Victor Hochhauser
Impresario who thrilled British audiences with Soviet stars like Rostropovich, Richter and Nureyev
VICTOR HOCHHAUSER, who has died a few days short of his 96th birthday, was a tireless impresario who, with his wife Lilian, kept open cultural links with the Soviet Union during some of the darkest days of the Cold War. He was one of the few promoters successfully to marry the artistic and the commercial, presenting a range of extraordinarily talented musicians without ever receiving any direct public subsidy.
Among those whom he introduced to British audiences were the pianist Sviatoslav Richter and the violinist David Oistrakh, as well as the Bolshoi Opera and Ballet. As Isaiah Berlin once wrote, Hochhauser “performed a unique service to British musical life”.
Along the way Hochhauser encountered spy scandals, diplomatic freezes and the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia – as well the persecution of Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union. On one occasion Edward Heath banned a visit by the Red Army Ensemble which Hochhauser had arranged.
Meanwhile, the artists themselves could not always be relied upon – Richter, for example, was such a notorious canceller that his concerts were almost impossible to insure.
At times opinion-formers such as Bernard Levin and Harold Pinter urged the public to boycott visits by the Bolshoi Ballet in protest at Soviet mistreatment of the Jews. Yet, with the exception of one 15-year period, the Soviets and their successors were for almost 60 years prepared to conduct business with this devout North London Jew who offered a showcase – propaganda even – for high-quality performance from their country while at the same time providing muchneeded foreign currency.
Hochhauser was often under fire for allegedly exploiting Jewish musicians from a country that persecuted them, promoting concerts that rarely pushed the cultural boundaries and charging ticket prices that, to some, seemed extortionate. His answer was: “If you knew that a violinist of the calibre of David Oistrakh was available, and would benefit from playing in Britain, what would you do?”
The combination of a fine ear for music and a knack of knowing what would sell helped to make him the doyen of London impresarios. Knowledge of languages, including Russian, helped.
The Hochhausers brought ballet to the masses, important British premieres of music by Shostakovich (including five symphonies and his violin and cello concertos) and paychecks to an illustrious list of musicians, among them Benno Moiseiwitch, Ida Haendel and Eileen Joyce. They introduced Dmitri Shostakovich to Benjamin Britten – with remarkable musical consequences – and reunited Rostropovich with Richter after an inconsequential row from which neither artist would back down.
Hochhauser liked to say how his great stroke of luck came when Stalin died in 1953 (ironically on the same day as Sergei Prokofiev, whom the dictator had hounded). Soon Oistrakh was able to visit Britain. The mercurial pianist Richter was next, followed by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. He, however, proved problematic when, in 1974, he refused to return to the Soviet Union and instead remained in London, living in the Hochhausers’ flat; it was the same year in which Mikhail Baryshnikov defected while on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in Canada. The Soviets responded by breaking off contact with the impresario for 15 years (“I became an Unperson,” Hochhauser noted drily, using the language of Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-four).
The big Russian element of the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, in which Rostropovich and Shostakovich dominated, was largely the work of Hochhauser’s Eastern bloc networking skills. The following year he brought the Kirov Ballet to the Royal Opera House – and was still bringing the troupe (by now renamed the Mariinsky) 50 years later.
Although the backbone of the empire was his lucrative work promoting cultural events, Hochhauser was far more than an mere artistic opportunist. Successive British – and Soviet – governments found him a useful channel through which to engage in dialogue with the other side. Indeed, Edward Heath, Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, and no mean musician, is said to have relied heavily on Hochhauser for his understanding of the Russian position on a range of issues.
Despite the murky political world in which the Hochhausers became enmeshed, there is no doubt that artistic life in the West benefited from their tireless endeavours and artistic intuition. As Ismene Brown wrote in the Telegraph in 2010: “There are no pure ethical answers in the world the Hochhausers dealt in, and undoubtedly they got rich by it, but so – my God – did we.”
