Lev Konyus was a Russian pianist, music teacher, and composer, born in Moscow on April 26, 1871. He was the son of Edward Konyus, who dedicated his best-known collection of piano études to him, and the brother of Georgy and Julius Konyus.
Konyus graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, having studied with Anton Arensky. Sergei Rachmaninoff was a fellow student, and the two remained friends throughout Konyus’s life. For their graduation, both presented one-act operas based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies. Konyus was also close to Alexander Scriabin and published a four-hand piano arrangement of Scriabin’s Third Symphony.
From 1912 to 1920, Konyus taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where he became a professor in 1918. He settled in France in 1920 and became one of the founders of the Russian Conservatory in Paris. His students there included Nina Milkina, and he also taught at the École Normale de Musique in Paris at Isidor Philipp’s invitation.
In 1935, Konyus and his wife, the pianist Olga Konyus, moved to the United States. He became head of the piano department at the Cincinnati Conservatory. The couple coauthored Fundamentals of Piano Technique, a textbook that was reissued several times. Konyus died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 18, 1944.
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