Sviatoslav Richter on memorizing

In any case, what's the point of cluttering up your brain when there are far better things to do? It's bad for your health, and it also smacks of vanity. True, it's not as easy to retain the same degree of freedom with a score open in front of you - it doesn't work straight away and requires a lot of practice - but now I've got used to it, I find that it has lots of advantages. In the first place, I've never made any distinction between chamber music and music written for a solo performer. But one always plays chamber music with a score; why should one have to perform without one as a soloist? In the second place, it's easy enough to memorize a Haydn sonata, but I prefer to play twenty while reading the music, rather than limiting myself to two performed from memory. As for contemporary music, there are only a few exceptional artists who are able to memorize a piece by Webern, or Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis, but it's a waste of time and effort. It's not practical. Moreover, even if the element of danger and risk aren't totally foreign to music, you feel more secure and can concentrate better if you've got the score in front of you. Finally, and above all, it's more honest to play like this: you've got how it has to be in front of you and you play exactly what's written. The interpreter is a mirror, and performing music doesn't mean contaminating the piece with your own personality, it consists in performing all the music, nothing more and nothing less. Who could ever remember all the performance markings indicated by the composer? Failing that, performers start to 'interpret', and it's that that I'm against.
By freeing the brain of the useless task of memorizing the music, you can also stop inflicting the same endlessly repeated programmes on audiences - and on yourself.
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There are too many masterpieces, and I'm laziness and passivity personified. I simply try to bring a little freshness to the music I play by performing what people don't expect, rather than what everyone else plays. I've worked it out. My repertory runs to around 80 different programmes, not counting chamber works. I'm an omnivorous animal with a large appetite. I've tried to eat all I can, and up until the sixties I continued to take on new works in order to provide myself with a basis on which to keep on changing my programmes. I don't reject a score because i'm not satisfied with what I've done with it in the concert hall. A performing artist doesn't develop in a straight line, it seems to me, but in a spiral. I can be patient and if a piece hasn't worked to my satisfaction, I continue to work on it and play it over and over again.

Sviatoslav Richter and Heinrich Neuhaus

There's a Russian saying: 'You lack ten roubles, you've one hundred friends.'
Wherever I went, even at the height of the war, I always found a potato to eat. I didn't mind not having a home. I slept wherever people would have me: At Anatoly Vedernikov's, at Volodya Tchaikovsky's, at the home of the mathematician Igor Shafarevich. I felt comfortable everywhere. Above all, however, I was put up by Neuhaus for several years. He was so generous that his pupils could call on him without warning, even at four in the morning. His wife was equally amazing and welcoming. She never slept; if you turned up in the middle of the night, she'd be drinking tea or wine and was delighted for people to come. And she'd say to you:'You've nowhere to sleep? Well, you can spend the night here.' They had a tiny flat.
At Neuhaus's, I slept under the piano.

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Emil Gilels was also another one of Neuhaus's students at the Conservatory. But he was a complex individual, had a frightful temperament, was extremely touchy and always sulking. He was pathologically jealous.
With Neuhaus he behaved appallingly badly. Towards the end of Neuhaus's life, he did something dreadful. He wrote to the papers and also to Neuhaus in person, saying that he'd never been his pupil. Everyone in Moscow knew that he had been Neuhaus's pupil and hey were all indignant. When I heard what he'd done, I refused to acknowledge Gilels in the street. Neuhaus was terribley affected by it and died soon afterwards.

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(the circumstances surrouding Gilels' death) are appalling. Before setting off on a tour, he went to hospital for a checkup. He was given and injection and 3 minutes later he was dead. It was the Kremlin Hospital. Everyone knows that the doctors there are chosen because of their political background. The result is that, through sheer incompetence, they gave him the wrong injection and killed him.

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Neuhaus was of German and Polish extraction, a cousin of Szymanowski. In his youth he had been friendly with Horowitz and close to Artur Rubinstein. He studied in Russia, Berlin, Italy and Vienna where he was a pupil of Leopold Godowsky. He was immensly cultured and widely read in literature, philosophy and the arts. He spoke fluent Russian, Polish, German, French and Italian.

You might have thought his small hands would have had an adverse effect on his playing. But nothing could be further from the truth. He produced a magnificient tone. It's to him that I owe this habit of sitting upright at the piano. He was right, everything depends on this.