Vladimir Horowitz: The Prodigal Returns

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The recital was televised the same day across Europe and the U.S. and was recorded for possible later broadcast by Soviet television as well. But TV could only begin to suggest what the 1,800 foreign diplomats, Soviet film stars, composers, musicians and ordinary Russians witnessed on an extraordinary afternoon. At 4 p.m. Horowitz emerged from the wings to thunderous applause, cut it short with an impatient gesture, sat down at his personal 9-ft. Steinway, which had been flown in for the occasion, and for two hours held everyone spellbound.

Two days before, at a public rehearsal given for lucky, and often weeping, Conservatory students, he had served notice that his playing would be infused with a passionate fire and breathtaking precision not heard in years--that he would be, in short, the Horowitz of old, one last time. "There is much emotion inside, but I will not let it out before Sunday, because then everything could go smash," he had remarked en route to Moscow.

Now, with his emotions rising in the heat of an actual performance, he delivered. "We have waited for more than 50 years to hear Horowitz," said Nadia Tsiganova, who had stayed in line all night to get her ticket. "He is magnificent." Yuri, a young soldier on his way to Afghanistan, exclaimed reverently, "I will carry the memory of this afternoon with me always." Reviewing the program of Scarlatti, Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Schubert, Liszt and Chopin, Critic Dmitri Bashkirov wrote in Sovietskaya Rossiya, "He indisputably remained the brightest bearer of the Russian performing tradition. I think there was not one person in the hall who didn't leave the concert in a happy, elevated mood." After watching on TV back in the U.S., Violinist Isaac Stern reached Horowitz by phone to say he had had tears in his eyes throughout the concert. Horowitz had once more proclaimed himself the greatest of living pianists. By turns elegant, playful, probing, introspective and, finally, heroic, Horowitz had also reaffirmed his lineage as the last romantic, whose artless, effortless, larger-than-life pianism, redolent with spontaneity and freshness, is a vanishing art.

Certainly, Horowitz comports himself with the regal mien of a 19th century monarch. He performs only on Sunday afternoons at 4. No matter where he is playing, he dines on Dover or gray sole flown in fresh that day. His wife, his housekeeper, his manager, his piano technician and a Steinway official all accompany him--as does, of course, his piano. The $40,000 concert grand, plucked by crane from the living room of his Manhattan townhouse, had its 12,000 parts cleaned and examined with a degree of care worthy of Air Force One. Its mahogany case was given coat after coat of high-gloss finish and hand-rubbed with fine steel wool, a laborious task that took 18 hours. It was then packed in space-age material resistant to heat and weather, loaded aboard a 747 early in April and shipped as a diplomatic pouch to Moscow. In the week before the concert, it was tuned and retuned so that it would be at its peak. "In the world of music," says Richard Probst, director of Steinway's concert and artist department, "this was our D day."