The Prodigal Returns

By Michael Walsh

Sporting a smart bow tie and clad in his best dark blue suit, the slender young man with carefully combed hair was nervous as he approached the border checkpoint. Officially, his exit visa was for six months' study in Germany, but he knew that he would not return. His leather suitcase was packed with six shirts, half a dozen butterfly ties, several pairs of socks and a formal cutaway suit. Hidden in his impeccably polished shoes, however, were hundreds of American dollars. In post-revolutionary Russia, he feared being imprisoned or shot for currency smuggling. But it was too late to worry about that. Confidence is the first rule, he thought to himself, reaching for his passport. Like Oscar Wilde, he would have nothing to declare but his genius.

Fortunately, the armed guards were music lovers. At once, they recognized the sensational 21-year-old pianist from Kiev who had had audiences from Moscow to Leningrad on their feet, cheering his pyrotechnical feats of pianistic derring-do. They gave only a perfunctory glance to his papers; instead, they crowded around him, rifles held casually, and pounded him on the back. "Now you go play for the rich over there and fill your pockets with money," one of them said. "But come back and play for us when your pockets are full. Do not forget the motherland."

Vladimir Horowitz never forgot. Last week, more than 60 years after that poignant admonition, he returned to the Soviet Union, to the rodina of myth and memory, the homeland of the soul that dwells in the hearts of all Russians, no matter where they live. "I have never forgotten my Russia. I remember the smells when the snow melts and the spring arrives," says Horowitz, 81. "I had to go back to Russia before I died. It brings an Aristotelian unity to my life, like a coda in music. It is the right time to go back."

It was a triumphal return. Not since those earlier expatriates Composer Igor Stravinsky and Choreographer George Balanchine visited in 1962 has the Soviet Union been so galvanized by a glimpse of a prodigal son. Keenly anticipated for weeks by Soviet music lovers, Horowitz's tour featured just two formal concerts, in Moscow a week ago and in Leningrad Sunday, before continuing to Hamburg, Berlin and London. The first recital provoked an unprecedented near riot. As the security gates in front of the Moscow Conservatory swung open to admit the pianist's chauffeured Chaika, hundreds of young people burst through the police lines and stormed the Conservatory's Great Hall. Plainclothes and uniformed guards managed to grab a few of them, sending several sprawling. But many, perhaps most, raced past astonished ticket takers and ran upstairs to the balcony, where they crouched in the aisles and stood shoulder to shoulder against the walls. In a country that takes special pride in preserving public order, romantic exuberance rarely overwhelms regimentation so publicly. It was fitting for the occasion.

The recital was televised the same day across Europe and the U.S. and was recorded for possible later broadcast by Soviet television as well. But TV could only begin to suggest what the 1,800 foreign diplomats, Soviet film stars, composers, musicians and ordinary Russians witnessed on an extraordinary afternoon. At 4 p.m. Horowitz emerged from the wings to thunderous applause, cut it short with an impatient gesture, sat down at his personal 9-ft. Steinway, which had been flown in for the occasion, and for two hours held everyone spellbound.

Two days before, at a public rehearsal given for lucky, and often weeping, Conservatory students, he had served notice that his playing would be infused with a passionate fire and breathtaking precision not heard in years--that he would be, in short, the Horowitz of old, one last time. "There is much emotion inside, but I will not let it out before Sunday, because then everything could go smash," he had remarked en route to Moscow.

Now, with his emotions rising in the heat of an actual performance, he delivered. "We have waited for more than 50 years to hear Horowitz," said Nadia Tsiganova, who had stayed in line all night to get her ticket. "He is magnificent." Yuri, a young soldier on his way to Afghanistan, exclaimed reverently, "I will carry the memory of this afternoon with me always." Reviewing the program of Scarlatti, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Schubert, Liszt and Chopin, Critic Dmitri Bashkirov wrote in Sovietskaya Rossiya, "He indisputably remained the brightest bearer of the Russian performing tradition. I think there was not one person in the hall who didn't leave the concert in a happy, elevated mood." After watching on TV back in the U.S., Violinist Isaac Stern reached Horowitz by phone to say he had had tears in his eyes throughout the concert. Horowitz had once more proclaimed himself the greatest of living pianists. By turns elegant, playful, probing, introspective and, finally, heroic, Horowitz had also reaffirmed his lineage as the last romantic, whose artless, effortless, larger-than-life pianism, redolent with spontaneity and freshness, is a vanishing art.

