Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Did Horowitz/Rubinstein Ever Express Opinions About Cliburn?

HankDrake and LaReginadellaNotte, I DO have my book on me and Horowitz said this about Cliburn:

(To Franz Mohr): "I hear you are going to Dallas to tune for Van Cliburn. I tell you what, Franz: This young man* has double the sound that anyone else has."

*Horowitz said this in 1989, when Van Cliburn was over 50.

yep that's it... again I say eeeewwww...

Thank you for providing the quote, OSK. I'm guessing that Horowitz meant that Van Cliburn could play twice as beautifully as anyone else.

As to Horowitz' extramarital affairs, is that something that is documented in his biographies? I remember hearing that he sometimes fought with Wanda over his close friendships with men, but I didn't know if anything sexual ever occurred.

Well I had read that Horowitz in his later years used to go to a gay club in NYC in the company with young men. He would promise to smoke only one cigarette and drink moderately. Wanda never joined him, though she obviously knew what he was up to. But it seems doubtful that Horowitz ever took things any further, as was the case with my last piano teacher and his London clubs.

All before my time, of course, but the thought of meeting and socializing with a man who knew Rachmaninov would be a bit of an overload for me. (I would require more than one drink.) Sort of like feeding and petting Edward Elgar's dogs and then asking the great man: what's the 'Enigma'?

The excerpts from the Byron Janis book were very interesting. Thanks JD for the link!

I have to agree with the "Ew"!!! A 20 year old with Wanda Toscanini! I always hated the camera time they gave her. She was always so rude to Horowitz. It was as though she went out of her way to be cruel to him. Horowitz just let it roll off as though she did this to him constantly. I am sure Wanda messed with his mind. Horowitz seemed to have a terrible personal life. With being married to Wanda and loosing his only child.

It's not surprising, with a father like that, she would naturally expect her husband to act the same, so eventually he fulfilled her expectations.

This has over 10,000 views?

I don't think Rubinstein especially liked Wanda, for what it's worth.

Which begs the question--is biography, autobiography, and raconteurism really that useful to musicology? Grout (originally) emphasized style over most personal details, for example.

(But, juicy gossip is fun.)

Sure -- not unusual.
First of all...maybe you didn't realize, this is a very old thread.

This site is a common resource for people everywhere. It shows up readily on google searches about piano stuff, which is probably often how new members get here. I suspect it's usually how they get here.

We members mostly just see the data for current and recent threads, for which the numbers of views are relatively modest. But over the course of time, many if not most threads accumulate many more views. We just don't generally see those data, except when an old thread gets re-upped, like this one did. I think if you go back a few hundred pages on the listing of threads on Pianist Corner, most of the threads will show thousands of views.

Heck, lemme try it....
I went to page 500 on that listing, which takes us back to year 2010. Every thread except the three that had zero replies have over 1000 views, and even those have over 900. The other threads have anywhere from 1500 to 25,000 views.