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TagsBY WARREN BOROSON
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
An astute music critic, Neville Cardus, once said that Vladimir Horowitz, who was born 110 years ago, was the best pianist who had ever lived.
Then that critic took it back.
What he had said, he apologized, may have been an understatement.
He should have included pianists who had NOT been born yet....
Cardus is quoted in an article about Horowitz (1903-1989) featured on the cover of this month’s BBC Music magazine. The article’s title: The King of the Keyboard.
Curiously, a few years ago BBC Music surveyed music critics as to the best pianists they had ever heard, and poor Horowitz came in a dismal third. After Sergei Rachmaninoff and Arthur Rubinstein.
The fact is, whenever someone astonishingly gifted comes along, the non-gifted—filled with envy—point to his or her flaws. It might be called the Hedy-Lamarr-was-beautiful-but- didn’t-have-great-legs syndrome.
The critic Norman Lebrecht conceded that Horowitz was probably the greatest pianist of the 20th century, adding that he was also “certifiably insane.” He did have long bouts of depression, and underwent electroshock therapy, possibly related to his guilt over his homosexuality. (Still, he did marry Arturo Toscanini’s daughter, Wanda. Their daughter, Sonia, died at the age of 40 after taking too many sleeping pills.)
Another great pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, said of Horowitz, “Great pianist, trivial mind.” And Rubinstein, while conceding that Horowitz was “by far the better pianist,” said that he was “not a musician.” (Meaning, I presume, that he was without passion.) And he stewed that Horowitz (like Heifetz) looked upon him contemptuously. “In short, he did not consider me his equal.”
Horowitz in turn had nasty things to say about Van Cliburn and Emil Gilels, and in a video I have, mocked pianists who look up into the heavens for inspiration before playing—which I presume implicated Rubinstein.
Rubinstein and Horowitz at one time were “close friends,” said Rubinstein, going out to meals together, playing the piano together. But they became rivals. Harold Schonberg of the New York Times has concluded, “They hated each other.”
Horowitz was an incredible technician, like Heifetz, and one critic in awe referred to his third hand. Between loud and soft, he had seemingly infinite gradations. And his fortissimo would almost knock you down. Still, as Nick Forton wrote in BBC Music, there was “infinitely more to Horowitz than mere pyrotechnics…. He mesmerized and thrilled with the raw passion and frightening power of his playing.”
Born in Russia, he made his debut in Berlin in 1926, as a last-minute substitute for another pianist. The conductor, named Eugen [cq] Pabst, treated this thin, pale, totally unknown pianist contemptuously. He opened the score, stared at Horowitz coldly, and said, in French, “Look, you. I conduct like this. This is my opening tempo. Here, I take it this way. There, I take it that way.”
“Oui monsieur, oui monsieur,” said the intimidated Horowitz.
“Just watch my stick,” said Pabst, “and nothing too terrible can happen.”
Horowitz could play fortissimo. And after the concerto’s orchestra opening, Horowitz broke loose.
Pabst spun around in amazement, Abram Chasins writes in his book, “Speaking of Pianists.” Then the conductor jumped off the podium and raced over to the piano, staring incredulously at Horowitz’s hands. His face reflected total disbelief. “When it was all over, the piano lay on the platform like a slain dragon and the whole house rose as one, screaming hysterically. Pabst grabbed his soloist and hugged him repeatedly, while the audience tore the place apart.”
Later, Horowitz said, “That was my big break.”
A few years later, when he made his debut in Carnegie Hall, it was also the debut of Sir Thomas Beecham, the arrogant and vicious conductor. (He once referred to Sir Benjamin Britten as “homo, sweet homo.”) Beecham conducted very, very slowly. He also had trouble remembering the score—Tchaikovsky’s First. When the last movement came, Horowitz broke loose, playing like a whirlwind. He and the orchestra almost—but not quite—wound up together. Horowitz got fantastic reviews from the critics. And from that day forward his concerts drew immense crowds.
He became good friends with Rachmaninoff. There’s a story that when Rachmaninoff heard Horowitz play his own very difficult third piano concerto, he was so awed that he promised that he himself would never play it again. “He swallowed it whole,” Rachmaninoff said.
On the other hand, Horowitz said that “Rachmaninoff could always find something to complain about in any performance.”
He once joked “There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists homosexual pianists, and bad pianists.”
The Times’ Schonberg wrote about Horowitz, after he died, that he was “the most brilliant technician of his day and perhaps in pianistic history.”
He also said that Horowitz was like Babe Ruth, Rubinstein was like Lou Gehrig. Horowitz went for the home runs, Rubinstein went just for hits.
And that while Heifetz had a successor, in Itzhak Perlman, Horowitz had no successors. He reigns supreme.
The Genius of Vladimir Horowitz
Carmen Fantasy
Stars and Stripes Forever—Sousa
Kinderscenen, Schuman
Rach 3
Documentary
Boroson leads music classes at Bard’s Lifelong Learning Institute in Annandale-on-Hudson and at Lifespring in Saugerties.
