Iosif Levin

Josef Lhévinne (Iosif Arkadyevich Levin) was a Russian-American pianist and music teacher. He was born in Oryol on 13 December 1874 and died in New York on 2 December 1944.

He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Vasily Safonov and graduated in 1892 as the top student of his class, ahead of fellow students Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin. He gave concerts and private lessons, and in 1895 won first prize at the Second Rubinstein Competition in Berlin.

In 1898 he married his former student Rosina Bessie, who remained his assistant for the rest of his life. From 1900 to 1902 he taught at the Tiflis Conservatory, and he served as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory from 1902 to 1906.

In 1907 the Lhévinnes left Russia and settled in Berlin, where they endured hardships during World War I. In 1919 they moved to New York, and from 1922 until his death Josef Lhévinne taught at the Juilliard School, assisted by Rosina.

Teaching occupied him more than performance, so he appeared relatively little in public and left few recordings. Nevertheless, the surviving recordings—especially his études by Chopin and Schumann—are regarded extremely highly; American musicologist Harold C. Schonberg compared Lhévinne’s playing to “the concordant singing of the morning stars.”

Lhévinne also wrote the pedagogical treatise Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing, considered a classic of music-teaching literature.

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