Concerto for Pianist & Audience

Allegro. He is born on Musikalnyi Peruelok -- Music Street -- in Kiev. His uncle is a music critic, his mother a brilliant amateur pianist. At the age of ten he memorizes the piano scores of Tannhaeuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal. Clearly, little Vladimir is a musical prodigy.

Fortunately, Papa Horowitz has plenty of rubles. Vladimir is sent to the Kiev Conservatory to prepare for a leisurely musical career -- so leisurely that when he graduates the family makes plans for him to study another ten years before contemplating concert work.

But in Moscow there are other forces, other plans. When the revolution comes, Papa's bank account, position, all go into the Red. The family must eat; Vladimir, the hothouse flower, protected and indulged during his first 17 years, blossoms into a full-time professional pianist at 18. Only 200 people --most of them admitted free -- attend his first concert. At the second, there are more paying customers. The third is a sellout. The career and the reputation gather velocity but not money. Vladimir is paid with bread, sausages, clothing; he is, literally, the family breadwinner.

He goes to Berlin, where he is a sensation, and to Paris, where they pay him in francs instead of franks.

In 1928, the slim, tense 24-year-old makes his American debut at Carnegie Hall with the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor. The conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, takes the tempo slowly, deliberately. Horowitz's fingers are like coiled springs of Russian steel; they tear with trip-hammer speed and force across the keys, and in the last movement he arrives at the end four measures ahead of the orchestra. The audience roars its affection for the impatient pianist; it is the beginning of a lifelong affair. Even the crusty Beecham cracks a smile. Paderewski calls Horowitz the best of the younger generation. Rachmaninoff and Ravel applaud him.

In 1933 he marries Wanda, daughter of Arturo Toscanini. Father-and sonin-law perform together. Their concerts are sellouts, their records collectors' items. Money, fame, esteem--everything comes quickly to Horowitz--except English. At the White House, when he is presented to Mrs. Hoover, he bows and says, "I am delightful." And so he is.

Largo. Occasionally Horowitz finds himself seized with a sickening stage fright. He asks the manager of one concert hall to tell the audience that Mr. Horowitz cannot appear. Tell them yourself, says the miffed manager. Horowitz tries: he goes to center stage, looks out over the blob of faces, opens his mouth--and then dashes for the safe harbor of his grand piano.

His technique is flawless, but his repertory grows slick and showy. The fingers remain like coiled springs; the man, too, is tense and overwound. He refuses to fly, cannot rest on trains. His fee rises from $500 to $3,000 per concert; he works only six months a year and never gives more than two concerts a week. Still, the springs keep tightening, the stomach keeps churning. Hypochondria becomes real illness. There is an injured finger, tonsillitis, flu, a stomach ailment--then, abruptly, the spring breaks, the mechanism winds down, the long pyrotechnics stop short. Horowitz takes a vacation. The vacation becomes a sabbatical, the sabbatical a leave of absence, the leave an adieu.

For twelve years he performs only for a microphone in a recording studio, and only rarely at that. To Horowitz fans, the disks are photographs pressed in an album; they trigger memories, but there is no blood in them. He is enveloped in mystery. Cultists transform him into a deity. He becomes a legend, never seen, yet somehow remembered. Then, in 1965, he realizes that he and an entire generation are strangers. Quixotically he announces that after twelve sheltered years in the wings he will go onstage again.

Outside Carnegie Hall, the long vigil for tickets begins. Some wait in line for 48 hours in the rain for the privilege of buying standing room. Moments before the concert begins, Horowitz, tight as a high wire, reaches out to an usher. "Listen," he says, "you're young and healthy. Give me your hands to warm my fingers." "When I felt his hands," Horowitz recalls later, "I drew mine back quickly. Mine were cold, but his were really icy. He was more nervous than I. Everybody was nervous."

Allegretto Con Amore. It is as if Liszt or Paganini had returned from the grave. Everyone in the hall's 2,760 seats rises and gives the 61-year-old pianist a standing ovation before he has played a note. He rushes to the piano and begins. The lean, intense face seems to exhale a melancholy all its own, but the fingers are as joyous as they were in the old days. The Chopin sings; the opaque, psychedelic visions of Scriabin are somehow made lucid. A critic calls him still a monarch. His wife is overjoyed at all the adulation. "Mr. Horowitz," she says, "is like a fifth Beatle."

But after the manic success, there is an odd depression. There is no second concert. Horowitz again withdraws from the public. Almost a year passes before he announces a new concert. The old affair begins anew. Two hundred candidates for tickets bivouac outside Carnegie Hall with sleeping bags and pillows. Again Horowitz begins to feel the old tensions rising. One day he gets a telephone call from a young mounted policeman, with whom he had chatted several times in his afternoon walks. "You probably know more than all of the people in the audience," says the cop. "You studied longer than them, so why do you have to be nervous?" Says Horowitz: "I was not so nervous after he said that."

And so, last week, he plays again. His Scriabin is more difficult and more triumphant, his Chopin alternately stormy and suave; it is more introspective than Rubinstein's, probes for a cerebral content that surprises and electrifies. His eyes are glued to the keyboard, his fingers carefully searching out each note as if they are switches that illuminate sound. But the greatest success is not in the relationship of Horowitz to his audience or Horowitz to his critics, but of Horowitz to Horowitz. He signs a five-year contract with Columbia Records. On May 8 he will play again before the public, at Rutgers University in a gymnasium where basketball is the normal fare. The tension is broken--this time, he thinks, forever. "My only idiosyncrasy is that I prefer to play in the afternoon," he says. "It is tense to wait until the evening. By the time evening comes I am ready to go eeeeeech! But that is all. The audiences are too hysterical now because I play too seldom. These hysterics, they bother me, they make me nervous. I have a responsibility to make the public relax. I am ready to play more."

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