. His younger sister Elizaveta, who would become a violinist, was born three years later. Gilels began studying piano at the age of five and a half at the Odessa music courses with Yakov Tkach, whose early assessment predicted that the child seemed born for the piano and destined to become a pianist of world stature.
His prodigious gifts developed rapidly. In May 1929 he gave his first public solo recital in Odessa, performing works by Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, Scarlatti and others. He studied with Berta Reingbald at the Odessa Musical-Dramatic Institute, later the Odessa Conservatory, and also worked on harmony with Nikolai Vilinsky. Gilels always regarded Reingbald as his principal teacher and a true teacher-friend. In 1931, although too young to compete officially, he took part in the Second All-Ukrainian Pianists' Competition in Kharkiv and received a special prize; around this time he also won praise from Arthur Rubinstein and the pianist Alexander Borovsky. All-Union fame came with his sensational victory at the First All-Union Competition of Musicians in 1933, after which he began touring extensively across the Soviet Union. He graduated from the Odessa Conservatory in 1935 and further refined his art from 1935 to 1938 under Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory's School of Higher Mastery, while becoming a soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic.
Before World War II, Gilels achieved outstanding international success. He placed second at the Vienna International Piano Competition in 1936 and, two years later, won the prestigious Ysaÿe International Contest in Brussels, then regarded as the strongest piano competition in the world. Leading musicians including Emil von Sauer, Leopold Stokowski, Otto Klemperer, Arthur Rubinstein, Walter Gieseking and Robert Casadesus spoke of him with admiration, and Queen Elisabeth of Belgium became one of his lifelong admirers. After Brussels he gave concerts in Brussels and Paris, and on returning home the young pianist was celebrated as one of the cultural heroes of the 1930s. By then he was giving more than 100 concerts a year and had begun teaching at the Moscow Conservatory as Neuhaus's assistant.
During the Great Patriotic War, Gilels demonstrated both artistic and personal courage. At the beginning of the war he volunteered for the people's militia, but was recalled by Stalin's order. He was evacuated with his wife, the pianist Rosa Tamarkina, his mother and his sister to Sverdlovsk, yet he did not remain in evacuation life for long, instead devoting himself to wartime concert work. He performed on the front lines to support Soviet troops and in autumn 1943 gave concerts in besieged Leningrad. Notably, he risked his own safety to petition Stalin personally for the release of his mentor, Heinrich Neuhaus, who had been arrested on grave political charges; Neuhaus was freed, first sent into exile in Sverdlovsk, and later allowed to return to teaching at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1945 Gilels performed at the Potsdam Conference for the heads of government of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom.
After the war, Gilels resumed an intense combination of concertizing and teaching and became one of the first Soviet artists permitted to tour abroad. From 1945 onward he appeared widely across Europe, later also in North America and Japan. In 1954 he became the first Soviet musician to perform in Paris's Salle Pleyel. His 1955 debut in the United States, featuring Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, followed by a solo recital at Carnegie Hall, was a historic triumph that established him as a global cultural ambassador. At the request of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, he also performed at the UN's tenth-anniversary celebrations in New York, playing Tchaikovsky's First Concerto under Leonard Bernstein. Gilels would tour America 14 times and became one of the most beloved foreign artists there.
In the 1960s and 1970s he was among the most sought-after Soviet musicians in the world, spending as much as nine months of the year on concert tours. Over a career lasting more than 50 years, he gave about 3,000 concerts, maintaining an exceptional schedule of 60 to 80 performances annually. In 1981 he suffered a heart attack after a concert in Amsterdam, from which he never fully recovered, though he returned to the stage and almost never canceled engagements. His final performance took place in Helsinki in September 1985. He died in Moscow on October 14, 1985, from complications of diabetes, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.
