Unknown author · Public domain

Spent 49 years, from 1868 to 1917, teaching violin at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where his students included Jascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and Nathan Milstein — a run of virtuosos that made him one of the most consequential violin teachers in history, more influential through his pupils than through his own performing career. Tchaikovsky praised the expressivity of his playing, and he converted to Russian Orthodoxy around 1870, decades before the Russian Revolution forced him to emigrate to the United States in 1918, where he joined the Curtis Institute's faculty in 1928.