Victor Hochhauser

'My great stroke of luck came when Stalin died.' - Victor Hochhauser

British music promoter Victor Hochhauser was born on 27 March 1923 at Košice in Czechoslovakia. His father was an industrialist, his grandfather and great-grandfather had been rabbis, and he was a direct descendent of Moses Schreiber (1762-1839), a leading Orthodox rabbi of European Jewry.

Victor moved with his family to the UK in 1939, as refugees from the Nazis. He began working as an impresario at the Royal Albert Hall in 1945. When Stalin died, Hochhauser was the first person to organise tours of the West by Soviet musicians, including David Oistrakh, Mstislav Rostropovich, Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky. Shostakovich stayed at Hochhauser's home.

Victor Hochhauser died in a London hospital on 21 March 2019, aged ninety-five.