Playing with Fire

3

1921–1927

GRADUATION AND START OF A MUSICAL CAREER

While there are no rules [in composition], there are of course laws. How else can a creation, based on thoughts expressed through material, be conceived without the laws by which it finds life?

Vladimir Favorsky¹

Bach climbs majestically to the heights like a pious aspirant, whereas Mozart is always at home there.

Father Pavel Florensky²

Maria Yudina returned to her official piano studies in the autumn of 1920 with the intention of graduating from the Petrograd Conservatoire the next summer. By now many of her former professors had left Petrograd. Vladimir Drozdov emigrated from Russia, eventually to settle in the USA, while Felix Blumenfeld had taken up a position at the Kiev Conservatoire in 1918. Yudina now enrolled in Leonid Nikolayev’s piano class. As the acknowledged doyen of the Petrograd Conservatoire’s piano teachers, Nikolayev boasted a strong class, including such eminent pianists as Vladimir Sofronitsky, Alexander Kamensky and Natan Perelman. The thirteen-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich had enrolled in his class in 1919, and was yet to decide whether to become a pianist or a composer. Additionally, there were Yudina’s closest friends Hermann Biek and his wife Vera Vinogradova, fellow students of Yudina and Shostakovich in Steinberg’s composition class.

Lessons with Nikolayev would be a mere formality in Yudina’s mind, for she was confident of having already learnt all she needed to know about piano playing. She had used her three years away from the Conservatoire studying new repertoire, consolidating the old, and extending her cultural horizons. Thus, Yudina and Nikolayev entered into discussion as near equals. While he recognized her outstanding gifts, she held him in enormous esteem as a serious composer and performer of immaculate taste. As Yudina’s friend the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky observed, ‘Nikolayev educated his students not so much as pianists, but primarily as thinking musicians. He never created a specific school of playing.’³

When, at the age of seventeen, a dissatisfied Shostakovich thought of transferring from the Petrograd to the Moscow Conservatoire, it was his devotion to Nikolayev that held him back. He might have preferred Moscow’s Nikolai Myaskovsky to Petrograd’s Maximilian Steinberg as a composition teacher, but in his opinion Moscow’s most illustrious piano professor, Konstantin Igumnov, ‘had a long way to go to reach Nikolayev’s level’.⁴ In addition, Dmitri attended Nikolayev’s classes on analysis and form, claiming he was by far the best teacher of this subject in the Conservatoire. He also respected Nikolayev the composer, and performed his ‘Variations for Four-hand Piano’, from which he would quote themes in his own Second Piano Sonata of 1943.

Nikolayev encouraged his students to develop their own musical personality, so that no two pianists in his class were alike. He demanded of all his pupils attentive listening and complete control of the musical phrase through use of finely nuanced dynamics and rubato. He taught that piano sound must be ‘constructed’ as a large mass, while preserving transparency and an infinite spectrum of nuanced colour.

Later in life Shostakovich recalled his years in Nikolayev’s class. Yudina and Sofronitsky were set as examples for him:

‘Just listen to how Marusya plays this piece’ – he called Yudina ‘Marusya’ and Sofronitsky ‘Vova’ or ‘Vovochka’. Or ‘listen to how she plays four-part fugues, each voice has its own timbre’. And I would listen and indeed each voice has its own timbre, although it seemed theoretically impossible. Yudina played Bach quite wonderfully.⁵

Nikolayev was often very late for his morning classes; if other students loped off impatiently, Yudina and Shostakovich stubbornly stayed on. ‘We would go to the library and take out some four-hand music to sight-read while waiting,’ Shostakovich wrote. ‘I remember on one occasion sight-reading Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor,^* a very complex work which posed no problems for Yudina. I would show her my own works, and she was very encouraging. And she in turn acquainted me with works by Hindemith, Bartók and Krenek. I much enjoyed her performance of Krenek’s F sharp minor concerto, and on a couple of occasions played second piano for her.’⁶

It was during this last Conservatoire year that Yudina developed an interest in contemporary music. She often performed new pieces by composition students. The boldness and conviction of her interpretations often raised a new work beyond its level of achievement, helping young composers to understand their own potential. The musicologist Yuri Tyulin was entranced by the young Yudina: ‘In all her being, her facial expression, her eyes shining in exaltation, one sensed the imminent arrival of a special and great event; all the more so as she was offering a student’s new sonata for judgement to our most illustrious examiners. The sonata may have been mediocre, but how she played it!’⁷