Certainly, Horowitz comports himself with the regal mien of a 19th century monarch. He performs only on Sunday afternoons at 4. No matter where he is playing, he dines on Dover or gray sole flown in fresh that day. His wife, his housekeeper, his manager, his piano technician and a Steinway official all accompany him--as does, of course, his piano. The $40,000 concert grand, plucked by crane from the living room of his Manhattan townhouse, had its 12,000 parts cleaned and examined with a degree of care worthy of Air Force One. Its mahogany case was given coat after coat of high-gloss finish and hand-rubbed with fine steel wool, a laborious task that took 18 hours. It was then packed in space-age material resistant to heat and weather, loaded aboard a 747 early in April and shipped as a diplomatic pouch to Moscow. In the week before the concert, it was tuned and retuned so that it would be at its peak. "In the world of music," says Richard Probst, director of Steinway's concert and artist department, "this was our D day."

For Horowitz, though, the concerts are only the most visible, public part of an extraordinary journey of rediscovery and remembrance. It began two weeks ago, as the pianist and his wife Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, 78, stepped off Japan Air Lines Flight 440 from Paris. Before leaving New York City, the pianist had been sanguine about his chances of success, both as a musician and as a cultural ambassador. "I am not a Communist, but I can understand their way of thinking better than most Americans," he declared. "We all know there is good and evil everywhere. I was brought up to seek the good. In the Soviet Union today, the good is the music they produce. I hope that by playing in the Soviet Union, I will make the good better. Music inspires. It does not destroy and kill."

Soviet officialdom treated the visit with a mixture of politesse and disdain. In the days leading up to the Moscow concert, there was no mention of the Horowitz visit in either Pravda or Izvestiya, only a brief announcement in the newspaper Sovietskaya Kultura. Soviet musical commissars explained the lack of coverage by observing the concert was already sold out. "We think of him as an American pianist," said Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful first secretary of the Soviet composers' union, who nevertheless went to the concert. In response to the American attack on Libya, the Soviets boycotted a dinner in Horowitz's honor at the Italian embassy, but a postconcert party at Spaso House, the ornate Moscow residence of American Ambassador Arthur Hartman, was well attended.

The thin crust of official coolness often melted, however, notably at the conclusion of a Horowitz press conference at the Conservatory's Rachmaninoff Hall. There, hardened Soviet journalists shouldered one another aside in their frenzy to get autographs. "Sign en Russe," reminded Wanda, overseeing the impromptu session. And when Horowitz emerged from the conference, he was confronted by a horde of fresh-faced music students eager to get a glimpse of the master. "It is very important to us for him to have a big success," said one girl through her tears.

The secret of Horowitz's appeal is twofold. His phenomenal technique, regarded by piano connoisseurs as the most dazzling since Franz Liszt set the standard of virtuosity in the mid-19th century, gets the listeners into the tent. Horowitz could always do anything he wanted at the keyboard, whether pounding out octaves or rippling off scales in thirds. But mere technique is not enough. Just as Luciano Pavarotti's high notes, in the tenor's prime several years ago, were backed up by a gorgeous liquid tone and a supple sense of phrasing, so Horowitz's pianism offers many subtleties: the absolute independence of each finger, which makes it sound as though he were playing with three hands, and a rainbow tonal palette that realizes Liszt's ideal of turning the piano into an 88-key orchestra, with every instrument from the flute to the double bass represented.

How does he do it? It is a question pianists have been asking in despair since Horowitz first exploded on the scene. "I did not have to develop a technique," he says. "It was there from the beginning." Although he is not particularly self-analytical about his mechanics, he credits his talented sister Regina, or Genya, with inspiring his famously unorthodox posture at the keyboard: sitting low, the hands flat rather than arched, the fingers, if anything, flaring upward. Surely no one can play the piano this way. But he does. "I discovered that the lower one sits, the greater attention one pays to making tone," he explains. "You are not using shoulders and upper arms. You are using the wrists, fingers and, to some extent, the forearm."

Even more important than his technique, though, is the sense of adventure he brings to each piece he performs, no matter how many times he has played it. He has recorded Chopin's Ballade in G Minor several times. On each occasion the bardic work, by turns plaintive, ruminative and explosive, emerged from his ministrations differently. The 1947 studio reading is a long-lined, unified structure whose final dramatic outburst comes as a logical summation of all that has gone before; two later performances from the '60s, both recorded in concert, are more febrile, as if the pianist were making the piece up as he went along. Producer Thomas Frost, who has worked with him since 1963, notes that the basic structure of a Horowitz performance is always thought out in advance. "But where he does change is in the spur of the moment. You don't know what to expect when he plays. He does it differently each time, with a degree of suspense in the way he does it. That is why he is so exciting."

