Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (November 5, 1989) was a Russian and American pianist. Considered one of the greatest pianists of all time, he was known for his virtuoso technique, timbre, and the public excitement engendered by his playing.

Life and early career

thumb|Birth certificate of Vladimir Horowitz

Horowitz was born on October 1, 1903, in Kiev in the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). According to Nicolas Slonimsky, Horowitz was born in Berdichev, a city near Zhitomir in the Volhynian Governorate. However, his birth certificate states that Kiev was his birthplace. He was the youngest of four children of Samuil Horowitz and Sophia (), who were assimilated Jews.

His uncle Alexander was a pupil and close friend of Alexander Scriabin. When Horowitz was 10, it was arranged for him to play for Scriabin, who told his parents that he was extremely talented.

Horowitz received piano instruction from an early age, initially from his mother, who was herself a pianist. In 1912, he entered the Kiev Conservatory, where he was taught by , Sergei Tarnowsky, and Felix Blumenfeld. His first solo recital was in Kiev on May 30, 1920.

Horowitz soon began to tour Russia and the Soviet Union, where he was often paid with bread, butter and chocolate rather than money, due to the economic hardship caused by the Russian Civil War. During the 1922–23 season, he performed 23 concerts of eleven different programs in Petrograd alone.

In December 1925, Horowitz emigrated to Germany, ostensibly to study with Artur Schnabel in Berlin but secretly intending not to return. He stuffed American dollars and British pound notes into his shoes to finance his initial concerts.

Career in the West

thumb|Horowitz in his early career.

On December 18, 1925, Horowitz made his first appearance outside his home country, in Berlin. He later played in Paris, London, and New York City. In 1926, the Soviet Union selected Horowitz to join the delegation of pianists that were to represent the country at the I International Chopin Piano Competition in Poland in 1927, but he decided to remain in the West and did not participate.

Horowitz gave his United States debut on January 12, 1928, in Carnegie Hall. He played Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham, who was also making his U.S. debut. Horowitz later said that he and Beecham had divergent ideas about tempos and that Beecham was conducting the score "from memory and he didn't know" the piece. Horowitz's rapport with his audience was phenomenal. Olin Downes, writing for The New York Times, was critical about the tug of war between conductor and soloist, but credited Horowitz with both a beautiful singing tone in the second movement and a tremendous technique in the finale, calling his playing a "tornado unleashed from the steppes". In this debut performance, Horowitz demonstrated a marked ability to excite his audience, an ability he maintained for his entire career. Downes wrote: "it has been years since a pianist created such a furor with an audience in this city." In his review of Horowitz's solo recital, Downes characterized the pianist's playing as showing "most if not all the traits of a great interpreter." In 1933, he played for the first time with the conductor Arturo Toscanini in a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5. Horowitz and Toscanini went on to perform together many times, on stage and in recordings. Horowitz settled in the U.S. in 1939 and became an American citizen in 1944. He made his television debut in a concert taped at Carnegie Hall on February 1, 1968, and broadcast nationwide by CBS on September 22 of that year.

Despite rapturous receptions at recitals, Horowitz became increasingly unsure of his abilities as a pianist. On several occasions, the pianist had to be pushed onto the stage.

All of Horowitz's recordings have been issued on compact disc, some several times. In the years following Horowitz's death, CDs were issued containing previously unreleased performances. These included selections from Carnegie Hall recitals recorded privately for Horowitz from 1945 to 1951.

Students

Horowitz taught seven students between 1937 and 1965: Nico Kaufmann (1937), Byron Janis (1944–1948), Gary Graffman (1953–1955), Coleman Blumfield (1956–1958), Ronald Turini (1956–1965), Alexander Fiorillo (1960–1962) and Ivan Davis (1961–1962). Janis described his relationship to Horowitz during that period as a surrogate son, and he often traveled with Horowitz and his wife during concert tours. Davis was invited to become one of Horowitz's students after receiving a call from him the day after he won the Franz Liszt Competition. At the time, Davis had a contract with Columbia Records and a national tour planned. Horowitz returned to coaching in the 1980s, working with Murray Perahia, who already had an established career, and Eduardus Halim.

