Ilya Aisberg, whose real name was Elia Samuilovich Aisberg, was a Russian and Georgian pianist, composer, and music teacher. He was born on January 26, 1868, in Odesa, and died on August 7, 1942, in Tbilisi.
Aisberg graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1892, where he studied piano with Karl van Ark, and subsequently continued his training in Vienna. He performed and taught in Odesa, where his pupils included Anya Dorfman and Maria Starkova. Contemporary criticism praised his technique, tonal power, temperament, and varied playing. From 1902 to 1906 he returned to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to study composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
From 1906 he taught piano at the music school of the Tiflis branch of the Imperial Russian Musical Society while continuing to perform. After the school became the Tbilisi Conservatory in 1917, he became a professor there. He was a professor at the Baku Conservatory from 1923 to 1934 and served as its rector from 1923 to 1928. In 1934 he returned as a professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory, where he taught until his death; his pupils included Andria Balanchivadze, Vache Umr-Shat, and Tamara Shaverzashvili.
His compositions include a Piano Concerto, Op. 15, a Fairy-Tale Sonata for piano, Op. 19, piano études, and songs. His best-known work was the Jewish Capriccio for piano and orchestra, Op. 20, composed in 1917 and published in 1926. Originally titled Jewish Rhapsody, it was performed by the Zimro ensemble led by Semyon Bellison, including at Carnegie Hall on November 1, 1919.
Aisberg also produced piano arrangements of Jewish folk music, including Wedding Dance and Reb Shmul’s Nigun. Between 1913 and 1917 he published articles on piano music and pianistic technique in the journals Music and Musical Contemporary. During his Baku years, he arranged Azerbaijani folk melodies for piano and wrote articles on musical culture and education, sometimes under the pseudonym Ledogorov.