Nearly 25 years after his passing, Vladimir Horowitz remains a controversial figure. Sviatoslav Richter’s brisk appraisal – ‘Great pianist, trivial mind’ – echoes Arthur Rubinstein’s feeling for his rival and erstwhile friend.
While conceding that Horowitz was the better pianist, as a man ‘He was … a curious combination of arrogance and stupidity. As a person, he was just not interesting.’ The entry in Grove’s Dictionary concludes ‘Horowitz illustrates that an astounding instrumental gift carries no guarantee about
musical understanding.’
Harsh? Or reality?
Who was Vladimir Horowitz?
When Horowitz died on 5 November 1989 in New York at the age of 85, the obituarists all reached for their superlatives. ‘A legendary figure at the piano,’ said The Times, 'whom some regarded as ‘the greatest pianist of all time, including those they never heard.’
‘Eccentric virtuoso of the piano whose extraordinary personality and skill overwhelmed six decades of concert audiences,’ ran The New York Times headline. ‘Phenomenal virtuosity,’ opined The Daily Telegraph, ‘mercurial speed and power and, in his prime, accuracy and dynamic contrasts were his trademark as much as his dapper appearance, always with a striking bow-tie.’ Many eulogies quoted the critic Neville Cardus’s description of Horowitz as ‘the greatest pianist alive or dead’, later adding that this was perhaps an understatement: ‘it was perhaps not positive enough about the pianists still unborn.’
Yet each obituary carried a health warning – in Horowitz’s case, a mental health warning. ‘As a result of prolonged efforts to suppress his musical and sexual instincts, [he] had a severe breakdown in 1936,’ (The Telegraph). ‘A cruel fight with pre-concert nerves, resulting from his fear that he would not live up to high expectations, led to psychosomatic disorders.’
'Certifiably insane'
Writing in 1997, Norman Lebrecht, having declared that ‘Pianists mostly come in two varieties: eggheads and fruitcakes’, thought that ‘Vladimir Horowitz, probably the greatest pianist of the 20th century, was certifiably insane. He suffered repeated breakdowns and remissions, described by the music industry as “retirements” and “comebacks”, and lived on steamed fish. He never got up before noon and only gave concerts at 4pm on Sundays.’
From such distortions are legends made. But Lebrecht had a point. Extraordinary musical genius is often associated with mental disorders. Manic depression is, for some reason, more common among musicians and poets than among sculptors or novelists. And of those musicians, pianists tend to be wackier than woodwind or string players.
Horowitz was highly strung, neurotic, demanding, spoilt, childlike and, one senses, incomplete away from the piano. The history of the keyboard is littered with similar cases. It’s a Faustian pact: ‘I shall make you the greatest pianist in the world in return for your personal happiness.’ When transcendent musical gifts are suffused with guilt or self-disgust over one’s sexuality, it can lead to despair and suicide. Noel Mewton-Wood and Terence Judd are just two such tragic examples.
Raw passion and frightening power
Vladimir Horowitz hovered on the border – just like his performances. Unleashing a penetrating sonority unequalled by any other pianist, he mesmerised and thrilled with the raw passion and frightening power of his playing. His recordings of the final pages of Liszt’s Vallée d’Obermann, Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 and Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto (live with Barbirolli in 1941) will convince you of that.
But there was much more to Horowitz than mere pyrotechnics. The range and variety of the colours, dynamics and touch he could conjure up had other pianists flocking to his recitals to see how it was done. His masterly control of the pedals, especially the use of the soft pedal or una corda, set him apart as did the sheer character and unbridled imagination of his conceptions (true, these could sometimes lapse into vulgar bad taste).
Above all, though, Horowitz's sound was unmistakable. ‘Horowitzian’ became a useful adjective by which to describe a certain kind of pianist. Any up-and-coming young pianist is still routinely (if lazily) described as ‘the new Horowitz’. Not many pianists can be said to have had such an influence on their own and succeeding generations. None – for good or bad – was as widely emulated.
He entered the Kiev Conservatory at age nine
So where did this ‘Tornado from the Steppes’ come from? He was born in 1903 (not 1904 as most sources have it) in either Berdichev or Kiev (no one, not even Vladimir Horowitz himself, has ever been certain). The fourth and youngest child of a cultured, prosperous electrical engineer and his pianist wife, he was known in the family as ‘Volodya’.
He entered the Kiev Conservatory at the age of nine but it was in 1919 that he began studies there with his most important teacher, Felix Blumenfeld, who had been a pupil of Anton Rubinstein. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Horowitz was always the centre of attention because of his keyboard prowess.
He didn’t care for rivals. Simon Barere, a classmate seven years older than Horowitz, was considered to be Blumenfeld’s best pupil. ‘He had this extraordinary technique,’ Horowitz recalled, ‘but that was about all he had… Blumenfeld liked him more than me. I remember I was a little bit jealous.’
'It was a new world'
Horowitz made his debut in Kiev in 1920. By 1925, he was well established as the leading Russian pianist of his generation with a repertoire of over 200 different works. He left the Soviet Union in 1925 to make his first appearance outside his homeland – and to avoid military service. His successful debut in Berlin early the next year in turn led to sensational concerts in Hamburg.
With Germany conquered, Horowitz moved on to Paris. Another triumph. Until then, few pianists trained in the Russian tradition had been heard in a Europe more used to the German school represented by the likes of Schnabel, Backhaus and Fischer. Rachmaninov and Horowitz were among the first to offer freer, more colourful and more thrilling playing.
