Moscow music critic Yury Borisov met a number of great musicians. Once he had an extremely interesting conversation with Sviatoslav Richter. They discussed pianists, their preferences. Richter shared his impressions of Vladimir Horowitz visit to the then Soviet Union and suggested a successor to the musician’s “throne.” Learn more about this and other things in the following study written specially for this newspaper.
Some twenty years ago I visited Sviatoslav Richter at his tower-shaped home on Bronnaya Street. He suggested playing a game called Pianists and their Element. It was enigmatic and offered vast room for imagination.
After throwing dice, sharing opinions, drawing up charts and statutes, this meant another trial, the more so that Richter added wood and metal to the key elements — fire, water, earth, and air — with a small stone to top it off, seven in all.
“The elements merge to create ether, something like the truth. This does not happen often, because everyone wallows in one’s own small puddle; some burn well, others have the ground cut from under their feet... If you understand everything, let’s play. I’ll draw up my list, you will make yours and then we’ll check them.”
“Could I add the name Richter to every element?” I asked.
“No, you can’t,” Richter shook his head. “You see, I want you to treat the whole thing very seriously. It’s important for the generations to come.”
And so I have kept the sheet with my squiggles. It reads:
“ Water: Michelangelo Benedetti (Narcissus, more than the rest, and the “suspiciously” impassioned Debussy; Fire: Prof. Sviatoslav Richter (surprisingly, I guessed right as he wrote the same, thus I won my first point shaped as a cross); Earth: Gilels (again I guessed right, although the Earth then seemed the least spectacular and too familiar element); Rachmaninoff and Sofronitsky: trees, oaks (I was not sure whom to choose, then wrote Rachmaninoff; years later I would read Horowitz’s “Rachmaninoff is a mammoth tree”); Guld is a metallurgist, metalworker, and the little stone goes to Yudin (wrong! Although I was sure it was meant as a philosopher’s stone).” And then I scored my third “cross.” I wrote that the air was Vladimir Horowitz’s element by right. So did Richter.
“Horowitz is weightless, he’s like a bird. No one can play Scarlatti like him, with such flitting virtuosity. See, I never play Scarlatti,” said Richter.
I was awarded Richter’s vinyl with his hooked signature, a box of English tea, but the third trophy caused an awkward pause. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of it. Finally, after fumbling in one of his caches, a remote wardrobe, he solemnly produced a gray bowtie made from Persian silk.
“This one’s for Horowitz. He collects such bowties. Note that they aren’t Shumanov’s.”
In those years, filled with temptations and cheap duchess pears, I knew little about Vladimir Horowitz and nothing about his collection of 800 bowties, his wife Wanda Toscanini, whom the Japanese called yakuma, or a little witch, or about most his recordings (except from Rachmaninoff’s third concerto and Scarlatti). But I knew that Horowitz was from the Kyiv stock and entered him in the Golden List of people born in the city being the mother of all Rus’ cities.
Being a patriot of Kyiv and [Gogol’s demon] Viy, I built that list by bits and pieces. It included philosophers and writers, even Gogol, although his Myrhorod puddle was a considerable distance from Kyiv’s Dnipro slopes, dancers, among them Nijinsky. Yet the main thing —
Yes, two quiet giants Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter, both born in Ukraine.
Horowitz was a graduate of the Kyiv Conservatory of Music, a pupil of Felix Blumenfeld, [Heinrich] Neuhaus’s uncle.
“Considering that Heinrich Neuhaus was like a second father to me, Horowitz and I are relatives,” Richter concluded jokingly.
He told the same thing to Vladimir Horowitz when first conquering America. Horowitz paused before answering, smacking his lips and studying his new self-described relative.
“I though we didn’t have that much in common — you see, I can’t play Scriabin’s etude of ‘nons’...”
“And I can’t play Chopin’s black keys,” countered Sviatoslav Richter and both felt delighted by their diplomacy.
That night Richter asked Horowitz about his training with Blumenfeld.
“You know what he did,” Horowitz made an intriguing pause. “He told us about the caterpillar turning into a cocoon and then into a butterfly. It was a fashionable subject at the time, something like a discovery. And so Blumenfeld taught us not to crawl but raise from our knees and try to fly.” Horowitz’s humorous mood suddenly left him. “My father never rose from his knees. They let him visit me abroad for a short while, but he returned to Russia and was immediately arrested...”
Richter echoed him. They spoke about their late fathers and their love of Wagner. Then each played Liszt’s transcription of the Death of Isolde. Richter had started his spectacular career with it, and thirty years later it would be performed in memory of Horowitz.
