One of the world’s greatest pianists takes the stage. He panics. Where is the plastic lobster? He doesn’t know. He only knows he can’t play without it.

Sviatoslav Richter with the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall, 1960. Whitestone Photo

The Hidden God

So! Everything is sentient! — Pythagoras …Often the most obscure of beings houses a hidden God;

And like a nascent eye veiled by its lids,

A pure spirit buds beneath the husk of stones! — Gérard de Nerval, “Golden Sayings” in “Selected Works”

Imagine the scene: the man in an evening coat carries his pink plastic lobster in a satin-lined box. He has brought the lobster with him from his hotel and now he is standing backstage, waiting to go on. The Yamaha CF concert grand, nine feet long by five feet wide, sits onstage in a pool of light. The Tokyo concert hall is filled to capacity, the audience awaiting one of the world’s great pianists.

The program is late Beethoven: the 30th, 31st and 32nd piano sonatas (Ops. 109, 110 and 111), his last three, written from 1820 to 1822 in a single outpouring of creative energy.

Should he take the lobster onstage? Perhaps not. People might ask questions. But there is one thing he knows with certainty. He can’t play without it.

The lobster can’t be far away. But how far away is too far? Fifty feet? One hundred feet? At what distance does its efficacy begin to ebb? He can play anything, no matter how difficult, but the moment he leaves the “proximity” of the lobster he must fall silent.

The pianist finishes the Op. 110 to rapturous applause. All that remains on the program is the Op. 111. While walking offstage, he thinks, “A-ha. The lobster is a security blanket, a crutch. It does nothing. It’s only because I think I need the lobster that I really need it. But if I think I need the lobster, don’t I really need it?”

He imagines a test. Let someone remove the lobster without telling him. Will he still be able to play the Op. 111?

He experiments, uncertain of the outcome. He tells an associate, perhaps his page-turner or his piano-tuner, to make a decision: “You decide whether to remove the lobster. Don’t tell me what you decide. Just do it.”

PIANO SONATA NO. 32 IN C MINOR, OP. 111 Performed by Sviatoslav Richter. NHK Hall, Tokyo. June 1, 1974

He is back onstage seated at the piano. He begins to play. He comes to the second movement — the lovely opening bars of the Arietta from the Op. 111. Should he look? The notes cascade along. The theme is so beautiful, so transfixing. But … has his associate removed the lobster? He looks nervously around. He worries that the lobster might not be in its box, and that concern begins to dominate his thoughts. He’s thinking about the lobster and not about the music, the Op. 111. He shouldn’t have taken the risk. It was a mistake to put his concert career in jeopardy.

It had happened at least once before. Before his first recital in Vienna, he met with his despised stepfather just before he was to play — Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, and Scriabin. The old man blurted, “My wife’s dying!” — his way of telling the pianist about his mother’s illness. What was the purpose of agitating him so close to a performance? The concert was a disaster.

But back to Tokyo. Was it all going to happen again? His thoughts shift between a contemplation of the Arietta and a fevered, paranoid concern that the lobster is gone. Perhaps it has been stolen, perhaps permanently lost. What then?

Isn’t it enough that he thinks he needs the lobster? Isn’t that the same thing as needing the lobster — thinking that you need something in order to do something? Your brain is telling you that in order to play the Op. 111, the plastic lobster must be there.

Being able to do something means thinking, believing that you are able to do it. It’s not enough to have the skill to play the piano. Something more is needed.

Jochen Blume/ullstein bild/Getty Images

The pianist is Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter, who died in 1997 but whose legacy of recordings is still unrivaled. He was the opposite of Glenn Gould, who abandoned live concerts at the age of 31 and retreated to a recording studio.Bruno Monsaingeon records the following anecdote from 1981: “Glenn Gould and I were about to complete the editing of our film on the Goldberg Variations in an underground studio somewhere outside Toronto … When the editing process was finished, we spent a whole night watching the film, but this time as spectators. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Glenn turned to me: ‘You know Richter … A musician like him, such a tremendous pianist and he doesn’t know how to make a recording. He has no recording philosophy and allows records to be released that are a betrayal of his abilities and in no way represent him. He really must learn the specific art of recording. I’d like to make a recording with him in which I’d be his producer.’

‘Glenn, are you serious?’

‘I’m damned serious. He could play whatever repertory he liked, even Rachmaninoff, on my own piano if he wanted. Put it to him.’ ”

Monsaingeon ran into Richter three weeks later and did just that. Richter’s answer: “ ‘I never go to America.’ He then reflected for a moment, before adding: ‘Tell Glenn Gould that I accept, but on condition that he agrees to give a recital at my festival in Tours.’

He said this with a smile in his voice, knowing perfectly well that Gould refused to perform in public. And that was the end of the matter” (“Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations” by Bruno Monsaingeon, xii–xiii).

Richter, on the other hand, hated studio recordings; he preferred live performances in front of an audience.In an entry in his notebooks from Oct. 24, 1971, Richter reacts to hearing an old recording of himself performing Bach’s English Suite No. 3 in G minor: “A very old recording, certainly outdated in terms of recording techniques. But I understand absolutely nothing about these things, which are a matter of total indifference to me. As long as a piece is correctly played, the recording technique shouldn’t bother you. But nowadays many listeners seem to attach great importance to the technical quality of a recording. I think this is because it’s something they understand and that they care more for it than they do for the music. They’re simply incapable of appreciating the true value of an interpretation. It’s a reflection of this century, with its concern for machines and technology. People are further away than ever from nature and from genuine human feelings and are gradually turning into machines themselves” (Monsaingeon, 183–84).

I have been obsessed with Richter’s playing for years — particularly the live recordings made during the last 20 years of his life, when he developed a strange, introverted lyricism. This is the period that followed his most severe depression: the year of the lobster, 1974.

It was with considerable interest that I started reading Bruno Monsaingeon’s book “Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations.” The notebooks themselves are boring. Even stultifying. A seemingly endless account of the pieces Richter played on various nights. But Monsaingeon also provides an autobiographical narrative that he assembled from years of interviews with Richter. It includes a passage on Richter’s struggle with depression:

I’ve known periods of chronic depression, the most serious of which was in 1974. It was impossible for me to live without a plastic lobster that I took with me everywhere, leaving it behind only at the very moment I went on stage. This was accompanied by a type of auditory hallucination that tormented me for months on end, day and night, even while I was asleep. I started to hear a recurrent musical phrase a few bars long, violently rhythmical and rising in pitch. It was based on a chord of a diminished seventh. In the cold light of day I tried to work out what it meant, even though the torment was permanent, even telling myself that such a phenomenon might be of interest to medical science. But try telling doctors about chords of a diminished seventh! Sometimes I would lie awake all night trying to work out what I was hearing — I wasn’t hearing it, but just thought I was — or to work out its pitch. I was for ever trying to identify the notes and the primitive harmonies and to correct them, as it was the most frightful nonsense … Monsaingeon, 140–42.

Richter, during that period of chronic depression, toured Japan playing the late Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Ops. 109, 110 and 111. I wondered if the late Beethoven sonatas could be partially responsible for Richter’s melancholy. The late sonatas (particularly Ops. 101–110) are considered to be some of the most technically difficult piano pieces Beethoven wrote. Was Richter burdened by the difficulty of the works? They are also some of the last piano pieces ever written by Beethoven. Was Richter bothered by the thought of death — his own or Beethoven’s? I found evidence for these ideas in a book on Richter by the Danish composer and writer Karl Aage Rasmussen:

By the end of 1973, [Richter] had begun work on Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata [Op. 106, written in 1818], and his struggle with this monster showed him his mental limitations, leading to self-deprecation and an extended period of depression … It is the longest of Beethoven’s sonatas, a work that, to a rare degree, tests the limits of the sonata form, the pianist’s ability, and the listener’s power of comprehension. In the middle of January 1974, Richter had a veritable breakdown. He stopped practicing entirely and refused to speak to anyone. For three months he cleared his calendar of concerts, but in April, in Moscow, he played the sonata for the first time. Rasmussen, 231–232.

It’s not clear when Richter took up his plastic lobster. He writes about it in a letter dated Sept. 14–15, 1974. He was performing Ops.109–111 in Japan in May and June 1974. Monsaingeon has Richter say he took the lobster with him everywhere, but not specifically that he had it with him for his performances in Tokyo or elsewhere in Japan. Still, it is my assumption that the lobster was present during his performances of Ops. 109–111 in Tokyo.