Throughout her pianistic career Yudina’s choice of repertoire was defined by her serious tastes; her idols were Bach and Beethoven, while she definitely preferred Brahms and Mussorgsky to Chopin and Rachmaninov. As a student, she was greatly enamoured of Liszt, in particular Années de Pèlerinage en Italie and ‘Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata’ in the second volume. Shostakovich found that:

Yudina’s interpretations of Liszt were quite marvellous – most particularly of those works where the composer was most sparing with the notes, as in ‘Les Cloches de Genève’ – one of his best piano works in my opinion. Yudina also had a deep understanding of Beethoven, and her interpretation of Op. 111 was especially remarkable. She held your attention completely in the second movement, which is so hard to grasp; the music’s inner tension never wavered for a second. It was Yudina who advised me to learn the famous ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. ‘Why do you keep playing the ‘Moonlight’ and the ‘Appassionata’?’ she reproached me. ‘Why don’t you tackle the ‘Hammerklavier’?’ Nikolayev gave his approval, and I played for Yudina a few times before taking it to my lesson with him.⁸

For her graduation programme, Yudina chose pieces she had already studied with Drozdov and doubtlessly also with Blumenfeld. Nikolayev did not interfere with her interpretation, wishing rather to ‘polish it’ and make her focus on the precise transmission of her musical ideas. During that year she increasingly valued his advice, acknowledging him as a true master.

The graduation exams commenced in spring 1921. Yudina passed her first exam in score-reading with the top mark (5+). A few days later, on 11 May, the first part of her solo piano exam took place as a public concert at the beautiful Small Hall of the Conservatoire. She performed a selection from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (she presented both volumes in their entirety to the commission), Beethoven’s Sonata no. 21 (Waldstein), Glazunov’s D minor Prelude and Fugue, and Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. The head of the examination commission, Alexander Glazunov, assessed her performance as ‘brilliant, large-scale and virtuoso. Yudina displays much temperament in her transmission of music, and her interpretation of the lyrical moments showed great depth and variety of colour. Massive, opulent sound, but her fortes are sometimes exaggerated.’⁹ He too awarded her a 5+, as he did for the second part of the performance exam a month later, where Yudina performed Hermann Biek’s new one-movement piano concerto, entitled Northern Legend.

Yudina had a high opinion of Biek as an original composer, and described the concerto as written in the Dorian mode, while showing the influence of Brahms and Mahler – something a little hard to imagine! The composer provided the orchestral accompaniment on second piano. Biek was an excellent pianist in his own right (he won the Rubinstein Prize in 1918), as indeed was his wife, Vera Vinogradova. Yudina enjoyed their warm friendship, but later looked back on Hermann’s life as one of squandered talent. Her verdict was that ‘it was ruined by pianism’¹⁰ – a remark to be understood in context. In 1921 Biek and his then pregnant wife left Russia, first for Estonia and later for Berlin, where Biek under the assumed name of Ben Berlin performed as a jazz musician with his own dance orchestra, founded in 1928. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1933, Biek and his family made a final move to London three years later. In Yudina’s opinion, living in Western ‘bourgeois conditions’ destroyed the best of talents. At the time Glazunov left a sole comment on Biek’s concerto and Yudina’s interpretation: ‘I find it difficult to judge.’ Paradoxically, Glazunov was renowned for his lack of sympathy with young composers’ music.

On 3 July 1921 the actual graduation ceremony took place, this time as an open concert at the Grand Hall of the Petrograd Conservatoire. Yudina and Sofronitsky played one after the other, making an indelible impression on the many young listeners. Amongst them was Shostakovich: ‘The hall was full to bursting, one could sense the special atmosphere [. . .] of festivity, elated excitement, yet without any hysteria. The two graduates enjoyed a remarkable triumph. They both performed the Liszt Sonata, incidentally Sofronitsky played first, as Nikolayev insisted on strict alphabetical order.’¹¹ The programme Yudina chose made little concession to public appeal, but exhibited her propensity for polyphony: Buxtehude-Nikolayev – Prelude and Fugue in F sharp minor; Bach-Busoni – Prelude and Fugue in E minor; Glazunov’s Prelude and Fugue in D minor. And the final work, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor with its compact through-composed structure and use of thematic transformation, is equally renowned for the fugato in the final section, a masterly exercise in contrapuntal skill. A music critic, Strelnikov, defined Yudina the interpreter as ‘an unexpected and idiosyncratic anachronism: the severe Eisenach of the seventeenth century, the wise madness of counterpoint, the head splitting Art of Fugue and extreme rationality of Bach’. He concluded that Yudina’s talent was ‘exceptionally organic [. . .] elated and enthusiastic and noble in artistic truthfulness’.¹²

Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva regarded Yudina’s performances as ‘events born of a deeply personal inner experience’ and pointed to the extraordinary contrast between these two pianists’ readings of Liszt’s Sonata:

Maria Veniaminovna created a terrifying and passionate discourse of a person suffering great pain, who insistently stands up for the truth in the face of powerful temptation. According to Yudina, her Mother had been frightened by her interpretation and disliked it. (She doubtless had difficulty accepting her daughter’s adolescent turmoil and religious passions.) I remember when Marusya once played the Sonata at home, at a certain point she pronounced the words ‘It’s coming . . . here it is . . . and now it’s all over . . . signed and sealed.’ Yet in the finale the power of evil evaporates as the music becomes infused with light. In contrast, Sofronitsky’s interpretation was marked by its multi-faceted expressivity – he commanded the most magical palette of sounds. There was, however, not even a shadow of struggle in his reading.¹³

Yudina interpreted Liszt’s Sonata as a rendering of the Faust legend, a battle between divine and diabolical, akin to Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Yudina and Sofronitsky’s triumph was made tangible through the joint award of the coveted Rubinstein Prize,^* presented to the year’s best graduate from the piano faculty. Apart from the enormous prestige attached to the prize – the winners’ names were engraved on a gold board in the Conservatoire – each recipient was to receive a concert grand piano. Material benefits, however, were not forthcoming during this period of ‘War Communism’. The Rubinstein Prize itself was discontinued the following year, and in the meantime neither Yudina nor Sofronitsky received a piano. Indeed Yudina never owned her own instrument to her dying day. In 1928 she addressed the Leningrad Conservatoire (unsuccessfully), demanding assistance in acquiring the Bechstein piano she was hiring. Yudina’s preference for Bechsteins was hardly a choice – they were the standard instruments in Soviet concert halls until circa 1957.

In compensation, it was announced at the graduation ceremony that Yudina was appointed to the staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire, an unprecedented honour and recognition of her artistic maturity. Two years later, on 25 June 1923, she was promoted to the position of full professor with her own class. Despite initial doubts about teaching, Yudina took her duties very seriously, and gave much thought to creating a system, which helped students to maximize their learning skills and achieve independence. Soon she won the respect and approval of her colleagues, as is evident from Conservatoire reports, where her students were singled out for their intellectual maturity, beauty of sound and musical awareness. As a young and eager teacher, Yudina sought to increase contact between students and teachers. She recommended that students attend each other’s classes so as to learn from each other and benefit from other professors’ approaches. She herself craved more discussion about methodology with her colleagues, and in the examination reports of 1925 expressed disappointment that there was little willingness for open exchange: ‘Why is this? We could help each other broaden these difficult issues. Does one single person possess the whole key to this mystery? [. . .] Why remain silent, when we should be striving to create a science of the artistic process? I don’t speak only of technique, for much is being done in this field. But science is the voice of our age!’¹⁴ In the spirit of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s proclamation that ‘the Squares are our Palettes’, Yudina urged ‘Throw open the classroom doors!’

