Lazare Lévy (January 18, 1882September 20, 1964) was an influential French pianist, organist, composer and pedgogue. As a virtuoso pianist he toured throughout Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

, in North Africa

North Africa

North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...

, Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

, the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 and Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

. He taught for many years at the Paris Conservatoire

Conservatoire de Paris

The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...

.

Biography

Lazare Lévy was born of French parents in Brussels

Brussels

Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

, Belgium

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

. After early lessons with an English piano teacher there, he entered the Paris Conservatoire

Conservatoire de Paris

The Conservatoire de Paris is a college of music and dance founded in 1795, now situated in the avenue Jean Jaurès in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, France...

 at age 12 in 1894. The noted pedagogue Louis Diémer

Louis Diémer

Louis-Joseph Diémer was a French pianist and composer.- Life :Diémer studied at the Paris Conservatoire, winning premiers prix in piano, harmony and accompaniment, counterpoint and fugue, and solfège, and a second prix in organ...

 supervised the young boy's studies, and Lévy received a Premier Prix in 1898. He also studied harmony with Albert Lavignac

Albert Lavignac

Albert Lavignac was a French music scholar, known for his essays on theory, and a minor composer.-Biography:Lavignac was borin in Paris and studied with Antoine François Marmontel, François Benoist and Ambroise Thomas at the Conservatoire de Paris, where later he taught harmony...

 and counterpoint with André Gedalge

André Gedalge

André Gedalge , was an influential French composer and teacher.- Biography :André Gedalge was born at 75 rue des Saints-Pères, in Paris, where he first worked as a bookseller and editor specializing in livres de prix for public schools...

. Among his comrades and early music partners were Alfredo Casella

Alfredo Casella

Alfredo Casella was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor.- Life and career :Casella was born in Turin; his family included many musicians; his grandfather, a friend of Paganini's, was first cello in the San Carlo Theatre in Lisbon and eventually was soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin...

, Alfred Cortot

Alfred Cortot

Alfred Denis Cortot was a Franco-Swiss pianist and conductor. He is one of the most renowned 20th-century classical musicians, especially valued for his poetic insight in Romantic period piano works, particularly those of Chopin and Schumann.-Early life and education:Born in Nyon, Vaud, in the...

, George Enescu

George Enescu

George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...

, Pierre Monteux

Pierre Monteux

Pierre Monteux was an orchestra conductor. Born in Paris, France, Monteux later became an American citizen.-Life and career:Monteux was born in Paris in 1875. His family was descended from Sephardi Jews who came to France in the wake of the Spanish Inquisition. He studied violin from an early age,...

, Maurice Ravel

Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...

, and Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud was a French violinist.Thibaud was born in Bordeaux and studied the violin with his father before entering the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. In 1896 he jointly won the conservatory's violin prize with Pierre Monteux...

.

At age twenty, Lévy made his début récital at the Concerts Colonne

Concerts Colonne

The Colonne Orchestra is a French symphony orchestra, founded in 1873 by the violinist and conductor Édouard Colonne.-History:While leader of the Opéra de Paris orchestra, Édouard Colonne was engaged by the publisher Georges Hartmann to lead a series of popular concerts which he founded under the...

, under Édouard Colonne

Édouard Colonne

Édouard Juda Colonne was a French conductor and violinist, who was a champion of the music of Berlioz and other eminent 19th-century composers.-Life and career:...

' s own baton, in Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

's A minor Piano Concerto

Piano Concerto (Schumann)

The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.54, is a famous Romantic concerto by Robert Schumann, completed in 1845.Schumann had begun several piano concerti before this one: In 1828, he had begun one in E-flat major; from 1829-31 he worked on one in F major, and in 1839, he wrote one movement of a concerto...

. In the front row of Lévy's earliest recitals was Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

, who considered him to possess "that rare union of technical perfection and musicality."

Lazare Lévy premiered works by French composers of his time, including Paul Dukas

Paul Dukas

Paul Abraham Dukas was a French composer, critic, scholar and teacher. A studious man, of retiring personality, he was intensely self-critical, and he abandoned and destroyed many of his compositions...

 and Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud

Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...