The plastic lobster story is endlessly suggestive.It is mentioned in a review of Monsaingeon’s book by Edward Rothstein, the former culture critic-at-large for The New York Times, “Allegro con Plastic Lobster.” Rothstein writes, “Richter was enslaved by obsessions. He was tormented by a ‘terrifying, nonselective memory’: he could recall the name of every person he ever met and lost sleep when one escaped him. He was driven nearly mad by a droning melody in his head, which he finally traced back to his childhood love of Rachmaninoff’s ‘Vocalise.’ During one period of chronic depression, he recalled, ‘it was impossible for me to live without a plastic lobster that I took with me everywhere.’ Doesn’t that plastic lobster cry out for some explanation?” Indeed. The question remains: Why the lobster? I wanted to investigate it further so I decided to ask Bruno Monsaingeon some questions. Monsaingeon is known for many extraordinary films on music — profiles of not just Richter, but also of David Oistrakh, Glenn Gould and Nadia Boulanger, among others. I reached him at his flat in Paris in late December 2008.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

ERROL MORRIS Hi, my name is Errol Morris. I have wanted to talk to you for some time. I don’t know if this is a bad time or not.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Well, I can hardly breathe at the moment, but never mind.

ERROL MORRIS Are you O.K.?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON I’m quite O.K., but I’m so totally asphyxiated by the postproduction of films that I’ve made this year. I find it difficult to find a minute, just crazy. But never mind. No, no, go ahead, it’s perfectly all right.

ERROL MORRIS I read your edited diaries, notebooks and conversations with Richter, and there was this extraordinary quote in one conversation where Richter starts to talk about his plastic lobster.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Yes. I tried to organize those conversations after those many years of work together. And then I do mention this extraordinary episode about the plastic lobster which was something very transient, but it happened, I can’t remember which year, I think it must have been around ’74, ’75, when he had all these phantasmagoric ideas and when he stopped performing from memory, and so on and so forth. It’s something that he just mentioned to me in a moment of complete openness. It must have been later than ’74, early ’70s, anyway, because I had never seen him with that contraption or apparatus, and it was quite unbelievable. But this is also the time when he started having some problems with his hearing and when he suddenly heard everything half a tone higher or below which really affected the clarity of his thinking. It was quite unbelievable.

ERROL MORRIS He also mentions that he was having odd dreams — repeated seventh chords that he could not identify.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON I’ve written everything that had to be written about that. I can’t go into any more precise details. It was a very real problem that he had but I don’t think I can really elaborate on this very much.

ERROL MORRIS But in the case of the plastic lobster — and this may reflect a misunderstanding on my part — did he need it for performance?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Oh, no. He needed it until the very last second before he came out on stage. He could hardly even part with it. It was at the last moment that he left it behind the curtain. But he needed it — that thing — which is extraordinary.

I had described the psychological environment, the material environment in which we pursued these long, long conversations. Years of conversations for the microphone and, later on, a little bit for the camera. There were days when he was still just speechless. There would be no words, nothing. And I remained there with him, and I kept talking, talking, asking questions. I would get just a “Da” or “Nyet” and nothing else. And then on another occasion, he’d pour out many things. He would talk about his parents and his childhood, which he found very difficult to do.Here’s Richter’s cousin, Walter Moskalew, on Richter’s relationship with his mother: “Svetik had formerly idolized his mother and talked of her to his friends in Moscow in the most glowing terms. Her involvement with Sergei [Kondratiev, the despised stepfather mentioned above] in Odessa does not seem to have affected his love for her. Perhaps he saw it as a temporary aberration, but more likely he just avoided thinking about it, as he had always avoided anything unpleasant. Kept apart from his parents by the war, it was only several years later that Svetik learned that his father was dead, his mother married to Sergei and living in Germany. That news shook him to the core. Although he was by then 29, his mother had been one of the pillars of his life. Now she was gone. He blamed his father’s death on [his mother’s] refusal to be evacuated from Odessa, and he would have perceived her marriage to Sergei and flight to Germany as a rejection of himself as well” (“Svetik: A Family Portrait of Sviatoslav Richter” by Walter Moskalew, 141). After his mother’s death, Richter wrote to a family friend, “My mother died for me a long time ago. I can’t feel anything. She has disappeared. She was just a mask” (Moskalew, 154). And there were so many such episodes, which I tried to recapture as well as I could in writing.

ERROL MORRIS Hearing things a half tone up or down — was this also a problem related to depression?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON It was probably related to depression. But actually, he mentioned that a bit later in our conversations. One day in a hotel room in Paris, he went to the Clavinova [an electric practice piano] which he had in his room. We had great problems plugging the machine in. And finally he started playing the “Carmen” overture. And he said, “This is in A major, isn’t it?” And I said, “Yes, yes of course, Maestro.” But he was playing the left hand in B major. There was a separation in his mind between the left and the right hand. One was playing one key and another in another key. It must have been a real nightmare for him.

ERROL MORRIS How can you play a piece when you’re transposing only one hand into a different key?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Well, that’s why he stopped. At that time, he had stopped playing in public. He was trying, towards the very end, the very, very last weeks of his life, he was trying to go back to the keyboard and was even planning to play some concerts. But, during those three years, there was not one note played (except on occasion on that Clavinova). Not one note. And he was desperate about it. It’s a very sad ending. This mighty artist and great, great mind, affected by all these problems.

ERROL MORRIS I keep wondering — is the lobster a metaphor for something? Or is the lobster just a lobster? The feeling that you can’t perform, you can’t play without this extra something —

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Yes, I think so, but particularly with pianists.

ERROL MORRIS Yes?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Oh, yes. I find there’s enormous difference between many people — from the very start, you know, people who want to play the violin or who want to play the piano or who want to be singers. There is always something which I’ve found with pianists particularly, of having to face the most psychological problems. With all of them except, naturally, Glenn Gould, who decided to have his own way and not perform in public — a very wise decision. And keeping to his decision instead of always shilly-shallying between so many temptations and the problems of having to face the public.

Now, some people do it as Richter did it. He did not pay attention to any kind of public reaction. And some others have to face different kinds of problems. But most pianists — I’m talking about great pianists, naturally — Why am I performing here? Why do I need to repeat myself all the time? Etc., etc. And this is a problem that is very acute with most of the great pianists that I’ve worked with. Violinists are, in a way, more immune to that because they’re trying to sing their heart out and don’t have to face the same intellectual challenge.

ERROL MORRIS What is it about playing the piano that is so different?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Their overall view of music. They’ve got to take a much more complex, let’s say, intricate amount of information, and I find that this probably is the key. The fantastic technical challenge, the gigantic amount of information.

ERROL MORRIS And there can’t be a single wrong note.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON There are some pianists who can’t stand wrong notes. Gould couldn’t. And when I had to force him to play one wrong note [for a film], it was terrible for him.

ERROL MORRIS You forced him to play a wrong note?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Oh, yes.

PIANO SONATA NO. 29 IN B-FLAT MAJOR, OP. 106 Performed by Sviatoslav Richter. Royal Festival Hall, London. June 18, 1975

ERROL MORRIS But are there any rough parallels to Richter’s lobster with other pianists?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Not really. Have you heard about Grigory Sokolov? Well, he’s got his own problems. This gigantic pianist who, first of all, plays the same program seven times in a row. And he couldn’t face the idea of not having the ritual of the concert so that he really refuses any kind of recording to be released. One day, he agreed to go into a studio for a recording. He came in with bow tie, polished shoes, evening dress. He had all that attire with him in order to play as if he was giving a concert.

ERROL MORRIS He had to pretend to himself that he was giving a concert?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON That he was giving a concert. Yes. Now, I never knew people like [Claudio] Arrau, and these people whom I was not particularly interested in anyway, but who had their own very serious problems.

ERROL MORRIS The Richter story touched me. The movie was a deeply moving movie.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON The whole background of Soviet Russia is an epic story. It left a deep mark on all the Soviet musicians that I knew. They all bear some common marks, those surviving today. And those who’ve tried to short-circuit the kinds of influence that the terrible regime had on them. It was a difficult thing. He was a man without compromises and he did manage to have his own way. But the human costs were huge. That’s for sure.

ERROL MORRIS During this period of depression, wasn’t he performing the last three Beethoven sonatas in Japan?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Yes.

ERROL MORRIS Was there any connection between the late Beethoven sonatas and the lobster?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I’m sure not. I’m sure this had to do with the general state of mind. Richter never kept down to one single program. There was always an immense amount of works available, and he was always changing. In a year, he would give so many different recital programs. And this went on until the very end. The last concertos he learned were the Saint-Saëns 2nd and the Gershwin. It was never: enough is enough. He was always curious. He said, “I’d rather play 25 Haydn sonatas than just two.”

ERROL MORRIS Did he ever discuss the late Beethoven sonatas?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Not in particular. Just talking about how badly he’d performed most of them most of the time. I remember the first time he ever played the “Hammerklavier.” I was there.

