Victor Hochhauser (27 March 1923 – 22 March 2019) was a British music promoter.

Early life

Hochhauser was born on 27 March 1923 in

Košice Košice is the largest city in eastern Slovakia. It is situated on the river Hornád at the eastern reaches of the Slovak Ore Mountains, near the border with Hungary. With a population of approximately 230,000, Košice is the second-largest cit ...

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

, the son of David Hochhauser, an industrialist. His grandfather and great-grandfather were rabbis. He was a direct descendant 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 a refugee from the Nazis.

Career

His career as an impresario started in 1945 at London's

Royal Albert Hall The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall on the northern edge of South Kensington, London, England. It has a seating capacity of 5,272. Since the hall's opening by Queen Victoria in 1871, the world's leading artists from many performance genres ...

. 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 David Fyodorovich Oistrakh (; – 24 October 1974) was a Soviet Russian violinist, List of violists, violist, and Conducting, conductor. He was also Professor at the Moscow Conservatory, People's Artist of the USSR (1953), and Laureate of the ...

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, and

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was a house guest. Hochhauser has said, "My great stroke of luck came when Stalin died". He and his wife Lilian were called "Britain's foremost independent promoters of classical music and ballet".

Honours

Hochhauser was appointed Commander of the

Order of the British Empire The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

in 1993. In June 2010, the Hochhausers were presented with the

Order of Friendship The Order of Friendship (, ') is a state decoration of the Russian Federation established by Boris Yeltsin by presidential decree 442 of 2 March 1994 to reward Russian and foreign nationals whose work, deeds and efforts have been aimed at ...

by Russia.

Personal life

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

in 2018. They married in 1949 and had four children, including the diplomat Mark Sofer. Hochhauser was a

vegetarian Vegetarianism is the practice of abstaining from the Eating, consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, seafood, insects as food, insects, and the flesh of any other animal). It may also include abstaining from eating all by-products of animal slau ...

."Victor Hochhauser Obituary"
thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 22 February 2023. Hochhauser died on 22 March 2019 in a London hospital.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hochhauser, Victor 1923 births 2019 deaths 20th-century British Jews Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Czechoslovak emigrants to the United Kingdom British impresarios People from Košice