Sviatoslav Richter

Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter (March 20 [O.S. March 7], 1915 – August 1, 1997) was a Soviet and Russian classical pianist, widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. Praised for the depth of his interpretations, his virtuoso technique, and the extraordinary breadth of his repertoire, he ranged from Handel and Bach to Debussy, Prokofiev, Bartók, Britten, and Gershwin. Born in Zhytomyr in the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine, to a family of Russian Germans, he spent most of his youth in Odessa. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter, was a pianist, organist, and composer educated at the Vienna Conservatory, while his mother, Anna Pavlovna Richter, came from a noble Russian landowning family. During the Civil War he lived for a time with his aunt Tamara, an experience that encouraged his early interest in painting and the arts more generally.

After his family was reunited in Odessa in 1921, Richter developed wide cultural interests that included cinema, literature, theatre, and opera. He was largely self-taught in his formative years, receiving only basic instruction from his father and one of his father's pupils, and quickly became an exceptional sight-reader. He regularly worked with local opera and ballet companies, and at 15 began accompanying rehearsals at the Odessa Opera. He gave his first recital in Odessa on March 19, 1934, and only in 1937 did he begin formal piano studies, when he moved to Moscow to study at the Conservatory under Heinrich Neuhaus. At his audition, Neuhaus is said to have recognized him immediately as a musician of genius. Richter also composed in his youth, but abandoned composition soon after settling in Moscow.

Richter's career was marked by a close association with Sergei Prokofiev; he premiered the composer's Sixth, Seventh, and Ninth Sonatas, the last of them dedicated to him, and later gave the first performance with Mstislav Rostropovich of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, in what proved to be his only appearance as a conductor. He also premiered, with Rostropovich, Prokofiev's Cello Sonata in C major in 1950. Although he became one of the leading Soviet pianists after World War II, his private life was shadowed by tragedy. His parents' marriage had collapsed by the start of the war, and in 1941 his father was arrested by Soviet authorities on espionage charges and executed. Richter remained separated from his mother for nearly two decades.

In 1943 he met the soprano Nina Dorliak, who became his lifelong artistic companion and closest domestic partner. They performed together extensively in recital and lived together from the mid-1940s until his death, though they had no children and did not formalize their union until after his death. Intensely private, quiet, and withdrawn, Richter rarely gave interviews and kept his personal life out of public view. Only in the final year of his life did he speak at length on camera, when Bruno Monsaingeon persuaded him to participate in a documentary interview.

Richter's rise to international prominence accelerated after he won the Stalin Prize in 1949, which brought extensive concert tours in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. He first performed outside the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1950, and in the following decade appeared in Romania, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. In 1952 he appeared on screen as Franz Liszt in the film The Composer Glinka. He served on the jury of the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, where he was deeply moved by Van Cliburn's performance of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto and awarded him a perfect score. Despite his official honors, including the Stalin Prize, the Lenin Prize, and the title People's Artist of the RSFSR, he could still unsettle the authorities, as when he chose to perform at Boris Pasternak's funeral in 1960.

Before Western audiences heard him in person, they came to know him through recordings made in the 1950s, notably Prokofiev's Fifth Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic. His eventual debut in the United States in 1960 was a sensation. After first appearing in Finland, he made his American orchestral debut in Chicago on October 15, 1960, playing Brahms's Second Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf. The performance caused an immediate stir, and the recording won a Grammy Award, the first received by a Soviet artist. His American tour culminated in a celebrated Carnegie Hall recital later that month. He went on to appear in England and France in 1961; his early London reception was initially cool, but criticism was reversed after his performances of Liszt's piano concertos with Kirill Kondrashin and the London Symphony Orchestra, which many came to regard as definitive.

Richter maintained a vast performing life and a repertoire of unusual size, once remarking that he could draw on around eighty different programs apart from chamber music. Central to his art were Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev, and Debussy, yet he continued learning new works throughout his life, including demanding scores in his final decade. He was famed for his phenomenal memory and powers of assimilation, and was said to have learned some major works with astonishing speed. Alongside his solo career, he was a devoted chamber musician, collaborating with artists such as Rostropovich, David Oistrakh, Rudolf Barshai, Oleg Kagan, Yuri Bashmet, Natalia Gutman, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Benjamin Britten, and members of the Borodin Quartet, while also accompanying singers including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier, Galina Pisarenko, and Nina Dorliak.

His love of opera, song, and chamber music found expression in the festivals he created. In 1963 he established the festival at La Grange de Meslay in the Touraine region of France, and in 1981 he founded the December Nights festival at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, later renamed in his honor. He continued traveling widely, including repeated visits to Japan from 1970 onward, and in 1986 undertook a remarkable six-month tour of Siberia with his Yamaha piano, giving around 150 recitals, sometimes in small towns without proper concert halls. In his later years he increasingly preferred performing at short notice in modest, darkened venues, with only a small lamp illuminating the score, believing that this helped listeners concentrate on the music rather than the performer's physical gestures.

Richter remained dedicated to his art into old age, continuing to perform some of the most demanding works in the repertoire well into the 1990s and occasionally giving free concerts for students. His last recorded orchestral performances were Mozart concertos in 1994 with Rudolf Barshai, and his final recital took place privately in Lübeck on March 30, 1995. He died in Moscow on August 1, 1997, at the Central Clinical Hospital, after declining health and depression linked to hearing changes that affected his sense of pitch. At the time of his death he was rehearsing Schubert. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery. Richter's own ideal of interpretation was one of complete fidelity to the score: the performer, he believed, should not dominate the music, but dissolve into it.

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