ERROL MORRIS Yes?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON That must have been in ’75 or ’76. He was so unhappy about his performance that he played the fugue again. And it went beautifully; it was actually beautiful. That was something that he did on occasion. He did the same thing in Paris for the “Left Hand Concerto” by Ravel with [Lorin] Maazel conducting. Instead of playing an encore, he repeated the whole concerto because he was not happy. So Richter was torn between his desire for perfection and his incredible self-loathing.

ERROL MORRIS Perhaps the two go hand in hand. It’s an idea of perfection, the perfect live performance. Richter preferred to play in public rather than to record in a studio.

BRUNO MONSAINGEON Oh yes, he couldn’t stand recording. He couldn’t stand making records.

ERROL MORRIS Why?

BRUNO MONSAINGEON I don’t know. I don’t know. He just wanted everything to be real.





Real … ! Like a plastic lobster?

Lobster letter from September, 1974. Walter Moskalew

Please note the juxtaposition of the lobster’s pincers and Richter’s brain.

The letter, in which Richter writes of the lobster, dated Sept. 14–15, 1974, is translated as follows:

Greetings, Dorochka!

See, your Reginald has completely gone overboard with his scribbling. First, I woke up very early this morning (in my bed with the baronial crest), or perhaps my lobster woke me — she now sits before me at the little writing desk (antique, naturally) and is helping me. She is huge and friendly. I use her primarily to scare people in Italy from inside the car. I make it seem as if she is about to attack and bite them. She is now my favorite toy, for after my illness I feel an overwhelming desire to play the fool.Moskalew, 222.

Playing the fool. Was the lobster a symptom of Richter’s illness or part of its cure? The flip side of Richter’s depression, his unaffected love of playing, becomes apparent in the accounts of those who knew him longest and best. He was a playful and uninhibited boy with a fantastic imagination. Richter described his childhood to his friend Yakov Milstein, another Russian pianist:

It was a period full of adventure and poetry. I lived in contact with nature, almost in symbiosis with it. My relatives were foresters, and in the family the virtues of the country life predominated. We loved nature, worshipped it: up until I was seven, eight years old, I believed in elves and mermaids. Nature was my contact to the supernatural, it was full of mysteries. Behind all its manifestations, there was something spiritual. I lived quite literally in a fairy-tale world.Rasmussen, 38.

Richter spent formative years at his family’s estate near Zhitomir in the care of his Aunt Dagmar, an illustrator and author of children’s stories, with whom he remained close and to whom he wrote the lobster letter in 1974. He was interested in music from a very early age but had little formal training until he attended the Moscow Conservatory in his late twenties; growing up he had rejected any suggestion by his father (who was also a pianist) that he should practice scales or Czerny exercises.Monsaingeon, 14. It may not be fair to call him undisciplined: his real interest — in these early days and, arguably, throughout his life — was not in playing the piano but in sight-reading music, being able to play whatever he wanted to, whenever he felt like it.

The day before he wrote the lobster letter, on Sept. 13–14, 1974, Richter wrote to his Aunt Dagmar, using the names he had invented for them in a romantic play called “Dora” he wrote when he was 9: “Your rather solid (in age) Reginald, [has] remained, I think (under your influence and that of Maeterlinck), the same child he was at the age of five or six when he lived in Zhitomir.” Dagmar, too, recalled those idyllic days in her response to the lobster letter:

And now your letter of 14–15 September — a brilliant illustration of the lobster and you. You even look like yourself, and the lobster also […] As to your again loving to “fool around” (to put it mildly), that very much speaks to my nature. I remember everything that happened in Zhitomir and Odessa. I would give much to be able to be with you now and for us to “divert” ourselves wholeheartedly in this way without the constraints of decorum or of “what is not done.”Moskalew, 259.

Photo by Jochen Blume/ullstein bild via Getty Images

I imagine Richter in 1974, almost 60 years old, at the end of 10 hours of practice.Richter claimed that he almost never practiced for more than three hours a day, but many of his friends and acquaintances would have found this laughable. A number of accounts I’ve read of Richter describe him practicing the whole day through. Particularly when he had to learn a new piece very quickly, Richter was known to practice incessantly (Rasmussen, 206–12). The room is dark. His hands are tightly clasped together. ‘What is it that will allow me to play the repeated figurations in the right hand in the Op. 111?’

Heinrich Neuhaus, teacher at the Moscow Conservatory and mentor to the young Richter, wrote about him:

I have only mentioned this to throw some light on the mystery of his genius. He is as much a man of seeing as he is of hearing, and this is a rather rare combination. For him all music is filled with images which are quite original sometimes. For instance he once said that the third part of Prokofiev’s Second Concerto made him think of “the dragon devouring children,” and that the first part of Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata represented “industrialization.”

Neuhaus wasn’t the only one to seize on Richter’s synesthetic habit of connecting music and images; his cousin Walter Moskalew writes:

The few comments [Richter] made revealed how visual his musical imagination was. I suppose many musicians conjure up scenarios and stories that help them to organize and make sense of the sounds they are producing, but Svetik’s images seemed especially vivid. “One can hear machine-guns firing and explosions in this sonata,” he said. As he was playing the second Allegro inquieto section of the first movement, he remarked at one point (around bar 316): “He [Prokofiev] is superb at conveying a sense of dread! There is constantly something awfully disquieting in all this.” I said, thinking of the passage marked senza Ped. (bars 317 et seq.), that the percussive nature of those chords struck me as machine-like. “No, no … not really,” he answered. “It is rather as if people are riding on horseback along a road … there are telephone poles passing by … they are going away … somewhere … and it is a kind of grey overcast day.Moskalew, 187.

Richter had an extraordinary repertoire. He played everything. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Prokofiev. He had a flawless technique. He had a strange ability to visualize sound and hands that could span a 12th. But somehow, none of this was enough to enable him to perform. Not without a plastic lobster.

Sparky’s Magic Piano

Manuel Litran/Corbis via Getty Images

I had terrible trouble practicing the cello as a little boy. I was constantly warned by my teachers, and by myself: “If you don’t practice, you will never be any good.” I, of course, wondered about the paranoid variation. Even if you do practice, you still will never be any good. (Malcolm Gladwell and his 10,000-hour rule notwithstanding.) Practice is necessary but something more is needed. Talent? Ability?

Just what is that “something more”?It reminds me of the greatest line since Shakespeare. It was written by Harry Crews in his novel “Car.” Herman, the protagonist, who eats a car, is talking to his twin brother in the largest car-wrecking enterprise in Florida. There are freshly mangled automobile hulks falling into the yard from the expressway seven stories above. “I don’t mean more of this,” Herman says. “More than this.” What ineffable quality? Is it “something” that translates into excellence — excellence in interpretation, excellence in performance? A missing ingredient? The “something” that makes everything else possible?

It’s not so unusual for a sports figure or a musician or a chess grandmaster to have an odd talisman or fetish object. Richter is not unique in that respect. The idea of being unable to perform without a lucky charm, a favorite pair of socks or even a pink plastic lobster makes some sense. If the fetish object gives someone that extra bit of reassurance, what’s the problem? Except for one small thing. Who is performing the Op. 111? What is the role of the lobster? Or the lucky charm? Or the pair of socks?

The story about Richter and the lobster caught my attention for many reasons. I had been horribly dependent on my mother through high school. She was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Hunter College, a graduate of Juilliard in piano, and had studied at Fontainebleau with Robert Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger. At the age of seven, I started to play the cello, and when I sat down to play she often accompanied me on the piano.

I had trouble practicing on my own and was always ill-prepared for my lessons. Enter “Sparky.” Sparky was presumably a fictional character, but he was also me, and this is a story about how Sparky and his magic piano may have ruined my life.

I recently found a website selling CD reproductions of the Sparky album, which was originally issued on shellac. It advertises: “During the late 1940s/early 1950s virtually every child who was taking piano lessons was given a copy of ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano.’ ” Could this really be true? Wasn’t I one of them? I was born in 1948. My father died in 1950 of a sudden heart attack at 43. My mother gave piano lessons in our home to support my brother and me. When I started kindergarten my mother gave up teaching in the evenings and afternoons and took a job as an elementary school music teacher in Woodmere, N.Y.

I remember our record player in the living room. A Magnavox. And the old vinyl 78s. Hard like a rock. And I remember Sparky.

The album’s narrator tells us: “Sparky was a little boy just about your age — maybe a little older by now. He had been taking piano lessons for almost a whole year and was already on his third piece … ” But Sparky doesn’t like to practice. He complains to his piano teacher, “More practice! I’ve been practicing every day for a whole year. I can’t even learn a piece in a week. When will I be able to play real good? How long does it take? Sometimes I don’t know if it’s worth it; I don’t get to play outside as much as the other kids … ” So far, I could relate.

