Biography (read more)
Sviatoslav Richter was born on 20 March 1915 in Zhitomir, in present-day Ukraine. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter, was a pianist who had trained at the Vienna Conservatory; his mother came from Russian nobility. He spent part of the Russian Civil War living with an aunt, and was drawn first to painting and drawing before music took hold in the early 1920s. He was largely self-taught, receiving only basic instruction from his father and from a Czech harpist, and by fifteen was accompanying rehearsals at the Odessa Opera. His first recital, an all-Chopin programme, was given at the Engineers’ Club in Odessa on 19 March 1934.
Formal study began only in 1937, when he auditioned for Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory with Beethoven’s Sonata No. 28. Neuhaus, who taught a whole generation of Soviet pianists, considered him the most gifted of them. Richter won the Stalin Prize in 1950 and toured extensively within the Soviet Union; he played in the West for the first time the same year, in Czechoslovakia, and made his American debut in Chicago on 15 October 1960 in Brahms’s Second Concerto, a sensation from which came a Grammy-winning recording. After anti-Soviet protests disrupted a Carnegie Hall appearance with David Oistrakh in 1970 he vowed never to return to the United States. From 1943 he shared his life with the soprano Nina Dorliak, though they never married. He founded the festival at La Grange de Meslay in France in 1963 and the December Nights in Moscow in 1981, and in 1986 undertook a six-month Siberian tour of some 150 recitals in towns that sometimes had no concert hall. His last recital was in Lübeck on 30 March 1995; he died of a heart attack in Moscow on 1 August 1997.
Richter’s repertoire was unusually large, running from Handel and Bach to composers of his own time, and he kept some eighty different programmes in readiness. He described the interpreter as an executant carrying out the composer’s intentions to the letter, and his preparation was correspondingly exacting: he learned Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata in four days. He disliked studio work and preferred to play live, which is why so much of his discography is drawn from concerts rather than from sessions.
In his later years he performed in deliberately darkened halls with only the keyboard lit, on the principle that an audience should attend to the music rather than to the player’s gestures. Colleagues wrote about him in exceptional terms: Shostakovich called his talent staggering, Glenn Gould described him as one of the most powerful communicators music had produced, and Arthur Rubinstein recalled tears running down his face on first hearing him. He held the Stalin and Lenin Prizes, a Grammy and the Léonie Sonning Music Prize, and the minor planet 9014 Svyatorichter carries his name.
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