A largely forgotten figure of the Rimsky-Korsakov/Stravinsky orbit, Maximilian Steinberg wrote large works in various genres. His essentially conservative style cost him prominence during the modernist reign, but several of them have been rediscovered in the 21st century. Born July 4, 1883, in Vilnius, Steinberg was of Lithuanian Jewish background. His father was a noted scholar of Judaism. Steinberg attended St. Petersburg University (Lithuania was then a part of the Russian Empire), majoring in biology. He finished his science degree in 1906, but by that time had already become hooked on music classes, studying with the school's powerhouse faculty members: Anatol Lyadov, Alexander Glazunov, and most important of all Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His chief rival among the student body was Igor Stravinsky. For a time, it was Steinberg who came out on top. Shortly before Rimsky's death in 1908, he married his daughter Nadezhda, converting to Orthodox Christianity in order to do so. He made his name as a scholar and teacher by editing Rimsky's Principles of Orchestration, a textbook still in use today. He began teaching at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, was made a professor in 1915, and spent the rest of his career there, retiring in 1946. His relationship with Stravinsky was always prickly, but he was highly esteemed by students including Dmitry Shostakovich and Galina Ustvolskaya. Nikolai Myaskovsky's Symphony in B flat minor, Op. 34, is dedicated to Steinberg. Steinberg's music was popular in its own time, and as Stalin's cultural apparatus began to clamp down on progressive styles, the late-Romantic music of Steinberg was largely unaffected. After his death on December 6, 1946, his reputation went into decline. Yet his work cannot consistently be classed as derivative. He wrote five symphonies, ranging from a memorial to Rimsky to one on Uzbek themes, and in 1936 he wrote his own Till Eulenspiegel ballet. Most interesting of all was The Passion Week, Op. 13, composed in the 1920s as Russian Orthodoxy was falling into disfavor with the Soviet Communist government. In the tradition of Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, but not really resembling it, the work was suppressed and remained unrecorded until a 2016 version by Oregon's Cappella Romana. Steinberg's first two symphonies were unearthed by conductor Neeme Järvi, and the high regard in which he was held by a variety of Russian composers suggests that other worthwhile music of his awaits rediscovery.