But then Sparky’s piano starts speaking. It offers to show Sparky what it’s like to play the piano well. All he has to do is run his hands over the keys and the piano will do the rest. Sparky astounds his mother with his (the piano’s) rendition of Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Étude, and she and Sparky’s piano teacher send him (and his magic piano) on a solo concert tour all around the country.

Pretty soon his newfound stardom goes to his head. Sparky becomes overconfident and then suddenly, unexpectedly the piano refuses to play for him during one of his encores (Mendelssohn’s “Spinning Song”). Sparky is humiliated. He wakes up in his living room and realizes that the magic piano was all a dream. The discovery is a shock, but Sparky is encouraged to practice until he can play “as good as I did in my dream … Well, anyway, as good as my teacher.”

Richter bowing after a successful concert at Carnegie Hall, 1960. Walter Sanders/Getty Images

A description on Wikipedia states: “The unusual popularity of ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’ can be attributed to the fact that the album is not only an excellent work of children’s fantasy; it also has a useful moral that would have been inspirational to any child practicing a musical instrument or studying classical music.”

Inspirational? I don’t think so. I took something from “Sparky’s Magic Piano” that was completely different. A different moral. Namely, you will never be able to do it — whatever it might be. You will always need a crutch. You will always be dependent. You will always need a magic piano, and you should know that the piano can and will be taken away.

Here is Sparky playing the most important concert of his career. His friends, family — everyone — waiting for him to close out the performance with a flourish. You come to trust something, to be completely dependent on it, and then — poof! — it vanishes. And you never find it again. Expectations dwindle. You give up hope. You try to make the horrible disappointment easier on yourself by aspiring to nothing.

Sparky is never going to amount to anything. He hasn’t been practicing, and now, rather than face the consequences of his inanition, he is going to cheat. Sparky is undisciplined. He refuses to practice. The time for his lesson is approaching, and he knows his teacher is going to be very cross.

Perhaps there is an inner voice talking to Sparky. That same high-pitched, squeaky, mechanical voice on the original 78s. I imagine the voice: “Sparky, you have the choice. You can either continue with this lie, or you can face the truth … ” Isn’t the truth that Sparky is a talentless schlub? That Sparky can’t practice, will never be able to practice, will never amount to anything?

Does the magic piano have reasons — good or bad — for abandoning Sparky? What if it is not Sparky’s behavior that offends the piano? The piano doesn’t actually supply a motivation. Like God in the story of Job, or destiny in any Greek tragedy, the piano doesn’t have to have a reason. Perhaps the Devil whispered in its ear.

The recording and my life have become intertwined. Who is Sparky? Is he me? Am I him?

And then, of course, there’s the lobster.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Ah, but you say there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was essential? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?

Glenn Gould had a real-life magic piano. Katie Hafner’s book “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” details Gould’s long love affair with CD 318, a Steinway concert grand he played for most of his career. As a teenage prodigy Gould performed some of his first concerts on the piano. After he rediscovered it more than a dozen years later in a Toronto department store, he would play on no other. He spent 10 years playing it for every recording until it was mysteriously, horribly damaged in shipping.

Gould forged his longest-lasting attachments with inanimate objects: his rattletrap of a chair [designed by his father], his cars (he even named them), his fingerless gloves. Over the years, he had made sincere proclamations of his affection for CD 318 and would play on no other instrument. Now, at the hands of movers who were at best inattentive, at worst incompetent, the entire investment in 318 had come to a premature and abrupt end.Hafner, “A Romance on Three Legs,” Kindle location 2327.

But end it would not. Gould sent the piano back to Steinway for repairs and, though unhappy with the result, bought it from them rather than give it back when Steinway terminated their long-running rental program. He continued to play on the restored piano, but was endlessly disappointed with it and frustrated that each time he sent it back to Steinway for repairs, it came back in worse condition. A few years before he died he began looking for a replacement piano. In 1981, when Gould rerecorded The Goldberg Variations (his first recording of them, released in 1955, had made him an international star), he played a Yamaha. He died a week after that recording was released.

In June 2018 I spoke to the pianist Jeremy Denk about Richter, fetish objects and “Sparky’s Magic Piano.” Denk has written about his interest in the metaphysics of piano playing — what it means to practice, to perform, to interpret — and I thought he might be the ideal person to discuss Richter’s need for a plastic lobster.

Richter practicing Tchaikovsky and Liszt at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, December 12th, 1960. Walter Moskalew

JEREMY DENK: I just took a glance at “Sparky’s Magic Piano,” which I’d never seen, actually.

ERROL MORRIS Really? You are so fortunate. I truly believe that “Sparky’s Magic Piano” ruined my life.

JEREMY DENK How exactly?

ERROL MORRIS I identified with Sparky. Sparky was a bad student. Sparky did not practice. He was always hoping for the best but not prepared to work to achieve the best.

At the very end — it’s interesting because I don’t remember it this way from my childhood. The end is — spoiler alert — Sparky wakes up and it’s all a dream. And as a result of the dream he’s going to work even harder now to learn to play the piano.

JEREMY DENK But?

ERROL MORRIS But I remembered it differently. The whole idea of “Sparky’s Magic Piano” just being a dream was lost. It just became a pure Faustian fable. Sparky goes around the world, he plays for all of the great dignitaries in the world capitals. Of course, he takes the magic piano with him everywhere. It’s not such a good piano. People can’t really understand why he’s doing this. But, of course, he not only likes the piano, he needs the piano.

As I remembered it, at the end he’s about to play this all-important concert. The culmination of everything, the fulfillment of everything. And just before he’s about to play the first note the piano speaks to him and says, “I can’t play for you anymore, Sparky.” And he’s pleading with the piano. “Don’t do this to me. Piano, I need you.” But the piano is adamant. The piano basically says, “Fuck you, Sparky.”

JEREMY DENK Yeah, I know that feeling. I’ve had that conversation before.

ERROL MORRIS Yeah. And Sparky’s crushed. He’s ruined and he never resolves to practice harder. I suppose the way I would remember it is: Sparky ends up in a mental institution.

JEREMY DENK Yes. So instead of resolving to be a better person, it’s just a tale of destruction. And it’s almost as if the piano’s willfully leading him into that trap.

ERROL MORRIS I think that’s a good way to look at it.

JEREMY DENK Because if the piano hadn’t gotten involved in the first place, he could have had a very nice life as a doctor or God knows what — a gardener or whatever.

ERROL MORRIS So many occupations would have been open to him.

JEREMY DENK That’s right.

ERROL MORRIS Have you seen these notebooks by Richter?

JEREMY DENK I haven’t spent enough time with them, actually, so I don’t know them that well.

ERROL MORRIS Every now and again, there are passages in them that are just remarkable. I kind of love it. I love the notebooks, as boring as they are. There’s a story in them about a recording he had made of the “Hammerklavier,” actually. And you can hear it. You can listen to this recording and he said he listened to it and he said he could find nothing wrong with it. There were no wrong notes. He had played it, if not perfectly, almost perfectly. The interpretation, he thought, was interesting. And yet, he loathed it.

JEREMY DENK O.K., yeah. Did it represent some falsification of the essential message of the piece? Was there a reason he felt that he loathed it?

ERROL MORRIS Well, he was always interested in what it meant to interpret something, of course. And what his actual function was in interpretation.Richter himself says, from Monsaingeon, 153: “The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer’s intentions to the letter. He doesn’t add anything that isn’t already in the work. If he’s talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it … I might have had doubts about the extent to which I managed to play what I intended, but from the beginning I was always certain that, for each work, it was in this way, and no other, that it had to be played. Why? It’s very simple: because I looked closely at the score. That’s all that’s required to reflect what it contains.” But he doesn’t quite say that he loathed the interpretation. He says he loathed it, “Because I hate myself.”“[Richter’s] self-criticism was merciless, so total as to seem self-destructive. In his notes from the years 1970–95 … one sees him again and again rap himself on the knuckles (‘most of my recordings are terrible. Listening to them puts me into a terrible mood … I’m always disappointed’)” (Rasmussen, 5).

JEREMY DENK Oh, good God. [laughter]

ERROL MORRIS Oh, good God is right.

JEREMY DENK Sorry I’m laughing. I mean, it’s not funny but, wow. And he says that in the notebook, or he says as much?

