Upon waking, I listen to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor, performed on piano by Sviatoslav Richter. Richter was a melancholic man, though this music conceals it. Bach composed for the greater glory of God, while Richter interpreted him with a deeply human spirituality, stripped of metaphysical aspiration. This makes him a radically modern artist – unlike Tatiana Nikolayeva, in whose hands these same notes would sound beyond time, yearning for eternity. That I believe Nikolayeva right and Richter wrong matters little here, for genius in this case belongs to the Ukrainian pianist. Just once – a single time – he encountered Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, the other towering pianist of the twentieth century’s second half, at the Festival de la Grange de Meslay. In 1975, the musician from Brescia performed Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, with its spectral «Le Gibet» as its centerpiece. In his journals, Richter noted his perplexity at the silence between notes and the absence of emotional impulse in the performance. In one of the few photographs preserved from that encounter, Richter smiles timidly, while Michelangeli greets him with a smile, but from an astonishing distance. Surrounded by an otherworldly silence, there is a profound sadness in both – a sadness that, nevertheless, does not pass between them. One imagines Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli disappearing into the fog and Sviatoslav Richter walking under the snow, as Bruce Chatwin was said to do in the outskirts of cities. «I don’t like myself,» Richter said at the end of his life, listening to one of his recordings – his father’s shadow always remained in the background.

Teofil Danilovich Richter, Sviatoslav’s father, died in Odessa in 1941, accused by Soviet authorities of spying for the Germans. He had been the organist at the city’s Lutheran church and a refined, meticulous pianist, though he rarely performed in public beyond religious ceremonies. Sviatoslav (whom they called Svetik, «little light,» in family intimacy) admired him. On the anniversary of his execution, each year, he would shut himself in his Moscow apartment and listen to his father’s favorite pieces: that Schumann and that Chopin he had studied at the Vienna Conservatory and had wanted to pass on to his son.

Conductor Sergiu Celibidache directed Richter only once. It was in Italy, in 1961, when they performed Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 together. Only one photograph remains from that evening, taken during a rehearsal. That and a few words. Of Richter, Celibidache said he was a brilliant interpreter in whom one could perceive a Luciferian flutter (Haydn said something similar about Beethoven). I understand this as his detecting a self-destructive element in his personality, the scars left open by his father’s murder and the experience of history’s totalitarian roar. Indeed, behind that «I don’t like myself» one senses the horror. And an iron will: that of refusing to yield to death or oblivion.

Listening to Sviatoslav Richter’s interpretations – as happens with those of Michelangeli or Celibidache – resembles nothing else we know. They are part of music’s miracle, which is transcended reality. Listen to this Chopin, for example, in which he intimately converses with his father:

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