TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112089/11208900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 3.9 KB | 74 lines

                                                                                MILESTONES, Page 120

Lord of All He Surveyed

Vladimir Horowitz: 1904-1989


    There was magic in the hands of Vladimir Horowitz. A
reverent hush fell over the audience when the century's most
dazzling pianist sat down at the keyboard. Impatiently, he would
adjust the bench, mop his brow and raise his arms over the
keyboard, as if in silent benediction. And then came the music:
Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff. The
imperious, flashing fingers commanded their 88-key realm as
surely as any absolute monarch, with a unique combination of
regal virtuosity and impish high spirits. When Horowitz died
last week at age 85, music's last romantic slipped into history.

    Reasonable people could argue over the fine points of
Horowitz's playing, but none could deny its sheer elemental
force. Horowitz was no intellectual, like Artur Schnabel, no
well-rounded man of the world, like Arthur Rubinstein. In many
ways, he was like a child -- selfish, willful, demanding -- and
his playing reflected these personal qualities. When he
performed the Chopin Polonaise in A-flat, he played with, rather
than played, it. Horowitz began the famous middle section
cautiously, as if he were a rank beginner terrified by the
technical challenge to come; suddenly the piano would erupt in
a shower of chords and a driving rain of left-hand octaves that
sent every other pianist scurrying for cover. "You see," his
playing said, "I can do anything I want." And he could.

    Horowitz was born in Kiev, of a prosperous Jewish family;
his father Samuel was an engineer. Like most great pianists,
Horowitz was a prodigy, and after the Bolshevik Revolution, he
quickly earned a reputation as one of the new Soviet Union's
brightest pianistic hopes. But, using a six-month visa for study
in Germany as a pretext, Horowitz fled his country in 1926, his
shoes stuffed with American dollars, his soul loaded with
dreams.

    Those dreams came true. In 1928 he made perhaps the most
spectacular New York debut in history, when, impatient with the
conductor's slow tempo, he ran away from Sir Thomas Beecham in
the finale of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat
minor, finishing several bars ahead in the music and even
farther ahead in popular esteem.

    In 1933 the dashing young firebrand married maestro Arturo
Toscanini's daughter Wanda, wedding the two most famous names
in American concert life. In 1965, after twelve years of
retirement during which he recorded but did not play in public,
Horowitz abruptly reconquered Carnegie Hall in a triumphant
return. He was the king, and his crown would neither be wrested
away nor passed on.

    The public man, however, masked a complex personality.
Horowitz's eccentricities -- he would eat almost nothing but
Dover sole, perform only at 4 p.m., teach his few students while
lying prone on the floor and stay up far into the night watching
B movies on his videocassette recorder -- were legendary. His
marriage was stormy, with periods of separation. His only child
Sonia was emotionally unstable; she died in 1974 after a car
accident.

    In the last decade of his life, Horowitz seemed content to
live quietly in his New York City town house. Yet the old wizard
had one last trick left: in 1986 he returned to the Soviet Union
for a pair of concerts in Moscow and Leningrad that, more than
any other single event, heralded for Westerners the arrival of
glasnost. In Moscow music students stormed the hall, pushed past
guards and crouched, weeping, on the floor. Around the world,
people sat transfixed before their television sets as the A-flat
Polonaise thundered out anew. And on the stage, there was the
old man, mopping his brow and puckishly winking to the end. "I
can do anything I want," his playing said. And he still could.