A Recital of a Legend’s Life

Sviatoslav Richter--prodigious of technique and repertory, uncompromising in communicating a unique musical vision--is widely regarded as the most complete pianist of the century. Personally aloof and artistically idiosyncratic, however, he is in danger of becoming--two years after his death at age 82--one of those legends about whom the only thing truly known is that he is a legend.

Now a moving new film biography, “Richter: The Enigma,” can fill in the blanks. Reminding us of the incandescent performances on which the legend is based and revealing much about the elusive and troubled man behind them, the 1998 documentary, written and directed by Bruno Monsaingeon, has its West Coast premiere tonight at the San Diego Museum of Art, just two days after its U.S. premiere at Lincoln Center in New York. First shown in Paris in September, the film has already won a pocketful of awards and is available on video in Europe.

“That the film is coming to North America is an enormous pleasure,” says Monsaingeon, who will speak and take questions at the screening. “I am very curious what the reaction will be. When Richter first came to America in 1960, the resonance of that concert tour was just phenomenal. There are still young Americans, I’m sure, who would travel anywhere to hear him if they could. But it is so typical, to be a gigantic hero one day and 20 years later completely forgotten.”

Monsaingeon is a concert violinist who last played in this country five years ago, leading performances of Bach’s “Art of the Fugue” and Glenn Gould’s String Quartet in New York City. He will soon be touring South America with a program of new Bach transcriptions. Since the early 1970s he has also been a prolific maker of documentary films, all about musicians and music, except for one on Russian tennis player Andre Chesnokov.

“Music is something that was right there from the beginning,” Monsaingeon says by phone from his Paris home. “I started playing piano, and had to beg my parents to give me a violin when I was 4--Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh were the two musicians who really fired me.

“I was also in love with languages. I started learning Russian because of musicians, and Russia has been one of my major interests, the results of that early passion. It’s amazing how learning a language can define a young boy’s future.”

As a violinist, Monsaingeon was asked to host and play on a weekly survey of European music for French television in 1971. This gave him a grounding in the technical basics of video and filmmaking, as well as occasion to seek a new outlet for his creative energies.

“I was about 25 years old then. We did a lot of programs and I was wondering, ‘What am I doing on stage all the time? Why shouldn’t I have my own projects?’ I had studied with Menuhin, so I wrote a script and asked him if he would do something with me about the violin and Eastern Europe.”

His Menuhin projects launched a series of films broadcast on French television. During the next 10 years Monsaingeon made more than 40 short films on subjects ranging from Gregorian chant to bow-making, from music teacher extraordinaire Nadia Boulanger to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

“It’s the creative statement that really interests me,” Monsaingeon says. “About technicalities, I would compare filmmaking to conducting: You have lots of specialists around you, you must know something about lighting and sound and editing, but you don’t have to be able to do it all yourself.

“More important is the parallel between filmmaking and composing. I always write my own scripts, direct my own films.”

Figuring largely in Monsaingeon’s output is pianist Gould, featured in eight programs plus a 24-part series. Appropriately, Monsaingeon himself was in the recent “Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” leading an ensemble in Gould’s own String Quartet.

When Monsaingeon met Gould, the Canadian pianist had already formulated his philosophy about performance, withdrawing from public concerts to concentrate on recording. In “Richter: The Enigma,” Gould appears in a clip from a television interview describing his belief that there are two types of musicians--those intensely involved with their instrument and the act of performance, and those who transcend it to a loftier plane of pure musical communication. Richter, Gould says, is a prime example of the latter.

Richter held similar ideas about interpretation, although he never lost his love of live performance--indeed, playing the piano is where he seems to have been most happy and most himself. He came to prefer playing with the hall in total darkness, with only a small lamp illuminating the music, so that the audience would concentrate on the music and not his performance.

“He wanted to make the performer disappear,” Monsaingeon says. “In the 20th century, the two major figures are Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter. I love performers who are somehow detached from the instrument, whose thinking depends on music itself.”

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It was raising the issue of interpretation and the role of the performer that finally brought Monsaingeon the opportunity to interview the famously reticent Richter and to begin a process that ultimately produced the 154-minute-long “Richter: The Enigma.”

Born in 1915 in what is now Ukraine, Richter had early music training from his father but was largely self-taught as a pianist until he entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1937. He was quickly recognized as the finest pianist of his generation and developed an enormous following behind the Iron Curtain, but he was not allowed to perform in the West until 1960. Never comfortable with the Western business of music, Richter eventually limited his appearances outside Russia to Japan and intimate European venues, leading an annual music festival at Grange de Meslay in France.

“I had known Richter for many years, but in such a way that I didn’t know if he really knew me personally,” Monsaingeon says. “I made an attempt many years ago to do a film with him, although he was somebody who had always shunned that whole process.

