[Several fans of Richter - does my personal involvement distort my own impression that the music world, especially music-lovers, have meanwhile come around to regarding him as the preëminent pianist of his time? - have for years urged me to make generally available again the story of his reunion with his mother the summer of 1961 after a separation of almost twenty years, which had led to an almost total lack of contact during that time.  That reunion provided the answer to the question I cited during my previous posting here about Richter.  A few years after the week this article depicts, my unique niche in Richter's personal life brought me, out of a clear sky, probably the most fascinating single assignment during all my decades of journalism, which began fifty-nine years ago when Harper's Magazine published the first article I ever wrote, about a brilliant young up-and-coming musician name of L. Bernstein: the German magazine stern sent me on a three-week tour together with Richter and Nina Dorliac to the three major European music festivals of Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Lucerne, and during those weeks we spent many, many hours together.  My primary literary agent in New York, Timothy Seldes (who took over the Russell & Volkening agency), by consensus one of the very finest of agents, who has done me numerous favors making me forever grateful to him - has done the opposite of encourage me to write at book-length about Richter, on the grounds - which I myself seriously doubt - that he has never become well enough known in the USA for Americans to take enough interest to buy a book about him.  If anyone reading this feels differently, and sufficiently interested to mediate between me and a possible publisher, naturally I'd appreciate that greatly.  So now here you have the extraordinary story of that intricate, far from untroubled mother-son relationship.  Incidentally, when High Fidelity carried this piece (as the longest article it had ever published), I realized I'd just written an exclusive chapter of exceptional importance in contemporary music history, so although the magazine automatically copyrighted every issue it published, in this instance I requested and received a personal copyright on what you can now read here, with an epilogue consisting of a few emendations from material that became known to me afterwards. It appeared in the October 1962 issue of High Fidelity under a title created not by me but the magazine's editor Roland Gelatt:]

A vignette of life in the mid-twentieth century – the reunion in a small south German town of a Soviet citizen named Sviatoslav Richter and the mother he had believed dead for nearly twenty years

Since Sviatoslav Richter, the celebrated Soviet pianist, never flies (“Why should anybody need to travel so fast?”), and since his train journeys from Moscow in almost any westerly direction take him through Berlin, where I live, I have seen something of him and his wife, the lyric soprano Nina Dorliac, fairly frequently.  We first met in Prague in 1956, got to know one another in Moscow in 1958, and have kept in regular touch ever since.  Our Berlin visits take place in their compartment on the Moscow Express, which tarries for almost an hour in the Ostbahnhof, in East Berlin.  There, or on the platform if the weather is clement, we swap gossip, news of mutual friends, goings-on in the Eastern and Western musical worlds, and future projects.

The Richters usually do not travel alone.  Following Soviet practice, they customarily are accompanied by a gentleman usually designated by other terms in the West but to whom the Richters refer as “the secretary”.  Contrary to the prevalent and somewhat leering Western impression, such escorts do not come from the ranks of Party hack or KGB bully-boys; rather the plum of foreign travel, especially westward, goes to a person of considerable position in the managerial side of Soviet music.  The precise nature of the secretary’s office remains somewhat obscure, but apparently the Minister of Culture, which accords its artists the solicitude bestowed upon Dresden figurines, reckons that if the stresses and shocks of an alien culture and environment become too trying or disorienting for the artistic temperament, the level-headed managerial type looking after it will know how and where to go out and find help.

By appointment, I went over to the Ostbahnhof the morning the Richters came through Berlin on their way to his first British tour, and after a Russian explosion of reunion greetings we settled down on the plush seats of their spacious compartment, the largest in the Soviet-made coach.  The compartment was crowded with vases of flowers, now slightly wilted, brought to the departing train in Moscow two nights before, and on one seat lay a Soviet edition of a Schubert sonata Richter had studied en route.  The secretary on this trip, Afanasi Ponomaryov – manager of the Leningrad Philharmonia (the umbrella name given Soviet cities’ musical organizations) and a long-time personal friend of the Richters – stuck his head in to say hello and shake hands, then returned to his own compartment, leaving the three of us free to talk without observation.  After we had caught up on the news of friends, the Richters paused and looked at each other with the transparent air of two people who know a pretty good secret and haven’t yet decided whether to let a third person in on it.

“Well stay in England now for several weeks,” said Richter, “and then we take the train to Romania via Vienna for a beach vacation on the Black Sea.”  They exchanged smiles again.  “But nobody knows – well, almost nobody – that before we left Moscow we received one-week visas for West Germany.  After London, we’re going to take the Orient Express from Paris, but get off in Stuttgart. and from there”, he was beaming now, “we’re going to spend a few days with my mother.”

Although none of us mentioned it, I think all three of us thought back upon a conversation in their Moscow living room three years earlier, when I had asked Richter about his parents and he had replied, soberly and emphatically, “They are both dead.”

I must here interject the reason why the Richters included me in their secret that morning in East Berlin.  Three years earlier, after Richter had told me that, without qualification, I happened to hear of a West Berlin lady who had received from West Germany a letter from a certain Frau Richter, who invoked mutual friends and identified herself as “the mother of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter”.  The writer of the letter asked the lady in West Berlin whether she could possibly send her some of the Richter records she had heard one could buy in Berlin’s Soviet sector.  At the time I heard that, I asked whether anyone had tried to see this Frau Richter personally, and my informant told that one person had, but that she had denied being more than distantly related to the pianist.  I noted the town, which was in the Stuttgart area.

Some months later, when I was travelling in that vicinity, I drove over.  I found the address, a two-story former private house which had been divided into four apartments.  The house faces a large park with beautifully tended lawns, trees, and flowers, and at one side of the building runs a brook shaded by beech trees.  By one doorbell was the name “Prof. Richter”.  This surprised me, for I had heard no rumors at all about the father’s still being alive.

After I rang, I heard a window directly over me open briefly and then close: I was being looked over.  Then the door buzzed, and I opened it.  Halfway down the stairs stood a short old gentleman in shirtsleeves with his hat on.  I started explaining who I was – I had my American passport in my hand ready to show him, if he cared to see it – but he suddenly turned and called excitedly up the stairs, Anni!  Anni! Der Paul Moor ist hier!“  Dumfounded, I saw an elderly grey-haired woman emerge from the apartment, wiping floury hands on her apron and with her eyes on fire.  I began my explanation again, but she too interrupted me and said with a smile, “Come in.  We know who you are.”

My mystification was cleared up when they told me that a niece in America had sent them the issue of High Fidelity for October 1958, which contained an article of mine about Richter – the first piece of any length about him to appear in the West.  His mother said, “Ever since seeing that, we’ve been praying something would bring us together with you.  We have had absolutely no contact with Slava since 1942, so even seeing someone who has actually seen him is for us a sensation.”

The modest two-room apartment was virtually a museum to Sviatoslav Richter.  The walls were covered with photographs of him, from childhood to manhood.  One showed him made up as Franz Liszt, whom he once portrayed in a Soviet film about the life of the composer Mikhail Glinka.  Colored drawings of the Richter houses in Zhitomir – his Ukrainian birthplace – and Odessa adorned the walls; one showed the corner in the Odessa house where he had slept.  One of the pictures of young Slava at about sixteen showed that in his youth, before his blond hair had begun to disappear, he had been really startlingly handsome.  There was a photograph of the famous Swedish coloratura Jenny Lind, a distant relative of Frau Richter’s, who told me her son was a mixture of Russian, German, Polish, Swedish, and Hungarian.  She showed me manuscripts of the first compositions for piano he had written as a child, deciphering for me his childish Russian longhand in the margins.

