Vladimir Horowitz was hailed as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, yet he sometimes had to be physically pushed onto the stage by his management. Born in Kiev in 1903, he dreamed of being a composer until the Russian Revolution wiped out his family's wealth and forced him to tour the Soviet Union, playing two-hour recitals for payment in bread, butter, and chocolate. In 1925 he left for the West with foreign currency hidden in his shoes, and at his 1928 Carnegie Hall debut he famously broke away from conductor Thomas Beecham's sluggish tempo and hijacked Tchaikovsky's first concerto.

This episode examines the price of that virtuosity: his flat-fingered "cobra strike" technique, his rewriting of Mussorgsky and Chopin with the blessing of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev, his marriage to Wanda Toscanini, and the hidden life he led as a ga ...