Horowitz: His Life and Music

"On April 20, 1986, the wheel came full circle for Vladimir Horowitz with an audible click, and he recognized it as such." So begins this definitive biography of the most electrifying piano virtuoso of our times, Vladimir Horowitz, describing his return to Russia after a sixty-one-year absence. From there, the book turns back to Horowitz's privileged and pampered childhood in Kiev, where he started to play the piano at the age of five. We then follow him through his tempestuous years at the Kiev Conservatory, which he entered before he was thirteen and where he was immediately at odds with all of his professors. He was already an individualist. We trace his development as an artist and his defection to Berlin in the turbulent aftermath of the Russian Revolution. We see him in Berlin and Paris, metamorphosed from a provincial to a colossus of the European stage. After his American debut in 1928 he becomes an awe-inspiring figure who is envied by musicians all over the world, exhibiting a kind of high-voltage playing that paralyzed audiences. Yet there was another side to him. There were times when he was invaded by demons, tortured by self-doubts. Author Harold C. Schonberg charts not only the course of Horowitz's many triumphs but also his mysterious withdrawals from the stage and other troubling aspects of the great pianist's life. This full portrait of Horowitz's life and music benefits particularly from hitherto unpublished anecdotes and information that derive from a series of taped interviews the author conducted with Horowitz toward the end of his life. Here is Horowitz the man, the musician, the icon, and even the raconteur. Through Schonberg's assessment of the special kind of genius that Horowitz brought to the piano and of his position among the other keyboard giants of his time, this biography is a panorama that takes in a good part of this century's piano world.