During the late stages of the pianist’s life, Vladimir Horowitz’s publicity handlers worked overtime to portray him as “the last Romantic.” Horowitz was a supreme technician, a volcanic virtuoso at the keyboard, one of the greatest in history. But he wasn’t the last Romantic, nor did his brand of Romanticism venture very far beyond self-serving, blood-and-thunder heroics.
Sviatoslav Richter’s did. The great Ukrainian-born pianist, who died Aug. 1 at 82, projected an aura of solitude, of deep introspection, of continual emotional and intellectual striving in his performances and many recordings. It was the playing of a man who knew his Shakespeare and Renoir and world architecture. In another life it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine him as a wandering scholar, or perhaps even a monk. In essence he was a Romantic poet as much as he was a pianist. If Horowitz was Byron, Richter was Shelley.
The obituary headlines called Richter “acclaimed” and “a superstar” pianist. But acclaim and superstardom were thrust on him from the time of his American debut, in 1960, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The truth was this moody, sensitive, contemplative artist broke with the notion that a musician must make a determined effort to win over the public if he or she is to have a career.
If Richter never solicited approval from his audiences, the firm bond he forged with the international concert public was as noble as any, because it was based on musical projection, not personality projection.
Richter was at once the most selfless and most individual of pianists: selfless in his absolute commitment to the content and ethos of the music, individual in the intellectual curiosity and imagination that shaped his interpretations.
With his stocky figure, thick neck and enormous hands, he could be a prepossessing figure on the platform. He came out on stage, his face grim, his body tense, barely looking at the audience, eager to get down to serious business at the keyboard. And he planned it so that the recitals late in his career were bathed in darkness save for the light of a single floor lamp — a practice calculated to call attention to the music and nothing else.
This kind of self-effacement was typical of the way he moved through the world, first as a conventionally marketed virtuoso and later as a free musical spirit who performed whenever and wherever he felt like it, often in tiny European churches and barns far removed from the glare of the global concert circuit.
Except perhaps for Franz Liszt, there never was a pianist as protean as Richter. With his sovereign sense of style, he commanded a repertoire larger than any keyboard artist of this century, indeed of all time. It included every important composer of piano music, a vast span of works extending chronologically from Handel and Bach to the Second Viennese School and his composer colleagues Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten. The only music that apparently never interested him was that of the postwar avant-garde.
Younger pianists of the postwar generation sought to imitate Horowitz, and the more gifted of them could even put up a reasonable facsimile of Horowitzian effects. None, but none, could imitate Richter, for what he created at the keyboard was indelibly his own and never the same from performance to performance. There was often an element of surprise to his playing, as if he enjoyed catching himself off guard as much as catching his listeners.
Nowhere is the contrast between Richter’s and Horowitz’s approaches more apparent than in the bravura quality of their playing. When Richter presented, say, Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” you felt the music was not so much being played as composed, right in front of you. The pianism was not geared for effect, nor did it trade in superficial excitement, as did Horowitz’s performances of this piece.
This style harkens back to Richter’s having been largely self-taught. Music, rather than the piano, was his first “instrument.” The first serious lessons he had were with the eminent pianist-pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory when Richter was already in his 20s. Before that, he conducted and worked as a repetiteur at the opera house in Odessa, where he learned all of Wagner’s operas by heart. Richter was perhaps the most notable conductor this century ever to lay down his baton to become a pianist.
For all the staggering breadth of his repertoire, there were strange gaps. Richter inexplicably avoided playing several of the big standard concertos, such as the Beethoven Fourth and “Emperor,” the Brahms First, the Prokofiev Third and the Rachmaninov Third. On the other hand, he played a lot of music most critics would consider lightweight. Piano miniatures like the Grieg Lyric Pieces were for him tiny gems of art to be scrutinized for their glints of hidden greatness.
He also played Bach with an aristocratic grandeur that made no apology for its having been achieved on the modern grand piano, as opposed to the harpsichord or fortepiano. He played Schumann with a full-blooded command that recognized the music’s wild abandon as well as its deep lyric tenderness. He played Liszt with a phenomenal virtuosity placed entirely at the service of the music. He played French music with an elegance and exquisite sense of color not heard since the heyday of Walter Gieseking. He was equally at home as a chamber music pianist and Lieder collaborator. He was a specialist in non-specialization.
As Richter grew older, his playing became less ecstatic, more objective, more contained, more severe, more concerned with musical structure than tone color. He became more a strict constructionist. The virtuosity was still palpable, still thrilling, but its greater inwardness forced listeners to adjust their aural fine-tuning.
Many musicians — think of conductor Arturo Toscanini — got faster as they got older. Richter generally got slower. It was as if, late in life, the very idea of music taking place in linear time bored him, so he made movement cyclical. This was especially true of his Schubert. For Richter, he was not a joyful composer. While most pianists take anywhere from 16 to 20 minutes over the first movement of Schubert’s G Major Sonata, D.894, Richter took almost 27, a glacial pace that allowed him to project inner voices with the utmost clarity and serenity. It was as if he were telling us this introspective music needs an excess of time to express its heartbreaking pain and loneliness.
He was not, nor did he ever try to be, infallible. From all reports, he could be inconsistent, unpredictable — wild one moment, cocooned in hypersensitivity the next. But even when his nervous intensity or extremes of tempo and dynamics made you uneasy, you understood the musical reasons behind the risks he took.
Richter, like the vast majority of musicians, was apolitical, and his relationship with the Soviet authorities was complicated as a result. Although he was no dissident, he clearly shunned the Soviet bureaucracy whose agents dogged him on concert tours outside Russia. Conscripted to play at Joseph Stalin’s funeral in 1953, he chose the longest and most concentrated prelude and fugue from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” The performance went on and on. Finally soldiers had to remove him from the piano bench and haul him outside. For an interminable moment, Richter feared he would be shot.
Yet, unlike other Soviet artists of the 1960s, he never wanted to leave his country and never defected. “If I go, who will be left?” he remarked, echoing the sentiments of conductor Wilhelm Furtwaengler when asked why he didn’t flee Hitler’s Germany when he had the chance. Moscow remained Richter’s home for most of his life. He hated plane travel and ocean crossings and disliked many aspects of life in the United States. “The only good things about America,” he once remarked, “are the museums, the cocktails, the orchestras and the films.”
That helps to explain why he never appeared here again after a 1970 tour. Our loss.
Still, we can take consolation from his vast discography, most of it derived from live performances. It will increase considerably as record companies rush to pay tribute in the months ahead. The pity is that the variable sound quality of most of Richter’s compact discs does scant justice to the infinite colorings of piano tone he was able to produce.
For all that, Richter will be remembered for being one of the last truly great musicians of this century to exemplify the writer Theodore E. Munger’s definition of music: “Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.”