   “But we haven’t even offered you anything to drink!” cried Frau Richter.  She made tea and we sat down to talk.  In 1937, Slava had left Odessa to go to Moscow to study with Professor Heinrich Neuhaus, who today says that he turned to another pupil the first time Richter auditioned for him and whispered, “In my opinion he’s a musician of genius.”  When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Richter’s mother happened to be in Moscow visiting him, but she returned at once to her husband in Odessa.  Slava planned to follow, but then they received a telegram from him saying he would be detained for a while in Moscow.  “Then communications were cut off”, his mother said, while her husband stared at his hands.  “That was the last direct word between my son and me to the present day.”

Frau Richter paused for breath.  “Excuse me”, she said.  “I suffer from asthma.”  After perhaps a minute’s silence, she resumed.  “My husband was arrested, together with about six thousand others in Odessa alone who had German surnames.  It was an order from Beria” – the merciless, murderous fellow Georgian Stalin had placed in charge of the predecessor of the KGB, himself executed almost immediately after Stalin’s death in 1953.  “My husband had done nothing – nothing.  He was a musician, I was a musician, most of our forebears and relatives were either musicians or artists, and we had never been active politically at all.  The only thing they could accuse him of was that back in 1927 he had given music lessons at the German Consulate in Odessa.  But under Stalin and Beria that was enough for them to arrest him and imprison him.”  She looked out the window and waited for breath to return; her husband stared at the floor.  “Then they killed him.”

Even without noticing my quizzical glance at the old gentleman sitting there with us, she went on to explain.  “Two years later I married his younger brother Sergei Dmitryevich”, she said, putting a hand on his and smiling fondly at him.  “Slava had been close to him, too, and had even had his first theory lessons from him.  When the Axis forces reached Odessa, it was predominantly Romanian troops that occupied the city.  When they retreated, we left with them.  We couldn’t take much, but I brought all the remembrances of Slava I could.  After Odessa we were in Romania, then Hungary, then Poland, then Germany.  My husband was offered a teaching position in Stuttgart, but by the time we got there the conservatory had been bombed out, so the refugee authorities sent us here temporarily.  We’ve been here ever since.  My husband gives music lessons.”  She indicated a small upright piano.  The furnishings were modest but neat.  I saw no telephone.

We talked a while longer.  Mostly, Frau Richter pumped me for every shred of news I could give her about Slava – or, as she occasionally called him, Svyetchik, her pet name for him, which means “Little Light”.  About some things she seemed quite well informed, and when I said so, she smiled and said that relatives in America sent them everything about Slava in the press there.  She asked when I’d see Slava again, and I had to say I had no idea; but I offered then and there, in 1958, to get a letter hand-carried to him as soon as possible.

Frau Richter’s letter was an innocuous short note, written in German (I was later to wonder at this, for I learned that Russian was the language they ordinarily spoke together) and containing no surnames or other giveaways; the salutation was “Mein über alles Geliebter!” and it closed with “Deine Dich liebende Anna“.  She also gave me three or four snapshots of herself and her second husband.  The letter bore no return address.

   Some months later, I gave the letter to a completely dependable Western friend of mine who was going to be in Moscow and asked her to put the letter into Richter’s mailbox with her own hand.  In due time, she wrote me from Copenhagen that she had done so.  Presumably, Richter actually received the letter, and thus contact with the parent he had believed dead was reëstablished after almost twenty years.  This was in 1959, a number of months before Richter made his first westward journey to Finland.

The first meeting between mother and son took place in the fall of 1960, when American relatives brought the old couple to New York for Richter’s début there.  Frau Richter went to the responsible impresario Sol Hurok – “I had to identify myself as thoroughly as if he’d been the Police” – but Hurok knew how nervous Richter was, so only after his first New York recital did the reunion take place, in Flushing, Long Island, at the home of American-naturalized relatives.  According to reliable reports, Mr. Belotserkovsky, the accompanying secretary for that tour, asked Richter at the time whether he would like to have his father rehabilitated.  With smoldering self-control, Richter is said to have replied, “How could anyone rehabilitate him when he wasn’t guilty?”  Before the American tour was over, Belotserkovsky extended to Frau Richter and her husband a personal invitation from Mme Furtseva, the Minister of Culture, to come to Moscow as her guests – for a visit or for good, as they liked – but the old couple said only that they would think about it.

Two years later, in the East Berlin railway station, as Richter and his wife excitedly announced their plans for the West German visit with the elder Frau Richter, I’m sure we were all thinking back on the events I have just described.  In any case, I found myself offering to meet the Richters in Stuttgart on their return from England, and to put my car and myself as chauffeur at their disposal if I wouldn’t be intruding.  Richter grinned: “No kanyetchna“, he exclaimed – “But of course!”

When the time came, I reached Stuttgart the night before the Richters’ expected arrival, and by prearrangement spent the evening with Constantin Metaxas, the Deutsche Grammophon official who had supervised Richter’s first Western-made recordings (in Warsaw, in 1959).  Mr. Metaxas had just himself come from London, and was full of details about Richter’s tour.  He was also in the best of spirits, for Richter had recorded a short recital for Deutsche Grammophon there which had come out very well.

At an ungodly early hour the next morning, Metaxas and his wife and I met the Orient Express from Paris.  The party arrived on time with about twenty pieces of luggage, including a pasteboard box which contained, Nina Dorliac explained derisively, a top hat which Slava in London had decided he could not go on without.  With the same affectionate raillery, Richter exhibited a large, globular brown paper parcel, which he said contained a lampshade Nina was hand-carrying from London to Moscow via Paris, Stuttgart, Vienna, and Bucharest.  After joining the Richters in greeting us, Ponomaryov set about counting the luggage, his face becoming increasingly serious, while he muttered to himself in Russian.  Finally he turned to Nina, stricken, and announced that one piece was missing.  Richter heard this, but turned back unconcernedly to smile and resume his interrupted conversation with us; it was Nina who busied herself with the problem and ascertained which piece had gone astray.  “Of course”, she said, with momentary irritation.  “I remember exactly where you left it.”

“I left it?” said Richter, his eyes widening indignantly.

“Nitchevo“, said Nina soothingly.  “We can wire for it.”

With considerable difficulty, we got the six of us and all the luggage into the Metaxases’ Mercedes and my Citroën.  Richter elected to come with me because, I was surprised to hear, he had acquired a Citroën of his own in Moscow and wanted to compare notes with me.  “Pathé-Marconi sent it to me”, he mentioned offhandedly.  “They wanted to make a record from the tape of a recital I’d broadcast, so when they asked me what I wanted for the rights, I said a Citroën DS-19.”

Now, I fancy myself reasonably mechanically minded, but I recalled how I had had to readjust my driving habits and reflexes to the radical innovations of the DS-19.  Inasmuch as I also knew that Richter’s aptitude and self-reliance in mechanical matters are such that when his watch needs winding and setting, he hands it over to Nina, I asked guardedly whether having a Citroën in Moscow, so far away from an authorized garage, didn’t present something of a problem.  “Oh, no”, he said.  “The French ambassador has one, too, so whenever I have any problems, his chauffeur is terribly nice about helping.  Of course, there are little things that can’t be replaced there.  Nina has a list of them – you know, hubcaps and things like that – we must think to buy this week.  In fact we still have quite a long list of things to buy before we leave.”

