Vladimir Horowitz: The Prodigal Returns

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New York City, 1944. After hearing a 15-year-old prodigy named Byron Janis perform, Horowitz invites the boy to study with him. The fee: $50 an hour. "I was awed, inspired and, yes, a little frightened," remembers Janis. "I was aware from what people were telling me and from what I had read about Horowitz that there would be difficulties in working with such a great artist." The pedagogy was unusual. Horowitz advised against practicing too much. (He himself dislikes practicing.) Sometimes the maestro would listen while lying on the floor, offering suggestions from a prone position. "The piano is a singing instrument," he would tell Janis. "Sing, sing, sing at the piano." Horowitz, says Janis, "taught me the secrets of piano playing."

In all, Horowitz taught some half a dozen students between 1944 and the early '60s. It was not always a happy experience for the students. Horowitz would sometimes cancel lessons without warning if he was not in the mood. "It had its negative aspects," says Alexander Fiorillo, a professor of piano at Temple University who studied with Horowitz between 1960 and 1962. "He is callous to people's emotions and their feelings. I almost had a nervous breakdown." Yet Coleman Blumfield, whose lessons came to a summary end in 1958 for reasons he never completely understood, declares, "It was a privilege and an honor to study under Horowitz. From him I learned the extreme range of tonal coloring possible with the piano."

New York City, 1986. In their 14-room white stone townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, purchased in 1947 for $30,000 and now worth a hundred times that amount, the Horowitzes live quietly, comfortably and just a little eccentrically. They eat out practically every night, chauffeured to one of a few favorite, mostly Italian restaurants, where Horowitz dines on pasta and the inevitable sole. After returning home, he relaxes by watching a triple feature of adventure and horror movies (The Terminator, Halloween, Raiders of the Lost Ark) on his videocassette recorder, then turns in about 4 a.m. and sleeps until noon. He no longer smokes, does not drink and never eats meat.

He is one of the highest-paid musicians in the world, commanding a fee of as much as half a million dollars for a single concert and never less than $100,000. "The Soviets can't afford me," he jokes, but Horowitz will receive about $2.5 million dollars for TV and recording rights to his five-concert series. His extensive art collection--which included works by Rouault, Degas, Manet and Picasso--was sold off when the insurance became prohibititive, and replaced with a Japanese silk-screen painting and a Chinese mirror painting. The big Steinway commands the living room, when it is not on the road with him. Near by on the wall are four autographed photographs: Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Puccini and Toscanini.