No critic today writes more knowledgeably about pianists than Harold C. Schonberg, late of the New York Times. And there is no pianist about whom he writes more knowledgeably than the late Vladimir Horowitz.
All of which should make the above biography self-recommending. Beginning with the 82-year-old pianist's return to his native land after decades of self-imposed exile, it traces his early studies in Kiev, his conquest of Europe and America, his unexpected and often turbulent marriage to Wanda Toscanini (the great conductor's daughter), his frequent withdrawals from the concert stage and invariably triumphant returns, all in brisk, to-the-point, highly readable prose.Along the way it touches on Horowitz's bouts with self-doubt and depression, his troubled relationship with his daughter, Sonia (found dead in 1975 from an overdose of sleeping pills), his sexual ambivalence and an absorption with himself and his music that all too often shut out anything that might mar that relationship. (He did not even accompany his wife to Europe, for example, for their daughter's funeral.)
The obvious competition for all this is Glenn Plaskin's exhaustively researched 1983 biography of the pianist, even more fascinating in its depiction of the Toscanini family and exploration of things like Horowitz's complex relationship with his students, his friendship with Rachmaninoff and longstanding rivalry with his colleagues, principally Arthur Rubinstein.
But it is Schonberg who paints the more vivid portrait of the artist at work and of the legendary but often misunderstood Horowitz sound.
"Raw excitement coupled with moments of delicate lyricism and washes of color" is how he characterizes the first of Horowitz's two recordings of the Liszt Sonata, also alluding to "the flashing octaves and awesome technical command." Earlier, however, he takes pains to undercut the notion of Horowitz as little more than a keyboard gymnast.
"The sound was very, very soft, very gentle, very piano, very beautiful," he quotes Vladimir Feltsman as saying of Horowitz's 1986 return to the Soviet Union. "Fragile, floating, very sad. It was indescribable. . . . Such a unique, magic touch, this unique floating sound, I have never heard from any piano player in my life."
At the same time he manages to relate Horowitz to the stream of late-18th-, 19th- and 20th-century musical thought, from Mozart and Clementi on. While acknowledging that he seemed more at home with some composers than others - the Horowitz repertoire was never very broad - Schonberg points out that "the charges critics brought against the Horowitz approach to Beethoven would have disqualified Beethoven himself as a pianist. Beethoven's own way of playing was described by Anton Schindler and Carl Czerny, two of Beethoven's associates who went into great detail about his style - about his metrical freedom, his constant fluctuation of tempo, his rubato, his extreme dynamics."
He also captures something Plaskin was simply not able to, namely the entire scope of Horowitz's career, his last recording having been made only days before his death in 1989. That means not only the early triumphs but also the later dips (particularly the near-catastrophic performances of 1983) and the unexpectedly sublime resurgence of his art and, for the most part, his technique around two years later.
In this he is able to draw on something else not available to Plaskin: the pianist's private recollections. As he explains in a preface, in 1987 Schonberg was engaged by Simon & Schuster to assist Horowitz with his memoirs. Though the project broke off after a few weeks, Schonberg and his publishers were left with a quantity of taped reminiscences, many of which are included here.
Thus we have Horowitz's reflections (not always accurate) on his own career and the younger crop of pianists, some of them withering. (Vladimir Ashkenazy: "Good once, not now"; Andre Watts: "Technically formidable . . . musically horrible.") More importantly, we also have Schonberg's assessments of those reflections and, despite his obvious sympathy with his subject, Horowitz himself.
"Yes, he could sometimes go overboard," Schonberg admits. "Yes, he could miscalculate in concert. Sometimes his dares did not come off; or a listener could legitimately ask why he took a phrase in this or that manner. But never was there a letdown in interest, tension, or drama, his ability to keep an audience at the edge of the seat."
Or, one might add, a reader of his biography as well.