Letters talking about that inner power struggle. Singer says, “And it was for me a breathtaking adventure to read these documents, these letters, of longing and jealousy and of sexual desire and anguish. And Wanda did not marry Horowitz, she married the most celebrated pianist of the world.”
“He didn’t marry Wanda, he married the daughter of Toscanini. Although Horowitz was married to Wanda Toscanini, the daughter of the famous conductor, Arturo Toscanini, “It was not a marriage, it was a deal,” Singer says in this Zoom interview with Intermezzo host Leora Zeitlin, along with the book’s translator from German, Elisabeth Lauffer. What Singer found in those letters forms the basis of her novel, “The Piano Student” (New Vessel Press, 2020), which depicts the passionate but hopeless love affair between Horowitz and Kaufmann in the 1930s. Many more years passed before Singer got the idea to research these mysterious letters. But when she checked a biography of Horowitz, not a word was mentioned about a student in Europe. Singer had heard Horowitz perform in Berlin ten years earlier and was struck by a certain sadness in his shy smile.
In 1996, German author Lea Singer read that a man named Nico Kaufmann had, before his recent death, donated a bundle of letters from his teacher, Vladimir Horowitz, to a Swiss archive.
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