Joseph Arkadievich Levin was born on 13 December 1874 into a Jewish family of musicians at Oryol, south of Moscow; the spelling Lhévinne was imposed later by a manager who thought it more distinctive and less obviously Jewish. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Vasily Safonov, made his public debut at fourteen in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto under Anton Rubinstein, and took the gold medal in 1892 at the head of a class that also contained Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. In 1895 he won the Second Anton Rubinstein Competition in Berlin, and in 1898 married Rosina Bessie, a fellow Moscow gold medallist, with whom he played two-piano concerts for the rest of his life. He died in New York on 2 December 1944.

The Lhévinnes moved to Berlin in 1907, were declared enemy aliens there in 1914 and trapped for the duration of the war, lost their savings in the Russian banks in 1917, and survived on the fees of a few pupils before emigrating to New York in 1919. He taught at the Juilliard School and toured, and was reckoned by his contemporaries — Horowitz among them — one of the supreme technicians of the age, though his public success never matched theirs; he seems to have preferred teaching to performing. His short book Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing, published in 1924, is still in print and still read.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Lh%C3%A9vinne
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q951486