| Biography | Victor Hochhauser CBE (27 March 1923 21 March 2019) was a British music promoter. He and his wife Lilian have been called "Britain's foremost independent promoters of classical music and ballet".
Hochhauser was born on 27 March 1923 in Koice, Czechoslovakia, the son of an industrialist father. His grandfather and great-grandfather were rabbis. He was a direct descendent of the Chatam Sofer, a leading Orthodox Rabbi of European Jewry in the nineteenth century. Hochhauser came with his family to the UK from Slovakia in 1939, as refugees from the Nazis.
The young Victor was sent to study at a Jewish seminary in Gateshead and went on to work as a fundraiser at a London synagogue for Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld. It was in that capacity that he set out to stage a charity concert - and in the process discovered that he possessed a hideen talent for promoting musical events.
His career as an impresario started in 1945 hiring venues including the Royal Albert Hall., which he hired for £30, and £60 for the London Symphony Orchestra, having borrowed £200 from his father. In May 1945 he staged the first of a series of concerts that featured such names as the violinist Ida Haendel and pianists Eileen Joyce, Louis Kentner and Benno Moiseiwitsch. It was always sold out, and in 1946 he secured teh conductor Sir Thomas Beecham for a season. "It all seemed so easy," Hochhauser reflectd many years later.
Following the death of Stalin in 1953, Hochhauser was the first impresario to organise tours of the West by Soviet musicians, and introduced audiences to David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Dmitri Shostakovich was a house guest. Hochhauser has said, "My great stroke of luck came when Stalin died".
His Sunday evening concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, often derided by critics as 'potboilers', popularised classical music long before the emergence of the Three Tenors.
Hochhauser was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993.
In June 2010, the Hochhausers were presented with the Order of Friendship by Russia.
He met his future wife Lilian Shields, born in Britain to Russian-Jewish parents, when they were both working for Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld in London. Lilian was also appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2018. They married in 1949 and had four children, including the diplomat Mark Sofer.
Victor Hochhauser died agred 95 on 21 March 2019 in a London hospital, survived by Lilian and their four children Daniel, Mark, Simon and Shari. |