Sviatoslav Richter. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Those who heard him in his last years remember something closer to a vigil than a concert: the hall in total darkness, the piano lit by a single small lamp, and Sviatoslav Richter playing from the score, with an assistant to turn the pages. The pianist with the most legendary memory of the century, the man who kept an amount of music in his active repertoire that his colleagues considered physiologically impossible, had decided that memory was vanity and darkness was honesty: without the performer’s face to look at, he said, what remains is the music, which is the only thing on the programme.
His whole career had been a coherent anomaly. He arrived at the Moscow Conservatory at nearly twenty, half self-taught, the son of a German organist shot by the regime, and became in the Soviet Union a sealed-off legend: the West knew him only through smuggled records, until in 1960, already forty-five, he was allowed a first American tour, which landed like an apparition. A world star, he accepted the concert machine only on his own terms: recitals announced at the last minute, programmes changed that same evening, and a passion, unique among the greats, for the wrong places. He played in provincial towns, in music schools, in the villages of deep France and Siberia, travelling by car with his piano in tow, convinced that an audience that has never heard anything listens better than a subscriber. The festival he founded in a barn in the Touraine is still there to prove it.
The most unsettling document about him came at the end: Bruno Monsaingeon’s interview film, shot shortly before his death in 1997, in which the most venerated living pianist surveys his own life with a notebook of self-criticism and closes with four words that no hagiography has ever entirely forgiven: I don’t like myself. It was no pose: it was the engine. Richter belonged to the rare species of performer for whom a severe judgement of the self is not the enemy of playing but its condition, the exact opposite of the stardom that consumes. The lamp on the music stand was the endpoint of that logic: taking himself off the stage, one watt at a time, until only the text remained. No one, before or since, has made his own ego so little decorative. And no one, perhaps for that reason, has played such a vast repertoire as if each piece were the only one.