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For Horowitz, though, the concerts are only the most visible, public part of an extraordinary journey of rediscovery and remembrance. It began two weeks ago, as the pianist and his wife Wanda Toscanini Horowitz, 78, stepped off Japan Air Lines Flight 440 from Paris. Before leaving New York City, the pianist had been sanguine about his chances of success, both as a musician and as a cultural ambassador. "I am not a Communist, but I can understand their way of thinking better than most Americans," he declared. "We all know there is good and evil everywhere. I was brought up to seek the good. In the Soviet Union today, the good is the music they produce. I hope that by playing in the Soviet Union, I will make the good better. Music inspires. It does not destroy and kill."
Soviet officialdom treated the visit with a mixture of politesse and disdain. In the days leading up to the Moscow concert, there was no mention of the Horowitz visit in either Pravda or Izvestiya, only a brief announcement in the newspaper Sovietskaya Kultura. Soviet musical commissars explained the lack of coverage by observing the concert was already sold out. "We think of him as an American pianist," said Tikhon Khrennikov, the all-powerful first secretary of the Soviet composers' union, who nevertheless went to the concert. In response to the American attack on Libya, the Soviets boycotted a dinner in Horowitz's honor at the Italian embassy, but a postconcert party at Spaso House, the ornate Moscow residence of American Ambassador Arthur Hartman, was well attended.
The thin crust of official coolness often melted, however, notably at the conclusion of a Horowitz press conference at the Conservatory's Rachmaninoff Hall. There, hardened Soviet journalists shouldered one another aside in their frenzy to get autographs. "Sign en Russe," reminded Wanda, overseeing the impromptu session. And when Horowitz emerged from the conference, he was confronted by a horde of fresh-faced music students eager to get a glimpse of the master. "It is very important to us for him to have a big success," said one girl through her tears.
The secret of Horowitz's appeal is twofold. His phenomenal technique, regarded by piano connoisseurs as the most dazzling since Franz Liszt set the standard of virtuosity in the mid-19th century, gets the listeners into the tent. Horowitz could always do anything he wanted at the keyboard, whether pounding out octaves or rippling off scales in thirds. But mere technique is not enough. Just as Luciano Pavarotti's high notes, in the tenor's prime several years ago, were backed up by a gorgeous liquid tone and a supple sense of phrasing, so Horowitz's pianism offers many subtleties: the absolute independence of each finger, which makes it sound as though he were playing with three hands, and a rainbow tonal palette that realizes Liszt's ideal of turning the piano into an 88-key orchestra, with every instrument from the flute to the double bass represented.