ABSTRACT
The Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter died in his dacha outside Moscow on August 1, 1997. No one could ever have thought of this peerless artist as a dissident within his own country in the manner of Solzhenitsyn or Mstislav Rostropovich. Richter's mother, a distant descendant of Jenny Lind, used to insist that the family was of a lineage composed of "Russian, German, Polish, Swedish and Hungarian" forebears. Richter's brooding and unpredictable personality flowed directly in his approach into the piano. There was also a manic side to him that he freely admitted to the rare interviewer. The psychologist Allen Wheelis, observing Richter at a concert, gave some idea of the peculiar atmosphere of a Richter recital, with the evident disconnection between the existence of a listening public and the intensity of concentration on what he was doing.
