Vladimir Horowitz

Musician

• Born: October 1, 1903
• Birthplace: Berdichev, Russia (now in Ukraine)
• Died: November 5, 1989
• Place of death: New York, New York

Russian-born American pianist

Horowitz was the foremost twentieth century exemplar of the Russian school of Romantic pianists. Believing music lay “behind the notes,” he produced unique interpretations by avoiding literal decoding of notes on a page. He rarely played a piece twice in the same manner.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

The youngest of four children, Vladimir Horowitz (VLAHD-ih-meer HOHR-oh-wihtz) was the son of Simeon and Sophie Horowitz, upper-middle-class Jews who, shortly after Vladimir’s birth, moved to a comfortable apartment on Music Lane in Kiev, the capital of the Russian province of the Ukraine. Each of his siblings were musical and received their earliest training from their mother, but it was Vladimir who showed such precocious talent that his parents enrolled him in the Kiev Conservatory just before his eighth birthday. Over the next eight years he studied with Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky, and Felix Blumenfeld, mastering the techniques and much of the repertoire that would mark him as unique and controversial. Even his posture at the piano was unconventional. Slumping low on the bench and playing with low wrists and flat fingers, Horowitz defied the high upright carriage, elevated wrists, and curved fingers of standard piano pedagogy.

Although initially more interested in composition than performance, Horowitz began performing publicly in May, 1920, to help support his family. Hard times descended when Bolshevik revolutionaries confiscated his father’s electrical supply business, evicted the Horowitzes from their home, and confiscated their bank accounts. During the next difficult year, Vladimir built a reputation by playing about one dozen concerts in Kharkov, Odessa, Tiflis, and Moscow. The tempo of his appearances increased until, in 1924 and 1925, he played as many as seventy recitals, twenty-three in Leningrad. His audiences had rarely heard octaves and scales played with greater velocity and clarity; moreover, such was his strength, belied by his frail Chopinesque build, that his thundering fortissimos often broke strings. Sometimes paid in food and clothing, he became increasingly celebrated in the Soviet Union as his life there became ever more intolerable. In 1925 he applied for and, to his amazement, received a visa to leave the country for six months, ostensibly to study with pianist Artur Schnabel in Germany. At the age of twenty-two and with his shoes stuffed with money to evade the restriction on leaving the country with more than $500, Horowitz departed the grim nation of his birth, not to return for sixty-one years.

Life’s Work

The cultural vitality of Weimar Germany delighted its latest Russian émigré. Horowitz began playing recitals to mixed notices, as neither his flamboyant Russian Romanticism nor his Jewish identity endeared him to the Berlin critics. However, a performance of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in Hamburg, an assignment accepted on less than one hour’s notice, won over critics and audience alike, and Horowitz’s reputation outside Russia took root. He moved to Paris in March, 1926, where the French embraced his playing as well as his whimsical personality. From there he booked sixty-nine concerts throughout Western Europe during the next year. In early 1928 he began his tour of the United States. In New York he met his hero and fellow expatriate Sergei Rachmaninoff and, in January, made his American debut at Carnegie Hall under the direction of English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, also making his American premiere. Again the critics were of divided mind, but the audience adored him. Guided by Arthur Judson of Columbia Artists Management, Horowitz toured extensively in American small towns and large cities during the early 1930’s. For the first time his fees were sufficient to allow him to indulge his fondness for fine automobiles (Studebakers) and elegant clothing he eventually boasted a collection of six hundred bow ties.

In New York, Horowitz met the legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, with whom he played Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto in March, 1933. Although intimidated by Toscanini’s musical stature and cowed by his volcanic temper, Horowitz made bold to court his daughter Wanda, whom he married on December 21. In October, 1934, the couple presented Toscanini a granddaughter, Sonia, who was destined to a life of almost operatic drama and despair smothered between the two towering geniuses who were her father and grandfather and emotionally impaired by two quarrelsome and monumentally heedless parents.