ERROL MORRIS Yeah, and again at the end of Bruno Monsaingeon’s film “Richter: The Enigma.” At the very end of it, Richter just slumps over and he says something to the effect, “You have to understand, I just don’t like myself.”Rasmussen makes a number of interesting points about this comment. He points out that in Russian, Richter says “ya sebe nye nravlyus,” which could also be translated as “I am not satisfied with myself” (Rasmussen, 1). And he calls into question how Monsaingeon edited the end of his film: “The touching ending (‘I don’t like myself’) is, if you will, a fake. The sentence is a typical outburst expressing his dissatisfaction with his London recording of Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata (‘there’s something [what?] that doesn’t entirely satisfy me’). Richter is actually reading from his notes. To create a deeper meaning, Monsaingeon has clearly edited the subsequent, unforgettable clip in which the pianist hides his bowed head behind his hand, for it shows a Richter in different clothes” (Rasmussen, 18). And it’s heartbreaking.

JEREMY DENK Oh, God.

ERROL MORRIS It’s just utterly heartbreaking.

JEREMY DENK Yes, that is heartbreaking. We spend so much time with ourselves as musicians, so there’s that sense of always looking in the mirror.

ERROL MORRIS It seems so, so very sad because he was so very, very excellent.

JEREMY DENK Of course. And brilliant. And the playing is full of feeling, too. In a way, I would be happier if Glenn Gould had said that about himself. But he didn’t.

ERROL MORRIS Also, that performance, which is extant, of the “Hammerklavier” is just utterly wonderful.

JEREMY DENK I’ve been listening to him playing Schumann a lot lately.

ERROL MORRIS Which Schumann?

JEREMY DENK “Papillons,” which is amazing. Stunning. Just stunning. It’s hard to actually unbottle what are the secrets that make it so. But the imagination, this fierce imagination applied all the time to the act of playing — which, you’re right, makes it heartbreaking. There wasn’t even some contentment or comfortable self-regard, deserved self-regard, or self-forgiveness, I guess.

PAPILLONS, OP. 2-3 Performed by Sviatoslav Richter. Teatro Communale, Florence. October 21, 1962

ERROL MORRIS Well, it’s hard to forgive yourself, really, if you’ve done nothing wrong.

JEREMY DENK [laughter] I don’t know that much about his personal life, either. So I don’t know how content or discontent he was. He feels like the kind of person for whom music was basically everything. But I might be mistaken about that.





Denk is not far off. Richter himself reportedly said: “Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life, and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theater presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.”Mervyn Horder, “A Richter Rehearsal at the Barbican.”





ERROL MORRIS I read this passage about him suffering depression while trying to master some of the late Beethoven sonatas. And for a while afterward he had to take this plastic lobster with him everywhere.

JEREMY DENK [laughter] The lobster. I’ve been telling that story, by the way. That’s really astounding. But he took it onstage with him, or he left it backstage?

ERROL MORRIS He left it backstage. I could never get — I interviewed Monsaingeon because I read this and I called him. I wanted a further elucidation of the story. You just can’t write this and not expect someone to ask a couple of questions. It wasn’t that I felt he was withholding anything from me, he just wasn’t terribly helpful.

And then I remembered seeing — it’s actually my favorite interview with you, which was done for NPR and you’re practicing your Ligeti études. And in passing, there are two objects. There’s an angry bird, and there’s some demonic toy [an UglyDoll].

JEREMY DENK Yes, right. It was a demonic. Like a little demon of some kind. Is that the one you were looking at?

ERROL MORRIS Indeed, it is.

JEREMY DENK Right.

ERROL MORRIS So here’s a question. Tell me about those two objects and why they’re in your studio?

JEREMY DENK I’ve never spent enough time psychologically unpacking. I think one of the things is I’ve never liked having, like many people have music posters or pictures of composers in the studio or sort of appropriately profound things. And it always feels very lonely to me, so I usually have … They’re like little companions I’ve accumulated over travels. You see them in the airport or in weird countries, and I don’t know exactly what appeals to me about them. I guess a certain manic look in the eye is an important part of the ones that I manage to keep and gather around.

I have one in my car, too, which is very much in that vein, sort of frazzled beyond all imagining. And I guess it’s just a way of channeling the stress into an external object. Or making it feel a little less threatening.

ERROL MORRIS Making the stress feel less imposing?

JEREMY DENK Yeah, exactly. The process of practicing, especially the Ligeti, is inherently impossible. So you have to have some good cheer about it while you’re driving yourself insane. It’s probably also a little bit of childishness. I still like stuffed animals, for some reason, which seems odd for a now 48-year-old man. But they do something for me.

ERROL MORRIS I promised my stuffed animals I would never leave them, and then I did leave them, but then I found them again and brought them back.

JEREMY DENK They’re like little totems or something, right? I brought that one to the editing session, actually. When we were editing the Ligeti, I brought the little demon and we put it on top of the monitor. Then my producer referred to it very often while we were editing. He would gesture to it when I was driving him out of his mind.

He wouldn’t say anything, he would just point to it and I knew that I had crossed the line. [laughter] Like demanding one note from this take and two notes from that take woven all together in some crazy fashion. He wouldn’t say anything; he would just point to the demon.

ERROL MORRIS The demon was going to hold you responsible?

JEREMY DENK No, the demon was just how he felt towards me at that moment, but he’s too nice to say it. It was a good-humored way of saying, “No, that can’t be done.”

ERROL MORRIS Do you think that these objects play a role? Coming back to the “Sparky’s Magic Piano” thing, what interested me is this feeling that you can’t do it alone. That I, myself, am some imperfect device and that somehow, something supplementary is needed, whatever in hell that could possibly be.

JEREMY DENK Yeah. I feel that very often and very strongly these days. Probably I’ve always felt that. I was studying for a long time. I have stayed in school studying with piano teachers much longer than many other people would do. Then for a long time after that, I felt that I just had to teach myself. I couldn’t rely on the helpful voice of the teacher anymore. Lately, I’ve come back around a little bit. You have to grab ideas and freshness and inspiration from everywhere possible. Different things at different times become essential to your work.

ERROL MORRIS So, why do you think Richter kept the lobster with him until he went onstage?

JEREMY DENK It’s incredibly weird, but I could imagine being attached to almost anything that gave you a sense of comfort. There is an incredible loneliness to being onstage, as I’m sure you’re aware. We’re surrounded by these kind of apparatchiks backstage and they don’t make you feel any cozier, either. They want to, but they can’t.

So I could imagine any kind of — whatever works, you know? I mean, a plastic lobster does seem ridiculous.

ERROL MORRIS Well, it’s no more ridiculous than your demon doll.

JEREMY DENK No, it’s no more ridiculous than that. I mean, look, I don’t travel anywhere without very specific coffee equipment. And if I don’t have it, I am desolate for days and I feel it’s impossible to play. So I guess I’m not that far away from that feeling. But still, a plastic lobster. I don’t know what it is about that crustacean. No idea.

ERROL MORRIS Weird, evil eyes?

JEREMY DENK Very agile claws? I don’t know. Was he a man of the ocean? I don’t know.

ERROL MORRIS No, I don’t think so.

JEREMY DENK I have to assume that the absurdity of the object was part of it.

ERROL MORRIS I would hope so. Why not? Why not a plastic lobster?

JEREMY DENK Exactly. Why not?

ERROL MORRIS If you play better with the lobster, isn’t that enough reason to have it there?

JEREMY DENK It sure as hell is. My only fear, if I were in that situation, would be the mockery and bewilderment of all the people backstage.

ERROL MORRIS You keep it in a box. You don’t share that information with too many people.

JEREMY DENK You do not share it. But it would be hard to hide a plastic lobster at a certain point.

ERROL MORRIS So you bring nothing with you backstage?

JEREMY DENK No, so far, I don’t bring anything backstage. I’m a little bit particular about what I eat before I go out on stage, which can sometimes be a little bit compulsive. Almost always spaghetti and meatballs and I get a bit upset if I can’t find them. I think probably the presenters feel that I’m slightly insane for that, too.

ERROL MORRIS And the coffee? What kind of coffee?

JEREMY DENK I have a place, Joe, here in New York and I like to have those beans and I have a little hand grinder. You know, Beethoven had 50 beans every day.Denk says 50, others say 60. For those wanting to follow Beethoven’s example, there may be no reputable source or citation. My suggestion is just simply to drink coffee in moderation. I weighed it out and it’s almost exactly 50 beans that I drink every day. I have a little scale; it’s very precise. So that’s one maniacal aspect of my routine when I’m touring.





The mystery of musical performance — it’s not just a mystery for people listening to the performance in a studio, a concert hall or on a recording. It’s a mystery for the performers themselves. It’s a bit like cooking: following directions in a cookbook does not make a master chef.

Beans. Could it all come down to beans? We all wonder what that extra ingredient might be. If I had this extra ingredient in my makeup would I be a great composer, a great musician or a great mathematician? Richter may have wondered the same thing. People focus on the things they can’t do rather than on the things they can. Richter might not have known where he ended and that ineffable something else began.While filming a piece for the Oscars, I asked Eddie Murphy if he ever worried about waking up one day and finding that he was no longer funny. He said, “Yes. It’s something I worry about all the time.” I then asked him if he could try not to be funny. He tried, but the result was some of the funniest stuff I have ever seen. And not knowing, he might have begun to worry. What is it that allows me to play? Could it be taken away? Could it suddenly vanish? Is it some property of my mind or brain? Could it be something external to me altogether?