Victor Hochhauser was born on March 27 1923 in what was then Czechoslovakia. His grandfather and great-grandfather were distinguished rabbis, although his father was an industrialist. The family kept a home in Vienna for when they visited the opera, but by 1938 this had been seized by the authorities; similarly, the area of Slovakia in which the family lived had been encroached upon by the Nazis and swallowed into Hungary.
Realising the severity of the situation, his father found an opportunity to visit Switzerland and then London on business. Hochhauser, his mother and two sisters joined him in 1939. Over the next six years the majority of his relatives who had not left would perish.
In Britain the young Victor attended a Jewish theological college in Gateshead, but eventually demurred from following the family’s rabbinical tradition. Instead, being musically inclined, he was asked by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, who had been active in supporting Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, to organise a charity concert to be given by the pianist Solomon. Hochhauser hired the Whitehall Theatre, “charged people one guinea and completely sold out”. A gig by the Polish violinist Ida Haendel soon followed.
Hochhauser quickly realised that there was a hunger in postwar Britain for quality music. Within months he had rented the Royal Albert Hall and guaranteed the violinist Yehudi Menuhin a fee of £1,000; that event also sold out.
By 1948 he was bringing the Vienna Philharmonic to Britain with Bruno Walter. More controversial was their tour under the baton of Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had been accused of siding with the Nazis. “Furtwängler was no crusader or fighter against Nazism, but he wasn’t a Nazi collaborator in the way that some others were,” Hochhauser explained.
Later that year he saw the ballerina Svetlana Beriosova and was so thrilled that he put on a ballet series at the Empress Hall in London, bringing the art form to an entirely new audience.
Stalin’s death coincided with the visit to Britain of a Russian cultural delegation that included the young Oistrakh and the pianist Bella Davidovich; Hochhauser seized the moment and within three weeks had arranged a concert for the violinist.
“I worked with people who will never be forgotten,” he said, listing the likes of Rostropovich, Oistrakh and the Kirov Ballet, before adding: “I’ll stop there, although modesty has never been my strong point.”
Under the banner “Victor Hochhauser Presents” there were myriad other events: performances of popular classics – an on-the-day rehearsal followed by a concert of orchestral warhorses – as well as spectaculars such as Mario Lanza or Gracie Fields in concert, and the Spanish Riding School of Vienna.
For 10 years they toured Rudolf Nureyev after his sensational defection to the West in Paris in 1961. “He was a great, great artist and an impossible man,” recalled Hochhauser.
When the Russians cut off contact – “We made money before the Russians, and we made money without them,” he sniffed – Hochhauser moved his gaze farther east, engaging Chinese acts such as the Peking Opera and Chinese acrobats. He also took the London Festival Ballet to China.
Indeed, exports of British talent were also an important part of the Hochhausers’ work: they took the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to Hungary, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to Russia and the BBC Symphony Orchestra – with Boulez and Barbirolli – to Prague.
After the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1989, Moscow’s ban on working with the Hochhausers was lifted. Other London agents, such as Ibbs & Tillett, tried to move in, but the Hochhausers found that, despite the political changes and the passage of 15 years, many of the individuals in Russian bureaucracy were unchanged and they were able to pick up their business in the new Russia: the lavish ballet tours resumed in the 1990s.
In later years the Hochhausers were more renowned for their safe taste, high ticket prices and merciless haggling, as well as their uncomfortable commercial presence renting the Royal Opera House for long periods of the summer. But, as Victor Hochhauser pointed out: “We take the risk, so we dictate the terms.”
The business was operated from their home in Hampstead, overflowing with 60 years of posters, programmes and memorabilia. Among other impresarios to have learnt their trade with the Hochhausers was Raymond Gubbay, who liked to recall that he worked for the couple for 10 months, 28 days, three hours and five minutes.
Victor Hochhauser was appointed CBE in 1993, as was his wife Lilian in 2018. His role in Anglo-russian cultural relations was eventually recognised by Moscow in 2006 when he received a special award at the Embassy in London.
He married, in 1949, Lilian Shields, a Londoner of Ukrainian family who quickly became an equal force in the business. She survives him with their three sons and a daughter.
Victor Hochhauser, born March 27 1923, died March 23 2019