Serafima Mogilevskaya

Serafima Leonidovna Mogilevskaya was a Soviet pianist and piano pedagogue, born on 15 November 1915 in Odessa in the Russian Empire and died on 4 May 2016 in Cologne, Germany. She was a professor of the Odessa Conservatory and belonged to a prominent musical family: her father, Leonid Mogilevsky, was a well-known Odessa trumpeter, conductor, professor, and one of the founders of the Odessa Conservatory.

She began studying piano at the age of five. As a child she was deeply devoted to music and spent much time at the opera house listening to famous performers. In her youth she first received a technical education and worked for some time as an engineer, but after a factory injury she returned permanently to music, entered the preparatory department of the Odessa Conservatory, and later studied in the class of Maria Starkova.

While still a student, Mogilevskaya became acquainted with Sviatoslav Richter, beginning a long friendship. She also met the musician Gedeon Leizerovich, who later became her husband. In 1937, after the execution of her brother Ionatan, she moved to Moscow and entered the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Heinrich Neuhaus. Leizerovich followed her to Moscow, and the two soon married.

She completed her studies at the Moscow Conservatory in early June 1941 with a recommendation for postgraduate study. The outbreak of war changed those plans, and she and her husband were evacuated from Odessa to Ashgabat. There they taught at the Turkmen State Music School, engaged in educational work, and performed actively in concert. After the liberation of Odessa, the couple returned to their native city and were both invited to teach at the Odessa Conservatory.

From 1945 until 1982 Mogilevskaya taught at the Odessa Conservatory, and from 1950 to 1960 she also worked at the Stolyarsky School. In 1945 her son Yevgeny was born. From an early age she trained him according to her own piano-teaching method; after he finished the Stolyarsky School, she entrusted his further education to her former teacher Heinrich Neuhaus. Mogilevskaya spent most of her life in Odessa, where she carried out extensive pedagogical and cultural work.

She developed her own method of teaching piano and became renowned as a formative teacher of several generations of pianists. Among her students were her son Yevgeny Mogilevsky, later winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels, as well as Mikhail Legotsky, Vyacheslav Dashkovsky, Alexey Botvinov, Felix Lyubarsky, Viktor Freydman, Nadezhda Zhuravskaya, and many other musicians. Her pupils remembered her warmly and called her their “musical mother.”

In the early 1980s she left Odessa for Moscow and soon afterward moved to Germany. She spent her final years in Cologne, where she continued teaching. Her legacy remained especially strong in Odessa: within the Odessa Classics festival, an annual Ukrainian competition for young pianists is held in her name. She was also the author of the book “Thoughts about Music and About Myself,” published in 2010, which reflects her views on piano playing and pedagogy.

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