Richter on Horowitz:
Admiration Without Mercy

The surviving record. In notebooks published with Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter could recognize Vladimir Horowitz's extraordinary gift while questioning the musical mind directing it. A contemporary review of the book reproduces the cutting summary of his view. [1]

At a distance, it is tempting to treat pianistic greatness as a single ladder. Someone must stand at the top, and everybody else must occupy a rung below. That is the logic of competitions, publicity, and the familiar argument about the greatest pianist of all time. Richter's remarks about Horowitz resist it. Talent and artistic judgment are not identical possessions. A musician may have a fabulous command of an instrument and still leave another listener dissatisfied with the choices made using that command.

Horowitz was an ideal figure to provoke such a division. His playing could appear to make the keyboard defy its physical limits. The combination of attack, color, tempo, and theatrical timing shaped a voice impossible to mistake for anyone else's. Even listeners skeptical of his liberties had to contend with the direct emotional power of the results. The Chicago Symphony's historical record confirms how swiftly he caused a sensation in the United States in 1928. [2] The apparent ease was deceptive: the sound was the result of taste, calculation, and a lifetime of experimentation.

Richter cultivated a very different public image and a different kind of interpretive intensity. His best performances can give the impression of a whole architectural world appearing at once. Yet he was famously hard on himself, too. Reviews of the notebooks make clear that he could be severe about his own recordings, not simply those of colleagues. [1] That detail matters. His judgment of Horowitz was part of a wider and sometimes unforgiving discipline of listening. It was not merely a competitor taking a cheap shot.

We should not claim to know the inner motives of either artist. We can, however, ask a productive question: when you admire a pianist's powers but reject the choices, which feeling comes first? Awe, annoyance, gratitude, or distrust? A recording can produce all four within a single movement. The value of the Richter–Horowitz contrast is that it gives a name to this tension without asking us to resolve it.

A listening invitation. Compare Horowitz in a spectacular nineteenth-century work with Richter in a work demanding a long structural span. Rather than counting wrong notes, listen for the way each pianist persuades you that the next phrase must follow the last. When the music changes direction, whose gesture feels inevitable? Your answer may change tomorrow.

Sources: [1] The New Yorker, review of Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations. [2] Historical programming and archive material from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. These links and references are supplied for reader verification.