The Piano John Lennon Used to Write “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/john-lennon-piano-up-for-auction

The John Broadwood and Sons upright piano is expected to fetch up to $1.2 million

By Joyce Chen

April 4, 2019

Lennon also wrote "A Day in the Life" and other tunes on the piano.Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

An iconic piece of the Beatles legacy is about to go up for auction — to the sweet tune of $575,000 to start. The piano that John Lennon used to write Beatles classics such as “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “A Day in the Life” will hit the Gotta Have Rock and Roll auction site on April 10, and is expected to fetch anywhere between $800,000 and $1.2 million. The upright piano is a John Broadwood and Sons design, with a unique gothic-style black-and-red exterior. It was originally built in 1872, and was believed to have been in Lennon’s possession from 1966 onward. (The auction site reports that it was his favorite piano, and that he played it frequently at his Kenwood estate in Weybridge, Surrey, in southeast England, which he sold in 1968 amid a divorce from his first wife, Cynthia.) The piano also boasts a plaque verifying Lennon’s ownership, which reads, “On this piano was written: ‘A Day in the Life,’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,’ ‘Good Morning, Good Morning,’ ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,’ and many others. John Lennon 1971.”

The aforementioned songs were part of the Beatles’ iconic Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, released in 1967, for which the group has received resounding critical acclaim. Lennon was believed to have eventually given the piano to a friend, and it was later sold from a private collection at Sotheby’s London in September 1983. Another piano of Lennon's found a prominent home after his tragic death in December 1980: The Steinway upright on which he wrote his iconic solo song “Imagine” was auctioned off to late singer George Michael for $2.1 million in 2000. The British singer told CBS News at the time that “it’s not the type of thing that should be in storage somewhere or being protected, it should be seen by people.” Other Beatles memorabilia that has been auctioned off over the years includes a rare demo cut of “Love Me Do,” the band’s first single, which sold for $12,000 last month. There were only 250 such demos printed by Parlophone Records in 1962.

Telling her mother’s war story on stage with a piano

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/telling-her-mothers-war-story-on-stage-with-a-piano/2018/09/17/94ddcbbe-b9e1-11e8-adb8-01125416c102_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a25c4a6a7636

Mona Golabek in Theater J’s “The Pianist of Willesden Lane.” (Hershey Felder Presents)

By Celia Wren 

September 17, 2018

It hardly seems accurate to describe “The Pianist of Willesden Lane” as a solo show, even though storyteller/concert pianist Mona Golabek is the only performer onstage: The classical music Golabek plays is such a powerful presence — and one so integral to this affecting and intimate show — that it almost deserves its own curtain call.

Presented by Theater J at the Kennedy Center, “The Pianist of Willesden Lane” tells the true story of a brilliant young pianist, Lisa Jura — Golabek’s mother — before and during World War II. Raised in Vienna, Lisa is a teenager when the Nazi regime becomes a dire threat to her Jewish family. After escaping to England on the Kindertransport, Lisa finds herself a near-destitute refugee, working as a factory seamstress and stealing moments at a piano in a London basement as bombs fall during the Blitz. Her onetime dreams of a concert career now seem beyond her reach — or are they?

Golabek authored a book about her mother’s experience, “The Children of Willesden Lane” (written with Lee Cohen). This stage production was adapted and directed by Hershey Felder, the creator of other musical-biography plays, such as “George Gershwin Alone.” (“The Pianist of Willesden Lane” has previously run in New York, London and elsewhere. Here, it kicks off a season that Theater J is mounting at stages around the District while its parent organization, the Edlavitch DC Jewish Community Center, copes with renovations of its building.)

Felder’s conception works nicely here. Wearing a black dress, the soft-spoken Golabek tells the story in an appealingly simple, direct fashion. Ably channeling her teenaged mother, she refrains from waxing too actorly when depicting other characters, such as Lisa’s polite Viennese piano teacher (who is forced to stop teaching Jewish students), the harried director of a London refugee-assistance center, and a lovesick French Resistance fighter.

When the script touches on music that Lisa played — works by Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Edvard Grieg and others — Golabek sits at a grand piano and performs. These interpretations of (excerpted) scores are resplendent in themselves — Golabek’s technique and musicality are tremendous — and they also seem to bridge past and present. In a way, we are hearing what Lisa heard.