As the lush landscape of the south German countryside flew past, Richter’s unconcerned attitude intrigued me.  Most people, if they consider themselves to have blood ties to Germany, tend to go into something of a seizure about die Heimat, native soil, and all that.  Yet here was a man named Richter, for the first time (discounting transit train journeys) in Germany, chatting away and glancing at the landscape as casually as if he had been a tourist in any country at all. I realized that I had unconsciously expected him to behave like a Heimkehrer, a homecomer; but he was not that at all – he was a Soviet citizen. and a visitor here, nothing more.  At one point he did lapse into a silence, but not a noticeably moody one, and after a minute or two of absorbing the scenery he put his hand on my shoulder, smiled, and, by way of explanation, spoke four words I was to hear many times during the next five days: “So many new impressions.”

We spoke only once about music during the drive, when the subject of dodecaphonism came up.  Richter said he admired Schönberg, but Webern less so, and did not know the post-Webernists at all.  (This past June, when Berg’s Lulu was staged at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, Richter was there in the front row on opening night, applauding for a full half-hour after the final curtain.)  He startled me by saying he had performed Aaron Copland’s Piano Quartet in Moscow.  “A very interesting composer”, he said.  “I hope to learn his Piano Fantasy, too.”  When I asked about Stravinsky, he said, “I know it’s an absolute disgrace, but I’ve never yet learned a single thing of his.”  Incidentally, Western audiences have still to make the acquaintance of Richter the chamber musician.  In Moscow he has recorded the Brahms and Franck quintets, and, with his old friend Rostropovich, Prokofiev’s cello sonata.  In Vienna this summer, Richter and Rostropovich completed a recording of the Beethoven cello sonatas for Philips.

Somewhere along the way the Metaxas car took a wrong turn, with the result that Richter and I arrived at our destination a good quarter-hour before the others.  I had, of course, no intention of intruding upon his moment of reunion in his mother’s home, but even at that moment he seemed to have qualms about leaving me sitting there alone, and his manner was apologetic and somewhat nervous as he got out and went diffidently into the house.  A neighbor from the same building, working over a flower bed, glanced up at Richter without interest as he passed by.  After perhaps ten minutes, a window in the Richter apartment opened, and Richter  stuck his head out and called to me to come up.  All three of them stood at the apartment door.  The faces of Slava’s mother and stepfather were transfigured, and although I was seeing them for only the second time, they embraced me with Russian vigor.  Frau Richter’s face was that of the prodigal returned.

Frau Richter led her son through the apartment and showed him the pictures she had rescued from their old home in Odessa.  The professor, his round face radiant under his fringe of white hair, stood nearby, chuckling to himself without let-up and almost dancing with delight.  The language was Russian, except for an occasional relapse into German by the professor.  Richter looked with faraway eyes at a sketch of the old house in Zhitomir, and another of his room in Odessa.  When his mother brought out the manuscripts of his first pieces for piano, he stared at them with concentration while the fingers of his right hand played them on the air and he shook his head in a daze of remembrance.  At one point a pet bird in the kitchen chirped.  Richter leaped up and bounded out of the room saying, “I want to see the bird!”  It was as if he were trying to absorb and assimilate the full atmosphere of his mother’s house in one mighty, sensuous gulp.

Softly, with an indulgent smile, Frau Richter said, “Why, he’s as happy as a little boy.”

Presently the Metaxas car arrived, and Richters wife was clasped to the family bosom with hearty Russian tenderness.  Frau Richter insisted we all stay for lunch, but we three interlopers left them and returned to our hotel, where we stayed except at such times as we were needed.  A couple of days later Ponomaryov and the Metaxases left, and Jacques Leiser, a Paris-Based representative of Britain’s EMI, arrived.  Leiser had arranged for tickets for Tannhäuser at the Bayreuth Festival, and we drove Nina, Slava, and his mother over to spend the night.  While we strolled about during the long intermissions traditional at Bayreuth, the only person to recognize Richter was a Czech musical official who knew him from Prague.  After the final curtain, Richter and Leiser tried to go backstage to thank Wieland Wagner, but a stubborn Bavarian doorman resisted all approaches with devastating finality.  I fell asleep that night musing over Wieland Wagner’s choice of language when he discovered whom his doorman had turned away.  The next day Leiser headed for Salzburg, and I took the three Richters back for the last evening of the visitors’ stay.  The return journey from Bayreuth was leisurely, as  opposed to the one going up, which the Russian concept of time had made precipitous and hectic.  Again I was curious to see whether Richter would experience one of those pseudo-atavistic fits about die Heimat to which so many descendants of Germans are prone.  Again he showed not the slightest indication that he identified himself at all with this land or its people.  We had lunch on an outdoor terrace just beneath the ancient buildings on the Burg, in Nuremberg, and that afternoon we stopped in the enchanting old town of Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber – both of them places calculated to arouse anyone’s latent sympathetic vibrations to deutsche Romantik; but for Richter these were merely a couple more of those “so many new impressions”.  He was simply, like me, another foreigner seeing the slights in quaint old Germany.

The time, understandably, had flown.  During those days with his mother, Richter seemed to divide his time between visiting with her and his stepfather and taking long, exploratory walks through the little town (pop. 63,000).  He seemed to be a man who had to have a certain amount of solitude, and when those moments came he would simply take off.  I occasionally saw Nina looking at a current newspaper, but despite high tensions in various political arenas that week – the Berlin wall went up the very night they boarded their afternoon train from Stuttgart! – Richter seemed totally indifferent to news of the world.  And as far as I was aware, he did not once sit down to practice.  This bore out what he had once told me about practicing only when he felt like it, sometimes going literally for months without touching the piano.

Except for the Bayreuth trip, I saw the Richters mostly at mealtimes, either when Frau Richter invited all of us to a real Russian meal at home or when one of us took them to a local restaurant.  In either case, Richter was likely not to be present whenever our groups came together, and inquiries almost invariably produced the reply that he had simply gone for a walk.  Usually he would meander along a few minutes later, wearing his new London clothes (a favorite costume was a blue suede jacket, knitted sport shirt, blue slacks, and blue sandals) and full of description of whichever new parts of the town he had discovered.  “So many new impressions!” he finished, with satisfaction.

Even before Richter’s visit, it had not remained unknown in the little town that the old refugee couple in the house by the brook had a son who was supposed to be pretty important in Moscow.  When Richter was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1961, the word spread round town, with the result that his mother became the target of some unfounded bumpkin abuse because of her “Communist son”.  The old professor was even anonymously informed on to the Ministry of Education, but the merest cursory investigation cleared the matter up.  During the Richters’ visit, word surely must have spread through the little town that there was a couple from Moscow at the hotel – after all, they had filled out hotel registration forms which called for their nationalities, passport numbers, and so on – but at no time during their visit did anyone except the parents’ most intimate friends show the slightest interest or even awareness of their presence.

