Belyayev circle
Winkler returned to the music school in Kharkiv as Professor of Piano from 1890 to 1896. On the recommendation of Leschetizky, he was invited to Saint Petersburg to teach at the Conservatory, where he had piano classes from 1896 to 1924, becoming Professor of Piano in 1909. The young Sergei Prokofiev was one of his pupils from 1905. From 1907, Winkler was music critic for the German-language newspaper "St. Petersburgische Zeitung". Like many professors of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, he was a member of the Belyayev circle, a creative group of musicians led by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which certainly affected his compositional work.