Vladimir Horowitz — pianist with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born in Kyiv in 1903, then a city of the Russian Empire, into a cultivated Jewish family - his father an engineer, his mother a capable pianist who gave him his first lessons. He entered the Kyiv Conservatory as a boy and studied under Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky and Felix Blumenfeld. An uncle who was a friend of Alexander Scriabin arranged in 1913 for the ten-year-old to play for him; Scriabin told the family the boy was exceptionally gifted.
He always maintained he had wanted to be a composer and became a performer to feed his family. The need was real. The revolution and civil war took everything the family had, and in those years he was sometimes paid for concerts in bread, butter and chocolate rather than money. He gave his first solo recital in Kharkiv in 1920 and within a few years was among the best-known musicians in the new Soviet state.
In 1925, aged twenty-one, he was given an exit visa valid for six months to study in Germany and tour western Europe. He had no intention of using the return half. An anecdote that has followed him ever since has a border guard resting a hand on his shoulder and telling him not to forget his motherland while he was away - and Horowitz, moved by it, being more concerned that the guard might ask him to take off his shoes, which had American dollars sewn into them.
He stayed away for sixty-one years. He settled eventually in the United States, married Wanda Toscanini, daughter of the conductor, and became the most celebrated pianist of the century - a player of enormous tonal range and velocity, and of a stage presence that the New York Times' senior critic put in the company of Toscanini, Callas and Pavarotti. He withdrew from public performance four separate times, for years at a stretch, and returned each time.
In April 1986, at eighty-two and out of his final retirement, he went back. The visit was the centrepiece of the cultural exchange agreed between Reagan and Gorbachev at Geneva the year before, and both governments treated it as the most significant event of that agreement. He gave a recital in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 20 April, televised by satellite to the United States, and another in Leningrad. Tickets were scarce and a large share went to officials; several hundred were sold publicly and his own party brought more. He played Scarlatti, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff - the last two composers he had known personally, more than sixty years earlier.
He did not perform in Kyiv. He died in New York in November 1989, three years after the return and a few weeks before the year that ended the state he had left.
"Left on a six-month exit visa in 1925; returned once, in 1986"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv / Berdychiv
He left in 1925 on a six-month exit visa and did not return for sixty-one years. His recital at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on 20 April 1986 was the centrepiece of the Reagan-Gorbachev cultural exchange agreement and was broadcast by satellite to the United States.
Born in Kyiv in 1903, then part of the Russian Empire. Trained at the Kyiv Conservatory under Vladimir Puchalsky, Sergei Tarnowsky and Felix Blumenfeld, and played for Alexander Scriabin at the age of ten.
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Kyiv / Berdychiv. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists."