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. Neither could one think of him or
his wildly individualistic behavior during the darkest days of
Stalin as anything but a special example of how art could triumph
over the most crushing of political repressions. He earned his
unparalleled personal freedom within the cultural politics of the
Soviet system all right, but at a price—no visas for concerts abroad
were allowed until 1959, when he was permitted a short tour of
Finland. A debut at Carnegie Hall and an American tour began what was
to be a regime of off-and-on summer exiles in France, Italy, and
Germany, though he was still most assiduous in giving concerts to his
countrymen in remotest Eastern Russia during whirlwind tours, since
he felt that they were the people who needed music the most.

A good example of Richter’s determination can be found when we
observe him playing at Stalin’s funeral in 1953, an occasion where
many Soviet artists were ordered to perform in memory of the great
man. Richter was to play a short piece, appropriately lugubrious.
Instead, he chose one of the longer and more elaborate preludes and
fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. In spite of repeated
remonstrations that he had gone beyond the allotted time, Richter
finished the particular