Vladimir Horowitz

Vladimir Horowitz was one of the most celebrated pianists of the twentieth century. Born in Kiev, according to his own account, around 1903, and died in New York in 1989, he spent much of his career in the West after leaving the Soviet Union in 1925. His American nationality and Ukrainian origins explain the profile of an artist trained in the Russian tradition who ended up settled in the Anglo-Saxon world.

There was confusion about his date of birth: earlier references gave 1904, but the real year seems to have been 1903, as his father is said to have altered the passport to make him appear a year younger and so avoid military service. Doubts also surround his birthplace, since some sources cite Berdichev, although the pianist himself always maintained that he was born in Kiev, a claim a cousin upheld in an interview in 1991.

His first teacher was his mother, who also taught his sister Regina, a pianist and teacher. At the age of nine he entered the Kiev Conservatory, where he studied with Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky and Felix Blumenfeld. The Revolution ruined a family that had previously been well off, and the young musician began giving concerts; he made his debut in Kiev in 1920 and toured Russia alongside the violinist Nathan Milstein. In the 1924–1925 season he gave some twenty recitals in Leningrad and established himself as the leading pianist of the new Soviet generation.

After settling in Berlin in 1926, his fame spread throughout Germany and then across Europe. His American debut, in 1928 with the New York Philharmonic under Beecham, was marked by a personal tempo in the finale of Tchaikovsky's concerto that surprised the audience. That same year he was already regarded internationally as the most exciting performer of his generation. In 1933 he married Wanda Toscanini, the conductor's daughter, in Milan. His career included several interruptions, the first between 1936 and 1938, and three more later on, which reflects a highly unstable personality and a constant insecurity about whether he was equal to his own talent. After 1982 he returned to Europe and visited London, Japan, Paris and the USSR. Between 1975 and 1985 he was under heavy sedation, and his playing suffered. He eventually recovered his health and played with serenity in his last five years, until a sudden death from a heart attack at his home.

His legacy is associated with a sound of great richness of nuance and a high-tension charisma that is often compared with that of Toscanini, Callas or Pavarotti. He was considered the greatest living interpreter of Liszt, Schumann, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, and he introduced Prokofiev's sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8 to the United States. His relationship with Mozart, though criticised at the time, could be reassessed over time, and his place among the great pianists in history is regarded as unquestionable.