The following article was published in The Daily Telegraph, London, on Saturday,
4 July 1998.
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History of the Russian revelation

Brian Hunt hears how Sviatoslav Richter, the most stubbornly elusive of
pianists, was finally persuaded to discuss his life and art on camera

You think you know what to expect from a video called Richter: The Enigma, and
what you expect isn't very much. In these days of hype even the cover flash
fails to raise expectations: "Includes rare archive material and Richter's only
comprehensive interview." The uniquely revered Russian pianist, who died last
year, couldn't even be relied on to turn up for his own recitals; so withdrawn
did he become that a single, low-wattage lamp was all he allowed on stage,
rendering his impassive features barely visible to concert-goers. The chances of
Sviatoslav Richter ever having opened up for the camera seem as remote as one
had always assumed the man to be.

Then you watch, and there he is: smiling, joking, telling his life story and
discussing his art with what appears to be total candour. Home movies show him
larking with friends. Was this man really an enigma? The truth is incredibly
complex. In fact, every truth connected with the film is, to use an apposite
phrase, a matter of interpretation.

The only person who can fully explain is the film's director, Bruno Monsaingeon.
A large-framed man with a pleasantly generous and expansive manner, the
Paris-based violinist has turned increasingly to film-making as an alternative
form of creativity. (Menuhin and Glenn Gould have been subjects.) After
producers prompted him to approach Richter, years of negotiation and relayed,
cryptic communications followed - a process familiar to anyone who ever had
dealings with Richter. Eventually, in September 1995, Monsaingeon received the
message: "Maestro wants Bruno to do his biography."

"I went to see his assistant, Milena Borromeo," says Monsaingeon. "I said, what
does this mean? To film his biography, to write it?" The question remained
unanswered for most of the two-and-a-half years in which the interview sessions
took place. The first meeting was not easy because he was depressed. He had pain
in his legs from a recent operation and did not know if he would play again. He
told me he had lost interest in everything, so the stimulus would have to come
from me. There was no way of telling him what I was about and no way of asking
what he wanted from me. I had brought a digital tape recorder. When he saw the
microphone on the table he was horrified. I said, look, Maestro, if you want to
put the record straight I think it would be a good idea. I put some white
flowers around the microphone and he forgot about it."

Richter and Monsaingeon met almost every day for 10 weeks. All this time the
pianist's life-long companion, soprano Nina Dorliac, kept urging Monsaingeon to
do something he was not prepared to consider: film Richter surreptitiously. Her
willingness to set Richter up was not untypical of the couple's unusual
relationship.

"They lived in one dwelling but completely separately," says Monsaingeon. "His
side was pure order, just two pianos and - nothing. Hers was all higgledy
piggledy. She was always concerned to behave decently, he relished scandal. He
sometimes felt the need to be provocative when he was with her, because he felt
imprisoned." Another dimension to this "marriage" has emerged in print since
Richter's death: the pianist was homosexual, an area not entered into by the
film.

One day, Monsaingeon found the maestro in high spirits - doctors had been
encouraging - and he plunged in to suggest bringing a camera to the next
session. "His reaction was marvellous. Nothing negative, just a smiling, 'We'll
see, we'll see.' "

At that moment, Nina walked in and expressed her pleasure at what she had
overheard. "That was the end of it. He became so violent, started smashing
things up. He did not want to be caught in a trap. He remained silent for five
days. I was absolutely sure it was finished. I went to England for the premiere
of my Menuhin film; when I got back there were messages from Richter telling me
to come straight away. I went, and he read me his latest diary entries -
concerning my films about Fischer-Dieskau and Oistrakh." Looks were exchanged.
"I thought, why is he doing this? It must mean something."

By the time the interviews resumed, the 80-year-old Richter was suffering from
the heart disease that would soon prove fatal. In response to a cry for help
from Nina, Monsaingeon installed the couple in a family flat in Antibes. The
French Riviera climate and proximity of doctors were advantageous for Richter's
health; the layout of the flat was advantageous for installing discreet cameras.

On impulse, Monsaingeon had already bought a digital camera no bigger than a
cigarette packet. "At that time nothing else mattered to me. I was obsessed with
Richter - I still am, I cannot get out of the whole adventure. It was an amateur
camera, which we linked to professional equipment in the kitchen. "It was
difficult to believe he did not know what was going on. We had to be incredibly
precise. We could only shoot between the hours of three and four in the
afternoon because of the light. We had to position him exactly in frame.

"Then one day there was an extraordinary, hilarious episode. He was asked by
Milena to give her his shirt for dry cleaning. He said, 'Oh no, it's much
prettier for Bruno.' Totally childlike." Did he mean prettier for Bruno's
camera? "I was feeling terribly embarrassed when I arrived for work that day,"
admits Monsaingeon, "I thought I'd been found out. But no mention was made of
it. Then, in the evening, he said to me with a slightly mischievous smile, 'Did
you manage to shoot today?' I said, 'Yes, Maestro.' Nothing more was said, until
his very last days. Then for the first time he began talking specifically about
the film. So I asked, would you like to see it? We have a rough cut. He said in
a plaintive voice: 'Oh that would be wonderful - I didn't dare ask.' We watched
it in Paris, and he said, in Russian: 'It's me.' That night we stayed talking in
his hotel room until three in the morning. He was leaving for Moscow the next
day, so we decided to meet again on the second of August. He died on the first."

The second of August session was to have been spent filling in the gaps in
Richter's faltering, disjointed and haphazard narrative. As it turned out,
Monsaingeon was left with fragments that would take months of painstaking
editing. "Not a single sentence was grammatically complete," he claims. The
result is an intricate montage of heavily edited soundtrack and archive film -
only 12 minutes of the on-camera interview could be used intact in the
two-and-a-half-hour film. Yet it takes us closer to the artist than any previous
document.

The man it reveals is full of paradoxes: at one moment convinced of his own
worth and almost cruelly dismissive of other musicians, at the next deflated by
self-doubt. He professes complete objectivity as an interpreter yet confesses to
theatricality on the platform. Wounded by early experiences, he has clearly
never grown up, remaining both exasperatingly childish and disarmingly
childlike.

"It was important for him that he should not be aware of what was going on,"
says Monsaingeon, rationalising the covert microphones and cameras. "It was the
same with music. You would have thought that among all musicians he was one of
the most analytical, yet one of the first things he said to me was: 'There are
two things I hate: power and analysis.' At times I was tempted to call the film
Richter: The Idiot - idiot in the Russian meaning, of course, the sense of
innocence, of candour." Enigma will do, however, and it is satisfying that
Richter remains one to the very end of Monsaingeon's film.



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