I am
very cheerful that the young disciples of the school of Heinrich Neuhaus in the capital
city of Italy had the courage of choosing just me as their president. I wish the future
Italian musicians of great successes, a lot of love for music, and a fruitful work. I give
a friendly greeting.
Sviatoslav Richter.
We could browse
through a voluminous notebook in which the Master marks his whole
repertoire, adding every
day a new work as soon as he performed it: a list of thousands of excerpts of any century
and any composer. Recently Richter has prepared thirteen new programs by J.S. Bach
alone. Speaking about the problems of teaching the piano, the Master almost justifies
initiatives like the concert just performed, a teaching for all those, young and less
young, who listened to him. Richter teaches in this way, with the example of his
intense care for the construction of the program, with the inexhaustible musical
curiosity, having an absolutely disinterested relationship with music, and with the
generous every day searching for a new audience, far from the big institutional circuits
of music.