Her godmother Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva was much impressed by Yudina’s pedagogical development in the 1920s: ‘Her students literally grew under our eyes. It seemed to me that her demands exceeded their possibilities, for she exacted the same requirements from them as she did from herself.’¹⁵ This was precisely what attracted the students, who felt privileged to be judged by such high standards and stretched to their limits. Naturally many students emulated their teacher, imitating her musical interpretations in every particular. As the young Shostakovich admitted, such an approach was doomed to failure. ‘In the years I studied with Nikolayev, Yudina was one of my idols. Sometimes I attempted to copy her in every detail of a performance: if she did a ritenuto somewhere, then I too would do it in that place. Much later I understood that I was treading the wrong path. What one could learn from her related not so much to particular mannerisms or colours, but to the overall shape and grandeur of her concepts. Yet such youthful errors had their use, in that I was imitating a mature artist, as Yudina was in her Conservatoire years.’¹⁶

When it came to technique, Yudina adhered to Nikolayev’s maxim that ‘a pianist’s hand must be trained in the same way as singers’ voices’.¹⁷ Adhering to universal physiological laws, Yudina would closely observe a student’s movements and hand position, checking that there was no sign of muscular tension. She used the analogy of a hosepipe carrying water through the arm’s whole length, explaining that weight and energy should be free to flow without impediment, so as to connect the fingertips to the shoulder and back. She likened the position of the fingers to the supporting pillars of an arched bridge, rounded, strong, yet sensitive, and able to carry the burden of weight. The tips of the fingers were of utmost importance, for their touch on the keyboard was the focal point on which the arm’s weight was concentrated.¹⁸

Yudina instructed her students to ‘develop a mind’ in the fingers, a metaphor also used by the great Jewish actor and theatre director, Solomon Mikhoels. In 1945 Yudina wrote to him, ‘Your theory is so apparent – and so close to mine – of seeing life in the very fingertips, one can observe this focused, creative heartbeat in the hands of your actors, bearing all life’s diversity, refinement, virtuosity and content.’¹⁹

The piano is, in effect, an instrument of illusions, where the creation of singing legato defies its basic percussive character. Sensitivity of touch was of fundamental importance in achieving a free sound, which Yudina believed had to have depth, with no trace of hardness, and be capable of great strength, while remaining precisely focused. Until a student could produce a beautiful and noble sound on the piano, he or she was not allowed to play up to speed. In developing virtuosity, a light but strong finger articulation was needed, allowing clarity of passagework. The natural weight of the arm was essential in producing a freely projecting sound – what she termed ‘maximum cantabile’.²⁰

Yudina selected her students’ study repertoire according to progressive difficulty, using examples of different musical forms, first and foremost polyphony. Some believed that she did not possess the lightness and flexibility suitable for Chopin, although she could avail herself of these qualities when needed. Certainly she recommended that her students study certain passages ‘with maximum lightness, airiness, transparency’. Other favourite maxims were ‘to combine flexibility and breathing with sharpness and tenacity’. More than anything Yudina detested ‘mechanical’ repetition, and insisted that students ‘play with the head and not the hands’. After all, artistic aims dictated performance methods. Only an exacting listening process guaranteed results; what the hands played should coincide with what the head heard. Yudina herself was known to repeat a passage for hours and hours to achieve perfection. All in all, the mobility of the pianist’s hand and arm apparatus had to become second nature, ‘like the function of breathing in musical speech’.²¹

Yudina liked to paraphrase the artist Vladimir Favorsky in saying there were no rules in music, only laws, by which she actually meant the embodiment of philosophical values. As her one-time student Marina Drozdova (and niece of Yudina’s teacher Vladimir Drozdov) put it, ‘laws as a philosophical category express the very essence of all phenomena and their inner connections’.²² In this Yudina shared Favorsky’s understanding of creativity: ‘Why is it that an artistic creation, based on ideas translated into matter, should not adhere to the laws by which it was born and by which it lives?’ Yudina responded: ‘Once you have an aim and the conditions to realize it, then laws exist implicitly. But you cannot turn these laws into rules. Laws are alive, whereas rules are static.’²³

Naturally students were expected to start with a minute study of the text and the composer’s indications. Yudina exhorted, ‘Look with attention, as if through a magnifying glass, so you don’t miss anything.’ One had to have a clear understanding of the form and structure of a piece of music, its style, harmonic language and rhythmic design. Here lay the key to interpretation, which could be aided by pictorial imagery or intuitions of inherent spiritual expression.

In music, the projection of sound is in itself an art. Sustaining sound and shaping the phrasing is achieved through minute control, whereby the decay of each single note is precisely calculated. Yudina also demanded that in passagework the melodic element must be highlighted even in the fastest figurations. Occasionally students found themselves in conflict with Yudina’s views when they felt unable to identify with her interpretation or were pressurized to refute their own ideas. Endowed with the essential quality of empathy, Yudina knew when it was useless to force a pupil to go against their firm convictions.

