Andre Previn: A hit in Hollywood, lionized in London, but it all began in Berlin

BERLIN - It felt strangely appropriate that the news of Andre Previn's death reached me here, in the German capital, where he was born in 1929 and spent his first nine years, one-tenth of his life. Had his family not fled the Nazis and emigrated to L.A. and changed his name, he would have remained Andreas Ludwig Priwin and almost certainly become a classical German pianist revered for his Mozart and Brahms.

In fact, as Andre Previn, he did become a celebrated pianist capable of bringing lyrical enchantment to Mozart and Brahms, but he is far better remembered in the obituaries for the obligatory statistic that as a young jazz pianist in 1956, he and drummer Shelly Manne were the first to make a jazz record that sold a million copies with their interpretations of songs from "My Fair Lady." Previn's Berlin beginnings, on the other hand, has been an inconvenient fact skipped over in one of the most remarkable