Those friends individually came round briefly to shake Slava’s and Nina’s hands and bid them welcome, and on two occasions Richter’s parents played host and brought them together.  The first time was an afternoon gathering in the little flower-and-vegetable garden some distance away from their house, which Richter’s parents kept as a hobby and as a reason for working in the fresh air.  When we arrived, there was a Latvian woman, also a refugee, who had shucked her shoes and stockings, donned an old dress, and worked up quite a sweat with the hoe she was leaning on when we arrived; she looked almost as if she herself had grown out of the soil.  Frau Richter seemed a trifle concerned about the primitiveness of this first impression, for after introducing us she whispered: “Really a very cultivated person, and very well off, before.”  Professor Richter led Slava and Nina about the little plot, chuckling and pointing out “the Philosopher’s Walk” and other such conceits in the garden which he and his wife had tended with such obvious love and care.  When the few invited guests had arrived, tea was served on the outdoor table.

The other get-together, the only one of any size, was scheduled for the night after the Bayreuth performance, when the Richters’ closest friends in town and their children had been invited for beer and Wurst.  They were assembled outside when we got back from our day’s drive, and they seemed to be in a state of some concern.  Professor Richter ran to meet us, calling, “Svyetchik!  Svyetchik!  Two men from the Embassy are here!”

Our glances turned to where two nice-looking, well-dressed men were walking towards us from what I recognized as a Soviet automobile, a Volga.  Professor Richter, his manner even more agitated and his laughter more anxious than usual, introduced the two unexpected Russians.  As they talked to the Richter family, a friend of Frau Richter’s said to me quietly, “They came down from the Embassy in Bonn yesterday, and they seemed terribly surprised to find Slava and Nina not here.  They stayed overnight in Bad Cannstatt, after about a three-hour talk with Professor Richter, and came back this afternoon to wait.  Professor Richter was so worked up last night I sent my son over to spend the night with him.”

“They’re nice gentlemen”, the professor said, his smile and laughter still a bit forced.  “We didn’t talk politics, just music and my various hobbies – botany and so on.”

The local people were openly staring at the two visitors (a third one, the chauffeur, remained in the Volga) as if they had dropped from Mars, but the expressions of the spectators showed that none of them could follow the Russian conversation.  The visitors, who seemed personable enough and totally unaware of their gaping audience, said they just wanted to talk to Richter and his wife for only a few minutes.  When Richter said he would prefer to go to the hotel first to clean up and change, one of the men politely offered him the Volga and driver, but Richter with equal politeness declined and said they were with me.  The Richters and I drove the short distance to the hotel in silence.  When finally I asked whether they had expected this visit, they laconically replied, “No.”

A few minutes later, we drove back, again in silence.  The Richters’ guests had gone inside, and the Russian visitors were waiting on a bench in the park opposite.  As the Richters got out, Nina said to me, “You go on in.  We’ll be along as soon as we’ve had a little conversation with these gentlemen.”

Up in the apartment, Professor Richter asked nervously after Slava and Nina.  Frau Richter seemed much more collected.  “They seemed like nice men”, she said, as she readied things in the kitchen.  “Svyetchik and Nina should invite them in.”

When the Richters finally came in, only a few minutes later, they were alone.  The sudden silence of the guests made me realize that until that point they had been talking in tense undertones.  Nina seemed to sense that everyone was waiting to hear what had happened, and although she spoke casually and naturally, everybody hung on her words.  “It was really terribly nice of them”, she said.  “They knew at the Embassy that Mr. Ponomaryov could stay only one night and so wouldn’t be able to help us when we leave.  They came all the way down from Bonn yesterday just to ask whether we had everything we need, and whether they could be helpful.  We told them everything was in order – train tickets, sleepers, and so on – and now they’re on their way back to Bonn.  It really was very thoughtful of the Embassy.”  The silent guests exhaled and the stillness quickly gave way again to animated chatter.  Someone asked Richter whether the Bayreuth Tannhäuser had pleased him.  As he did repeatedly to the same question during the course of the evening, he hesitated a second and then said, “Yes.  In general, yes.”

There were perhaps fifteen or twenty people present.  The old couple’s doctor was there with his wife, and one of Frau Richter’s closest friends, a widow who ran a cake shop, had brought her two sons, one of whom took piano lessons from Professor Richter.  The Latvian lady was there, this time shod and neatly dressed but still with something chthonic about her.  Many of those present spoke a German heavily colored by the local Swabian dialect.  They were not sophisticated people who would never dream of asking an artist of Richter’s stature to interrupt an evening of relaxation by playing, even on the finest of concert grands; they were, rather, uncomplicated, natural small-town people, most of whom had little or no formal musical cultivation but who were visibly almost bursting to hear Sviatoslav Richter have at his stepfather’s upright.  It was only a question of who would be the one to ask him.

Finally I noticed one of the ladies present call her teen-age son to her and whisper something to him.  He seemed to protest half-heartedly, but his mother remained firm.  Hesitantly, he approached Richter, stammered that he was a piano pupil of the professor’s, and asked whether Richter might play just one short piece, anything at all, for them.  Every pianist knows what torture it is to try to get a good performance out of anything less than a really responsive grand piano; also, there was Richter’s reputation for intractability.  He hesitated not one second in responding to this forthright request.  He got up, smiled at everyone present but especially at his mother, and said, “Aber natürlich!”

He began the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in D minor, opus 31, no. 2, and I was curious to see whether he would play the entire work.  He did.  When he finished there was that sort of applause produced by people self-conscious over clapping at close range in a small room.  No one dared ask Richter to play any more, but no one needed to.  When the enthusiasm had subsided before the awareness that he was going to play more, he turned around and launched into Chopin’s A-flat Ballade, which he followed with the C sharp minor Scherzo.  He finished with some Debussy – Voiles, and a performance of L’Isle joyeuse which, even on that little upright, gave one gooseflesh.  It was quite an experience, sitting at the end of the keyboard while he played.  He became, almost literally, a man possessed.  His eyes bulged, his breathing became heavy, and he seemed to have completely forgotten, through a kind of self-hypnosis, everything else on earth except the music and the piano before him.  Throughout the recital, his mother in the next room with the slightest of smiles on her face, and with Nina sitting beside her holding her hand, smiling and listening.

By the little town’s standard, it had become fairly late when Richter finished playing, and after a decent interval people began to leave.  From their expressions when they said goodbye to Richter, it was obvious that for them he was something almost incredible, but I wondered if they really were fully aware of who he was.  You would not have known it to look at him at that moment.  My musing was answered by one of the guests, a heavy-set man with an earnest manner.  “Herr Richter,” he said, holding the pianist’s huge hand in both of his, “Herr Richter, I know one of the concert managers in Stuttgart – not well, you know, but I do know him.  Any time you can come back, all you have to do is let me know and I’ll do everything I can to persuade him to organize a concert so you can play in Stuttgart.”  Richter thanked him cordially and patted his hand.

Next morning, the last of the visit, Nina went shopping on her own (it later turned out she had almost bought out the local five-&-ten) and Richter asked me to help him with his own purchases.  He was wearing a pair of short Lederhosen he had bought a few days before, a short-sleeved sport shirt, and his blue sandals from London; he looked youthful, even boyish, and more like anything else in the world than like a great pianist.  We tried in vain to get a hubcap and a few other Citroën accessories which Nuremberg had failed to yield, but we did get twenty tiny little inset drawer locks – “for a cabinet I’m having built in Moscow”, he explained.  “I designed it myself.  I’ve never in my life had a cabinet with enough drawers in it.”  We also bought, or rather ordered, an enormous quantity of heavy, bright green floor paint for the datcha outside Moscow which was then under construction.  (Nina told me later, “That’s where all our money goes – concerts, recordings, Lenin Prize, everything.”)  When the salesman said it would take some days to get it, Richter paid for it and said airily, “My mother will take care of sending it.”  After that we picked up a pastel drawing of his which he had brought his mother from Moscow and had left in a local shop for framing – an urban landscape, but not apparent of which city.  “It’s a little section of Moscow I especially love”, he said.  “Of course it’s not really exactly like that – I did this from memory – but that’s the way I think of it.”  He obviously thought of it with affection.  The delicately nuanced colors made me think of Sisley.

