Hennessey contacted the Peltzmans and asked if they were related to Beatrice. She died in September at 83.Ī few months later, Mrs. She married a pharmacist, was widowed at 47 and raised three sons, Alan, Richard and Roger.
“When the Nazis came there, my mother counted her rosary beads in front of them.”Īfter the war, Beatrice went to England and then to the United States. “The way we always heard it, it was a teacher named Gertler who arranged for the convent,” Mr. They vanished up the smokestacks of Auschwitz.īut Beatrice, who was 17, avoided capture by climbing out the attic window and huddling on the roof for hours. One morning in January 1944, the Nazis battered the door, seized Norbert and his parents and packed them off on trains. To avoid the roundups of Jews, the Sterns moved to the attic of a Madame Acremant. 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. The Sterns had settled in Brussels in the 1930s. We would bring it to show-and-tell at school.”
“My mother had no reservations about telling us everything. “We’d all seen it since we were little kids,” Mr. Peltzman knew that picture, and thought he knew the whole story behind it.
#Piano tuner tampa full#
Peltzman’s mother, Beatrice, dressed in the full habit of a Catholic nun. Hennessey had all these pictures ready,” Mr. Peltzman would discover that theirs were the hidden hands that had helped his mother survive. Hennessey’s parlor that afternoon in June, Mr. 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.įor that matter, they had never heard of the Bomhals. 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. More than half a century ago - in January 1944, to be precise - Mr. He gave a quick nod, and she flipped to the next page in the score of Chopin’s Berceuse, a cradle song.įor Roger Peltzman of Washington Heights, who had flown to Brussels to sit at that Steinway, it was a chord from lost history. The white-haired woman wet her index finger, then bent toward the shoulder of the man seated at the bench of a grand piano. (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. It was originally built in 1872, and was believed to have been in Lennon’s possession from 1966 onward. The upright piano is a John Broadwood and Sons design, with a unique gothic-style black-and-red exterior. 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. An iconic piece of the Beatles legacy is about to go up for auction - to the sweet tune of $575,000 to start.
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