Most concerts are simply recitals. Horowitz's are events. His emergence in 1965 from a self-imposed twelve-year retirement, during which he made records but did not appear in public, was a sensation. Hundreds of people queued up outside New York City's Carnegie Hall on a rainy, cold night, waiting patiently for tickets to go on sale the next morning. "Is this a Beatle thing?" inquired one passerby. "No, this is a Horowitz thing," came the reply.

What is it about Horowitz that sets him apart from every other living pianist--indeed, from the other great pianists of the century? Horowitz made his reputation during a Golden Age of pianism, in competition with the likes of Rachmaninoff, Josef Hofmann, Josef Lhevinne, Moriz Rosenthal, Leopold Godowsky and Arthur Rubinstein, to name a few. Rosenthal, Lhevinne and Godowsky all had flawless techniques to rival Horowitz's, to which asset Rachmaninoff added physical power and Hofmann unearthly control. At his peak, Horowitz had it all, heightened and amplified by a daredevil recklessness that infused every performance with an exhilarating, unabashed theatricality. If he was not the deepest musical thinker or the most probing interpreter, few seemed to care. Horowitz was unique, and he was the people's choice. His rival Rubinstein had a broader repertoire and a warmer personality; there was never any doubt about who was the better musician. But neither was there any doubt about who was the better pianist.

This most extraordinary of artists has led a far from ordinary life. It has been marked by the psychic dislocation of revolution and separation from his family; by several psychologically troubled retirements from the stage; by difficulties in his relationships with his wife and his late daughter. He can be a shameless ham who deflates his own posturings with a sly wink or a puckish smile. Or he can be morose and withdrawn, complaining bitterly about real or imagined physical ailments. He can be selfish and difficult, even by the generous latitudes granted to performers of genius. He bemoans the fact that younger pianists do not seek him out in a spirit of collegiality, but his sometimes aloof and always unpredictable demeanor discourages such contact.

For years Horowitz has repressed or altered the memories, refusing to speak about--or, when pressed, discussing in only the vaguest, most idealized way--such personal or painful subjects as his early life in the Soviet Union and the death of his daughter Sonia. "So many myths about me, all of them lies," he says. But now, in contemplation of returning home, the barriers have been breaking down. "I remember everything," he says. Speak, memory:

Russia, 1904. Horowitz was the youngest of the four children of Samuel and Sophie Gorovitz. The assimilated Jewish family lived in a handsomely appointed house on, appropriately, Music Street in Kiev. Samuel (who has been known in the West as Simeon) was an engineer who spoke fluent French and German and was sometimes given to wild impulse; after hearing a Pablo Casals concert one day, he rushed out and bought a cello, which he never learned to play. "My father used to say that we are all good at some aspect of music," Horowitz recalls. "It could be listening, playing, composing, studying. But we all feel a kinship to music."

Sophie was the musical one, a large woman with luxuriant hair and kind eyes. She was an excellent amateur pianist; it was her taste that dominated the household, and not only musically. "As I look back, I realize that my mother set a tone of politeness and good manners. She loved flowers. And this was a period in our lives when music became a source of inspiration and wonder. Ours was a happy home." Both parents had great hopes for their children. "They wanted us to shine like suns."

Young Volodya's attraction to music was demonstrated in dramatic fashion. He was listening to Regina practice one day, and kept time by beating his fingers against the window. The impromptu accompaniment abruptly ended when his tiny fist went through the glass. Fortunately, he escaped without serious injury. "Imagine a child of three with such strength," he marvels, savoring the memory. "But it was so. I still remember it."

Piano lessons and enrollment at the conservatory followed at a leisurely pace, for the family saw no need to rush a prodigy to the stage. Horowitz (the spelling was Westernized after he moved to Germany) was a brilliant sight reader and was endowed with a capacious memory; he devoured the piano literature and steeped himself in opera scores as well. The Revolution of 1917 abruptly put an end to his relaxed, privileged existence. The Horowitzes had survived the Czarist pogroms of 1905 with their lives and possessions intact. The more thorough Bolsheviks tossed the pianos into the street and made bonfires out of the music books.