‘It was a new world,’ recalled the young pianist Rudolf Firkušný, ‘a different approach to the piano, and the Horowitz recital [in Paris] made one of the greatest impressions of my life.’ London was less impressed.
Horowitz's American debut went down in history
The story of Horowitz’s American debut is well known. Carnegie Hall (12 January 1928) was the venue; Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto was the vehicle; Sir Thomas Beecham, also making his American debut, was the conductor. In the rehearsal, there was disagreement about tempos. In performance, Beecham got his own way for the first two movements before Horowitz took matters into his own hands for the finale.
‘I played the octaves the loudest, the fastest, they ever heard in their life. I was too fast, I admit it. It was not artistic. It was show-off, pour épater le bourgeois.’ Some critics noticed and said so. The most prominent, however, went into raptures.
'Like a tiger let loose'
Even though the performance had been a mess (and, incidentally, Beecham and Horowitz parted without animosity) it had ‘stampeded the audience as an audience has seldom been stampeded of late years,’ wrote Olin Downes in The New York Times. ‘It was like a tiger let loose.’
The most expensive pianist in the world
Horowitz continued to stampede audiences over the next six decades – but for 21 years of those 60, he never played in public. His average fee for the 1927-8 season was about $500. During the Depression, when most men would be happy to take home $1,000 a year, Horowitz was earning $1,500 a concert. By 1942 his fee had risen to $2,750; by the mid-1950s it could be in excess of $8,000, making him the most expensive pianist in the world.
In 1933, he married Wanda Toscanini, daughter of the great conductor. The world, it would seem, was Horowitz’s oyster. Shortly afterwards, suffering from nervous exhaustion, Horowitz abandoned the concert stage for two years, the first of four such retirements. By far the longest of these was from 1953 to 1965, though he made frequent visits to the recording studio during this time.
One of Horowitz’s favourite quips was that there were only three kinds of pianist: homosexual, Jewish and bad. He himself ticked the first two boxes. When he announced his intention to marry in the autumn of 1933, eyebrows were raised among his friends and peers as his same-sex preference was well-known. ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a woman,’ he told Arthur Rubinstein who, like most of his contemporaries, was astonished when it transpired that his bride was to be none other than Wanda, the tough, beetle-browed daughter of Toscanini.
A volatile marriage
The marriage was a highly volatile one with periods of estrangements (including one when Wanda had an affair with pianist Byron Janis) but endured until Horowitz’s death. He was lost without her. In 1940 Horowitz began treatment for depression with Dr Lawrence Kubie, a colourful psychiatrist who ‘cured’ homosexuals. The couple lived apart from 1949-53, a period when Horowitz was looked after by Carl Erpf, a former alcoholic and brother-in-law of Dr Kubie, with the help of Kenneth Leedom, a young actor.
Towards the end of his life, Vladimir Horowitz was happy to be seen in New York’s gay clubs. Yet despite the assumption that he was gay, there is no record of him having a physical relationship with a
man. Horowitz was married to the piano. ‘If people understood what Horowitz’s tone meant,’ the American pianist William Kapell observed astutely, ‘he would be banned from the keyboard.’
Rarity value and astute marketing made Horowitz’s 1965 ‘comeback’ at Carnegie Hall the must-have ticket: over 1,500 people queued overnight in the cold and rain to make sure of hearing this piano legend. No classical concert of that decade matched its dramatic impact, introducing Horowitz as it did to a whole new generation.
A terrible family tragedy
But within four years, Vladimir Horowitz had disappeared from public again. In the summer of 1973 he underwent electroshock therapy for depression, as he had done in the early 1960s. Revitalised, he returned to concert activities again in 1974.
The following year, the Horowitzs’ only child, Sonia, was found dead in her apartment in Geneva at the age of 40. A classic case of the unhappy child born to famous parents, she had taken too many sleeping pills, though whether by accident or design has never been established. Neglect from a self-absorbed father and a mother whose sole role was to minister to her genius husband made Sonia a tragic figure. ‘If Horowitz had any deep feelings about Sonia’s death,’ wrote Harold C Schonberg in his biography of the pianist, ‘he hid it very well.’
The year 1978 marked the Golden Jubilee of his American debut with a return to his old war horse, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3, partnered by the New York Philharmonic and Eugene Ormandy. It was the first time Horowitz had played with an orchestra for 25 years.
Horowitz, it was conceded, owned the work but this performance was mannered, frenetic, self-indulgent and littered with errors. It was the beginning of a long period when Horowitz played below his best, though London was happy to welcome him back in 1982 after an absence of more than 30 years.
Audiences were in tears
The nadir came in June 1983 during an ill-advised tour of Japan. He had been on drugs prescribed by his psychiatrist since 1975. The cumulative effect of these and too much alcohol left him playing in a semi-stupor, with memory lapses and many wrong notes. Another retirement followed.
Horowitz's final return in 1985, with concerts in Paris and Milan, heralded the start of a glorious Indian summer. He could still dazzle an audience but there was a calmness and serenity to his playing that was new. Most critics agreed that these were probably the years of his finest playing. The film of the Moscow recital he gave during his historic return trip to Russia for the first time in 61 years shows some members of the audience in tears. It’s hard, as a viewer, not to share their emotion.
Horowitz gave his last concert on 21 June 1987 in Hamburg, the city of his early triumph. His final recording was taped on 1 November 1989, just four days before he died.
Nick Forton