Personal life

In 1933, in a civil ceremony, Horowitz married Wanda Toscanini, Arturo Toscanini's daughter. Although Horowitz was Jewish and Wanda was Catholic, this was not an issue, because neither of them was religiously observant. Because Wanda knew no Russian and Horowitz knew very little Italian, their primary language was French.

Horowitz was close to his wife, who was one of the few people from whom Horowitz would accept a critique of his playing, and she stayed with Horowitz when he refused to leave the house during a period of depression. They had one child, Sonia Toscanini Horowitz (1934–1975). She was critically injured in a motorbike accident in 1957 but survived. She died in 1975. It has not been determined whether her death in Geneva, from a drug overdose, was accidental or a suicide. David Dubal wrote that in his years with Horowitz, there was no evidence that the octogenarian was sexually active, but that "there was no doubt he was powerfully attracted to the male body and was most likely often sexually frustrated throughout his life." Dubal felt that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent communicated in his playing. Horowitz, who denied being homosexual, was said to have joked that "there are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists!"

In an article in The New York Times in September 2013, Kenneth Leedom, an assistant of Horowitz for five years before 1955, said he had secretly been Horowitz's lover:

<blockquote>

We had a wonderful life together... He was a difficult man, to say the least. He had an anger in him that was unbelievable. The number of meals I've had thrown on the floor or in my lap. He'd pick up the tablecloth and just pull it off the table, and all the food would go flying. He had tantrums, a lot. But then he was calm and sweet. Very sweet, very lovable. And he really adored me.

</blockquote>

In the 1940s, Horowitz began seeing a psychiatrist in an attempt to alter his sexual orientation. In the 1960s, and again in the 1970s, the pianist underwent electroshock treatment for depression.

In 1982, Horowitz began using prescribed antidepressant medications; there are reports that he was drinking as well.

Last years

In 1986, Horowitz announced that he would return to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1925 to give recitals in Moscow and Leningrad. In the new atmosphere of communication and understanding between the USSR and the US, these concerts were seen as events of political, as well as musical, significance. Most of the tickets for the Moscow concert were reserved for the Soviet elite and few sold to the general public. This resulted in a number of Moscow Conservatory students crashing the concert. The recital was televised internationally; in the United States, CBS televised the recital as part of a special live edition of Sunday Morning, which also followed Horowitz's preparations for the concert.

thumb|Horowitz, accompanied by his wife [[Wanda Toscanini, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan (presenting it to him)]]

Following the Russian concerts, Horowitz toured several European cities, including Berlin, Amsterdam, and London. In June, Horowitz redeemed himself to the Japanese with a trio of well-received performances in Tokyo. Later that year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States, by President Ronald Reagan.

Horowitz's final tour took place in Europe in the spring of 1987. A video recording of his penultimate public recital, Horowitz in Vienna, was released in 1991. His final recital, at the Musikhalle Hamburg, Germany, took place on June 21, 1987. The concert was recorded, but not released until 2008. He continued to record for the remainder of his life.

thumb|The [[Toscanini family tomb in Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy, where Horowitz is buried.]]

Death

Horowitz died on November 5, 1989, "I saw him sitting in the chair with still eyes...and boom...and then on the floor, flat on the floor" recounted his wife. She continued: "But the thing that is interesting, that I didn't get rid of that chair. You know, somebody would think get rid of the chair — no. I sit, every day, in that chair" as her eyes watered. He was buried in the Toscanini family tomb in the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan, Italy.