Could it be a plastic lobster?

The fetish object tells us that we might not be able to do it alone. We, ourselves, might not be enough.

Music for Machines

Fourth variation, second movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor (Op. 111). 32 Sonate per pianoforte, vol. 3, Milano: Curci, 1949.

There are passages in late Beethoven that endlessly fascinate me. Played the way I believe they should be played, the music could have been produced by a supremely intelligent machine. The notes have a music-box quality, a mechanical quality — played without inflection, without rubato, without anything. And despite this attempt to defeat everything emotional about the music, an emotion comes through even more strongly. I find it difficult to describe. It could represent a pact with the devil.

Two sections in particular: one from the last movement of the Op. 111, the other from the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120 — the second variation. Beethoven worked on both of them around the same time.Charles Rosen, “Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas,” p. 248: “Unless we think that the extraordinary resemblance of the Arietta to Diabelli’s waltz is entirely coincidental — and this is unlikely since he worked at both of them around the same time — we must admit that not only did Beethoven realize that he could create a grand work with Diabelli’s trashy tune, but he also, perhaps unconsciously, rethought the principal elements of the tune into a melody of great beauty.”

I believe that there are no good movies, no good books, no good music compositions just great scenes, great passages, great moments. I suppose at some point I should assemble a top10 list of great scenes in movies, great passages in literature, great moments in music. (Best left to another time.)

The moments in the Arietta from the Op. 111 are among my favorites. From the fourth variation. The 32nd notes in the right hand should have a metronomic, repetitive quality. I have listened to many recordings. None of them are completely satisfying — from Artur Schnabel to Claudio Arrau to Grigory Sokolov to the recent recordings by Andras Schiff and a slow and strange performance by Varvara Nepomnyaschaya. As more and more LPs are issued, more CDs, more mp3s, more streams, more everything, we are flooded by a multitude of interpretations — searching for exactly what? Some sublime moment? According to Andras Schiff, the trills are not “decorative but existential.” “From darkness to light … From the ground to the stars … ” He calls it “transcendental music … It has nothing more to do with an instrument — with a miserable piano. You just hear the human spirit … ”

Or as Jeremy Denk puts it, “some element of the outrageous, the unassimilated, the ridiculous, creeps in and Beethoven did not, like some too-serious artists, want to let that part of existence go.”Jeremy Denk, “Regrets and Bumps,” October 24, 2005.

PIANO SONATA NO. 32 IN C MINOR, OP. 111 Performed by Sviatoslav Richter. NHK Hall, Tokyo. June 1, 1974

ERROL MORRIS I was really interested in your writings on the Op. 111 and all the variety of stuff that has been written, as you well know, on the Op. 111. It attracts various literary figures, et cetera.

JEREMY DENK It sure as hell does, and for good reason.

ERROL MORRIS But there’s one set of passages in the Op. 111 that people don’t really write about. Maybe I wanted to write about it. There’s stuff in Beethoven that fascinates me. It’s actually in Ligeti as well, because it seems to flirt with the idea of the player almost as a machine. And the more machine-like it becomes, oddly enough, the more profound it becomes. I’m not really saying this well at all. It’s the last movement. It’s always described as celestial, because it’s just these repeated figurations.

JEREMY DENK You mean all the ones high up?

ERROL MORRIS Yes, exactly. I love that stuff. And it seems to me in my favorite recordings of it, it almost becomes like a machine. Another example I could give you is the second variation in the Diabelli Variations, which is machine-like. Maybe this is a bad way of describing it, I’m not sure.

JEREMY DENK No, it’s not. It’s interesting, the 111 passage I’m thinking of, that we’re thinking of, is quite extreme and the stream of notes is unending, right? And there’s something about that that feels, you’re right, unnatural or unusual. And because the stream is constantly changing. Also, it’s not one kind of figuration, it’s a lot of different figurations. It’s almost like a DNA sequence, if you know what I mean?

ERROL MORRIS I do. It could be like a kind of code.

JEREMY DENK And so you’re right, it does not feel like a figuration from normal music and it feels like something that’s almost being spit out on a tape. And you’re right, because of that it has a very uncanny — it reaches into somewhere. I often find that I get tripped up in that passage in concert a little bit, because the patterns are so bizarre and twisty and constantly a little bit against the grain of what you expect. They’re treacherous.

I hadn’t really made the connection to the Ligeti, which is so obvious. Also way up in the high register. That feels like a very real connection. And it’s similar because he’s extenuating a rhythmic process from the original idea with the long-short-long, then it just sort of multiplies and reproduces until it becomes diffused in this endless stream. At which point it’s no longer the thing anymore. I don’t know if that addresses what you were saying.

ERROL MORRIS I don’t even know what I’m saying, but I think it does.

Ludwig van Beethoven M. de Lemud/National Library of France

JEREMY DENK The rhythmic process is so bizarre by that point. It’s a process of variations somewhat like what classical composers used to do, but it’s become so abstracted in a way that it inhabits an unnatural realm. I find when I’m reaching up there and it is trying to become the theme again in one way or another, where you hear these fragments of a theme fleetingly within it, that process is incredibly moving. And then the colors, of course. And the part when it goes low — there’s kind of the sense of these little gaps in the structure. You know this part, it’s just hovering and there are just little bits.

Because in that variation, it switches back and forth from the high part of the piano to the low, right? And that’s one of the most amazing elements of that variation, that switch from light to dark and the way the low part of it feels kind of empty or more haunted, and the higher part feels — I don’t want to cover it with mushy words or anything, but you get more of the feeling of the theme in it. There’s a tenderness in it that is still waiting for some sort of release, which, of course, he gives you. But it is weird that there are no rests, really, for a long, long time.

ERROL MORRIS So when your producer looked at your demon figure, addressing the demon figure instead of you, or warning you through the demon figure, why was the demon figure there for you? To hold Ligeti at bay?

JEREMY DENK [laughter] There’s a whole process of going up to his house to edit. If there’s anything worse than recording, it’s editing what you’ve recorded. There’s an existential hopelessness to it. You can’t even change it, really, anymore. What’s done is done. It’s just sort of trying to make the best of whatever you’ve got. So I often bring kind of a spectacular — when I originally wrote The New Yorker article, I had eight paragraphs on the snacks that I would buy to go to a recording editing session because I just need all sorts of treats and comforts when I’m there.

There was a huge passage about food, as there often is in my first drafts of things. I took most of it out. I wrote about going to the grocery store at eight in the morning before I go to record or edit. It’s like preparing for the apocalypse or something. And I threw the demon in the bag, I remember, because I thought it would cheer him or me up or just somehow make it easier.

ERROL MORRIS Make it easier for whom?

JEREMY DENK For both of us? I guess my producer is so used to his process, day in and day out. For me, it’s like once a year I have to go confront what I’ve recorded and it’s very fraught. So probably easier for me. But he liked that it was there. It might have been at the recording session too, honestly, just to remind me how to play some of the Ligeti, especially “The Devil’s Staircase.” Because a lot of the Ligeti études require you to get this electric kind of mania and just keep at it. The normal things, when you play Mozart or Schubert, this kind of breathing around the end of the phrases, it’s not really part of Ligeti’s language. You have to stay on this high-wire feeling for long periods of time. That’s probably why it got brought along.

ERROL MORRIS To appease the fearsome Ligeti gods?

JEREMY DENK What Ligeti’s asking from you is impossible, or nearly, and it resembles much more the kind of things and the programming instructions you would give to a computer. Do this similar thing, but make this small change. All the unmemorizable little changes in self-similar fractal patterns, you know? There’s something about that, which is quite different from asking you to inflect a melody in a meaningful or affecting way. It’s asking you to become part machine.

And the thrill ride of that is you don’t know if your brain’s going to keep up. Very often when we were editing it, we couldn’t actually follow the music in the score. I had played it from the score. I had somehow managed to make my fingers do it from the score. But when I had to listen to it and stop the record at the place where we were, I couldn’t. It was very bizarre.

ERROL MORRIS You couldn’t consciously do it?

JEREMY DENK Yes. I often couldn’t find it by ear, where we were. It went by too fast for my brain except when I was playing it.

ERROL MORRIS That’s interesting.

JEREMY DENK Yeah, it was weird. That caused us a lot of hours of frustration, actually.

ERROL MORRIS So how do you go about memorizing something like that?