“I had given up all hope. In the summer of 1995, I had just finished four films and was totally exhausted. That is when I got a message from Richter [who kept apartments in Paris and Moscow], about making some kind of biography--a film or a book, it wasn’t clear--which he wanted me to do without meeting with him.

“I decided to write a few pages, sketching a framework for what I might do. Coincidentally, I had recently bought an edition of Proust in Russian. I looked up a quotation I knew, where Proust talks about an actress whose interpretation of a role was an act of genius on a par with the writing of the role, and I queried Richter, ‘Would Maestro agree?’

“It so happened that Richter loved Proust. He immediately invited me over, and that began a mad series where we saw each other almost daily for two years. It was only for an hour at a time, and there were days when he was so depressed he wouldn’t even speak. At first I was only able to record his voice, but finally I got him to accept the presence of a camera, although it had to be small and hidden from him.”

The interviews were remarkably wide-ranging, covering the gamut of his tortured personal life--his father was executed by the Stalin government in the early days of World War II, and his mother fled to Germany with her lover, not to see or communicate with Richter for 20 years--and his interaction with contemporary Soviet life and culture.

“I wanted to make a profile of a man, of course,” Monsaingeon says, “but also something very telling about the history of his time and place, constructed like a Russian novel.”

Monsaingeon had access to Richter’s detailed diaries and personal archives, as well as many other sources. Richter’s longtime companion, singer Nina Dorliac, was also interviewed and appears in the film.

The extensive performance clips include astonishing rarities from Russia, as well as concerts abroad, ranging from a duo-piano performance of Mozart with Benjamin Britten at Britten’s Aldeburgh Festival in northern England, to the troika of Richter, Oistrakh and Mstislav Rostropovich attempting Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Vienna under Herbert von Karajan--and Richter’s caustic recollection of insensitivity and egotism.

Chronologically, the clips extend from his student days in wartime Moscow to a 1993 festival performance of Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 2. Monsaingeon has documented some 830 pieces--not including chamber music or songs--in Richter’s all-encompassing repertory, and his film suggests some of this extraordinary range.

Given the wealth of pertinent performance clips here, which Monsaingeon allows to unfold in detail rather than as mere sound bites, and the reflection and self-examination he finally elicited from his terse subject--in one haunting moment near the end, Richter reads from his diary: “I do not like myself” and looks up and says, “That’s it”--why the “enigma” of the title?

“That was really sort of a second choice for a title,” Monsaingeon says. “In the French and German and Russian versions there are words that can’t be translated exactly into English, words meaning somebody unsubdued, not in a revolutionary sense of opposition, but somebody who can’t be touched by outside pressures.

“Richter does remain a mystery in the fact that, although he never accepted the regime, he stayed in Soviet Russia all his life without any protest, and he was the last major Russian artist of his generation to be allowed to perform in the West.”

But then Monsaingeon notes that the film does offer explanations of even these mysteries. The history of Richter’s parents probably accounts for much of the Soviet reluctance to allow him freedom to travel, and the film makes perfectly clear that the freedom to play when and what he wanted, without promotion, scheduling and related business distractions, was the freedom he most cherished.

“One year before his death, he was in bed so ill and fantasizing about where he would like to play,” Monsaingeon recalls. “He told me, ‘We should only give free concerts. I have a way around the organizers and others. Simply put a big black hat on the stage and let people contribute what they want.’

“He wouldn’t have given a damn. All he wanted to do was play--where didn’t matter. In 1970 he traveled by car from Moscow to Vladivostok and back in six months, playing 150 concerts, many in obscure little Siberian villages. One day he might be in the best hotel enjoying Champagne, the next night he might sleep on a bench. It did not matter.”

Richter died in August 1997. Had he lived longer, this would have been a very different film. Shortly before he died, Richter had left Paris and returned to Moscow. He had become fully reconciled to the documentary process, and had agreed that Monsaingeon finally would be allowed to bring full crews to Richter’s apartment and work from prepared scripts. But Richter died the day before Monsaingeon was to arrive.

“For me, what was amazing was that I had not imagined I would find this such an emotional blow,” Monsaingeon says, “although the same thing had happened 15 years before with the series with Glenn Gould. He had cabled me from Toronto, ‘Ready for next episode,’ the day before he had a stroke. I arrived only to attend his funeral.”

Richter did see a raw version of the film before he died. Monsaingeon had already started editing their interviews, boiling them down at that point to 3 hours and 20 minutes.

“In a strange, vague way, Richter had become interested in the results. We looked at this together over a period of two days. Afterwards he just said, in his laconic manner, ‘It’s me.’ ”

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“‘Richter: The Enigma,” today, 6 p.m., San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, $9-$12, (619) 696-1966. An exhibit of photographs of Richter taken by Jacques Leiser over 30 years will also be on display.