Music: 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!"