In his later years Sviatoslav Richter performed in near-total darkness, with only a small reading lamp clipped to the score, so audiences would focus on the music rather than the man. This episode traces how a largely self-taught pianist from Odessa, sight-reading for the local opera by age 15, survived the Soviet regime by treating himself as a mirror for the composer. We cover the 1941 execution of his German-born father on espionage accusations, his mother’s abandonment, and his late arrival at the Moscow Conservatory at 22, where Heinrich Neuhaus called him the genius pupil he had waited for his whole life and taught him almost nothing.

We follow his rumored-about reputation in the West, his sensational 1960 American debut and Grammy, his hatred of the commercial touring circuit, and the 1970 Carnegie Hall protest that made him vow never to return to the United States. The conversation also examines his lifelong partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak as a shield in a state that criminalized homosexuality, the wrong note in Bach’s Italian Concerto he played for 40 years before printing an apology, his impromptu Siberian tours and a concert in Aachen inspired by a Charlemagne biography, and the shift in his perfect pitch that darkened his final years before his death in 1997.

• Why classically trained pianists were baffled by his intuitive, unorthodox technique
• How Neuhaus provided institutional cover rather than instruction in the Stalinist system
• His decision to abandon composing because the world had enough bad music
• Trans-Siberian train journeys to Japan instead of flights between gigs
• The paradox of a performer whose attempt to disappear became his unmistakable fingerprint