Vladimir Horowitz, 1986. Via Wikimedia Commons.
New York, Carnegie Hall, 9 May 1965. The queue for tickets has wrapped around the block for two days, with thermoses and sleeping bags, and the newspapers send photographers as if to a news event: because it is one. That afternoon Vladimir Horowitz returns to play in public after exactly twelve years away. When he walks on, the applause goes on so long that he stands beside the piano, disoriented, waiting for the audience to let him begin. The first chord of the recital is slightly wrong. Nobody minds: the legend has already started up again.
The withdrawal had begun in 1953, after the concert marking twenty-five years since his American debut. The best-paid and most mythologised pianist in the world, the man of sold-out halls and octaves that did not seem human, had simply stopped: exhaustion, depression, the wear of a concert machine that treated him as a luxury carnival act, and that he himself fed and loathed. For twelve years he lived in his New York home, leaving it as little as possible: he practised, recorded now and then in the living room, took a few students, and let the world wonder whether it would ever hear him again. It was not the only withdrawal of his life: he had already stopped in the 1930s, and would stop again in the 1970s. Horowitz’s career, seen from afar, is an alternation of eclipses and returns, each more sensational than the last, up to the final and most moving: Moscow 1986, the return to Russia after sixty-one years, with conservatory students hanging from the windows to hear him.
It is instructive to set this silence beside the other two this magazine has told: Gould, who left the stage for good in the name of the recording studio, and Kleiber, who appeared in dribs and drabs all his life. Three different strategies against the same enemy, the machine that devours performers: Gould fired it, Kleiber kept it on a starvation diet, Horowitz let it devour him at intervals, fleeing when the bite reached the bone. His version was the most human and the least theorised: not a manifesto, just a man who could tell when he was about to break, in an era when stopping was considered professional suicide and the word exhaustion was spoken in a whisper.
Today we would call it burnout and conferences would discuss it. Back then it was called the whim of genius, and the public forgave it only on condition that the return be triumphant. Horowitz paid the bill three times and three times came back, the last time past eighty, with that sound the microphones never captured in full. The queue around Carnegie Hall in May 1965 remains the involuntary monument to a truth the profession still struggles to accept: an interpreter’s silence is not an interruption of the career. It is part of it, and sometimes it is the part that saves all the others.