Minding Mr. Horowitz

New York — In the fall of 1981, I returned to New York from my job as assistant manager of the Boston Symphony to join Columbia Artists Management, the renowned talent and booking agency for classical musicians. Soon after, the formidable wife of Vladimir Horowitz, arguably the greatest concert pianist of all time -- whose centennial was celebrated Wednesday -- invited me to become his manager. Wanda Horowitz had not only helped shape her husband’s illustrious career but had also assisted her father, Arturo Toscanini, the most eminent conductor of his era. Still in my 20s, I was a little rattled by so imposing a task.

“Mr. Horowitz is bored with the same old routine of concerts, and we need someone young and energetic like you to present him with artistic challenges that will stimulate him,” Mrs. Horowitz would tell me. Since my plan in joining Columbia Artists was to create a new division that would focus on special projects such as television and film productions, I began to view the idea of taking on responsibilities for so legendary an artistic property as a thrilling prospect.

What I didn’t fully understand at the time was that those responsibilities were fraught with headaches.

The Horowitzes had been living in a brownstone on 94th Street between Fifth and Madison avenues since the 1940s, when they decided to make America their home. From the start of my new duties, Mrs. Horowitz would meet with me in the living room, decorated throughout with Japanese and French antiques. Her husband’s trigger-action Steinway concert grand stood at one end.

Always dapper in bow tie, immaculate shirt and dark suit, Horowitz would eventually join us from his upstairs bedroom, which was next to his wife’s. He usually greeted me with the same plaintive request: “Tell me why I should play again?” This puzzling gambit inevitably led to a long spell of reasoning and cajoling by Mrs. Horowitz, myself and whichever guests were present for the dinner that followed.

Horowitz, then 78, had often stopped performing in public for years at a time, once absenting himself for more than a decade (from 1953 to 1965). My foremost concern, consequently, was: What if he suddenly decided to hide from public view once again? Another problem was his reluctance to travel abroad. When I started as his manager, he hadn’t left American soil in some 40 years. He once told me that he was afraid of jet airplanes and would never fly in one, that he no longer liked ocean liners and that he hated trains.

The problems didn’t stop there. Chronically obsessive and phobic, Horowitz would not waver from his ritual of eating the same precise menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner for months on end and sometimes for years. In fact, he kept a bound red diary on the living room coffee table that was an exact record of his eating and digestive habits. What’s more, he insisted on giving concerts only at 4 p.m. on Sundays with a temperature in the concert hall of exactly 72. He also demanded that his hotel windows be blacked out, since he liked to sleep well into the afternoon. And he would travel only with his own Steinway piano -- one of but a few artists in history to do so -- and with Steinway’s chief piano tuner, Franz Mohr, in attendance at all times.

But for a manager, his most daunting stipulation of all was his reluctance to sign contracts. He explained that this notion was based on his abhorrence of canceling concerts; he reasoned that if he did not sign contracts, a concert of his could never be canceled. How was he to know how he’d be feeling when the concert date approached? “What if I am sick?” he asked, not entirely unreasonably.

With the help of my boss at Columbia, Ronald Wilford, I tackled all these issues. The Concorde had recently started flying, and the idea of getting to London in a little more than three hours appealed to Horowitz. As for his contract fears, we never asked Horowitz to sign a long-term management agreement with us. We didn’t even list his name on the Columbia Artists Management roster. Instead, Wilford developed the completely unusual and somewhat nerve-racking procedure of signing Horowitz to a separate managerial contract for each concert he played, usually just before the first ad was scheduled to announce the sale of tickets. Each time Horowitz agreed to play a concert, he would sign a contract appointing us as his manager, but only for that specific concert. Noting Wilford’s reputation as the sharpest and most skillful of all managers, the Horowitzes labeled him “the Barracuda,” much to his amusement.

A true eccentric

Over the next several years -- despite ample evidence that his mental capacities were diminishing and his artistic instincts were no longer infallible -- Horowitz played to sold-out crowds at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and at London’s Festival Hall and made his debut in Tokyo.

I learned, in Tokyo, more about his considerable eccentricities. Together with his retinue -- the Horowitzes’ longtime companion, Giuliana Lopes; his personal chef and butler, Duane; and myself -- he remained holed up in the luxurious Okura Hotel for several weeks leading to the concert. Heavily medicated, overindulging in Campari and feasting daily on mounds of caviar, he became addicted as well to watching B horror movies until 3 or 4 in the morning, which we were obliged to watch with him. I once tried to tiptoe out of the room when I thought he had dozed off, only to be admonished severely and ordered to return forthwith.

After the Tokyo concert, he was persuaded by his wife to retire from the concert stage once again to regain his mental equilibrium, a process that took almost two years. During this time, he stopped taking most of his medications and gave up alcohol and cigarettes.

In 1985, fully recovered, he agreed to be the subject of a documentary film, “Horowitz: The Last Romantic,” produced by Albert and David Maysles and Susan Froemke, that proved to be an intimate portrait of a genius once again at work.

