Inside the case of one grand piano in our collection, written on the cast iron plate, there is a signature: Josef Lhévinne. Beside it is a place and a date: Denver, February 12, 1907.
In our shop in Lafayette, Colorado, we spend our days inside pianos. We see plenty of pencil marks: the initials of a long-ago bellyman, a tuner’s date scratched on a key, a regulator’s note to himself. A signature from one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century is something else. It takes us back to a particular winter, when a young Russian virtuoso crossed America by train and stopped for a few days at the foot of the Rockies.
The Contract with Four Zeros
Josef Lhévinne made his American debut at Carnegie Hall on January 27, 1906, with the Russian Symphony Orchestra under Vassily Safonov, his old teacher from the Moscow Conservatory. He was thirty-one. He had won the Anton Rubinstein Competition in 1895, and those who heard him often compared his sound to Rubinstein’s own.
Within a week, on February 2, Steinway & Sons signed him to tour America under its management the following season. Only two pianists had been engaged by the firm in that way before him: Anton Rubinstein in 1872 and Ignacy Paderewski in 1891. According to Robert Wallace’s family history of the Lhévinnes, A Century of Music-Making (1976), the offer was $10,000 plus expenses, and Lhévinne sent off a delighted cablegram: “I have a contract with four zeros in it!”
The fine print was a little less romantic. Steinway scheduled more than a hundred concerts for that 1906–07 season, and, as Wallace notes, Lhévinne was guaranteed no more money for playing a hundred concerts than if he played only forty. He played them anyway. Newspaper advertisements along the way billed him as “Russia’s Greatest Pianist,” with a line every piano maker of the day understood: Steinway Piano Used.
An Hour at the White House
In late January 1907, Lhévinne played in Washington with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Fritz Scheel. Mrs. Roosevelt was in the audience. As the Providence Evening Tribune reported on February 10, she was so delighted that she wished to meet him, and the next day Mr. and Mrs. Lhévinne called at the White House by appointment.
Wallace describes what happened next. The Lhévinnes were introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt, the First Lady, and the president’s daughter Alice with her husband, Nicholas Longworth. “For nearly an hour, Lhevinne played for them.”
It is a lovely picture: a Russian pianist and his wife Rosina, herself a gifted pianist, in a White House drawing room, the President of the United States listening. Then it was back to the train.
Westward in February
The tour pushed west through the heart of the country. Lhévinne played the Grand Opera House in Topeka on Wednesday, February 6, and Omaha on Saturday, February 9. On Monday, February 11, he gave his concert in Denver.
The small-town papers noticed. On February 14, the Greeley Tribune reported simply that “Fred Good went to Denver to attend the concert given by the noted pianist, Josef Lhevinne, Monday.” We like that sentence very much. It tells us that people across the Front Range thought this music was worth a trip in February.
While he was in town, Lhévinne practiced at the Brown Palace Hotel on a Steinway provided for him by Steinway & Sons, so that he could rehearse in private. The Denver Post photographed him at the instrument, and the clipping accompanies the piano today. The next day, February 12, 1907, he signed and dated its plate.
That piano is a 1906 Steinway Model A, serial number 123270, in ribbon mahogany, six feet two inches long. It was barely a year old when he played it.
The Sound He Was Known For
What did people hear in Lhévinne? Above all, a singing tone. He could make a piano sound as though it were breathing between phrases, and he combined that warmth with a technique that other pianists spoke of with something like awe. His signature encore, the glittering Schulz-Evler arrangement of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, was demanded by audiences wherever he went, and his later recordings became touchstones for generations of pianists.
He also loved to teach. With Rosina, he later joined the faculty of the Juilliard School in New York, and together they shaped a remarkable number of the century’s finest players. After his death in 1944, Rosina carried on for decades. Her students included Van Cliburn, John Browning, and James Levine.
Theodore Roosevelt was not the only president drawn to his playing. Harry Truman heard Lhévinne as a young man and never forgot it. “That was when I made up my mind that Josef Lhevinne was the greatest of them all,” Truman recalled, and in 1951 he said so publicly at a White House ceremony.
Colorado Summers
Lhévinne’s tie to Colorado did not end in 1907. By the late 1930s, Josef and Rosina were spending their summers here, teaching in Denver and in Boulder.
In Denver they taught at the Lamont School of Music. In Boulder they taught at the University of Colorado, where Lhévinne’s former student Mark Wessel led the piano department. On weekends they would retreat to Estes Park, to a spacious cottage with a grand piano on the estate of their friend John Rosborough. In June 1939 the Lamont School gave Rosina an honorary doctorate.
In August 1940 the University of Colorado awarded Josef an honorary doctorate of his own. Wallace tells the story in a single sentence that we think says everything about the man: “Instead of standing to give an address, Lhevinne sat down to play music of Chopin and Debussy.”
When you are a musician, the music is your speech.
We Want to Be Careful Here
We care a great deal about getting history right, so we want to say plainly what we know and how we know it. Lhévinne’s signature and the February 12, 1907 date are on the plate. The Denver Post clipping and other materials have stayed with the piano. The tour dates, the White House visit, and the Colorado summers come from period newspapers and from Robert Wallace’s A Century of Music-Making. Beyond that, we will not guess. If you have family letters, programs, or photographs connected with Lhévinne’s Colorado years, we would love to hear from you.
An Invitation, by Appointment
A piano does not remember in words. But we believe a good instrument carries the shape of the hands that have played it: the voicing, the touch, the way a note blooms and fades. Sit at this Model A, and you are playing the same keys a great pianist chose to practice on in Denver, in the winter of 1907, between a White House drawing room and the next train west.
This historic Steinway is offered at $250,000. You can read the full history and see more photographs on the 1906 Steinway “Josef Lhévinne” Model A page.
Our Lafayette shop is open by appointment only. Call (303) 521-3722 or contact us to make an appointment, and we will be glad to lift the lid, show you the signature, and let you play.
— Trevor Nelson, Registered Piano Technician, Renaissance Piano Service