Although time had become short, he insisted he wanted to buy flowers for the five local ladies who had come to his mother’s the night before.  The shop we got referred to offered an unusually rich selection, and Richter, although it had become quite late, took his own time about deciding.  He would think back upon each individual lady, concentrate on her and the impression her overall personality had made upon him, and then buy accordingly.  Finally he felt satisfied with his purchases – they filled a huge carton almost the size of a coffin – and one inspiration especially pleased him: for the Latvian lady he had first seen sweaty and barefooted, he had bought a spray of delicate orchids.  Back at his mother’s house, we persuaded him with difficulty that he had too little time to make the five floral deliveries personally.  He earnestly asked his mother to explain to the five ladies that he had not intended that omission rudely.

After their last lunch together, the four Richters joined me at my hotel.  I had engaged a taxi for the baggage; we filled its luggage compartment, then piled bags inside almost to the ceiling.  The five of us set out in my car with the taxi behind us, Professor Richter nervously laughing and chattering uninterruptedly the entire way.  At one point, he suddenly said, “Svyetchik, does it still say in your passport that you’re a German?”  I knew the Soviet practice of naming each citizen’s ethnic origin (e.g., “Jew”) but it had never occurred to me that western European strains would also get identified like that.

Richter, a little cautiously, as if not sure what to expect, answered, “Ye-es.”

“Ah, that’s good!” the old man chuckled happily.  “That’s very good!  But the next time you come to Germany, you ought to have a German name – Helmut, maybe, or something like that.”

Richter smiled indulgently, but, exchanging a private glance with his wife, he said with decisiveness, “Sviatoslav is good enough for me.”  I thought of a prominent Soviet musician who some years earlier had told me, “Make no mistake about it, Slava Richter is a Russian through and through.  He could no more live away from Russia than Boris Pasternak could have.”  I also thought of Frau Richter’s reply a day or two earlier when I asked whether she had any inkling at all that her son might possibly one day not return to Moscow from abroad.  She said, “No.  Never.”  Then she added, “And I think he’s right.  Musicians are much more honored and esteemed there than here.”

There was a brief Russian flare-up when we arrived at the railroad station in Stuttgart and Nina suddenly realized she had left their precious address book in a drawer back at the hotel.  Richter thereupon vehemently began cataloguing all the items Nina had lost during all the tours they had made together, but Nina reminded him of enough forgetfulnesses of his own to make him subside.

While the driver of the chartered taxi went looking for porters, we retired to the station restaurant.  The waitress treated us rudely, but that had the advantage of providing something to joke about, for the party’s mood had become noticeably elegiac.  Frau Richter tried to impress it upon her son how much it meant for her to have news of him, but I wondered what effect that would have: Nina had told me with a laugh that in all the years she and Slava have known each other, he has sent her many telegrams but never once a letter or even a postcard.  Richter had definite plans for appearances in France, Italy, and Austria, but these still lay some distance in the future, and his parents – both of them with sick hearts and his mother with asthma as well – had both reached that estate where any future plans of any kind become a goal one can only hope for but not ever really count on.  Both of them – even the professor – had fallen silent, but they could not take their eyes off their Svyetchik, as if they were storing up his image for all time.

(Richter has not seen his mother again since that afternoon.  When he made his Viennese début this past June, his stepfather attended with Nina, but his mother had to stay in the hospital at home where she was recuperating from the latest of a series of heart attacks.)

The tea and pastry we had ordered finally came, but Richter lost interest in his halfway through and suddenly stood up and announced he was going to take a last stroll.  Even at that moment he found it impossible to be with people for more than a few minutes.  His wife took up the burden of conversation, but only halfheartedly.  Frau Richter was managing to smile, but to talk was too much for her.

When Richter came back from his walk, it was time to go onto the platform.  The taxi driver had marshalled all the luggage into the compartment and was now waiting to drive the old couple back home.  Richter and his wife boarded the train and reappeared at their compartment’s open window.  I made my farewells and retired several yards to where the taxi driver stood, leaving the four Richters together, but as the train began moving and they could no longer talk, I ran back to where they stood.  We all waved and blew kisses.  Frau Richter, smiling sadly, murmured, half to herself, “My dream is over.”

As the train slowly pulled out, Nina’s face showed that something had suddenly occurred to her.  She vanished for a moment, but returned, frantically calling through megaphone hands, soon enough for us still to hear her: Slava had left his top hat in the hotel.

Down on the street, after farewells, the old couple boarded the taxi and the driver took his seat at the wheel.  Through the open window, Frau Richter said, “Tomorrow I must go to the hotel and get Svyetchik’s hat and the address book and send them to him.”  Her smile was abstracted and seemed a little less sad.  “And then there will be the green floor paint for the datcha to attend to.”  This seemed to hearten her.  Frau Richter drew on her beige lace gloves and took her husband’s hand, and the car pulled away.

With only nominal changes, I have copied the above article almost exactly as it originally appeared, but today, almost forty years after publication, with the Soviet Union no longer even in existence, certain passages in it require a bit of comment and explanation.  A previous article of mine, also in High Fidelity, recounts in detail my first meeting with Slava and Nina, at the 1956 Prague Musical Spring festival, and our reunion in Moscow in early 1958.

People always spoke of the extremely gifted lyric soprano Nina Dorliac as Slava’s wife, but after his death claims appeared to the effect that they never in fact married.  (Most recently I have heard that after Slava’s death – conceivably for legal reasons in connection with his estate – a wedding ceremony took place posthumously.)  The more time passed, the more generally it also became known that Slava in fact preferred not women but men, with Nina fully aware of that and seeming, as far as I could detect, to have no particular problem with it.  A handsome young Austrian lover of Slava’s, whose relationship extended over a considerable period of time, himself told me of a visit he had spent in Moscow at their invitation, living in the National Hotel, at that time Moscow’s most desirable, and a hotel where one obtained accommodations only through influence of the kind such prominent citizens as Slava and Nina could muster.  I myself had personal occasion to observe this trio more than once, in more than one country, and Nina showed every indication of genuine affection for Slava’s inamorato – and vice versa.  Even after decades together, Slava and Nina addressed each other by the more formal of Russian’s second-person-singular pronouns; French friends have told me that in France “les ménages chics” did the same, addressing each other not as tu but vous.  Slava and the lover I mention addressed each other as Du.  Slava also spoke with him over the telephone – something he did only with Nina and almost no one else on earth, ever.

Today one has difficulty realizing or reconstructing the east-west division of Europe, in fact the entire world, at the time when I found Slava’s mother in the town of Schwäbisch-Gmünd – thirty-five miles from Stuttgart, with a population of about 63,000.  Her having wound up in not even East but West Germany after World War II could hardly have made Slava’s predicament vis-à-vis the KGB less difficult, for during the Cold War the Soviet government regarded the USA as its primary enemy but with West Germany close behind.  In addition, from the Soviet standpoint, Slava’s mother and her second husband had forsaken the embattled anti-fascist motherland, gratuitously attacked by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, in company with Hitler’s contemporaneous Romanian fellow fascists.  To put that deceptively simple fact into perspective, one must know that when Soviet soldiers taken prisoner by German forces during World War II returned to that motherland, Stalin rewarded hordes of them with summary execution on the grounds of contact with the enemy.

