"With Horowitz, the piano is charged with magic powders and an unheard of eloquence in the true sense of the word, each note having its own life which surrounds it with its own space." - Igor Markevitch
The name of Vladimir Horowitz denotes the legend of a super-pianist who reached millions of listeners with his art. Horowitz's enormous bell-like thunderous sound and physical ability to carry out technical miracles made him unique. Piano teachers gasped in horror to see a low wrist placed well below the keyboard with nearly straight fingers, anatomically 'wrong' for relaxed and accurate piano-playing. Yet Horowitz's physique permitted this position and enabled him, when he wished, to achieve an evenness and accuracy defying those adopting a correct position. In later years the attention surrounding him completely distorted a genuine perception of his art, heralding him as "The Last Romantic". Such a stereotype is not only wrong but rather an injustice to his art, which ought to fascinate in the way it departed from Romanticism to make Horowitz was one of the first modernists.
It developed at a time when Russia was exploding on the cultural front: although the Revolution and its aftermath eventually destroyed Constructivism and the experimentation of composers such as Mossolov, Lourie and others, the visual arts maintained these frenzied and innovative styles far later than music could. Although Horowitz avoided this avant-garde music and instead built upon Rachmaninoff's style, Horowitz played the piano in a manner akin to Mossolov's allusions to industrial sounds on the keyboard. Horowitz's art, however, was far more complex and as he explored the visceral tones of his instrument, he equally delved into its softer hues and nuances. His love for Poulenc or Debussy demonstrates both precision and care through a subdued yet electrified refinement. Rather than being a Romantic who somehow survived into the digital age, Horowitz was more the aesthete who sought the pulsating music at Harlem jazz clubs by Art Tatum as much as he was intrigued throughout his life by Schumann to the point that he believed he had coexisted Schumann in some way. It is a pity that these points are ignored, but the endless barrage of his promoters made it convenient (for them and their sales objectives) to launch their ploy and embed it even into the minds of his three biographers so that their books did not objectively examine his music making.
Horowitz was truly a Twentieth Century figure. His art was closer to a modern pianist like Vladimir Sofronitsky than any earlier figure. He and Sofronitsky were colleagues and once went on a trip to the Crimea (with Elena Alexandrovna Scriabina, Sofronitsky's wife) shortly before Horowitz left Russia with no intention of returning. Another friendship, perhaps the central one in his life and most cherished, was with Rachmaninoff. In listening to Horowitz's recording of the composer's Prelude we may experience a performance that pleased the composer himself. That Rachmaninoff regarded Horowitz so highly is due to his own remoteness and individuality in the Russian musical world. While he began composing in a manner indebted to Tchaikovsky, the development of his individuality led his music and pianism far away from the all-embracing term of Romanticism. When listening to Rachmaninoff's own recordings, especially with the score, one is aware of the extremely personal nature not only of the music but its execution. His own piano playing was highly influenced in the beginning by his cousin Alexander Siloti, a Liszt pupil. Some of Siloti's family even believed that Rachmaninoff's playing was more compelling when he was closer to Siloti's way. While his music did not radically depart from the vocabulary of the Nineteenth century, his style developed into a unique, ascetic mode that is so well balanced and filled with an undercurrent of movement and tension that it strikes the ear today as being far more modern than the most daring flights of fancy of artists such as Glenn Gould. One need go no further than the composer's playing of his Oriental Sketch to prove the point, to hear a piano that has an animal-like ferocity and unpredictability. This was what drew Horowitz to his music, and to build his own style on Rachmaninoff's pianism, taking the brass and bronze edged tones and underlying pathos to their furthest. Both Rachmaninoff and Horowitz often played works for two pianos in private: one of the great losses for posterity was that their record company took no steps to document them in Rachmaninoff's Suites, the Mozart Sonatas, and other works.
Even Horowitz's early repertoire was poorly represented by too few recordings being made at the beginning of his international career. With a wildly increasing popularity, it is surprising that he was not commissioned to record more at the beginning. In looking through old programs, we find Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit and Jeux d'eau, Brahms' F minor Sonata and Paganini Variations, Liszt's Dante Sonata, Mazeppa Etude, Orage and Feux Follets and Balakirev's Islamey. Luckily we have the Liszt Sonata from this period: at the time of his fiftieth anniversary, Horowitz turned backward to again play the sonata and Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, but they are removed from his earlier level. He had by then grown into such a legendary figure that all was equally applauded with overwhelming enthusiasm, even when he once suffered a disastrous season in which anti-depressant medication effected his control and lucidity.
The greatest surprise came with the final recordings made by the pianist, some within a week of his sudden death. On a Chopin Nocturne (in E flat, op.55#2) he imitates the playing of his friend and colleague Ignaz Friedman. Works appear which he never programmed before his public, as he maintained his myth by selecting works both appealing to himself and with enough sensation for his public. Gone was a need to electrify and in its place came a reposed private music-making that differed from his concert-playing. At home, Horowitz passionately listened to recordings of past singers and played through entire opera scores: what a pity he wasn't cajoled into recording some of his adaptations of overtures and arias. The one clue to this important and also overlooked side of his art comes in a recording rarely ever mentioned by his admirers. Mussorgsky's song "By the Water" from the Sunless cycle is among his finest discs, as it contains his arrangement of a brooding song arising from a melancholic depth but cloaked in a strophic regularity which underscores its pathos even further. The elegant poise and modernist anguish which Horowitz brings to this work reveals his true self as a rationally analytic player whose career was unfortunately built on the circus atmosphere his exciting Carmen Variations or Sousa march. Perhaps we will never be able to have a full portrait of Horowitz as his many recordings reflect his beloved and hated activity as a concert pianist. But with these early discs one hears many directions available to an enigmatic artist who never ceased to surprise all.
© Allan Evans, 1996