Sergei Bortkiewicz was a romantic composer, and teacher of Polish descent who lived in Austria. He was born on 28 February 1877 in Kharkiv and died on 25 October 1952 in Vienna. His father, Eduard Bortkiewicz, a nobleman from Vitebsk, owned a distillery, while his mother, Sofia Ushinskaya-Bortkiewicz, a graduate of the Kharkiv Music School, headed the local branch of the Imperial Music Society, organized charitable support for needy music students, and helped establish a music school and symphony orchestra in Kharkiv. He spent much of his childhood at the family estate at Artiomovka near Kharkiv. His mother gave Sergei and his siblings their first musical instruction; encounters with Anton Rubinstein and Pyotr Tchaikovsky were also formative influences on him.
Bortkiewicz attended the Third Kharkiv Gymnasium and studied at Ilya Slatin's music school with A. F. Bensh. He later enrolled simultaneously at the law faculty of St. Petersburg University and at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied piano with Karel van Ark and music theory with Anatoly Lyadov from 1896 to 1899; he also worked with Alexander Glazunov. After leaving St. Petersburg in 1900, he spent two years at the Leipzig Conservatory, studying piano with Alfred Reisenauer and composition with Salomon Jadassohn, both pupils of Franz Liszt. On completing his studies in July 1902, he received the Schumann Prize and began appearing in concerts and on tour.
In July 1904 Bortkiewicz married Elisabeth Geraklitova, a friend of his sister Vera; the couple had no children. They moved to Berlin, where he taught at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and formed a lasting friendship with the Dutch pianist and composer Hugo van Dalen. It was in Berlin that he began composing seriously. Although he was known as a pianist, he was even more highly regarded as a composer. His Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 16, was premiered by van Dalen in Berlin in November 1913 with the Blüthner Orchestra, conducted by Bortkiewicz, and became the greatest success of his early career.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Bortkiewicz and his wife were forced to leave Germany and returned to Kharkiv via Scandinavia. He gave private piano lessons there, performed in a violin-and-piano duo with Franciszek Schmitt, also known as Frank Smit, and endured the loss of the family estate and of close relatives amid the upheavals of the period. In November 1919, he and Elisabeth escaped from Yalta aboard the steamer Konstantin and reached Constantinople impoverished. There he gave concerts and private lessons, co-founded a music school with the pianist Barshchansky, and received support from musical circles connected with the Yugoslav embassy. In 1922 the couple travelled via Belgrade and Sofia to Austria, initially settling in Baden before moving to Vienna in 1923. Bortkiewicz became an Austrian citizen in 1926.
After six months in Paris in 1928, Bortkiewicz returned to Berlin, but left Germany again in 1933 and resettled permanently in Vienna. Despite severe domestic and financial difficulties in his later years, including his wife's grave illness, he continued to compose. He translated the correspondence between Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck into German; it was published in Leipzig in 1938, while van Dalen prepared a Dutch adaptation. In 1942 Bortkiewicz gave the first performance of his Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 60, at the Vienna Musikverein, and van Dalen presented its Dutch premiere in Amsterdam in 1944. In 1945 Bortkiewicz was appointed director of a master class at the Vienna City Conservatory. He retired in 1948 and received an honorary pension from the city of Vienna.
A Bortkiewicz Society was founded in Vienna in 1947 at the initiative of Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven, giving regular concerts of his music, often with the composer himself at the piano. For his seventy-fifth birthday in February 1952, the society and the Ravag Orchestra gave a concert at the Musikverein at which Bortkiewicz conducted his First Piano Concerto with Felicitas Karrer as soloist and his First Symphony. He died later that year following an operation for a stomach ailment. Elisabeth Bortkiewicz died in Vienna in 1960, and the couple are buried at Vienna Central Cemetery.
As a composer, Bortkiewicz belonged to the Romantic tradition of the Russian piano school and described himself as a romantic and melodist. His style was based on the art of Liszt and Chopin, influenced by Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, early Alexander Scriabin, Felix Blumenfeld, Wagner, and Russian and Ukrainian folk traditions, and largely untouched by twentieth-century musical trends. His music is characterized by vivid and expressive thought, original melody, idiomatic piano writing, and effective orchestration; from about 1925, his works became increasingly personal and nostalgic. Often described as a late Romantic or Neo-Romantic, he retained a distinctive individual voice rather than merely imitating Tchaikovsky.
The First Piano Concerto has affinities with the music of Rachmaninoff. The Second Piano Concerto, written for the left hand, was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, to whom it was dedicated; Wittgenstein premiered it in Vienna in 1923 and performed it widely. Bortkiewicz subsequently wrote the Russian Rhapsody for piano and orchestra for Wittgenstein, later arranging it for two hands. His output comprises 74 works, of which 15 are considered lost; manuscripts of both symphonies, once believed lost, were later rediscovered.
His principal works include the opera The Acrobats, three piano concertos, a cello concerto, a violin concerto, two symphonies, the Austrian Suite, the Yugoslav Suite, an overture, a symphonic poem after Shakespeare's Othello, a violin sonata, two piano sonatas, other piano works, and songs to poems by various poets. His papers, including manuscripts, letters, printed scores, and his written autobiography Reminiscences, were preserved through the van Dalen collection and are held in The Hague; this collection includes the only known manuscript of the Second Piano Sonata and surviving preludes from Op. 66. Renewed performances and recordings have helped revive interest in his music, including Ukrainian premieres of the First Symphony and First Piano Concerto in 2000 and a 2018 recording of his chamber works by pianist Pavlo Gintov.