At the time this first article appeared, I dared not reveal the fact that none other than Heinrich Neuhaus had acted as courier when I gave him Frau Richter’s letter in Warsaw to take to Slava in Moscow.  I forget the exact year, but not long after my first visit to Schwäbisch Gmünd, the end of the 1950s or beginning of the 1960s, a Time assignment took me to Warsaw to cover the Chopin Competition, where the original announcement of the jurors had included Neuhaus, but followed by an announcement that he would not come after all.  Less than an hour after I checked into Warsaw’s Hotel Bristol (once the personal property of Poland’s great pianist Ignace Paderewski), I could scarcely believe it when I ran into Neuhaus, and I told him urgently I had something to discuss with him, concerning his beloved Slava, so we met for dinner and spent the entire evening together.  Getting Frau Richter’s letter from my desk in Berlin to Warsaw by air freight – mere airmail in those censor-ridden times would never have worked – took a great deal of telephoning to more than one person in West Berlin, but it worked: just before Neuhaus had to leave Warsaw for Moscow, the letter did arrive and I immediately consigned it into his hands.  During our long evening together, when I asked him how much of Slava’s family story he had already known, he said he had known most of it, except for the important fact of his mother’s actual eventual location.

I owe my discovery of Slava’s mother in Schwäbisch Gmünd to one almost incredible coincidence plus a bit of independent detective work on my own part.  I ended that earlier High Fidelity article by mentioning a West Berliner named Rolf Drescher, who maintained contact throughout eastern Europe on behalf of the Hamburg affiliate of Steinway & Sons, and who left Slava’s and Nina’s apartment with me that day.  Rolf and I subsequently became close friends, but already on that first day, once we had left together, he told me about “a Frau Braun” who had received that letter from the Frau Richter down in Schwäbisch Gmünd – the astronomically improbable coincidence that set my feet on their first step towards finding Slava’s mother.  Even today my memory has retained the address: Stadtgarten 2.

I know for a fact that to me Frau Richter identified her second husband as the younger brother of her first husband, whom she claimed to know had died as a result of a sweeping edict from Stalin’s secret-police hatchetman Lavrenti Beria.  Since then other sources have called him not a brother but a cousin.  I mention this discrepancy purely in the interest of eventual accuracy.

I had met and spoken briefly with Slava’s great teacher Heinrich Neuhaus – himself a pupil of the legendary Viennese pianist Theodor Leschetizky and a polyglot intellectual with a riveting personal story of his own, intimately involving the Nobel laureate poet and novelist Boris Pasternak – but during the ensuing years I got to know him and his Swiss-born violinist wife Sylvia much better.  Among numerous other things of interest, Neuhaus told me – with a rueful smile – that when his book about the art of playing the piano had appeared, it had not exactly pleased his next-greatest pupil, Emil Gilels, to find in it far more mentions of Richter than of him.  Neuhaus and I spoke German together, and I can quote verbatim his own recollection of what he remarked to his assistant after Slava’s initial audition for him: “Ich glaube, er ist ein bisschen genial” – from Neuhaus, praise of a most extraordinary nature.

Not even today have I ever heard the reason why Slava, already on the staff of the Odessa Opera as a rehearsal pianist and assistant conductor, decided – at an exceptionally late age – to take the giant step of auditioning at the Moscow Conservatory.  He himself would tell me only that “something had happened” at the Odessa company; his mother would say only that he felt “ill-treated” there, with the implication that his superiors had passed him over for some advancement or reward he felt he had deserved but failed to get.  In view of the private life Slava as a Soviet citizen had to keep so hermetically secret throughout his life, in connection with a sweeping homophobic purge at the Moscow Conservatory not long after the 1958 inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition (which sent one top laureate in that event to prison and totally destroyed his brilliantly promising career), one cannot eliminate at least the possibility that Slava himself suddenly found it prudent to quit provincial Odessa for the more metropolitan atmosphere of the much larger metropolitan capital.  Such a move to Moscow from Odessa – or any other Soviet location – entailed complications unimaginable elsewhere, for no one could move to the frightfully over-crowded capital without express official permission from the responsible authorities.

At the time of our rendezvous in Schwäbisch Gmünd, I still had only the slightest impression of the true situation with shortages of every conceivable kind in the Soviet Union, which explained Nina’s and Slava’s lengthy shopping list for things westerners took for granted but which the USSR simply didn’t have.  Two subsequent personal experiences will provide typical examples of what beset even such comparatively pampered prominent Soviet citizens.  Even after the dawning of the Gorbachov era, my discovery after arriving in Leningrad that I had an inadequate supply of underwear with me led to a tour, guided by my interpreter hired by the Ministry of Culture, of every possible local source, by the end of which we had found – nothing.  Even some years after that, when I asked a California-bound Moscow gynecologist whether he could bring me a few glasses of the proper size to fit those typically Russian tea-glass holders, he did find some, but gave me a detailed account of having had to go from pillar to post all over the Soviet capital before he found them.  That sort of constant annoyance figured as part and parcel of Slava’s and Nina’s daily existence within the USSR.

Slava’s gift of a Citroën DS-19 from Pathé-Marconi typified the sort of grey-market arrangements conducted by eager western recording firms in order to land top Soviet artists.  Naturally the Ministry of Culture had final say, about everything, but western recording executives of course realized that the personal wishes of the artists involved might well have an important influence upon the Ministry’s decisions, so they openly courted their favor with such spontaneous gestures of sheer personal affection as a brand-new automobile.  (One thinks of Dorothy Parker’s “one perfect limousine”….)  Constantin Metaxas told me that on another occasion a western firm had given such a bauble to David Oistrakh.  The great violinist had surprised his benefactor by asking for not a western car but a soviet middle-class Volga, on the pragmatic grounds that the export model he would get would run better than what he could get at home, and that repairs would not necessitate such necessities as Richter’s informal arrangement with Moscow’s French Ambassador.

Naturally the KGB had known all along that Slava’s mother had gone to the west, probably even her exact eventual location – and that fact of course explained Moscow’s years of refusal to let him travel anywhere beyond the boundaries of the USSR and its allies.  (He did make at least one trip to China – by train, of course.)  Two of the top-echelon Soviet musicians who participated have told me, independent of each other, how four or five prominent Soviet musician friends of Slava’s, who had had permission to make western tours, banded together to present the Minister of Culture herself with the case for finally relaxing that ban, arguing that the longer she delayed it, the greater the eventual embarrassment for the Soviet Union, since everywhere they travelled in the west they found themselves constantly confronted with the question “Why can’t we hear Richter?”  My usually reliable memory recalls the members of that group as Emil Gilels, Kiril Kondrashin, David Oistrakh, and Mstislav Rostropovich.  Under that pressure, Mme Furtseva and her Party associates made a canny decision: as a test case, he could play a few recitals in neighboring Finland – the only nominally western country that wouldn’t dare grant him asylum if he asked for it.  He didn’t, he caught the train back to Moscow on schedule – where wily old Sol Hurok waited, open fountain pen in hand, to sign him up for his first U.S. tour, which followed almost immediately.