Gilels possessed a vast repertoire spanning from the Baroque era to the 20th century. He is particularly celebrated for his interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven, recording all the piano concertos and most of the sonatas; his readings were praised for their "healing perfection." A 1968 Cleveland cycle of the five Beethoven concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra became especially renowned. He did not complete his projected recording of the full sonata cycle, but left 27 of the 32 sonatas and nearly all the variation sets. He was also a peerless interpreter of Romantic composers such as Liszt, Brahms, Schumann and Tchaikovsky, and his artistry extended to Weber, Schubert, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Weinberg, as well as the French Impressionists Debussy and Ravel. He helped revive the music of Nikolai Medtner in the Soviet Union by writing about the composer and performing his sonatas, gave the first performance of Prokofiev's Eighth Sonata at the composer's request in 1944, and was also acclaimed for his Mozart, becoming a regular guest at the Salzburg Festival. Uniquely among the great pianists of the century, he performed and recorded all the piano concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
His playing was renowned for its unique "golden sound," combining steel-fingered virtuosity with profound lyricism, nobility, stylistic refinement and natural simplicity. Musicians and cultural figures across the world held him in extraordinary esteem. Rachmaninoff, having heard the young Gilels on the radio, called him his successor in pianism. Arthur Rubinstein, after hearing Gilels in Stravinsky's Petrushka suite, is said to have withdrawn the work from his own repertoire, believing he could not surpass that performance. Gilels collaborated with many of the greatest conductors of his age, among them Herbert von Karajan, Eugene Ormandy, Leonard Bernstein, Fritz Reiner, Lorin Maazel, Karl Böhm, Eugen Jochum, George Szell, Simon Rattle, Kurt Masur, Kurt Sanderling, John Barbirolli, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Yevgeny Svetlanov and Gennady Rozhdestvensky.
In addition to his solo career, Gilels was a distinguished chamber musician. He formed a legendary trio in 1950 with violinist Leonid Kogan and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, which performed and recorded with great success for a decade in the Soviet Union and abroad. He frequently appeared with his sister, violinist Elizaveta Gilels, as well as with ensembles such as the Beethoven Quartet, the Borodin Quartet, the Bolshoi Theatre Quartet and the Amadeus Quartet. From the 1970s he also performed in duo recitals with his daughter, the pianist Elena Gilels, recording works by Mozart and Schubert with her. Among his other chamber partners were Yakov Zak, flutist Alexander Korneyev and horn player Yakov Shapiro.
Gilels served as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory from 1952, having taught there from 1938 until 1976. Among his notable students were Marina Mdivani, Valery Afanassiev, Igor Zhukov and Felix Gottlieb, as well as pianists from various Soviet republics who later became leading performers and teachers in their own countries. He was also an influential jury member at major international competitions, including the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels and the Long-Thibaud Competition in Paris. He chaired the piano jury at the first four Tchaikovsky Competitions, where he famously insisted on awarding the top prize to the American Van Cliburn in 1958 and to the young Grigory Sokolov in 1966, placing artistic truth above political pressure.
He recorded extensively for major labels including Melodiya, Deutsche Grammophon, EMI, BBC, Sony, Columbia, Eterna and Suprafon, leaving an official discography of roughly 900 works in studio and live performances; many of these recordings received major international awards. He also wrote for the journal Soviet Music, contributing articles on figures such as Medtner and Berta Reingbald and on the touring activities of Soviet pianists. In public life he showed unusual moral independence, repeatedly refusing to sign politically motivated collective letters, including the 1953 letter directed against the so-called "doctor-murderers" and later denunciations of Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, even when such refusals carried personal consequences for his family.
Among his many honors were the title People's Artist of the USSR in 1954, the Stalin Prize First Class in 1946, the Lenin Prize in 1962, and the title Hero of Socialist Labor in 1976. Yet his legacy rests above all on his art: a massive body of recordings and an example of artistic integrity, luminous humanity and "sunny" spiritual strength that has continued to sustain generations of listeners. As Neuhaus said when Gilels was still young, "Gilels's art helps one live."
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