A Farewell to the Last Legend of the Keyboard

Absolutes in the critical profession are thought to be foolhardy. And yet who would have complained last week, before his death on Friday, if Sviatoslav Richter were called the greatest living pianist? Will anybody object now if we mourn him as the last great legend in music?

Those of us who grew up in the postwar era heard many musicians we now considered that kind of legend. Of the older generation, there were Heifetz and Horowitz and Rubinstein. There were the great conductors: Stokowski and Szell, Mravinsky and Karajan, and maybe you would like to add a another favorite or two. We’ve also lost the legends from North America: Callas and Gould and Bernstein.

But Richter, who was 82 when he died of a heart attack in Moscow last week, is the last of that era. The last great Russian legend of his generation. And although there are many particularly rewarding pianists before the public, the last keyboard legend. Right now the only pianist who has that kind of cult status is the elusive Martha Argerich.

Richter’s playing was well-known through recording. But of all the great musicians of this century, he was one of the least well-known personally. He may not have cultivated mystery exactly, but he most certainly did not court publicity. He seemed to have an especially strong revulsion toward the press. He didn’t like the music business much either, and mostly stayed away from it. And, of course, he had to deal with all the restrictions the Soviets placed on performers.

A mystical aura arose around him. As a pianist he achieved a sense of painterly color (he was a real painter, as well) from the keyboard, especially when he played the German Romantics. A halo seemed to surround him and his instrument in Russian music, especially Scriabin, such a glow did he get from it. As for his Schubert--a good example would be the sonatas he recorded in 1979 as part of a large set of Philips recordings--he could produce a sense of mystic awe from the intensity of tone.

He lived and concertized in a manner that was utterly devoted to music. He was not heard outside Russia before the ‘60s, although his reputation was huge in the West thanks to his Melodiya recordings and also to reports of Western musicians--Van Cliburn was one--who heard him in Moscow. But his appearances in the West were mainly eccentric. He did give famous recitals in Carnegie Hall and other great theaters, but by 1970 he mostly restricted himself to playing in provincial venues, usually without announcement.

He felt that music should not be programmed years in advance but should be made on the spot. He started a chamber music festival in a barn in Tours, France. He was more likely to be found in a small church in Schleswig-Holstein or someplace outside Tokyo than in Paris or London. You needed inside information to hear him, and fans went to great lengths to obtain it.

I remember the huge commotion set off when rumors began about appearances in Pasadena around a dozen years ago. The Ambassador Auditorium worked hard to snare him and came close, but not close enough. A few years later, the Lincoln Center switchboard was jammed for days when an unconfirmed rumor of a recital was suggested in New York Newsday.

Richter actually never performed in the United States during the last 25 years. He didn’t like airplanes or ships and did most of his traveling in Europe, and even to Japan, by train. He also didn’t much like America.

“The only good things about America are the museums, the cocktails, the orchestras and the films,” he is reported to have said.

He was offended when, during a concert recital in 1970, with violinist David Oistrakh, protesters attempted to storm the stage of Carnegie Hall to draw attention to the plight of Soviet Jews. Richter was not Jewish, but Oistrakh was, and the pianist was deeply offended that the protesters did not understand the precarious position of Soviet artists, especially Jewish ones.

He was also offended by the lack of dignity of the protest, its interruption of great art for filthy politics. Richter was a formal man, to the point, it was said, that he and his wife always addressed each other with formal language. He held art on a similar pedestal. He disliked being even considered an interpreter, disliked attention drawn to him as a performer rather than to the composer. It was absolute faithfulness to the score that he attempted.

Still, Richter had a riveting musical personality. He had a rock-solid technique, and he could absolutely dazzle in the bravura works of Liszt or in the great percussive flourishes of Prokofiev (who wrote for him, as did Shostakovich). But it is not technical prowess (which is easily reproduced among the best of the young these days) that will take us back to Richter’s many recordings, especially the live ones.

Instead, we will return to Richter over and over for playing that manages to communicate the lack of compromise. Richter treated each piece--and that could be sharply etched Bach or something modern, it could be exalted Mozart or hugely dramatic Beethoven--as if it were all that mattered at that moment. That is why he was not so much an outsider as the ultimate insider. He didn’t take himself outside the real world, he took himself outside the artificial world of professional concert life to make music that really was part of the exalted way he insisted life be lived.