   Only several years later – at the start of that wonderful trip I made together with Slava and Nina to the festivals of Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Lucerne – did I come to realize the greatest single flaw in my original article as it went into print.  During that week we all spent together in Schwäbisch Gmünd, I couldn’t help noticing that old Prof. Richter’s incessant chattering got on Slava’s nerves and propelled him on one after another of that vast number of sudden walks he took – but frankly, his chatter got on everybody’s nerves, except possibly his wife’s.  The old man obviously adored Slava – but only in Salzburg did it finally come out into the open that Slava could not abide him, and had exercised all the forbearance at his command to put a good face on things during that week in Schwäbisch Gmünd, entirely for the benefit of his mother’s feelings.

Less than an hour before Slava and Nina boarded their train from Stuttgart on that August 12th, 1961, when he and I had our little huddle in the station restaurant to discuss whether or not I might indeed publish Slava’s entire story, he puzzled me with the only request he made of me after giving me the permission I had waited for so long and eagerly: “Please do not write about this week with sentiment – for there is none.”  Today I realize that I projected my own feelings into that situation: a sizable leaven of spontaneous sentiment simply had to punctuate such a delayed reunion between a famous son and his adoring mother.  Only much later did I learn a few important peripherals about Slava’s relationship to his step-father.

Nina herself confided to me that when my finding Frau Richter in Schwäbisch Gmünd had indirectly brought Slava details of his mother’s remarriage, he spontaneously ejaculated, with indignation, “So she did marry him!”

Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed the title A la recherche des temps perdus, from the French translation of the Shakespeare sonnet that begins

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past….

The effects of my own kind of madeleine this weekend confiscated my day when a friend over in exotic Albuquerque asked me a casual question about the great pianist William Kapell, whom I knew only briefly but fairly closely the year his plane bringing him back from his first tour of Australia crashed into the side of Mount San Bruno mere seconds before its scheduled landing at San Francisco airport in October 1953.

Willy and I had met only that summer at the fourth of what had become an annual international music festival focussed upon the greatest of all cellists and the No. 1 figurehead of his beloved Catalonian nation – musically a world-class event that brought music-lovers from all over the world to its preposterously improbable (and, for creature comforts, impossible) location, little Prades in France’s southwestern-most département of Pyrénées-Orientales; I’ll forever remember the Route Nationale’s highway signs as one entered the village, proclaiming its population as 4,222.  (Record labels identify the uniquely great cellist who wound up in exile there as Pablo Casals, but he himself preferred his Catalonian name, Pau.)  After Hitler’s and Mussolini’s like-minded side-kick fascist general Francisco Franco had overthrown Spain’s legally elected first democratic government, with all-out support from his far more powerful, infinitely better equipped buddies in Rome and Berlin – for instance the unprovoked bombing to smithereens of the Basque town of Guernica, which Casals’ fellow Catalan Pablo Picasso eventually turned into a permanent symbol of their treacherous villainy – Casals fled his seaside home outside Barcelona in fear of his life: Franco’s equally fascistic fellow General Quiepo de Llano had broadcast his intention, if he could capture Casals, to cut off his hands.

I attended three of those Prades festivals, the inaugural one in 1950 (the bicentennial of J. S. Bach’s death), when the Russian-born violinist Alexander Schneider, who had long exerted himself, without the least success, to persuade Casals to return to concertizing, turned around by suggesting that if Casals wouldn’t come back to the world at large, how would he feel if at least part of the world came to him? 

Thus came into existence possibly the most wildly improbable major festival in all musical history.  I then lived in New York, but as soon as I heard that a local travel agency (run by a music-loving Jewish refugee from Germany) had chartered an entire Air France flight and offered seats at an irresistibly tempting price, I swiftly rounded up enough piddling little assignments (most importantly from the monthly magazine Theatre Arts) to make it possible for me to go.  (That charter deal, incidentally, permitted a return flight from Paris to New York at any time within the following year.  Arriving back up in Paris after the festival, I learned that Moscow-dominated North Korea had just invaded South Korea, launching what Washington euphemistically called the Korean “conflict” that had all the world wondering whether World War III had just begun.  I swallowed hard over my decision, but my early preference for the European way of life in favor of what I’d come to consider its over-estimated American equivalent had already taken such a grip on me that I cashed in my return ticket on Air France, and remained in my grungy little walk-up room in the more than modest Hôtel de Londres (at 3, rue Bonaparte, only two doors south of the Seine – long since converted into luxury apartments sold at astronomical prices).  Thus began my enthusiastic expatriation half a century plus seven years ago – and it really all began with Pau Casals.

Sasha Schneider, naturally with Casals’ approval, had hand-picked that festival’s soloists, and they included two particular favorites of Schneider’s, the great violinist Isaac Stern, already established worldwide as one of his age’s greatest, and the born American pianist Eugene Istomin, whom Stern persuaded Schneider to engage in spite of his tender age at that time: twenty-four.  That summer also brought the beginning of two lifelong friendships for me, especially with Istomin. 

In more ways than one, that Prades festival also changed my own life.  Like every American tourist, I’d arrived for my first European visit with a camera – but unlike most, when I returned a year later I’d equipped myself with two cameras, and by then I aspired to more than merely snapshot mementoes.  Back in Prades for the second time in 1953, I attempted the first real photoreportage of my life, irresistibly tempted by the fact that Istomin and Casals’ American pupil Madeline Foley had succeeded in assembling a star-studded orchestra so Casals, then 77, could once again conduct – an activity he’d made a major attraction in pre-war Barcelona with the symphony orchestra that bore his name.  By that time I’d settled in Munich, where Eugene and Madeline bombarded me with entreaties to come.  To my response that I would if Casals would give me special photographic consideration, Eugene wired back: CASALS D’ACCORD COME ALREADY – so of course I did.

That photographic coverage of mine, completed, attracted the attention of the Hungarian-born World War II star photographer for Life, Robert Capa, who with three equally distinguished colleagues – France’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, Polish-born David Seymour, and the English gentleman George Rodgers – had founded what swiftly became the world’s unrivalled premier photographic agency, Magnum Photos.  Bob Capa, who had a thoroughly deserved reputation for figuratively chewing up and spitting out aspiring neophyte photographers seeking Magnum’s sponsorship, struck me dumb not only by ponouncing my Prades coverage “more than sensitive” but also taking me into Magnum’s humblest of three categories, the “Correspondents”, for whom Magnum recognized no obligation but did try to help with whatever assignments came up in our respective geographical areas. 

Please do not expect me not to mention that several years ago, when Casals’ almost palatial seaside villa in San Salvador got turned into a museum, Eugene Istomin and his wife Marta (Casals’ much younger widow) invited me to fly down from Berlin as their guest because, in their opinion, I had in 1953 done the best of all photographic coverages of that almost uniquely great musician, which they gave lavish display at the inauguration of that new museum.  (As I mentioned in a previous bloggery occasioned here not long ago by the death of Mstislav Rostropovich, I last saw Slava there when he and Eugene teamed up for the Rachmaninoff sonata.)

With Casals once again conducting at that 1953 festival, it also featured a number of major soloists – to name only one at this moment, the California-born world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin. 

(En passant: I’d heard so many musicians pronounce his surname not MEN-you-in, as prevalent in his native country, but Me-NYOO-in, reflecting the Russian original Me-NOO-khin, so in Prades I seized the opportunity to get a horse’s-mouth answer.  As Menuhin himself told me, he himself compromised midway on Me-NYOO-in – with which I triumphantly one-upped a New York CBS Newsroom editor during a telephone feed from Berlin when he tried to “correct” my pronunciation .  See the unexpected bits of enlightenment you can pick up in this playpen…?) 