Hanging above the piano on the Family Theater stage are enormous gilded frames that relay projections, including images of Vienna streets, World War II fighter planes and Lisa’s family. Photos of children accompany a scene set in the eponymous Willesden Lane, where a generous matriarch takes in Lisa and other refugee kids. Needless to say, it’s a plot point that resonates, given the current world refugee crisis and recent family separations at the U.S. border.

www.washingtonpost.com

Every Piano Has A Story

July 30, 2010
Mother’s Savior: A Revelation
By JIM DWYER
The white-haired woman wet her index finger, then bent toward the shoulder of the man seated at the bench of a grand piano. He gave a quick nod, and she flipped to the next page in the score of Chopin’s Berceuse, a cradle song.

For Roger Peltzman of Washington Heights, who had flown to Brussels to sit at that Steinway, it was a chord from lost history.

More than half a century ago — in January 1944, to be precise — Mr. Peltzman’s uncle had played that same piano, and the elegant white-haired lady, now Ghislaine Hennessey but then a lively 20-year-old named Ghislaine Bomhals, had also turned the sheet music for him. Earlier this year, Mrs. Hennessey tracked down Mr. Peltzman and his brothers in New York.

The Peltzmans had heard plenty from their mother, a Holocaust survivor, about the uncle, Norbert Stern, a piano prodigy who made his debut at age 15, playing the symphonic études of Schumann to rave reviews; they knew nothing, though, about the Steinway piano in the Bomhals home that he practiced on for two years while in hiding from the Nazis.

For that matter, they had never heard of the Bomhals.

Sitting in Mrs. Hennessey’s parlor that afternoon in June, Mr. Peltzman would discover that theirs were the hidden hands that had helped his mother survive.

“Mrs. Hennessey had all these pictures ready,” Mr. Peltzman, 49, said last week.

One was a photograph of Mr. Peltzman’s mother, Beatrice, dressed in the full habit of a Catholic nun.

Mr. Peltzman knew that picture, and thought he knew the whole story behind it. “We’d all seen it since we were little kids,” Mr. Peltzman said. “My mother had no reservations about telling us everything. We would bring it to show-and-tell at school.”

The Sterns had settled in Brussels in the 1930s. Norbert so dazzled the city with his piano playing that the queen made him her ward, an honor that turned out to be of little use when the Germans invaded. To avoid the roundups of Jews, the Sterns moved to the attic of a Madame Acremant.

One morning in January 1944, the Nazis battered the door, seized Norbert and his parents and packed them off on trains. They vanished up the smokestacks of Auschwitz.

But Beatrice, who was 17, avoided capture by climbing out the attic window and huddling on the roof for hours. She made her way to a school friend. “The way we always heard it, it was a teacher named Gertler who arranged for the convent,” Mr. Peltzman said. “When the Nazis came there, my mother counted her rosary beads in front of them.”

After the war, Beatrice went to England and then to the United States. She married a pharmacist, was widowed at 47 and raised three sons, Alan, Richard and Roger. She died in September at 83.

A few months later, Mrs. Hennessey contacted the Peltzmans and asked if they were related to Beatrice.

“She had a new chapter,” Roger Peltzman said.

When the Sterns went into hiding in Brussels, they happened to be living a few doors away from the home of Fernand Bomhals, the owner of a movie theater and a member of the resistance to the Nazis.

“Norbert needed to practice, and we had a beautiful Steinway, and someone put him in touch with my father,” Mrs. Hennessey said last week by telephone. “He was brilliant. He asked me to play something, and I had been taking private lessons from age 7. He said to my father, ‘She’s good, she must go to the conservatoire,’ the place he had attended.”

Norbert’s sister, Beatrice, also visited and became friendly with Ghislaine.

Soon after the raid that captured Norbert and his parents, Mr. Bomhals was called to the house where Beatrice was being sheltered.

“My father went to see them, and he said, ‘I will try to get her in the convent,’ ” Mrs. Hennessey said. “I remember very vividly, like it was yesterday, that she was dressed as a nun, and that they went by train. He wouldn’t let me come with her. If people were caught hiding Jews, you were either sent to Germany, or shot.”

After the war ended, Beatrice was staying with a relative in London; Ghislaine had married a British serviceman, Thomas Hennessey. The two women met one last time in 1946. There is a picture of them at Waterloo Station, arm in arm. “After that, I lost her completely,” Mrs. Hennessey said.

Until a few months ago, when Mrs. Hennessey saw a television program about the Jews sent from Belgium to the death camps. She asked a friend to see if the young pianist Norbert, and his parents, were included in the records of those killed.

“I was worried that the names of Norbert and his parents had not been given as Jews who had lived in Belgium and died in Auschwitz,” Mrs. Hennessey said.

Using the Web site of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, the friend found that Beatrice Peltzman had submitted their names. The friend also found a death notice for Beatrice that listed her sons. What had started as an act of remembrance by an old woman in Brussels had become a moment of revelation for three men in America.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com