Ilya Repin · Public domain

One of the great keyboard virtuosos of the nineteenth century, Rubinstein founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, building Russia's first formal training ground for composers and performers where none had existed. He toured Russia, Eastern Europe and the United States with a legendary series of seven consecutive recitals surveying the entire history of piano music, and taught Tchaikovsky composition. He also wrote prolifically — twenty operas, five piano concertos, six symphonies — though it is as an institution-builder that his influence outlasted him.