By the time of that 1953 festival, Istomin had long since virtually become an adopted son of Casals, who had no children of his own, and Eugene successfully made a strong pitch to engage for that festival a fellow American contemporary he held in especially high regard – and thus we finally come back now to Willy Kapell, who had flashed across the pianistic firmament less than a decade earlier with such virtuoso barn-burners as the colorful but rather meretricious piano concerto by Soviet Armenia’s Aram Khachaturian and the even flashier Rachmaninoff Third, technically one of the most horrendously demanding concertos ever written.  By the time Willy came to Prades that year, he’d wearied of that sort of pianistic tinsel and turned all the way around to such musical basics as Mozart.  In a concert of chamber music in Prades that summer he played a Mozart piano quartet – certainly no challenge whatever for his blazing technique, but I can still see and hear his earnestness when he described it to me as “a very difficult piece!” – musically for sure, and by that time Willy concentrated on the music per se.

Willy almost invariably played like an angel, but in personal appearance he most strongly evoked what Americans in those days called Dead-End kids, after Manhattan’s little lower east-side thugs assembled for the grittily naturalistic Broadway production Dead End.  That summer’s Prades soloists included the diminutive Hungarian-born Swiss soprano Maria Stader, and Istomin, originally scheduled to play piano for her, wiggled out as soon as he discovered he could sweet-talk Willy into taking that assignment over for him.  Willy happened to run into me immediately after his first meeting with Stader, and I can easily imagine her reaction when she viewed only the rough facial exterior of the young man from uncivilized America assigned to play Schubert and Schumann for her.  That infelicitous introduction had left Willy in a seething humor; he irately described Maria Stader to me as “a very arrogant girl!”  Once she got a rehearsal sample of Willy’s superb abilities at the keyboard, though, she of course completely melted, and from that point on all went swimmingly; I have a vague recollection of her even raising the possibility of further collaborations.  Willy told me he’d never before played for a singer, but he emerged from that recital (with Schumann’s great Frauenliebe und -Leben cycle its highpoint) figuratively smelling like a rose, in spite of a minuscule curve Stader inadvertently threw him in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, which forced him to cover it up right in the middle of the uninterrupted, almost uninterruptable rippling accompaniment figure in the right hand.

Istomin’s musical and filial adoration of Casals had moved him actually to maintain a year-round furnished apartment in Prades, occupying the ground floor of a sizable private home.  When Eugene and I had said goodbye at the inaugural 1950 festival, he’d lamented to me Casals’ predicament at that point – “stuck down here up in the Pyrenees, with nobody even to play the piano for him.  You just can’t let things like that happen to him!”  My 1953 return to Prades for my second sojourn found me financially absolutely on my uppers, but the spacious kitchen in Eugene’s apartment contained a narrow sort of sofa, with only a thin pad to sleep on and not quite but almost long enough for a really tired person, and Eugene kindly permitted me to crash there, starting with the arrival of the orchestra members, well before the festival itself began.  By placing a straight chair alongside the end where my feet protruded, and sleeping on my side without ever turning over, I somehow managed to survive that nightly ordeal.

Eugene, profligate as always, had also had Steinway’s Paris office ship a good medium-sized grand piano down to Prades, and that automatically turned his apartment into the only available real practice facility in town for all those big-shot soloists, who democratically scheduled their time at Eugene’s piano in shifts.  With that wretched sofa temporarily my home away from home, that situation brought me into at least fleeting contact with such stars not already mentioned here as the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, one of Istomin’s teachers at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.  Thus I got to know not only Willy Kapell but also his wife Anna Lou and their little girl, whose name I repress for reasons easily understood in retrospect.

In time, Anna Lou became a psychotherapist, but even then she already showed an affinity for what Germany’s 1960s revolutionary student movement called “anti-authoritarian” child-rearing; those young Germans (and possibly also Anna Lou) had become profoundly impressed by the book Summerhill, named after the unprecedentedly progressive school for “problem” children founded in England by A. S. Neill, a disciple of the early maverick Communist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, today best remembered for one of his books with the unforgettable title The Function of the Orgasm.  While Willy practised, Anna Lou and their rather less than dainty little daughter would bask in the sizable garden behind the house.  Other soloists who came to practise took violent exception to the fact that the little tad’s ultra-permissive toilet-training permitted her to drop her underwear and squat down to do what came naturally whenever and wherever the moment happened to find her, and some of them raised holy hell over what in that garden they’d unexpectedly stepped into – complaints that both Anna Lou and Willy took with placid parental equanimity.

To this day I have one auditory recollection from a personal incident of my own.  In accord with the custom of the country, I’d crashed one afternoon on that abominable sofa for what had become (and today remains) my daily siesta when unmistakable, aurally salacious sucking sounds waked me.  My eyes opened to behold, only a few yards away from me, Willy’s and Anna Lou’s young ‘un having at a tube of sweetened condensed milk she’d joyously discovered in that kitchen and uncapped, with the tubs sucked almost flat by the time she woke me. 

Madeline Foley told me about the little Kapell family’s introductory visit to the unpretentious gate-keeper’s lodge that had become Casals’ home in exile, when the proud parents had merely looked on when their little girl not only clambered all over Casals’ bed but also, evoking associations I need not mention, actually sat on the pillow he slept on.  Casals’ jaw tended to go prognathous whenever something displeased him, and Madeline told me she saw it jut farther and farther out the more his youngest guest continued her bed-top clambering. 

Casals’ less than enchanted septuagenarian reaction to that did not escape Willy’s attention.  Istomin gave me his own eye-witness account and expressed regret over Willy’s reaction, classifiable as a kind of minor-league culture shock; in essence he said that even the saintly musical giant Casals has his blemishes of character: “He doesn’t like children.”

Margo Shore, the San Francisco character who ran Magnum Photos’ Paris office and had tentatively taken me under her photographic wing a while before my pivotal talk with Capa in the bistrot of that office building’s ground floor, where all the Magnum gang hung out, had specifically requested me to shoot what she called a side-story on Kapell, so I made an unusual number of photographs of him, the best of them showing him rehearsing the second Beethoven concerto with Casals conducting.  They show Willy with a cigarette characteristically dangling from his lower lip even while playing.  Those several photographic sessions certainly furthered the spontaneous reciprocal friendship that developed between Willy and me.

I’ll forever treasure a nine-CD set his RCA Red Seal / BMG record-label brought out several years ago, covering his tragically truncated career from its recorded beginning in 1944 until his death only nine years later, and I enthusiastically recommend that to all who appreciate great pianism.  Let me take affectionate leave of Willy here with two quotations on the back of that handsome boxed set.

From Claudia Cassidy, the testy battle-axe who for years ruled Chicago’s musical as well as theatrical roost as its most influential and frequently most savage critic: “He was this smoldering, passionate young pianist, generous, lovable, deeply gentle at heart.  I loved his playing above all other playing.”

And from the composer Virgil Thomson, at that time writing regular music criticism for the Herald-Tribune, the only New York paper – long since disappeared – mentioned in the same breath with The New York Times: “He was a great musician and a great fighter.  He did not fight for himself or for just any music.  He fought to play well and to play the best music.  Also to take part in the creative life of his time.  And he was winning, would have gone on winning.”