Horowitz carried out Blumenfeld’s behest to the end. He never crawled like a caterpillar. He caught his Firebird in the 1920s, leaving the Soviet Union and settling in the New World where he could live and work as a truly free individual. The public recognize him as a leader raising the civic spirit with his grand piano, playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Dubal in his book, Evenings with Horowitz, writes that the King of the Air could be a snake, hissing out that he wanted to catch them all, not only their status, and then all of us would try to help do just that.
Horowitz would drive his chariot, descending to those born to crawl, and we would then watched incredible things, earthquakes on the scale of Liszt, fires raging on the scale of Schumann piano concerto. From the smithy of Horowitz’s Vulcan erupted the thunder of Tchaikovsky’s concerto on the scale of metal being pounded.
Impresarios presented him as a sirocco or the Acrobat from 94th Street. To all appearances, however, he was a soft-spoken jeweler-precise Vladimir Scherzo handling Schubert the way an expert does an uncut diamond. He treated Schubert and many others like that.
That was how he emerged in Russia after sixty years of separation, having learned many truths, instantly captivating the audience with crystal-clear ether-washed chords.
For several days the sky over Moscow and St. Petersburg seemed covered with the Stars and Stripes. Horowitz’s nine-foot Steinway was flown in from New York and rolled out on the Conservatory stage. Yet on that particular he allowed him an act of infidelity, playing the longevous clavicembalo with the pet name Chayinka at the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the town of Klin.
The ancient instrument had suffered countless mishaps, awaken from lethargy as its joints and sinews were healed by experts. It had stoically watched the smirks and heard the sarcastic remarks, without grieving but patiently preserving its master’s secret body strength.
It had heard about Horowitz. Some said he was a brute, others that he was cute. All that was rubbish, of course, but Chayinka wanted to feel his fingers on its keyboard, sensing it would be a joyous experience.
It greeted Horowitz as a guest of honor, the way its master had taught him:
“A serviette for His Lordship.”
Horowitz patted Chayinka, but then said something rather disappointing:
“I am not particularly interested in Tchaikovsky pieces like Dumka and Troika (the usual repertoire). I did long ago. I’m going to play Rachmaninoff’s Elegy, that’s all.
Let him have his way, decided the ancient instrument, the more so that no one seemed interested to know its opinion. Another thing is important. Archangel Michael will be at the keyboard now. The one with a rainbow. I call him Archangel because he’s from Arkhangelsk. And the rainbow is because he raised my master’s music sky-high.
When the Archangel began to play Tchaikovsky’s unknown piece the instrument sang with such passion as though its very soul had turned white hot. All the way Chayinka marveled at the pianist’s hands, so delicate, skilful, fingers flying over the keys. At their sure touch the instrument breathed and sang like an orchestra. Horowitz glanced at the yakuma and smacked his lips appreciatively.
Liszt also. The first Mephistopheles decided to have a piano orchestration. And the way it was done! Now it is a motto with Horowitz and Pletnev: Never play the way it’s written. Play the way you feel it. Learn to hear in a Chopin scale the sounds of violins, cymbals, fistulas — and the shrieks of birds being slain.
“The composer’s hands are still the best,” Chayinka admitted to me. “Pletnev’s suites, the Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty are like a rain of silver. Pletnev is also an expert on cocoons, judging by Grieg’s Butterfly, that desire to sting and caress in Scriabin’s Tenth Sonata. Here it’s like a myriad of moths!
“Pletniev is also a topographer, singing like a lark in a shapeless sky. Chopin’s Third Sonata is packed with glaciers, rivers, and caves. All this is entered in a chart. Under his hands all curves turn into straight lines and begin to move. Then they vanish, evaporate. He can make rivers flow backward and forests march... The world is changeable, it exists only in flight. Jean-Paul gave these words to the lark, ‘I’m singing, and therefore I fly.’”
Chayinka paused and then spoke urgently, as though having just remembered something important:
“When they asked Horowitz to please come visit us again, he shrugged and said vaguely, ‘What for? You have your own good pianists.’ I knew he was thinking of Archangel Michael... Now that Horowitz plays on other Steinways, who do you think has ascended to the throne? The King of the Air?”
If Richter were there, I could perhaps win another cross by saying Pletnev.
Heels clicked. I could hear the museum guide delivering his lecture at a distance. I realized it was time to leave. I ran my hand across the instrument’s smooth side, bidding a reverent farewell, wondering how much such instruments know.
“There is going to be a large gathering on the Star of Kyi, by the Hero’s Gate,” Chayinka informed me as if reluctant to let me go. “Can you hear them tuning the pianos?”
I raised my head, trying to hear the sounds in the museum confine.
“Now all the elements will join in a quadrillion of hands and begin to play. Can you imagine? A quadrillion! Horowitz is expected to be at the first grand piano, the Master of the Keyboard... Too bad the moon is waning, meaning there could be interferences with the broadcasts...”
The excursion was approaching and Chayinka fell silent, as though never having uttered a word.
