Genius Unbound

When Sviatoslav Richter first stepped out from behind the Iron Curtain two years ago, the chorus of praise that greeted him carried one hesitant note. Richter is a great pianist, the critics decreed, "in the Russian style." Last week, after Richter gave three recitals in Paris and appeared in a new German recording of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, the European press revised its first estimates. Said the Paris Art: "Sviatoslav Richter is the greatest pianist in the world."

The hint of provincialism in Richter's earlier style had at first deterred critics from such bold appraisals. For years he was known beyond the Soviet bloc only in legends that told of a pianistic Paul Bunyan who played 120 concerts a year, every one of them good enough to make Beethoven weep. When he appeared at last--46 years old and bald--his mastery of the Russian technique was so impressive that he made its vices into astonishing virtues.

But Richter had been cooped up at home too long, and he had things to learn. "He must browse in the cosmopolitan markets," wrote New York Times Critic Harold Schonberg in a summing up of Richter's American tour. "All that is lacking is a real knowledge of the many directions musical thought has taken outside of Russia in the last generation."

Welcoming Disaster. When Richter turned up in France last month, a new sophistication was almost taken for granted. Recording-company lackeys pressed favors on him at every turn, crowds shivered in the streets outside his hotel, concertgoers cheerfully paid four times the normal Paris prices for their tickets. Richter, in return, expressed his feelings for Paris by swooping around town with a belle epoque enthusiasm scarcely expected from a visiting Soviet-chik. "Such taste, such wonderful music, such flair!" he proclaimed, having passed an evening watching the strippers at the Crazy Horse Saloon. "I could happily spend two or three days in here."

But Richter also worked. Returning to his old graveyard-shift practice schedule, he would emerge from his studio alone in the middle of the night, then wander down to a restaurant in Les Halles and eat platters of sea urchins fresh from the shore. Such excursions seemed enriching, and by the night of his first concert, Richter was ready with more than just music. Hoping to cast a sympathetic spell for his program of Chopin and Schumann, Richter adorned the Salle Gaveau stage with flowers, tapestries and a battalion of immense candelabra--a naive little gesture that welcomed disaster by suggesting that the spirit of Liberace dwelt in the room beside him.

Richter was so exhausted for his final concert that he talked of canceling out, then appeared to play a brutal program of Hindemith's First Sonata, five Shostakovich preludes and fugues, Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata and, for encores, a bouquet of Prokofiev Visions Fugitives. Had his playing improved? Though the atmosphere that surrounded him could not help but candy the reviews, Paris could only say: "Such taste, such wonderful music, such flair!"

Seeking Refinements. Away from Paris, there was only the new Tchaikovsky recording to judge, but in it the changes in Richter's style seem most remarkable. Richter gives Tchaikovsky's old war horse a slower run than it usually gets and, building to a sensitive rapport with Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Symphony, he uses the lingering tempo to explore the high beauties only his hands can find. The performance (on Deutsche Grammophon) is not the most overpowering of the 34 recordings of the First now available, but, sparing the Horowitz-Toscanini recording, it makes the others seem just right for cake plates.

The new shadings of Richter's technique are the cosmopolitan touches that were missing before, the refinements he might have expected to pick up from Rubinstein or Horowitz. The bell-song quality of his touch is unchanged, and the tight control that makes a Richter crescendo sound like the run of a well-trained voice is, if anything, firmer than ever. The honesty that has led him to the core of all the Prokofiev and Beethoven and Schumann he has played in the West remains the kindling that touches his technique with emotional fire.

Moving Alone. Life has taught Richter enough sharp lessons to make him anything but doctrinaire. He lost touch with his family in 1942; their German name and his father's old post as music teacher at the Odessa German Consulate were enough to bring suspicion--and soon Beria's police killed his father and drove his despairing mother to escape Russia with the retreating Axis armies. And although the Soviet Cultural Ministry has turned Richter into one of the world's most coddled musicians, he is still marked "German origin" in his passport--a bureaucratic distinction that cannot help but bring him some dark thoughts.

In Moscow, Richter and his wife live among the bourgeois splendors of a vast apartment. They own two cars and a dacha in the woods outside the city. Outside Russia. Richter may now travel about without escort; the Ministry of Culture "secretaries" who used to tag along to chaperon him have disappeared. He moves quietly and alone between two cultures, riding trains when planes are faster, shopping for trifles, taking no interest at all in the news of the world. He is modest and inconspicuous, and when students ask him if he would consider giving piano lessons, he exclaims in genuine horror: "Good heavens no! If anything, I ought to take a few myself."

Last week Richter went alone to West Germany to visit his ailing mother. Having supposed her dead for 20 years, he had discovered her living in a small town near Stuttgart. He played the small upright piano where his stepfather gives music lessons, visited his mother's hospital room, walked in the streets alone. Among the townspeople who know him, it did not matter that he is a Soviet citizen who has no intention of doing anything but catching the Moscow train in a few days and riding home to Russia. Nor, in such a quiet man, seen in such a quiet town, did it seem to matter that in Paris he had just lived beyond his legend.

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