By 1986, there appeared to be only one truly extraordinary concert event left for him to undertake: his long-awaited return to Moscow. Horowitz had departed Mother Russia in 1925 with gold coins stuffed in the toes of his shoes, and he still considered himself a defector. But 41 years later, Mikhail Gorbachev was the Soviet president, and relations between the United States and the Kremlin were thawing. Gorbachev and President Reagan had just signed a cultural exchange agreement symbolizing better relations between their countries, and Horowitz was convinced of the timeliness of his return.

Although Horowitz was a practical man in some ways -- he once said in response to a question about the acoustics of a new concert hall, “Check good, acoustics good” -- his fears about his diet appeared to be the major hurdle to realizing his dream of returning to Russia. At the time, his evening meal consisted of fresh Dover sole and asparagus, a routine repeated night after night for several years, all faithfully recorded in his bound red book. Obsessed with his diet, Horowitz was convinced he could not survive without this specific menu, and his return to Russia ultimately hinged on the availability of fresh fish.

The Soviet Union was still a country of great food shortages, with even tomatoes a luxury obtainable only on the black market. There seemed not the remotest chance of obtaining either Dover sole or asparagus there, even through illegitimate means. But the State Department was excited by the possibility of Horowitz’s becoming the first artist to tour the Soviet Union under the terms of the new cultural agreement, and it offered to assist. Fortunately, the U.S. ambassador, Arthur Hartman, was a great lover of classical music and a devoted fan of Horowitz. He regularly hosted musical soirees in the ballroom of Spasso House, the ambassador’s grand home in Moscow, performed mostly by Russian refuseniks (Jewish artists awaiting their exit visas) in front of audiences composed of members of the diplomatic community.

Ambassador and Mrs. Hartman offered to turn over their spacious living quarters in Spasso House to Horowitz and, even more crucially, agreed to engineer the first Dover sole and asparagus airlift into Moscow. Hartman organized his fellow ambassadorial corps -- the British ambassador was to be responsible for the sole, the Italian ambassador for the asparagus, the French ambassador for the Dom Perignon rose that Mrs. Horowitz preferred -- and the Hartmans’ chef was in charge of obtaining copious quantities of fresh caviar on the black market. Members of Hartman’s staff who greeted the arriving food flights wore T-shirts imprinted with the words “Dover Sole Air Lift.”

Assured by the guarantee that his New York standard of living was going to be rigorously upheld in Moscow, Horowitz agreed to go forward with the journey. Deals were negotiated with the Soviet Union’s concert agency, Gosconcert, and the state broadcasting authority, Gostelradio, although their officials dragged their feet about signing the actual contracts until days before the first concert was to take place. Horowitz had insisted that at least half the tickets be distributed to the music-loving public at normal box-office prices, which in Russia in those days were the equivalent of just a couple of dollars. Although Horowitz was by far the highest-paid classical artist in the world, with his usual contract calling for him to receive 80% of gross ticket sales, he offered to donate his services, since the box office would have amounted to next to nothing anyway. Instead, in exchange for waiving his fee, we proposed that he be allowed to produce his own live television program and to control all of the rights.

The actual concert was remarkable. Horowitz played one of the great recitals of his life, belying his age and the pressure-packed situation of performing live for an audience of tens of millions of TV viewers throughout the world. The television production was a significant success too but was produced amid considerable tension. The Soviet authorities, afraid of a live broadcast over which they would have no control, placed several heavily armed KGB agents in the broadcast truck, presumably with orders to stop the director, Brian Large, if the transmission didn’t go according to plan. Ultimately, they didn’t interfere. With a visibly moved Russian audience in the background of most of the shots, the program successfully captured a poignant and triumphant moment in music and history.

Horowitz played with the freedom and spontaneity that had always been the trademarks of his performance style. He was fond of explaining his pianistic approach in nontechnical terms: “My first music teacher in Russia told me to play the piano with my nose, if that would create the right musical effect.” He would then point to his nose, his most prominent feature. He would also often whip torn pages of a book of Mozart’s letters out of his inside jacket pocket and read aloud quotes that supported his views about the need for independent musical expression. “You see, Mozart wanted his music to be played freely,” he would say, “not like the Hochschule” -- the German word for “music academy” and the antithesis of everything he stood for artistically.

Unending applause

Rejuvenated by his return to Russia, Horowitz went to Germany to perform in Berlin and Hamburg. Wherever he went, even when he wasn’t performing, he received an ovation. If he was attending the opera, members of the audience would spot him and within seconds the entire audience would be standing and cheering, perhaps somewhat to the consternation of the singers and conductor who had not yet started their performance. Even when he was taking his afternoon constitutional on the Kurfustendamm, Berlin’s main thoroughfare, people would stop to applaud him.

Horowitz remained active right up to his death in the fall of 1989. His living room had been outfitted with a recording system that he could operate on his own, and he was in the process of making a recording. One morning, he awoke after a night of working and went to his wife’s bedroom to speak his final words. “What shall we eat for dinner?” he asked, just before dropping to the floor, instantly dead from a massive heart attack. A few weeks earlier, he had started varying his nightly menu and had developed a taste for rabbit.

Gelb is president of Sony Classical records.