Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

[For some time now, I've had a short book of very personal memoirs about the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on my mind, and my blogfather Perry Nelson, the sage and techno-wizard of Knoxville, Tennessee, has done his best to pound it into my head that I'd do the really hip thing if I'd get that ball rolling right here in this rumpus-room.  Don't ask me how come, for I myself really don't quite know, but anyway here you have what I'd had in mind as my projected book's first chapter - the first article ever to appear in the U.S.A. about a mysterious living pianistic legend I'd first met, briefly, at the 1956 Prague Spring music festival, got to know better two years later in Moscow, when he had me up to his and Nina Dorliac's apartment for the interview that produced this first article about Sviatoslav Richter to appear in the U.S.A. What really brought us much closer together, and won me a unique niche in Richter's life, came a year or so after that Moscow meeting when a combination of one almost incredible coincidence plus some detective work on my part enabled me to find his mother, living in West Germany, and restore contact between mother and son for the first time in about twenty years.

When that splendid, much lamented magazine High Fidelity published it in its October 1958 issue, the editor headed it with this: "Some critics have gone as far as to call this sensitive Muscovite the best pianist in the world, but for some reason the [Soviet] Ministry of Culture seems reluctant to let him perform in the West.  This article does not solve the mystery, but it presents to you the man.”  In reading this in 2007, don’t lose sight of the fact that it originally appeared in print almost half a century ago, so naturally some details have changed - but naturally I’ll correct those when the time comes.]

If you go to Moscow, list your occupation as anything but that of correspondent.  This, in Russian - pronounced karaspondyent - is a dirty word.  I had heard and met Sviatoslav Richter, one of the greatest living pianists, in Czechoslovakia, during the 1956 “Prague Spring” music festival, and when I got to Moscow for the first time earlier this year, nothing would have seemed more natural than to try to get into direct touch with him.  However, having willy-nilly, and not altogether accurately, got myself tagged as a karaspondyent upon my arrival, I was soon properly cowed about attempting such things, and I put in an official request to see Richter.  Even though I saw him sitting at the jury table every day during the piano half of the Tchaikovsky Competition, I forced myself to ignore human impulse and waited instead for my request to complete its leisurely way through channels.

Some weeks later I was still waiting - and might have been yet if I hadn’t run into an old acquaintance, George Georgescu, the Romanian conductor who used to do guest dates with the New York Philharmonic during Toscanini’s tenure.  To him I told the sad story of my fruitless requests to speak with Sviatoslav Richter.  “Un instant“, said Georgescu, dramatically extending his hand palm-forward in my direction, like a traffic cop: “Ne bougez pas!”  He disappeared into the jury room, to return un instant later with Richter in tow.  Richter gave me a warm greeting, and a prompt invitation: “Aber natürlich!  Could you come to my apartment?  When?”  And the next afternoon, I found myself entering the residence of Sviatoslav Richter.

He had drawn a map for me.  “The building isn’t yet entirely finished, you see.  Go through the hole in the fence and then to the second courtyard.  I live in apartment eighty-seven.”  He wrote it down, then screwed up his face in heavy concentration.  “No, apartment seventy-nine.  I think.”  Another pause.  I suggested perhaps it would be better if I phoned him.  “Yes!” he said, grabbing my hand in both his noticeably big ones and pumping it - but when I asked for his telephone number, he looked desolated: “Everyone in Moscow knows my telephone number except me.”  Then he beamed with huge relief and said, “Well, anyway, come to the building and take the lift up to the sixth floor.  If there’s no apartment seventy-nine, ring any doorbell and say ‘Richter’ and they’ll help you.  Da-svidanya!”

