Rosina Lhévinne

Rosina Lhévinne (née Bessie; March 29, 1880, Kiev, Ukraine, Russian Empire – November 9, 1976, Glendale, California) was a pianist and famed pedagogue.

Rosina Bessie was the younger of two daughters of Maria (née Katch) and Jacques Bessie, a prosperous jeweler from a Dutch Jewish family who emigrated to the Russian Empire to ply his trade as a diamond merchant. There were violent anti-Semitic riots in Kiev during her first year, and the Bessies moved to Moscow in 1881 or 1882. The young Rosina began studying piano at the age of six with a teacher in Moscow, where the family had moved shortly after her birth. When her teacher became ill, a family friend suggested that she continue her studies with Josef Lhévinne, a talented student at the Moscow Imperial Conservatory, five years older than Rosina.

She showed remarkable talent, and several years later she was admitted to the Conservatory herself, where she also studied with Lhévinne's teacher, Vasily Safonov. At her graduation in 1898, she won the Gold Medal in piano as had Josef before her, and that year the two were married. With Josef's career as a concert pianist already well underway, Rosina decided that she would give up her own ambitions to be a solo performer and confine her activities to teaching and performing on two pianos with her husband - a vow she kept until well after her husband's death in 1944. Together they lived and taught in Moscow, Tbilisi, Georgia and later in Berlin before emigrating after World War I and the Russian Revolution to New York, where they joined the faculty of the Institute of Musical Art which later became The Juilliard School. Josef and Rosina Lhévinne had two children, Constantine "Don" Lhevinne (1906-1998) and Marianna Lhevinne Graham (1918-2012).

Having acted essentially as a preparatory teacher to her more famous husband's students for 46 years, she felt reluctant after his death to assume his full duties at the school; however, Juilliard's administrators were unanimous in wanting her to continue in her husband's place.

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