Victor Hochhauser used to joke that I was born in the week he got married to Lilian. He was 18 months out, but I understood what he was trying to say — that the music world which I inhabit could not have existed without them. As it happened, we also shared the same rav.
It was the strictly-Orthodox Solomon Schonfeld who got Victor to put on his first concert in 1945. Rabbi Schonfeld needed money to house and feed hundreds of refugees. He had one congregant who owned a West End theatre that stood empty by law on Sundays, and another whose son was the concert pianist Solomon, known only by his first name. “What do I know about music?” said Victor.
Black hats in the audience averted their eyes from lobby photographs of scantily-clad actresses. In the interval they gathered for evening prayers. Victor had to find a way of persuading the soloist to delay the second half. Through that concert, Victor found both a vocation and a wife; Lilian, in her teens, was running Rabbi Schonfeld’s office.
Victor came before the war from Kosice, now in Slovakia, where his grandfather was chief rabbi and, ex officio, a Hungarian MP. Early in the present century, I bumped into Victor in the brocaded Gothic gallery of the Hungarian Parliament at the launch of a national concert hall. “You see this?” he exclaimed, waving a seigneurial arm at the tapestries. “This is where the dictator Horthy greeted Hitler and Mussolini…”
He liked to meet Soviet artists in Budapest because it had a kosher restaurant. David Oistrakh, the Odessa violinist who was his closest friend, had been given a hint by the Hungarian ruler Janos Kadar that he, too, might be Jewish. Victor, for his part, never compromised his ritual standards.
After Oistrakh, there was Slava — the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich who, when in London, insisted on staying at the Hochhausers. After the Soviets threw him out for giving shelter to the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Slava and his family lived in the Hochhauser office for a while, permanently wrecking Victor’s credit in Moscow. Victor eventually got him a flat in Maida Vale.
After concerts, coming down literally to earth, Slava would get on his knees and scrub the tiled floor. At his 60th birthday in Washington DC, with the Hochhausers and half of Hollywood in attendance, I saw Nancy Reagan take charge of the orchestra to conduct “Happy Birthday”.
Victor and Lilian welcomed all the great Soviet artists, maintaining an open house and staying friends with their children. Lilian brought over the Bolshoi Ballet. Victor bonded with the brilliant defector Rudolf Nureyev. Lilian would fly off to talk to the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who never used the phone.
Victor would inform Yehudi Menuhin of the dates of Jewish holy days when he preferred not to play. The ascetic French composer Pierre Boulez looked to Lilian to unfreeze Soviet resistance to his post-tonal music. Bugged in their Moscow hotel, the Hochhausers would take walks in the snow to outwit the commissars.
Covertly, they left behind prayerbooks and phylacteries for Soviet Jews, contributing to a religious revival. I never once saw in Victor any hint of a dichotomy between who he was and what he did for a living.
Touring Russian all-stars was the high end of their business. The bread-and-butter was weekend concerts at the Royal Albert Hall — everyone’s favourite bits of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Holst’s Planets, Elgar’s Enigma Variations, Handel’s Water Music and Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
More people in Britain heard their first live classical music at a Victor Hochhauser concert than at the BBC Proms and all the subsidised orchestras. Without Victor there might well have been no Classic FM.
There was, needless to say, establishment resentment of his successful populism, a note of envy that deprived Victor of the knighthood he richly deserved. He was always an outsider, never reluctant to shout out an opinion that contradicted the prevailing political correctness.
He never once asked me (nor I him) for a favour. In the working day, we maintained a proper detachment. After hours, we had him over with Lilian to play Scrabble. Victor was right: our world is not the same without him.
Norman Lebrecht is a commentator on music and cultural affairs