Repertoire, technique and performance style

Horowitz is best known for his performances of the Romantic piano repertoire. Many consider Horowitz's first recording of the Liszt Sonata in B minor in 1932 to be the definitive reading of that piece, even after over 90 years and more than 100 performances committed to disc by other pianists. Other pieces with which he was closely associated were Scriabin's Étude in D-sharp minor, Chopin's Ballade No. 1, and many Rachmaninoff miniatures, including Polka de W.R.. Horowitz was acclaimed for his recordings of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3, and his performance before Rachmaninoff awed the composer, who proclaimed "he swallowed it whole. He had the courage, the intensity, the daring." Horowitz was also known for his performances of quieter, more intimate works, including Schumann's Kinderszenen, Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, keyboard sonatas by Clementi and several Mozart and Haydn sonatas. His recordings of Scarlatti and Clementi are particularly prized, and he is credited with having helped revive interest in the two composers, whose works had been seldom performed or recorded during the first half of the 20th century.

During World War II, Horowitz championed contemporary Russian music, giving the American premieres of Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8 (the so-called "War Sonatas") and Kabalevsky's Piano Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3. Horowitz also premiered the Piano Sonata and Excursions of Samuel Barber.

He was known for his versions of several of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. The Second Rhapsody was recorded in 1953, during Horowitz's 25th anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, and he said it was the most difficult of his arrangements. have used. He substantially rewrote Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition to make the work more effective on the grounds that Mussorgsky was not a pianist and did not understand the possibilities of the instrument. Horowitz also altered short passages in some works, such as substituting interlocking octaves for chromatic scales in Chopin's Scherzo in B minor. This was in marked contrast to many pianists of the post–19th-century era, who considered the composer's text sacrosanct. Living composers whose works Horowitz played (among them Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Poulenc) invariably praised Horowitz's performances of their work even when he took liberties with their scores.

Horowitz's interpretations were well received by concert audiences, but not by some critics. Virgil Thomson was consistently critical of Horowitz as a "master of distortion and exaggeration" in his reviews appearing in the New York Herald Tribune. Horowitz claimed to take Thomson's remarks as complimentary, saying that Michelangelo and El Greco were also masters of distortion. In the 1980 edition of Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Michael Steinberg wrote that Horowitz "illustrates that an astounding instrumental gift carries no guarantee about musical understanding." New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg countered that reviewers such as Thomson and Steinberg were unfamiliar with 19th-century performance practices that informed Horowitz's musical approach. Many pianists (such as Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini) hold Horowitz in high regard, and the pianist Friedrich Gulda referred to Horowitz as the "Super-God of the piano".

Horowitz's style frequently involved vast dynamic contrasts, with overwhelming double-fortissimos followed by sudden delicate pianissimos. He was able to produce an extraordinary volume of sound from the piano without producing a harsh tone. He elicited an exceptionally wide range of tonal color, and his taut, precise attack was noticeable even in his renditions of technically undemanding pieces such as the Chopin Mazurkas. He is known for his octave technique; he could play precise passages in octaves extraordinarily quickly. When asked by the pianist Tedd Joselson how he practiced octaves, Horowitz gave a demonstration and Joselson reported, "He practiced them exactly as we were all taught to do." Oscar Levant, in his book The Memoirs of an Amnesiac, wrote that Horowitz's octaves were "brilliant, accurate and etched out like bullets." He asked Horowitz "whether he shipped them ahead or carried them with him on tour."

Horowitz's hand position was unusual in that the palm was often below the level of the key surface. He frequently played chords with straight fingers, and the little finger of his right hand was often curled up until it needed to play a note; to Harold C. Schonberg, "it was like a strike of a cobra."

  • 1982 – Wolf Foundation Prize for Music
  • 1985 – Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur from the French Government
  • 1985 – Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
  • 1986 – United States Presidential Medal of Freedom
  • 2012 – Gramophone Hall of Fame entrant

Notes, references and sources

Notes

References

Sources

  • Epstein, Helen. Music Talks (1988) McGraw-Hill (a long profile that appeared in the New York Times Magazine of Horowitz, 1978)
  • Plaskin, Glenn (1983). Horowitz: A Biography of Vladimir Horowitz. New York: William Morrow.
  • The Horowitz Papers at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University
  • Vladimir Horowitz website at Sony Classical
  • Vladimir Horowitz at Deutsche Grammophon
  • Entry at 45worlds.com