During the 1980s, when Mieczyslaw Horszowski was enjoying nonagenarian status, a host of devoted pupils, including Richard Goode, Peter Serkin and Andras Schiff, helped return the nearly forgotten pianist to public attention.
Elektra Nonesuch began recording him, concert promoters began booking him again and a new generation of listeners belatedly discovered one of the important remaining links to the late 19th Century school of pianism.
The Polish-born virtuoso died a year ago at age 100. Friends and colleagues at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, where he taught for 51 years, continue to fan the flame of his memory. And the record companies are paying their posthumous respects to the geriatric wonder, as if to make amends for years of comparative neglect.
Teldec has recently issued a splendid document of Horszowski’s 1990 return, after an absence of 84 years, to a sold-out Carnegie Hall (“Horszowski Live at Carnegie Hall,” 4509-90651-6, laserdisc only). And the English label Pearl has released a two-CD set containing treasurable performances the pianist made in 1940 for Vatican Radio (9108). Two other Japanese-made videos are available overseas, and there is hope that they eventually will reach the U.S. market.
Now another Horszowski disciple has weighed in: none other than the pianist’s widow, Bice Horszowski.
A pianist herself, the Italian-born Mrs. Horszowski (nee Costa) put her own career on hold in 1981 when she and Mieczyslaw married. It was the first marriage for each; he was 89, she 49. During the 12 years of their union she devoted herself to him and his Indian-summer career, assisting in his summer master classes in Lucerne, Switzerland. Without her help the pianist, by then frail and nearly blind, probably could not have continued performing and teaching.
Bice Horszowski is coming to Chicago next week to perform a special tribute to her late husband under auspices of the International Music Foundation, which had sponsored his long-awaited Chicago return in 1987. (His final Chicago concert was in 1989 at Orchestra Hall.)
Horszowski’s recital, presented as part of the Dame Myra Hess series, will be at 12:15 Tuesday in Preston Bradley Hall of the Cultural Center.
Horszowski politely deflects questions as to whether her husband suffered from years of being pigeonholed by impresarios and record companies as an accompanist and chamber musician, not a solo artist. Nor is she interested in speaking about her own career in music. “It was nothing to compare with what my husband did,” she says, modestly.
She has, however, given much thought to how she would like posterity to remember her late husband.
“He was a sort of genius, a great musician, a natural talent,” she says. “As a fish swims, so could he play. He felt the keyboard as an extension of his hands. He had such a warmth and beauty of sound.”
The onetime prodigy was one of the foremost links to the school of Theodor Leschetizky, whose artistic progeny also included Artur Schnabel and Ignace Paderewski. “From Leschetizky he absorbed a singing line, simplicity, rhythm, taste. The way he played Chopin-nobody dares to play it that way today. He did it so freely and also so beautifully.”
She attributes Horszowski’s longevity to good genes (“everyone in his family is very strong”) and to his lifelong interest in a wide variety of intellectual disciplines other than music.
Horszowski’s program includes works you could easily imagine her husband playing: the Bach-Busoni “Nun komm der Heiden Heiland” Chorale Prelude, Schumann’s “Arabesque” and Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat, Op. 110. She also will offer three vignettes by one of her countrymen, the late-Romantic composer Alfredo Catalani. Admission is free, and WFMT-FM 98.7 will carry its usual live broadcast.