In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were seeing to the ruination of the Horowitz family. During the civil war, Horowitz’s brother Jacob died in the ranks of the Red Army. Not long thereafter, his brother George committed suicide while under psychiatric care. Most devastating of all, his beloved mother, Sophie, died of peritonitis after incompetent treatment for appendicitis. Around the time of Sonia’s birth, Horowitz’s father visited Paris, promising a prompt return to the Soviet Union. Happy amid the splendors of the French capital and desperate to remain with his son, Simeon tore himself away to spare his new wife an unthinkable punishment if he failed to keep his bargain. Arrested anyway when he crossed the border into the Soviet Union, he was condemned to a gulag and died miserably several years later. Only Horowitz’s sister Genya survived. Understandably, Horowitz never dared return to the Soviet Union during Genya’s lifetime despite the assurances of Joseph Stalin’s government that he could come and go freely.

The heartbreaking destruction of his family combined with the pressures of overwork, a stormy marriage, colitis, and professional frustrations to bring on the first of several breakdowns and retirements that punctuated the remainder of Horowitz’s career. His mastery of the piano notwithstanding, he was always prone to the paralyzing self-doubts that left him incapacitated between 1936 and 1938. With a family to support and a censorious father-in-law to mollify, he struggled back to the stage in the fall of 1938 and performed until the fall of 1939, when World War II began.

The war prompted an exodus of some of Europe’s finest musicians to the United States, among them Rachmaninoff, Toscanini, and Horowitz himself. In the United States, the musical public resumed its love affair with its favorite Russian; obligingly, he began every concert with his own version of “The National Anthem” and closed many with his transcription of John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” On Easter Sunday, 1943, he played a war bond rally that raised more than ten million dollars, the largest sum ever collected at a musical benefit to that date. Granted U.S. citizenship in 1942, he bought a large townhouse in New York City on Fifty-ninth Street near Central Park, which he appointed with great works of art bought as investments and which he later sold when he tired of their insurance costs.

After the war Horowitz kept up his demanding schedule of concerts and recordings, but as his career expanded, his marriage collapsed. Unsuited for marriage in almost every way, especially in his sexual preference for men, Horowitz shared with Wanda his intense ambition, avarice for fame and fortune, and single-minded musical perfectionism. Without her, moreover, he was nearly helpless in the day-to-day business of life. She was the tough, uncompromising mediator between the childlike Horowitz and the world outside their Manhattan townhouse. Nevertheless, in 1949 they separated and, except for brief reconciliations, lived apart until 1953, when Horowitz endured his second and longest breakdown. Under his wife’s close ministrations, he gradually recovered, took a few students, and resumed recording. During this period, Horowitz’s deeply troubled daughter was nearly killed in a traffic accident in Italy and was left with lasting brain injuries.

Thanks in part to medical treatment, Horowitz resumed concertizing on May 9, 1965. The night before tickets went on sale, more than 1,500 people lined up reverentially in a rain storm to ensure their place in the hall. The next morning Wanda sent Horowitz’s shivering devotees hot coffee, but when only three hundred made it to the ticket booth before the concert sold out, the remainder left distressed and irate. Half of the 2,700 available seats had been reserved for the press, record company executives, officials of the Steinway company (whose pianos he played exclusively), and others who had not stood patiently through the rain-drenched vigil. The concert was a gala affair, one of the most celebrated concerts in the history of Carnegie Hall, with, among others, Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, Richard Tucker, Rudolf Nureyev, and Igor Stravinsky attending.