In the early stages of her teaching career, many of Yudina’s students were her contemporaries in age – a few were actually older. Several, like Alla Maslakovets and Anna Artobolevskaya, became lifelong friends. Maslakovets enjoyed a distinguished career as a performer, whereas Artobolevskaya was to become a famous teacher in her own right at Moscow’s Central Music School and Conservatoire.^* Initially Yudina recognized the gifts of one particular student, Yuli Kremlyov, and stimulated his interest in contemporary music, setting him works by Hindemith, Poulenc, Berg and Stravinsky. When he stopped performing because of illness, he became a music critic. Yudina believed that his attitudes to life and people hardened, and worse still, he became overly eager to oblige the Soviet authorities.

In 1928 Yudina met the art historian Alexei Bykov, a good amateur pianist who had sought an audition with her. She greeted him with the words: ‘Consider it a happiness not to become a professional pianist!’ Before Bykov had even played a note, Yudina put him through his paces in a small colloquium on philosophy. A panic-stricken Bykov had forgotten all he knew about Kant and Hegel, and couldn’t answer Yudina’s questions on the Critique of Pure Reason. She nevertheless agreed to teach him privately, setting him a programme worthy of any professional – Chopin’s First Ballade, and Bach’s F sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from volume one of The Well-Tempered Clavier. At their first lesson she worked on just one line of the Chopin Ballade! When Bykov asked Yudina to name her fee she exclaimed angrily, ‘It has absolutely no importance. Of course, everybody needs money from time to time, myself included. Bring however much you want, what you can afford.’ Money was never to be mentioned again, she added.²⁴

Soon Bykov took on secretarial duties for Yudina, and often accompanied her to her concerts at the Leningrad Philharmonic by taxi. Silence had to be observed so as not to interfere with her concentration. ‘I have to just see black and white before the concert,’ she would say. When she walked out on stage, she would bow without looking at the audience, and sit down completely focused on the keyboard. On one occasion she played as an encore Liszt’s arrangement of Bach’s A minor Prelude and Fugue. Bykov recalled:

. . . the stream of people, musicians, composers and music lovers going to the green room, headed by Nikolayev. He kissed her hand and paid some compliments; Yudina, however, took her head in her hands, and exclaimed, ‘Good God, Leonid Vladimirovich, how ashamed I am – I messed up the encore.’ Nikolayev calmed her down: ‘I expect nobody noticed, other than me! Even if you didn’t play exactly what Bach wrote in that bar, you retained the correct voice-leading!’²⁵

Bykov was astonished to see Yudina receive her fee, a pack of notes, which she threw onto the piano. He tried to hide them in her briefcase, but Yudina took out a bunch and started giving them away, stuffing them into people’s pockets. Her brother Boris, who had moved to Petrograd and stayed with her, always waited for this moment. Soon her fee had evaporated. ‘Money is to be used, to be spent,’ she would say. And indeed she spent without a thought for tomorrow.²⁶

Although officially Yudina gave lessons at the Conservatoire, she preferred teaching at home on the Palace Embankment with its balcony facing the Peter and Paul Fortress. The piano stood in the middle of the largest room, which was modestly furnished, with two pictures and various scraps of paper pinned to the wall, usually quotes from her favourite poetry. As the artist and close friend of Leningrad absurdist Oberiuti writers, Alisa Poret, recalled, ‘the students’ lessons lasted as long as she thought necessary, sometimes for several hours. This could lead to conflict.’²⁷

Yudina never mentioned religion when teaching her students, given the taboo at all Soviet institutions. However, as her former student Valentina Friedman recalled, she often spoke of the philosophical and spiritual nature of music: ‘Yudina might remark when teaching Beethoven’s 29th sonata, Op. 106 (the ‘Hammerklavier’): “Can you hear how much Goodness there is here?”’²⁸ In Friedman’s view, everything about Yudina was different, and as a performer she differed sharply not only from other Russian musicians, but from the famous pianists who came on tour to Leningrad in the 1920s.

