Neuhaus summed him up rather well when he called him the poor man's Prokofiev or Shostakovich. I knew him, but it would never have occured to me to play his threatbare music. (...) K. was a true intellectual, someone who was genuinely cultured, but as a person he was compromised, and deeply unpleasant.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Neuhaus summed him up rather well when he called him the poor man's Prokofiev or Shostakovich. I knew him, but it would never have occured to me to play his threatbare music. (...) K. was a true intellectual, someone who was genuinely cultured, but as a person he was compromised, and deeply unpleasant." in the context of "Sviatoslav Richter, in Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations" to mean that wisdom is timeless.