Every epoch writes its legends. Already within his lifetime Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888–1964) transcended the definition of pianist and pedagogue. Known as “Heinrich the Great” (Genrikh Velikiy), he became a symbol immortalized by Russia's greatest poets including Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and, in the younger generation, Bella Akhmadulina. As he toured the Soviet Union Neuhaus was honored to find that his portraits graced the walls of conservatories and stood on the nation's countless pianos in apartments “like icons,” and that his entrance onto the stage was greeted with long ovations and “tears of joy.” Despite the era's political tensions and limited interchange of information, at the height of the Cold War students from as far afield as America sought to be admitted into his famous class in Room 29 at the Moscow Conservatory where he taught up to his death in a professorship spanning some forty-two years.

It is difficult to describe the magnitude of what Neuhaus represented to those around him across the vast expanses of the USSR. Being born in Imperial Russia into a multiethnic family, he returned to Russia in 1914 having essentially spent the first twenty-six years of his life living abroad in Germany, Italy, and Austria. Like his great friend Artur Rubinstein, with whom he kept close company and even shared the same pedagogue, Neuhaus had intended to make Europe his base from which to launch himself as a musician of international renown. Both pianists were marked by a magnetic charisma, élan, and a highly erudite but dandy manner that captivated those around them. Yet the First World War set into action a sequence of events that poignantly demonstrated how differently fate would unfold for these two friends, separated by new borders. Rubinstein, free to travel across the globe, became an international superstar. Neuhaus became trapped by the hotbed of unrest that would drag his homeland into revolution and civil war. With the window of cultural exchange narrowing under the tightening grip of censorship that signaled the beginnings of the Iron Curtain's inexorable descent, Neuhaus lost his contact with the world that he was expecting to conquer. His meteoric rise to fame within the USSR, however, proved that it was not a lost connection in the eyes of those around him.