JEREMY DENK You know, I tried memorizing it. I memorized the first book but it always had mishaps, unfortunately. It’s one of the most unmemorizable things I’ve ever tried to do and I kind of gave up at a certain point. Didn’t know if it was worth the suffering. I mean, I love that music. The stuff that would happen — once one note got left out, you had to really make up things for a long period of time. Because the beats between the hands almost never coincide. So there are very few places to say, “All together now, let’s start here.”

ERROL MORRIS There’s no reset mechanism.

JEREMY DENK That’s right. It’s all discombobulated. Once it gets going, once the machine starts spinning out of control, you just have to hold on. Which is exactly how you’re not supposed to feel when you’re playing music, by the way — normal music.

ERROL MORRIS How do you know how you’re supposed to feel when you’re playing music? How would anyone ever know the answer to the “supposed to feel” question?

JEREMY DENK [laughter] I just know from my own experience. There are those moments where you’re playing and it feels like that, and it’s the worst thing in the world. And there are those moments on stage where it feels like each moment you could take a little time or take less time. There’s a freedom of mobility within the musical unfolding and that feels a lot better to me. It’s not relevant to Ligeti, per se.

ERROL MORRIS But when you know something by heart — a late Beethoven sonata, for example — are you consciously aware of what you’re doing while you’re playing it? Is it nonconscious? Is it mechanical? What is it? Not that it has to be one thing rather than another.

JEREMY DENK Usually there’s some conscious thread that I’m following. And sometimes, that’s somewhat physical, like I want to bring this finger down with this level of intensity and then this one. You’re just following the notes, calibrating the attacks of each finger so the phrase unfolds the way that you want it to.

But then while that’s happening, a lot of stuff is happening subconsciously around the perimeter that you can’t as much consciously control. And sometimes things go wrong in the perimeter there and you have to redirect your conscious forces to that place and then come back to the thing you originally wanted to focus on.

And then sometimes, it does feel as though the whole thing is running and you don’t have to particularly do anything. That’s nice.

Drawing of Richter by Jules Fehr. Gertrude Fehr/Getty Images

Consciousness, unconsciousness. Denk describes “calibrating the attacks of each finger so the phrase unfolds the way you want it to … ” Conscious decisions, volition, calculation. But he follows this with a machine-like image. The device, presumably the brain, is turned on and music is produced. “The whole thing is running and you don’t have to do particularly anything.” Which is it? Are there two separate independent pictures here? Are they interrelated? The mind. The brain. Two entities running in tandem.

It reminds me of Benjamin Libet’s experiments on consciousness and free will. In the 1960s, Libet, a neurophysiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, gained access to the operating room of the neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein at Mount Zion Hospital. There Libet performed experiments on the exposed brains of patients who were undergoing surgery for treatment of Parkinson’s. In his earliest experiments, Libet stimulated areas of the cortex with electrical probes and asked patients what they felt. He discovered that a person feels something only after the cortex has been stimulated by electrical impulses for half a second. Shorter stimuli are not experienced at all. Why would this be? You only need to touch something hot to realize it doesn’t take half a second to feel it. Libet discovered there’s a gap — a half-second delay — between experience and conscious experience.

More experiments with Feinstein’s patients would reveal something even stranger: Consciousness projects itself backward in time. Though Libet’s results and their significance are endlessly debated, the experiments demonstrate that even though our subjective experience doesn’t begin until after 0.5 second of stimulation, it seems as though it began when the electrical field in the brain first registered activity — about 0.02 second after a stimulus was applied to the skin.

The popular science writer Tor Nørretranders explains:

Consciousness presents its possessor with a picture of the world and a picture of himself as an active player in this world. But both pictures are heavily edited … Consciousness portrays itself as the initiator, but it is not, as events have already started by the time consciousness occurs. Consciousness is a fraud, which requires considerable cooking of the temporal books. But that of course is precisely the point with consciousness: Enormous quantities of information are discarded; what is presented is precisely that which is relevant.Nørretranders, 241–42.

Richter during a concert, 1964. Jochen Blume/ullstein bild via Getty Images

Consciousness as fraud. It is not our consciousness that decides when to undertake some action, but something else — something nonconscious. Basically, Libet is telling us that an action precedes our conscious awareness of that action, allowing for the possibility that consciousness itself is a chimera, an ex post facto justification for things that have already occurred.But before we go off the rails worrying about our status as possible automata, it’s important to note that in Libet’s experiments, consciousness occurs after the brain has gone into action but before the body has. Free will can still be exercised — in the form of a veto. Could this be an augmented version of Freud’s idea about the superego?

So, Jeremy Denk’s playing, when it’s going well, is not conscious. He is thinking while he plays, but he does not know it, is not conscious of it. He is carrying out a series of practiced, preprogrammed exercises. But whence the feeling of discomfort, the need for something more — something beyond us to help us get through? Could it all just be a misplaced representation of an internal conflict — the consciousness recognizing its own inadequacy but refusing to recognize any other internal source of efficacy? Nørretranders, once more:

It is not a person’s conscious I that really initiates an action. But it is quite clearly the person himself. There is a difference between the I and the person as a whole … But the I does not want to accept this. The thinking, conscious I insists on being the true player, the active operator, the one in charge. But it cannot be. Not if we take Libet’s findings seriously.Nørretranders, 257.

We seem to be juggling two themes — to good effect? I hope so. One is, do we see our brains, conscious or not, as the author of what we do? Does my brain, conscious or not, allow me to play the Op. 111? The other, is the brain enough? Do I have to imagine something supplementary to the brain? Because it’s not a mind-body thing or a mind-brain thing, it’s a me-and-something-else thing?It goes back to a story about John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and the protagonist of Sylvia Nassar’s “A Beautiful Mind.” Well, it’s not really about John Nash — rather, a fellow mathematician at M.I.T., Donald Newman. As Newman recounts the story, “I was thinking about a problem, trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t and I couldn’t. And I went to sleep one night and I dreamt. I did not dream directly of the solution to that problem. Rather, I dreamt that I met Nash and I asked him the problem, and he told me the answer. When I did finally write the paper, I gave him credit. It was not my solution; I could not have done it myself” (“A Brilliant Madness,” 2002). (Do we need help? Or do we need to imagine that we need help or are receiving it?)

The question of Richter’s lobster leads us into the labyrinthine world of mind-body questions. And if that is not bad enough, mind-consciousness questions. Perhaps the lobster is at the heart of the problem of how we think about what constitutes thought. How important is consciousness, really? Does it decide anything? Does it allow us to take the left-hand fork in the road rather than the right one? Does it give us the illusion of free will? Or does it sit atop the brain as an ornament — a kind of finial? A conceptual yarmulke? Is consciousness like the lobster, a crypto-crustacean helper that makes us think we know what’s going on but is inherently irrelevant?

Perhaps thinking about any of this does us no damn good. Niels Bohr, the author of the complementarity principle of quantum mechanics or, if you like, the non-interpretation interpretation of quantum mechanics, tried to subject movies to logical analysis. For example, “He developed a theory which explained why the hero is quicker and manages to kill the villain despite the fact that the villain is always first on the draw. The Bohrian theory was based on psychology. As the hero never fires first, the villain has to decide when he is going to shoot, and this hampers his movements. The hero, on the other hand, acts reflexively and snatches his revolver quite automatically the instant he sees the villain’s hand move.”This story comes from the physicist George Gamow and is reported by Nørretranders (255–56). Gamow wrote a paper with a graduate student, Ralph Alpher, and included the physicist Hans Bethe as an author just so that he could present the author list of Alpher, Bethe and Gamow, a play on the Greek letters alpha, beta and gamma. He was a funny fellow. Bang, bang. You’re dead.

The Secrets of the Sea

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865. John Tenniel

I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gobble up your monadic privacy like dogs do. And Goethe had an aversion to dogs, and he wasn’t mad!

— Gérard de Nerval’s answer, as reported by his friend Théophile Gautier, when asked about why he kept a lobster as a pet and walked it on a leash.

Gérard de Nerval — a French poet and writer, a surrealist before there was surrealismJust think of all the people obviously influenced by Nerval since his own lifetime. Goethe said he never understood his work better than when he read Nerval’s translation. Proust was infatuated of him. T. S. Eliot, too. (My first acquaintance with Nerval came in the final stanza of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” but it wasn’t until 20 years later that I read the referenced poem, “El Desdichado.”) And his influence on Borges is unmistakable. — is most famous for walking his pet lobster, Thibault, on a blue ribbon through the Palais-Royal. There have been countless discussions of Gérard de Nerval’s lobster. Did he walk it in the park? Is it even possible? Can a lobster walk on land? (Don’t they scuttle?) And if it wasn’t a lobster, what was it? A different crustacean more suited to extended ambulation en plein air?