The place of Sviatoslav Richter in the international music world of today is unique.  Of all top pianists now before the public, he is certainly the one with the widest range: one moment he can melt your heart with the poetry of his Schubert, and the next knock the spots off some showy Liszt display piece.  Yet he has never once played in the West, and he is almost the last of the really tiptop Soviet artists of whom this can be said.  Richter is also one of the very few never yet sent to East Germany, which would of course entail playing in East Berlin, where Westerners might hear him - since movement between East and West Berlin is almost entirely unhindered.  (Incidentally, to speak of Soviet musicians’ being sent abroad is to employ the mot juste: the Ministry of Culture makes all such decisions.)

Some of Richter’s records are available abroad, but with few exceptions they do him only scant justice.  He hates to record, and Mr. Ilyin, the a & r man of the Soviet recording industry, told me that Richter cancels - usually at the last moment - far more recording sessions than he keeps.  (”When he recorded the Schumann concerto, he had a rehearsal run-through, then went straight through it twice for recording, and stopped.  That is to date the longest Richter recording session on record.”)  Yet his public performances in the U.S.S.R. and eastern Europe have made him the subject of a mass cult.  It is Emil Gilels who has the big name in the West, but I have yet to talk to a Russian, or an eastern European, who prefers Gilels to Richter.  And when Gilels himself made his American début with the Philadelphia Orchestra, he is reported to have told Eugene Ormandy then, with commendable modesty, “Wait till you hear Richter!”

It is not that Western impresarios have not tried to bring Richter to the West.  They have in fact all but tied themselves into double bow-knots, but have elicited from the Ministry of Culture only one polite “Perhaps” after another.  The semiofficial word around Moscow is that Richter’s health is not too robust, and for that reason he is hesitant to go too far away from Moscow, a city which he genuinely, passionately loves.  About the time I first heard this explanation, a young Chinese violinist in Moscow told me, “They went crazy over him in China.  He practiced fourteen hours a day and had his piano tuned four times a day.  They had to get the police out to handle the crowds at his concerts.”  Now, China is a good deal more distant from Moscow and its doctors than New York is, to make no mention of such closer points as London, or Paris, or Rome, or Berlin.

The map Richter had drawn for me proved, not surprisingly, to be less than accurate, so there was some stumbling and cursing through wheelbarrows and building materials in one wrong courtyard after another before I finally found myself in front of the padded, sound-treated door of Richter’s apartment.  I rang the bell.  He answered it himself, took my hand, and launched into a deluge of worried questions about my delay.  He was very formally dressed, and explained, “Please excuse my appearance.  You know Queen Elisabeth of Belgium is in Moscow” - his manner was almost apologetic over dropping a name in this fashion - “and I have to go direct from here to a reception at the Belgian Embassy.  Please, come sit down.”

We turned from the foyer into a sitting room which had a Mexican-style rug on the floor, a beautiful and obviously very valuable icon on the wall, hung like a painting, and handsome modern furniture and lamps which Richter said he had bought in Prague.  Adjoining the sitting room was a much larger salon, with two small grand pianos (one of them a German Steinway) and, on an easel, another beautiful old icon.  Richter sat on the edge of his chair, one foot underneath it as if poised for flight - never relaxed, jumping up at the slightest provocation, solicitous, even courtly.  He was speaking German - Russian-accented German, to be sure, but with a fluency and command which one can obtain only in early childhood, and then only through constant practice.

“Forgive me if I seem restless”, he said.  “I always am, to a certain extent, but with the Tchaikovsky Competition going on, mornings and evenings, too, it’s even worse.”  Suddenly confidential, he dropped his voice and put his hand on my arm.  “This Competition is torture for me - torture.  I had never sat on a jury before, and I never will again.  When that poor French girl last night made such a mess of that concerto, it made me almost physically ill.”  Day after day I had watched Richter enter and leave the Conservatory’s concert hall during the Competition; when he was conversing with anyone, his face was unusually mobile and animated, but at other times his eyes could fill with a limitless, bewildered melancholy.  Then he suddenly laughed, clapped his huge hands together, and said, “But that’s not what you came to talk about.”