Tired and dispirited after four more years of concerts, including a television special in 1968, Horowitz retired yet a third time, his depression so grave that he eschewed the piano for eight months during 1973 and 1974. After more shock treatments, he resurfaced to play at Cleveland’s Severance Hall on May 10, 1974. Then, in January, 1975, his daughter Sonia died, apparently by her own hand, in Geneva. In the aftermath, the seventy-two-year-old pianist engaged in a whirlwind of concerts for which promoters paid him 80 percent of ticket sales plus expenses. Cantankerous about his accommodations and personal comforts, he had always been anxious before performances, arriving at the last moment and insisting that no one talk to him before going on stage. On occasion he had to be nudged toward the piano. Regardless of the enormous fees, he often canceled dates at the last moment. The eccentric pianist Oscar Levant, himself notorious for the same maddening predilection, once quipped that he and Horowitz should have placed an advertisement in Musical America: “Vladimir Horowitz and Oscar Levant available for a limited number of cancellations.”

By the mid-1980’s, communism was crumbling in the enfeebled Soviet Union, and Horowitz, then more than eighty years old, felt safe to go home. In 1986 blissful Russian audiences wept at the return of their prodigal son and sent him back to the United States buoyed and musically reawakened. He played and recorded steadily over the next three years until, on November 5, 1989, he suffered a fatal heart attack only four days after his last recording session. Ironically, his wife buried him not in Russia with his own family nor in the United States, which had adopted him so lovingly, but in the Toscanini family plot in Milan, Italy, near the father-in-law who had terrified him and close by his daughter, whose funeral fourteen years earlier he had neglected to attend.

Significance

Horowitz was the last great representative of nineteenth century Romantic pianists and among the foremost interpreters of Franz Liszt, Robert Schuman, Frédéric Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. Small wonder, then, that he played the music of most Baroque and classical composers indifferently, Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti and Muzio Clementi excepted. Obsessed with opera, he overcame the naturally percussive quality of the piano to wrest a singing tone from taut metal strings. This passionate lyricism came, in part, from his uncanny ability to combine pedaling and dynamics to coax unexpected colors from his instrument.

Contending that the music lay “behind the notes” and impressing his own personality on the score to produce unique interpretations, he avoided literal decoding of notes on a page and rarely played a piece twice in the same manner. To the horror of purists, he sometimes rewrote music, such as Modest Mussorgsky’s Kartinki s vystavki (1874; Pictures at an Exhibition) and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies (1851-1886). He was, consequently, out of step with mainstream twentieth century pianists such as Arthur Rubinstein, Arthur Schnabel, and Rudolf Serkin, who stressed fidelity to the composer’s intentions and aimed at interpretations consistent with historically authentic performance practices. While no one doubted Horowitz’s astounding technical ability and his unmatched virtuosity (indeed, many regarded him as the greatest pianist of the century), influential critics such as Virgil Thomson, B. H. Haggin, and Irving Kolodin questioned his musical judgment, condemned his cavalier rejection of the composer’s authority, and decried his self-conscious showmanship.

Bibliography

Dubal, David. Evenings with Horowitz: An Intimate Portrait. New York: Carol, 1994. Gossipy recollections of private moments and conversations by one of Horowitz’s most uncritical admirers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Remembering Horowitz: 125 Pianists Recall a Legend. New York: Schirmer, 1993. Mainly hagiographic but useful for understanding Horowitz’s technique and his approach to turning notes into music.

Horowitz, Joseph. Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Horowitz traces the development of classical music in the United States across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One chapter, “The World’s Greatest Soloists,” discusses Horowitz’s American performances, and the book contains additional references to Horowitz.

Mach, Eleyse. Great Pianists Speak for Themselves. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. Presents Horowitz’s observations on teaching, his retirements from public performance, and his views on the performer’s relationship to the printed score and the composer’s intentions.

Plaskin, Glenn. Horowitz: A Biography of Vladimir Horowitz. New York: Morrow, 1983. A book-length biography of Horowitz’s career to 1982. Written without Horowitz’s cooperation and generally unsparing. Includes bibliography and discography.

Schonberg, Harold C. Horowitz: His Life and Music. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Schonberg’s book, the first book-length biography of Horowitz’s entire career, is based on six weeks of recorded conversations with Horowitz. More sympathetic than Plaskin’s account but less than Dubal’s. Includes bibliography and discography.