NOVEMBER 2002

SVYATOSLAV RICHTER Born in 1915, Zhitomir Died in 1997, Moscow Composer, Pianist, Interpreter

"Music is a universally understood language through which man directly expresses his feelings to others and awakens their participation." (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

Holidays: Allerheiligen, All Saints' Day
_________Volkstrauertag, Day of National Mourning
_________Buß- und Bettag, Day of Repentance and Prayer
_________Totensonntag, All Souls' Day

PIANIST VIRTUOSO OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Svyatoslav Richter was already a legend before anyone had heard him in the musical world of the West. Artists and art critics returned from their travels through the Soviet Union and reported that they had heard a wondrous pianist who without a doubt counted among the greatest contemporary pianists.

In 1958 Van Cliburn was celebrated with ticker tape parades in New York. This cool, matter-of-fact, brilliant representative of a new generation of pianists won the first prize at an international Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. Concerning Richter, who was sitting in the panel of judges, Van Cliburn, early in his fame commented, "I was as if dumbfounded. This is the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard."

Other Soviet virtuosi had been triumphantly received long before in the concert halls of the centers of Western music. However, Richter did not travel to the West. Finally, a West German record company was allowed to produce recordings by Richter. He played Robert Schumann's Toccata, which is considered one of the most difficult piano pieces, at one sitting. When he was not satisfied with his performance he played it six more times. Other pianists were glad when they managed to do the work once.

After his first concert abroad in Finland in 1960, a music critic in Helsinki wrote, "Strange that a Communist country could produce the most arrogantly individualistic instrumentalist of this era." That same year he performed for 10 weeks as a guest in the USA. The New York Times wrote about Richter, "Came, saw, and conquered." For Richter, however, there was a reunion with his mother in New York after almost 20 years. Richter's family was a family of musicians. His father, Theophil, came from a German family in Volhynia. He was educated at the conservatory in Vienna. Afterward he returned to his hometown of Zhitomir to become established as a piano teacher and organist. There he married his student, Anna, the daughter of a Russian estate owner.

The elder Richter was 42 years old when his son Svyatoslav was born on 20 March 1915. One year later, at the invitation of an Evangelical Lutheran parish, the family moved to Odessa where he worked as an organist and also gave music lessons to children of diplomats. His son attended the German school there and spoke German fluently.

As an eight-year old, Svyatoslav could only be taken away from the piano in the evenings and put to bed after he had played the piano passages all the way through to the end of the operas that he was already practicing. By that age he had also begun to compose. At age 16 Richter was serving his second term with the opera in Odessa and by age 18 was already the resident chief conductor. There were great tensions at home. His mother Anna, who was many years younger than his father, did not make a secret of her relationship with the professor of music, Sergei Kondratyev. In 1937 Svyatoslav abruptly went to Moscow where he received lessons from Heinrich Neuhaus at the Tchaikovsky conservatory. The piano professor called the 22-year-old self-taught young man a genius. Later Richter said he had had three teachers: his father, Richard Wagner, and Neuhaus.

In 1941, a few days before the invasion by Rumanian troops, his father was arrested, tortured and executed. Anna Richter stayed in Odessa under Rumanian occupation. When the occupational forces began their retreat, she went with Kondratyev to Munich by way of Bucharest.

One day Anna, who had had no contact with Svyatoslav for a long time, heard a concert by her son on Moscow radio. She was able to get records by Richter in East Berlin. A friend of the family smuggled a casual letter to him in Moscow, with no return address, signed "Your Anna who loves you," and made the first contact. She went to New York to meet him at Carnegie Hall after a concert. He gave eight concerts at that time. Richter completed four more tours, but never returned to his apartment on the sixth floor of a run-down, modern high-rise in Moscow. Together with his wife Nina Dorliac, a soprano from France, he visited his mother in southern Germany where she lived with Kondratyev. Anna suffered a heart attack after this visit and died in 1963. Svyatoslav Richter spent his last years in Paris. In 1997 he went to Moscow to study the archival file of his father in Odessa. He died two days before keeping the appointment and was buried in Moscow. He was a unique phenomenon among his contemporary interpreters of music, held in esteem as "first pianist of this century" by musicians as well as critics.

German text by Susanne Baker

According to Georg Egert and Vladimir Smirnov