I said that before I forgot it, I wanted to tell him something about Norman Shetler, a young American entrant in the Competition.  He had worshipped Richter’s record for years, and had come to Moscow in the hope of returning one day to study with him.  As a gift, he had brought Fischer-Dieskau’s recording of the Schumann Dichterliebe for Richter, but had remained too much in awe of him, especially since they had not formally met, to present it.  Richter was touched; from the expression on his extraordinarily sensitive face, I almost expected to see tears in his eyes.  “How kind”, he said.  “How very kind, how nice of him to think of me and do something so thoughtful.”  He looked at me with a quickened glance.  “But I must do something for him.  Tell me what I can do.”  I said all Norman even dreamed of at that moment was to be able to speak with him.  “Aber natürlich!  I shall be more than happy to!  Tell Mr. Shetler by all means to come talk with me.”

I told Richter that in spite of his never having played in America, the sale of his records there (”Not very many”, he said, looking down in deprecation) plus word of mouth had developed for him an already legendary reputation.  Then, bluntly, I put the important question: “And just what are your plans as far as playing in Western Europe or America is concerned?”

He smiled his big, boyish, Slavic smile, inclined his head, and said, “I must be invited.”

“But you have been!”

“Not that I’m aware.”

I told him I knew for a fact that not one but several Western managers had approached the Ministry of Culture about organizing tours for him.

He screwed up his face, shrugged, turned his hands palms up, and replied, “I leave all these business details entirely up to the Ministry - I myself understand nothing at all about business and such matters.”  He leaned forward on the edge of his chair, put the tips of his fingers together, and gave me a big new smile as if to indicate that the subject no longer interested him.

I asked him to tell me a bit about his early years.  He received this with a moue of distaste, and protested, “But my playing is the important thing.  Why don’t you just write about that?”  He did, however, give me at least a sketchy account of his youth.  He was born forty-three years ago in the town of Zhitomir, in the Ukraine, of Russian, German, Polish, and Swedish ancestry, “with just a tiny bit of Tatar.”  His father, a pianist and composer, had spent twenty years in Vienna and had studied at the Conservatory there, but he never taught his son Slava.  His mother, however, spotting his Wunderkind potential early and, doing everything to further it, took Slava to Odessa to study.  Prior to that, he had had hardly any musical instruction - “I just grew like grass.”  In Odessa, by the time he was sixteen, he was a rehearsal conductor at the Opera, where he fell in love with operatic repertory.  Because of a phenomenal sight-reading ability, he was much in demand as accompanist for vocalists, but the piano was only a sideline: he thought of his future in terms of conducting and composing.  At twenty-one, when he had for three years been the chief assistant conductor at the Odessa Opera, he realized a conductor’s career was not for him.

Many people had told Richter he had good hands for the piano (he can play tenths and, simultaneously, between the index and little fingers, octaves!), so he set out for Moscow to see Heinrich Neuhaus.  Professor Neuhaus had studied with Leschetizky in Vienna, and in Moscow had been in the circle of Rubinstein and Horowitz.  He had also taught Emil Gilels, who had been touring widely in the Soviet Union since he was about fifteen.  Richter was accepted by Heuhaus as a pupil (”Gilels is half a year younger than I am, but he was already famous when I was just starting lessons with Neuhaus”), and in due time came to love his new teacher as “a second father”.  Now in his seventies, Neuhaus - the Russians pronounce it Nay-gowz - still teaches a full schedule at the Moscow Conservatory.

Four years later it was through Neuhaus’s intervention that Richter was chosen to play the public premiere of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata.  “I’d never really liked his music until then, but I fell in love with this work.  I didn’t actually meet Prokofiev until he came to me after that performance.”  It was the beginning of a fast friendship that ended only with the composer’s death.  Richter played Prokofiev’s Fifth Concerto with the composer conducting.  He played the premieres also of the Seventh and Ninth Sonatas; the latter is dedicated to him.  Richter’s only return to the podium during his mature years occurred in February 1952, when he conducted and Mstislav Rostropovich performed the world premiere of Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra in Moscow.  (One fine record I acquired in Moscow offers Richter and Rostropovich in Prokofiev’s Cello sonata, opus 119.)

