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Portnoff

Leo Portnoff (1875–1940) was a violinist, composer, and teacher born in Kyiv who served as professor at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin from 1906 to 1915, before emigrating to the United States and eventually settling in Miami, where he taught at the university. He died in 1940, the same year the Nazi Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, the register compiled to facilitate the persecution of Jewish musicians, was published with his name in it. As a pedagogue he claimed to have systematised what Paganini had called a secret method for shortening the years needed to master violin technique; his Russian Fantasias remain in regular use worldwide.

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