“Nothing is insignificant, nothing is inconsequential in the universe; an atom can destroy it all, an atom can save it all!” (“Aurélia ou Le Rêve et la vie”). Nerval paints a picture of boundless interconnection, of endless cause and effect. “Everything is alive, everything is in motion, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays that emanate from me or from others flow directly through the infinite chain of creation whose transparent network is in continuous communication with the planets and the stars. A captive here on earth for the moment, I commune with the chorus of stars, and they join in my sorrows and joys.” Nerval, “Aurélia ou Le Rêve et la vie”

Nerval’s oeuvre is characterized by an unremitting sense of loss. As though everything were connected, except him. He writes about the death of his mother:

I was seven years old, and playing carelessly at my uncle’s door, when three officers appeared in front of the house. The blackened gold of their uniforms barely gleamed beneath their military greatcoats. The first one hugged me to him with such emotion that I cried out: “Father … you are hurting me!” All three were returning from the siege of Strasbourg. The oldest, saved from the waters of the frozen Beresina, took me with him to learn what were called my duties. Richard Holmes, “Footsteps,” Kindle location 3947

Richter behind a fountain, 1971. Jochen Blume/Getty Images

Part of the genius of human intelligence is that we’re able to discern boundaries between ourselves and the world. But we could be wrong. About everything. Perhaps the boundaries we have imagined are not really there or have been incorrectly placed. Our cartography of the universe could be false, incorrectly imagined. In one of his last poems, Nerval wrote: “Often the most obscure of beings houses a hidden God; and like a nascent eye veiled by its lids, a pure spirit buds beneath the husk of stones!”“Souvent dans l’être obscur habite un Dieu caché; / Et, comme un oeil naissant couvert par ses paupières, / Un pur esprit s’accroît sous l’écorce des pierres!”

One should always remember: The hidden God is all around us. Nerval seems to quintessentially express these views, the views of the mystery of everything. Is it madness or an acknowledgment of our own inherent limitations in understanding the world around us? The hidden god — ultimately what is this hidden god? The idea that someone, something is pulling strings. But where are these strings? The idea of a presence — ineffable, ephemeral, undefinable — that is part of the universe at large. The hidden god ultimately seems an expression of not just the unknowability of God, but perhaps the ultimate unknowability of everything. Where does music come from? How does the pianist take this endless concatenation of notes on a piece of paper, this assemblage of the white and the black, and transform it into sound? Into music? Nerval, once again, perhaps said it best in his farewell note to his aunt and his farewell note to life itself. Within hours he would be dead. A suicide. Hanging from a window grate in the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne. (There are a surprising number of depictions of Nerval’s place of death. There are two etchings by Nerval’s friend Gustave Doré, who must have been fascinated if not obsessed with the scene. My favorite depiction, though, is a lithograph by another of Nerval’s friends, Célestin François Nanteuil.)

In this last note to his aunt, he wrote: “Ne m’attends pas ce soir, car la nuit sera blanche et noire”: “Do not wait up for me this evening, for the night will be white and black.” What was he talking about? Was it about ink on a page? About writing? Or about music?

The Hills Are Alive

La Rue de la Vieille Lanterne: The Suicide of Gérard de Nerval, 1855. Gustave Doré/Mary S. Adams Fund

I have an immediate connection with music and madness. My mother, Cinnabelle Burzinsky, and her younger sister, Rosalind. Roz was 13 years younger than my mother. And as such, my mother was more than an older sister. She was a second mother. Roz both loved and resented her. She saw her as a faux artist — something other than the real thing. And although my mother was technically the better pianist, Roz was the better pianist, artistically.

I remember Roz spent part of her time at what was then Pilgrim State Hospital and part of her time on a red wool couch in our living room. She read constantly about atomic war — these, after all, were the 1950s — and was convinced that doctors had put cobalt in her brain and that she was dying from radioactive poisoning. She had been a beautiful young woman and, like my mother, a graduate of the Juilliard School. Whether the craziness had something to do with her piano playing, I don’t know. But I do know that she played Schumann, who also spent time in a nuthouse, better than anyone else.

I remember her in her black short shorts, unshaven legs, sitting at the Steinway M in our home playing Schumann’s “Album for the Young,” in particular “Rundgesang” (or Rondelay), No. 22. I have heard it played many times. Indeed, I play it myself. But there is something about how Roz played it that was different, completely different from any other version I’ve heard. (I thought of including a sample of the Rondelay but couldn’t find a version that I really liked or thought comparable to what my crazy aunt had played nearly 60 years ago.)

There are performances that are just different — Jacqueline du Pré’s performances of the Elgar cello concerto, Richter’s performance of Schumann’s “Papillons,” Op. 2. I am endlessly moved by Dinu Lipatti’s last concert just weeks before he died of cancer. A description of that concert is offered in the recording’s liner notes and available online. Lipatti gave a heroic performance of Chopin’s “Grande Valse Brillante,” Op. 18, but was too weak to play the final waltz he had programmed, Op. 34 No. 1. “While no recording of this part of the concert has been found, it is said that he began the waltz, and then stopped and left the stage. The audience waited in heavy silence. Then Lipatti reappeared, and played ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,’ the leitmotif of his career, which had been the work he played at his first recital.”

Nadia Boulanger, who was his close friend, was unable to talk about Lipatti without crying.

Who knows what ingredients go into the greatest of performances? Can two people read the same book, listen to the same piece of music, watch the same movie, and come up with completely divergent — even diametrically opposed — interpretations? Yes, of course they can. I just made a movie with Stephen K. Bannon, “American Dharma,” in which together we look at various iconic movies and see different things.

Over the years I’ve asked so many people about “Sparky’s Magic Piano.” Maybe you have to have grown up in the 50s to know about it. I play music with a friend of mine, Alfred Guzzetti. I play the cello; Alfred plays the piano. And, yes, he too grew up listening to “Sparky’s Magic Piano.” Me, in Hewlett, N.Y.; he, in Philadelphia. Alfred took Sparky’s lesson the “right way” — as an inducement to work even harder. I took it as a story about myself — a fraud, a self-deceived miscreant.

I was always in awe of my mother, who had nearly a doctorate in French Literature from Columbia and a graduate degree in piano from Juilliard. I wanted to play as well as my mother but it never happened. I would sit at the piano and turn pages for her when she played “Carnaval” or “The Wanderer Fantasy.” It was one of my great pleasures as a little boy. When I started to play the cello, my practice often took the form of playing compositions with my mother. If my rhythm was off, she would always compensate for it. There was no practicing with a metronome. There was simply the ecstasy of playing with my mother, the two of us. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized that in many of the pieces we played together, the piano parts were almost impossibly difficult. And I didn’t realize until I started to think about Richter and his lobster that my mother was my magic piano. She was the person who made it all possible, who created a dream — a dream of competence that might not have been entirely justified. Sparky was me. And some day, when she was gone, I might have to suffer the consequences.

There’s an existential bleakness that confronts Sparky or, at least, the version of Sparky that I remember: the almost certain knowledge that no amount of practice, 10,000 hours or otherwise, will produce that perfect rendition of Beethoven’s Op. 111. And what’s worse, even if it did produce the perfect rendition, you, the performer, might think it stinks. Richter felt his piano playing was no good. On two occasions, in 1975 and 1983, Richter noted his opinion of recordings he heard of himself playing the Op. 111. The first was a televised broadcast: “I don’t even know if I play this sonata well or only half well (it’s considered Beethoven’s finest work). It’s hard for me to judge and I find myself in a state of the utmost uncertainty. It’s true that I detest televised broadcasts, especially those in which I myself am involved.”Monsaingeon, 226.

Richter is less ambivalent in 1983: “I’m sure I must sometimes have played this sonata reasonably well. But of all the recordings that have been made of it, not one of them is any good. It’s almost always like this with recordings. I find it very depressing.”Monsaingeon, 288.

How could he believe this? What does it all mean if even that level of achievement grants him no comfort? Maybe this is the bleakest part of all: that no matter how good we can ever be, we may still be chained to the wall in Plato’s cave, fantasizing about an unreached ideal. Perhaps we are all slaves to the magic piano that hovers above our heads, ungraspable, unreachable, but still there.

I would like to thank Joshua Kearney and Alfred Guzzetti for many discussions and for help in the writing. My interview subjects, Jeremy Denk and Bruno Monsaingeon; Robert Hurwitz, Jim Feichtmann, and Mike Spring for their help with music licensing. And Walter Moskalew, who supplied me with photographs, translations and transcriptions of Richter’s letters, and wrote the fantastic biography, “Svetik: A Family Portrait of Sviatoslav Richter.”

And thanks to George Kalogerakis, who started all of this off. And Peter Catapano, who finished it.