With Samuel's business in Socialist shambles, it fell to the pampered Volodya to become the family breadwinner by hastily beginning his public career. "My father cautioned against doing anything mad. Madness was not having a good home filled with music, good food and good companions. Madness was depriving his children of what he felt they deserved. Madness for him was leaving Russia; the land was his soul and his heart. But he could send his son out and give the son his blessings because he believed music has no boundaries and no barriers."

After he went to the West, Horowitz saw his father only once more, in Berlin in 1936. The visit proved to have fatal consequences. Returning home despite the pleas of his son, Samuel was arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi agent; his fluency in German and his trip to Berlin were used as evidence against him. He was exiled to Siberia, where he died in 1939.

New York City, 1928. Sir Thomas Beecham, the prickly British baronet and conductorial autodidact, was making his American debut in a concert with the New York Philharmonic. So was Horowitz. Beecham was apparently not about to let some upstart, unknown Russian steal his thunder, even if the piece was Tchaikovsky's thunderous Piano Concerto No. 1. Horowitz was unable to speak English, but it was clear from the rehearsals that even a translator would be no help. "Beecham thought I was of no importance," the pianist remembers. At the concert, the conductor adopted an even more ponderous tempo than during the preparation. As the concerto progressed, Horowitz felt the audience slipping inexorably away, and it was clear that desperate action was called for.

So off he went. From the opening bars of the finale, Horowitz raced ahead with all the mad passion of a cossack charge. "I played louder, faster and more notes than Tchaikovsky wrote," he later recalled. Beecham tried to rally, but there would be no catching up. "I was doing it my way. He was doing it his way," says Horowitz. "On the first night, Beecham came in second." The pianist finished several bars ahead of the orchestra. The audience erupted in a frenzy. In the New York Times, Music Critic Olin Downes captured the intensity of the moment. "A whirlwind of virtuoso interpretation," he wrote, adding, "Mr. Horowitz has amazing technique, amazing strength, irresistible youth and temperament." At the next performance, Beecham got a measure of revenge, cutting short the ovation with a short speech while Horowitz cooled his heels.

New York City, 1932. In a golden age of conductors, one stood above all the others in popular estimation: the ferocious, dynamic, irascible Arturo Toscanini. It was inevitable that the paths of the world's most celebrated conductor and its fastest-rising pianist would cross. Intersecting them was Toscanini's youngest child Wanda.

"I hadn't heard his name before," recalls Wanda. "A French lady was gazing at him, and I asked, 'Who is that?' She answered, 'Horowitz. He's a genius.'" At a private party, Wanda and Vladimir met again. He was shy and withdrawn, so he took refuge where he was most comfortable, at the piano, playing Chopin mazurkas. Wanda listened with a fascination that grew in intensity as, over the next few months, she heard him in both New York and Italy. At Milan's La Scala, Horowitz performed his signature concerto, the Rachmaninoff Third. "Then he came to visit my father, and, as they say, I was swept off my feet." They were married in December 1933 in Milan. She knew no Russian, he no Italian, so they spoke French, the language they use at home to this day.

"I married an angel," he says. "She married a devil. There was much devil in me then." So there was. A relationship with a woman was an unusual experience for Horowitz, who was more comfortable in the company of men. As for Wanda, even a life of caddying for her fiery father had not prepared her for the emotional wringer she would go through with Horowitz. Despite the birth of their daughter Sonia in 1934, Horowitz's bisexuality ensured that the marriage was often stormy. They separated in 1949 and did not get back together permanently until 1953. "There were predictable problems for the marriage," says an Italian artist who has known Wanda since she was a girl. "She was deeply hurt. But she didn't surrender. Toscaninis are not quitters."

Sonia was the tragic Horowitz. A pretty but moody girl with dark burning Toscanini eyes, she was her famed grandfather's favorite and could speak to him in a way that nobody else dared. The maestro once asked her whether she would prefer to be a conductor or a pianist. "A conductor," Sonia replied. "It's easier." She was naturally talented, adept at the piano, a good writer, accomplished at painting and photography. But she was emotionally unstable, and Toscanini's death in January 1957 grieved her deeply. Five months later, she was severely injured in a motor-scooter accident in Italy. In 1974 she was in another motor-vehicle accident, this one in Switzerland, and she died shortly thereafter.

Now the storms of the marriage have subsided. "I think the Horowitzes have a relationship that transcends most marriages," remarks a close friend. "They have suffered, they have been hurt, and they have come through their personal torment, needing each other today with a degree of happiness that is freer and better than anything they had before." Wanda is at once mother, sister, friend, wife, adviser and sweetheart, guarding her husband against any real or perceived lese majeste. "In the end," notes another family friend, "she believes faithfully and passionately that his genius is to play the piano like no one else around."

