Disinformation and Misinformation at History of Music

 

Since 2019 I have been administering a Facebook group dedicated to Vladimir Horowitz.  We have grown to over 2,000 members even though I carefully screen applicants for entry and turn down nearly as many applications as I approve. The reasons I am so cautious about how I administrate this group has as much to do with Facebook’s privacy settings as with Horowitz.  As to Facebook’s group settings, I’ll leave it to a tech expert to explain how putting the group on a global setting where anyone can join leaves legitimate members vulnerable to such niceties as identity theft and fraud.  As to Horowitz, I’ll merely state that there’s a lot of bullshit within the Classical music field and the pianist’s story is not immune to it. 

Hardly a week goes by where I don’t read something nonsensical about Horowitz, either ham-handed, half-informed opinions about his musical and pianistic abilities, or blatant factual errors.  As for the former, as Horowitz himself said, “It’s just opinion, it doesn’t matter!”  But factual misinformation and disinformation must be called out, else it obtains the patina of fact.  Thus we come to an article on Horowitz that was published at History of Music.  I know nothing about this site, except that links from it pop up on my Facebook feed with some regularity.  A quick perusal indicates it’s not well maintained, unlike, say, Classics Today.  The article in question is an example of that.  It fails to shed any new light on the Horowitz phenomenon, and contains numerous statements that are vague at best and worse, blatantly false.  

First, it’s obvious that the article in question was not written in English, but so poorly translated from another language as to be almost unreadable.  As there is no author listed, one can only guess as to the language of origin but I suspect a Russian author.

The article states that life in the Horowitz household was upended by political chaos in 1914.  First, the Russian Revolution began in 1917, when Horowitz was 14, not 1914, when Horowitz was 11.  Second, the 1914 date is in direct contradiction to Horowitz’s own recollection, who stated that the early months of the Revolution were actually a boon to Kiev: “The Revolution started in the north, and the best forces in music came down from Petersburg and Moscow to escape the bolshevism and because we had food and there they had famine.  So, in our Conservatory I played four hands with the teacher of Gilels and Richter.  Glazunov was there.  Gliére was there.”  (Quote is from a 1977 interview with Helen Epstein, originally for the New York Times and later published in Music Talks.)

But that benefit was short lived, as Soviet forces entered Ukraine and invaded Kiev in early 1918.  Nevertheless, Horowitz was still able to continue as a student and did not perform publicly until 1920. 

The pianist’s initial successes in Russia are recounted, along with his early post-Russian career.  No new information is presented to the reader.   

The article glosses over Horowitz’s sexual conflicts and presents the fairy-tale version of his courtship with Wanda Toscanini.  The author appears to blame American audiences for Horowitz’s 1936 breakdown.  This is patent nonsense as Horowitz’s most recent concerts in North America had been in the Spring of 1935, followed by a full year’s worth of concerts in Europe (including England).  Horowitz’s last concert in 1936 took place in Trieste on May 2, 1936.  But it wasn’t until September that Horowitz, aware that his mother had died from peritonitis following a delayed appendectomy, began to complain of severe intestinal pains and demanded that his appendix be removed.  Post-surgical complications, in particular phlebitis, and the stultifying presence of the Toscaninis were contributory factors in Horowitz’s subsequent breakdown.  Contradictory to the article’s assertion, it was not Toscanini but rather Rachmaninoff who helped get Horowitz back on track to the concert stage, enlisting the help of Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who had used hypnosis to help Rachmaninoff himself overcome depression following the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony.  Toscanini’s main contribution to Horowitz’s recovery was limited to looking askance at Horowitz and proclaiming, “He’s crazy!” to anyone within earshot, including the pianist himself.

Speaking of Rachmaninoff, the article perpetuates the myth, addressed in this very blog, that the composer abandoned his Third Concerto after hearing Horowitz play it.  Again, blatantly untrue.  Additionally, the author mislocates the story of Rachmaninoff mounting the stage to congratulate Horowitz after a triumphant performance of said concerto: the incident took place not at Carnegie Hall, but at the Hollywood Bowl, just a few months before the composer’s death.

Further, the author seems quite confused about the dates of both Horowitz’s retirement and Toscanini’s death – facts which are easily verified.  Horowitz and Toscanini last performed together in October, 1948.  Horowitz’s second breakdown took place in Minneapolis in March, 1953, where the pianist was scheduled to play a concert.  At that point, Toscanini was not only still alive, but still active as a conductor (his final concert was on April 4, 1954).  Toscanini died in January 1957, by which time Horowitz had returned to recording for RCA, continuing his association with the label until 1959.  In 1962, he switched his affiliation to Columbia Masterworks but, contrary to the author’s assertion, he never recorded    “Cherny [sic] sonatas” – in fact, the only Czerny work recorded by Horowitz was from 1944, the Variations on Rode's La Ricordanza, Op.33, for RCA. (The pianist considered this his favorite amongst his own recordings.)

Finally, the article seems to despair that Horowitz is often described as an “American pianist.”  Well, that was according to the pianist’s own wishes – not just in the period immediately after he became a United States citizen, but for decades afterwards.  Indeed, when Horowitz announced his intention to return to the Soviet Union in 1986 to perform a pair of concerts, he cautioned media to refer to him as an American “I’ve lived here for 50 years, far longer than in Russia.  This is my home.”

The question remains: Is this article an example of sloppy research, or is it deliberate misinformation, or a mix of both?  This is something only the anonymous author knows.