That same year, Richter broke a finger, and musical Russia almost went into collective mourning.  Richter himself regarded the incident fatalistically, and even greeted the occasion as grounds for a rest from what had grown into a schedule of up to 120 appearances a year.  A few months later, his finger good as new, he returned to concertizing and has been at it hard and heavy ever since, in the U.S.S.R., China, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania.  In view of the immensity of the U.S.S.R. (nine time-belts as compared with four in the United States), of the distances in Eastern Europe and Asia (Moscow to Vladivostok is farther than Moscow to New York), and of his harrowingly heavy schedule, it would probably have brought a smile to Richter’s face to see Time describe him earlier this year as ” . . . internationally, [the world's] least widely heard pianist”.  There is more than a grain of truth in Richter’s comment “There are many cities - big, important cities - right here in the Soviet Union where I’ve never yet played.  Why should I be so eager to go play in the West?”  Still. . . .  There certainly is a marked contrast between Richter and, say, the well travelled David Oistrakh.

“I have no working habits”, Richter said.  Sometimes I practise all day long, for days on end.  Other times, I may go for months without practice.  But please,” he said, with sudden urgency, “if you write that, make it clear for young pianists that I certainly don’t advocate that sort of thing.  It’s just that for me it’s natural.”

I asked him why he, almost alone among top Soviet performers, never taught.  He smiled helplessly and finally shrugged and said, “It’s just not my sort of thing.  Maybe I’m too egoistic - that’s probably it.  What I would like, though, would be to have a small group of young pianists of the highest caliber, who would come not as pupils but just as other musicians, so we could play four-hands, or two pianos, or chamber music, and learn from one another. But teaching in the usual sense - no.”

Richter was, characteristically, afraid of seeming immodest when I asked about the size of his repertoire.  At first he said he had thirty complete recital programs, but then he said, “No, say twenty-five.  Thirty might sound like bragging.”  As to how many concertos, he couldn’t even estimate.  He continued to speak of his accomplishments unpretentiously.  “The only really big work in piano literature which I’ve ever learned in its entirety is the Bach Well Tempered Clavier.  I don’t play the Fourth Beethoven Concerto, or the Fifth, or the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, or the Third Rachmaninoff Concerto, or even all the Chopin Etudes or Ballades or Scherzos.”  He has, however, performed and even recorded such offbeat works as the concertos of Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, and Les Djinns, by César Franck.  He loves to play chamber music, and at least once a year in Moscow he and his wife, the lyric soprano Nina Dorliac, give a joint recital.  I was surprised at Richter’s knowledge of Western contemporary music, for this is far from general in the Soviet Union.  “I played the Bartók Two-Piano Sonata, for instance, several years ago here with my friend Anatoli Vidyernyikov.  This autumn at the Warsaw International Festival of Contemporary Music I’ll do the Second Bartók Concerto, Hindemith’s Second Kammermusik, sixteen Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, the First Hindemith Sonata, and the Third Szymanowski.  Schubert and Liszt are the two composers to whom I feel the closest ties, but I also especially love Debussy and Ravel.  I don’t like to play them too often, though - they’re just too beautiful.”

He suddenly gazed out the window, his face radiant, his voice impassioned as he exclaimed with unaffected exaltation, “Oh, I find life really so full of beauty!  I love it all so!  If one can only find the necessary harmony, life can be so wonderful.  My painting - even though I know nothing about it and fool around with it only on weekends at our dacha in the country, it gives me such pleasure.  Or my little movie camera - I shot film after film these last weeks in Romania, but I must have done something wrong because all of it came out completely blank, but just seeing while I was shooting gave me so much joy!”

