Sviatoslav Richter - Biography
Sviatislav Richter the great Russian pianist was born in Zhitomar Ukraine on March 20th 1915 and died on August 1st 1997 in Moscow. Richter’s father was a German pianist who immigrated to the Ukraine, his mother Anna an amateur pianist was Russian and came from the land owning gentry. Richter as a very young boy was separated from his parents during the period of the Russian Civil War and lived with an aunt. In 1921 Richter was reunited with his parents in Odessa where his father now taught piano in the conservatory. Richter seems to have been initially self taught in music despite his father’s musical pedigree. At the age of 15 he became a piano accompanist in the Odessa Opera. Richter soon realized that he needed a more formal musical education and sought out Heinrich Neuhaus a great pianist and famed teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. Neuhaus declared Richter a ‘genius’ and took him under his wing.
Richter career had a slow build unlike his near contemporary Emil Gilels. An issue was that Richter was so interested in literature and painting that it was hard for him to concentrate on being a piano virtuoso. Richter was also a difficult personality a trait that wasn’t welcome in Stalin’s Soviet Union. His family at the start of Second World War was to go through severe hardship, his father was under suspicion for being German tried to leave the country but was arrested and executed as a spy. In 1946 he met and was an accompanist for soprano Nina Dorliak. Dorliak soon to become Richter’s lifelong companion and was nominally thought to be Richter’s wife. What was not known about Richter until he spoke about it just before he died was that he was gay. It was known in musical circles, but if Richter lived an openly gay life his career would be destroyed and in the Soviet Union he would be openly subject to criminal prosecution. Dorliak would not only offer him companionship but organize his affairs which he was hopelessly inept in handling. Richter received the Stalin Prize in 1949 and was allowed to perform outside the Soviet Union in Prague in 1952 where he is to make a well known recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Czech Conductor Karel Ancerl. Richter even appeared as Liszt in a film about Russian composer Mikhail Glinka. Richter was strictly apolitical; this along with his family history made him one of the last Soviet artists allowed to perform in the West. Recordings of limited fidelity circulated in the U.S and U.K. wetting the appetite for Richter. His first performance in America was in Chicago in November of 1960 where he created a sensation with his performance and recording of the Brahms Second Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Richter was hugely successful in a series concerts in New York and Boston. R.C.A. made studio recordings and Columbia made live recordings that were later legally banned and became expensive collector items. Richter for non political reasons didn’t like America and rarely returned. The next year saw the release of his demonic performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition recorded live in Bulgaria in what seems to be a closet full of people who are coughing away which just increases its intensity. In more pristine conditions in Vienna he recorded Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Herbert Von Karajan who he later on relates in an interview that he despised; they hardly agree on a tempo but it is a fascinating performance and a perennial best seller.
Richter may have had the largest repertoire of any pianist. He was said to dislike recording but because of his immense celebrity from 1960 on an enormous amount of his live performances were preserved. The early 1960’s were to see outstanding recordings of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev and a famous pairing of the two Liszt Piano Concerto’s with conductor Kiril Kondrashin. Richter was sympathetic to modern music and was a fine performer of Hindemith, Berg, Szymanowski, Bartok and established close collaborative associations with Shostakovich and Britten. Richter was a sometimes controversial but great interpreter of Chopin and s brilliant interpreter of, Scriabin Debussy and Ravel. He could be a commanding interpreter of Beethoven and a truly great one of Schubert and Schumann. His one stumbling block as he once admitted in interview was Mozart.
Richter as he became older made music more and more on his own terms and would give concert on short notice in small out of the way venues. Richter established in the 1960’s a music festival in a French hamlet La Grange de Meslay near the city of Tours. Richter was also an fine chamber music pianist and had many collaborations with Oistrakh, Rostropovich and the Borodin Quartet, Besides accompanying his wife he accompanied the great German Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in song recitals of Schubert and Hugo Wolf many preserved on recordings and video.
Richter was a very private and reclusive man and it was surprising that shortly before his death he was willing to have a full scale documentary of his life Enigma by film maker Bruno Monsaingeon. Richter still a physically imposing man in old age relates in a deliberately sardonic manner his views on life and art. When discussing Prokofiev’s funeral that was totally ignored with the death of Stalin the same day, he tells us that Prokofiev disliked Tchaikovsky so that’s what he performed at his funeral. Asked if there is any great composer he can’t fully understand , he becomes flushed and spits out ‘Mozart’. He has some amusing deprecating anecdotes about Karajan, Horowitz and Glenn Gould. He rails against the standardization of life in America (he once that the only place in America he liked was Chicago). His eventual inability to perform at his standard caused him to fall into depression and he died at 82, his companion Dorliak was to follow him a few months later.
Richter can’t be measured by the usual standard of a performing artist he was a fantastic figure more like one of the Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century or Franz Liszt himself. His reputation as a towering re-creative artist has only grown after his death. Luckily almost every aspect of his art is on recordings covering a bewilderingly number of composers and styles.