. He was also an early champion of Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Albéniz

Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz y Pascual was a Spanish Catalan pianist and composer best known for his piano works based on folk music idioms .-Life:Born in Camprodon, province of Girona, to Ángel Albéniz and his wife Dolors Pascual, Albéniz...

, whose "Iberia

Iberia (Albéniz)

Iberia is a suite for piano composed between 1905 and 1909 by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. It comprises four books of three pieces each; a complete performance lasts about an hour and a half....

" (Book I) he played in 1911.

In his twenty-fifth year, Lévy co-authored a Méthode Supérieure for piano published by Diémer (whose assistant he became), though he would later advocate a much more personal and innovative piano technique, involving more hand and arm technique than pure finger technique, with the cushioned part of the fingers going deeply into the key.

Lévy was a distinguished professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire, first as a temporary teacher (1914-16 and 1920-3) and then as Cortot's successor (1923-40; reappointed 1944-53).

As a Jew in occupied France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 during the Second World War

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, his life was held in balance yet he survived only through constant movement and vigilance, hiding, adopting aliases and using false papers. The Conservatoire position he had held was nevertheless given to Marcel Ciampi

Marcel Ciampi

Marcel Paul Maximin Ciampi was a French pianist and teacher. He held the longest tenure in the history of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris and also became head of piano classes at the Yehudi Menuhin School in England...

 and Lévy never recovered it. His youngest son, Phillipe, a prominent resistance fighter, was betrayed to the Gestapo by two French Nazi collaborators, captured, then transferred to the Drancy concentration camp where he was recognised as a Jew and tortured by SS officer Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner

Alois Brunner is an Austrian Nazi war criminal. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's assistant, and Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man." As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to...

.

Among his pupils were John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

, Teodor Cosma, Marcel Dupré

Marcel Dupré

Marcel Dupré , was a French organist, pianist, composer, and pedagogue.-Biography:Marcel Dupré was born in Rouen . Born into a musical family, he was a child prodigy. His father Albert Dupré was organist in Rouen and a friend of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who built an organ in the family house when...

, Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss

Lukas Foss was a German-born American composer, conductor, and pianist.-Music career:He was born Lukas Fuchs in Berlin, Germany in 1922. His father was the philosopher and scholar Martin Fuchs...

, Valentin Gheorghiu

Valentin Gheorghiu

Valentin Gheorghiu is a Romanian classical pianist and composer.-Biography:Gheorghiu was born in Galaţi, Romania in 1928. He was first a pupil of Constanţa Erbiceanu at the Bucharest Academy of Music and then of Lazare Lévy at the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris, France...

, Chieko Hara-Cassado, Monique Haas

Monique Haas

Monique Haas was a French pianist.Born in Paris, she studied at the Conservatoire there with Joseph Morpain and Lazare Lévy, taking a Premier Prix in 1927. She went on to study with Rudolf Serkin and Robert Casadesus. She was married to the French-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici...

, Clara Haskil

Clara Haskil

Clara Haskil was a Romanian classical pianist, renowned as an interpreter of the classical and early romantic repertoire....

, Oskar Morawetz

Oskar Morawetz

Oskar Morawetz, CM, O.Ont was a Canadian composer.Morawetz was born in Světlá nad Sázavou, Bohemia . He studied piano and theory in Prague and, following the Nazi takeover of his country in 1938, studied in Vienna and Paris, always staying one step ahead of the invading Nazis...

, Michel Plasson

Michel Plasson

Michel Plasson is a French conductor.Plasson was a student of Lazare Lévy at the Conservatoire de Paris. In 1962, he was a prize-winner at the International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors. He studied briefly in the United States, including time with Charles Münch...

, Georges Savaria

Georges Savaria

Georges Savaria is a Canadian pianist, composer, ondist, college administrator, and music educator. His compositional output consists of a 1951 piano concerto, several songs and works for solo piano, and music for theatre, television, and radio...

, Kazimierz Serocki

Kazimierz Serocki

Kazimierz Serocki was a Polish composer and one of the founders of the Warsaw Autumn contemporary music festival.-Life:...

, Solomon, André Tchaikowsky, and many other virtuosos mostly known in France nowadays.

Lazare Lévy died in 1964, aged 82.

Sources

• Arbiter Records # 150, Francis Plante and His Peers. Masters of the French Piano Tradition, New York, 2007