The doorbell rang and Richter returned with Rolf Drescher, of Hamburg and Berlin, who travels throughout Eastern Europe for Steinway & Sons.  He had with him an advance pressing of the Tchaikovsky First Concerto and the Prokofiev First, which Richter had recorded in Prague for the Czech firm Artia in collaboration with the Deutsche Grammophongesellschaft in West Germany.  “Please come to Berlin and record”, Herr Drescher said.  “DG has asked me to tell you you can have the Berlin Philharmonic or any other German orchestra you want.”  Richter smiled bashfully and hung his head.  “If you want a Soviet conductor, so you’ll feel more at home, all you have to do is name him.”  Richter twisted in embarrassment.  “Please, please come.”

Richter said only: “It all depends on the Ministry.”

Drescher dropped the subject, and we drank a quick cup of scalding, excellent coffee before Richter rushed off to the Belgian Embassy.  In the foyer of his apartment, I remarked a handsome Fernand Léger I had failed to notice before.  “O-ri-gi-nal”, said Richter admonitorily, his eyes wide, his voice proudly emphasizing each German syllable.

A few evenings later, during intermission at the Competition, I saw Richter again.  “I’ve been hunting you”, he said.  “I’ve decided to give a recital on Wednesday and the next night I’ll do the Schumann and the Brahms Second with Georgescu.  Would you like to come?”  His diffident tone made his query sound almost like a favor he was asking.  He pressed four tickets into my hand and disappeared towards the jury room.  I was all the more touched by his thoughtfulness when it subsequently transpired that these were his first public Moscow appearances in almost a year, and tickets were all but fought over.

His recital opened with Schubert’s great posthumous B flat Sonata.  There followed the Schumann Toccata, and the second half was all Prokofiev: the Cinderella Suite, four Visions fugitives, and the Seventh sonata (which, Richter mentioned later, he had learned in one week when he played the premiere in 1943).  I shall not here attempt any detailed account or assay.  Everything was right - everything.  His pianissimo was lovely, his fortissimo majestic.  The difficult and taxing finale of the sonata was as exciting as anything I had ever heard, with an unbelievable subtlety of buildup to the climax, and the crowd set up such a shout he finally came back and played it a second time, even more excitingly.  Two of his encores - a Liszt Valse oubliée and Debussy’s Les Cloches à travers les feuilles - were miniature marvels of style and poetry.  Sitting next to me was Van Cliburn, who wept unashamedly through the entire Schubert first movement.  Later during the evening, he turned to me and said with deliberation: “I really don’t think I’m in a daze or anything, but I honestly believe this is the greatest piano playing I’ve ever heard in my life.”  I fully concurred.

“And he’s such an endearing guy”, was what Concert Master Jacob Krachmalnick later said, in Stockholm after the Leningrad concert in which Richter had played the Prokofiev Fifth Concerto with the visiting Philadelphia Orchestra.  Eugene Ormandy added, “Either onstage or off, he shook the hand of every single member of the orchestra after the performance.  He came to the train to Moscow with us and when it began to pull out he said, ‘I don’t want to get off.  It’s so hard to leave you after all this!’  I spoke with the Minister of Culture, Mr. Mikhailov, and with one of his deputies, and told them I would like to bring Sviatoslav Richter to American under the Philadelphia Orchestra’s sponsorship.  I also wrote them letters to that effect.  This was the last thing I discussed with them this morning at the Moscow airport before coming to Stockholm, and they at least seemed to agree with me that he should come.”

The last time I myself saw Sviatoslav Richter was at a buffet supper given at the American Ambassador’s residence in Moscow in honor of Van Cliburn.  Richter excused himself early, and for characteristic reasons: “Georgescu returns to Bucharest tomorrow morning, and I must get up at five to go say goodbye to him at the airport.”  He took my hand in both of his.  “Auf Wiedersehen - auf ein baldiges Wiedersehen!”  He emphasized the word soon.  I returned his handclasp and said I hoped it would be soon, too.