Horowitz, when asked what is most important in his life, answers simply: "My wife and that I can still play, am still a musician." He continues: "I made only one mistake when we were married, and that was I did not teach her to play duets. Now I will correct that mistake, and we will play four hands together." Wanda looks at him, understanding this unspoken declaration of love, and appears content. "You're lucky," she tells him.

New York City, 1944. After hearing a 15-year-old prodigy named Byron Janis perform, Horowitz invites the boy to study with him. The fee: $50 an hour. "I was awed, inspired and, yes, a little frightened," remembers Janis. "I was aware from what people were telling me and from what I had read about Horowitz that there would be difficulties in working with such a great artist." The pedagogy was unusual. Horowitz advised against practicing too much. (He himself dislikes practicing.) Sometimes the maestro would listen while lying on the floor, offering suggestions from a prone position. "The piano is a singing instrument," he would tell Janis. "Sing, sing, sing at the piano." Horowitz, says Janis, "taught me the secrets of piano playing."

In all, Horowitz taught some half a dozen students between 1944 and the early '60s. It was not always a happy experience for the students. Horowitz would sometimes cancel lessons without warning if he was not in the mood. "It had its negative aspects," says Alexander Fiorillo, a professor of piano at Temple University who studied with Horowitz between 1960 and 1962. "He is callous to people's emotions and their feelings. I almost had a nervous breakdown." Yet Coleman Blumfield, whose lessons came to a summary end in 1958 for reasons he never completely understood, declares, "It was a privilege and an honor to study under Horowitz. From him I learned the extreme range of tonal coloring possible with the piano."

New York City, 1986. In their 14-room white stone townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, purchased in 1947 for $30,000 and now worth a hundred times that amount, the Horowitzes live quietly, comfortably and just a little eccentrically. They eat out practically every night, chauffeured to one of a few favorite, mostly Italian restaurants, where Horowitz dines on pasta and the inevitable sole. After returning home, he relaxes by watching a triple feature of adventure and horror movies (The Terminator, Halloween, Raiders of the Lost Ark) on his videocassette recorder, then turns in about 4 a.m. and sleeps until noon. He no longer smokes, does not drink and never eats meat.

He is one of the highest-paid musicians in the world, commanding a fee of as much as half a million dollars for a single concert and never less than $100,000. "The Soviets can't afford me," he jokes, but Horowitz will receive about $2.5 million dollars for TV and recording rights to his five-concert series. His extensive art collection--which included works by Rouault, Degas, Manet and Picasso--was sold off when the insurance became prohibititive, and replaced with a Japanese silk-screen painting and a Chinese mirror painting. The big Steinway commands the living room, when it is not on the road with him. Near by on the wall are four autographed photographs: Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Puccini and Toscanini.

His tastes in music have changed. "At one time, I had 44 major and 66 minor works in my repertory," he notes. "Now I play only a couple of dozen or so, and I play them very well, if I may say so." Where once his piano roared largely to the grandiose strains of such extroverted composers as Liszt and Prokofiev, today the balance has shifted to the intimacies of Scarlatti, Mozart and Schubert. Even a pyrotechnical display piece like Scriabin's Etude in D-sharp Minor is sanded, smoothed and tossed off as if it were a jeu d'esprit. If Horowitz is aware of the irony that the erstwhile conqueror of the Tchaikovsky concerto and the Liszt sonata is now primarily a miniaturist--a salon pianist--he does not let on.

Horowitz is sitting in his living room, secure in his accustomed spot on the sofa. On the coffee table is a letter from his niece in Kharkov. "Here we can feel spring coming, and it is beginning to get warm," he translates as he reads. "It is warmer because you are coming. We will be so happy to see you. One of my dreams has always been to hear you in concert, and now it is coming true. We are waiting for you."

The memories come flooding back. Now you go play for the rich over there and fill your pockets with money. But come back and play for us when your pockets are full. The border guard's prophecy has come true. "I have given my best, and I feel there is still more to give," he muses. "This remains my purpose in life, to bring meaning to music each time I play. I am not tired of life. I can still feel wonder when it is a beautiful day."

Moscow, 1986. Despite slate-gray skies and a cold, driving rain, it is a very beautiful day indeed. --By Michael Walsh. Reported by Dean Brelis/Moscow

With reporting by Dean Brelis/Moscow