An ardent admirer of Yudina’s artistry, the philologist and her close friend Yevlaliya Kazanovich found that Yudina the performer was:

. . . touching in her humility and shyness, in her intensity and seriousness, her winning qualities of youth and femininity. Her smoothly drawn back hair, tied in a knot at the nape of her neck, her black, almost monastically plain dress, her pure, high forehead over dark eyes and modestly blushing cheeks, her awkward, almost masculine manner of bowing to the audience – a deeper bow when acknowledging the orchestra than for the audience, her unsmiling face and always downcast eyes – such an unusual image for an artist signalled a person both simple and modest, and equally, profound and grand.²⁹

Some Leningrad musicians accused Yudina of developing ‘the pose of a Catholic nun’. The critic and composer, Boris Asafiev, in summing up Petrograd’s musical life in a letter dated 15 December 1924 to his Moscow colleague, Nikolai Myaskovsky, described Yudina as ‘an enigmatic personality – an intelligent Holy Fool. She seems to augur things profound. Yet she is mushy, limp, with no dynamics, and then suddenly she will play something so incredibly – some Glazunov fugue – that you rub your eyes, wondering “What was that?” She plays the Old German masters best of all.’³⁰ Asafiev felt the Conservatoire overestimated her, promoting her as a Master – this was not the kind of encouragement needed. ‘She is simply a young chick of female sex, who needs to experience life. I fear she lacks musical culture, and because of her schoolgirl passions for Medtner, the Middle Ages, or Church music she won’t fly far from the roost.’³¹

Bogdanov-Berezovsky’s description, on the contrary, depicted the young Yudina as possessing great cultural and spiritual qualities:

Seated in complete concentration at the piano she wipes her hands and the piano keys with a handkerchief, and after a short silence collects herself [. . .] as if in preparation for a significant event, something which will exceed all aesthetic criteria, placing ethical pathos to the fore. This is how listeners of the most varied aspirations perceive her rhetorical outpourings, her exhortations through sound. They await a purifying catharsis, and their expectations are fully justified.³²

The unusual severity of her dress in everyday life did much to reinforce such impressions. Poret often attended Yudina’s concerts with the writer Daniil Kharms, an ardent music-lover. They were much amused by her concert attire:

It was established once and for all that her dress would be long, rigorously black, in the form of a pyramid or a sack, with a lightly scooped top, and free sleeves – known as priest’s sleeves. A belt of sorts was permitted, often just a bit of string, knotted at each end. In private houses she would wear a large cross on a chain. Yudina was utterly uninterested in footwear. At home she loved wearing her comfy, fur slippers, and once appeared in them at a concert, having left her black patent moccasins at home. The conductor Fritz Stiedry’s eyes stood out on stalks! He stared long and hard, first at the pianist’s face and then at her feet, mumbling, ‘Aber Frau Judin!’ She replied drily that it was too late to fetch her concert shoes, although I proposed dashing back home to get them. Then I had a brilliant idea – to borrow the shoes from the lady-cashier, since she hardly needed them – after all only her head was visible at the box-office window. ‘Danke schön, Fräulein,’ a delighted Stiedry repeated. I brought the shoes to Yudina. She tottered on stage with very fast, uneven steps, but as soon as her hands struck the keyboard everything else was forgotten. After a while Kharms nudged me under the elbow, and I noticed with alarm some commotion under her long skirt. Evidently, uncomfortable using the pedals with high-heeled shoes, Maria Veniaminovna, with a simplicity characteristic of great people, had unceremoniously kicked them off, leaving them lying on their side. When she finished playing, she bowed and swept offstage, without affording the shoes as much as a glance.³³

Others, like Valentina Friedman, believed that Yudina chose this form of dress to cover up her heavy build. In this she created a fashion, for her students also adopted this simple mode of black dress with white collar, which differentiated them from other Conservatoire students. This gave rise to their nickname ‘Yudintsy’ (Yudina followers).³⁴ Yudina particularly enjoyed performing privately in her own home or in trusted friends’ homes. Her listeners could include distinguished visitors such as the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the Oberiut^* writer Kharms, the poet Samuil Marshak, the artists and illustrators Tatiana Glebova and Poret (both students of Pavel Filonov), and not least the spiritual leader and great scientist, Father Pavel Florensky.

Yudina had been introduced to Marshak by Glebova and Poret. He oversaw a group of artists and writers at Detgiz, the State publisher of children’s books, and he employed talented people who otherwise would have been out of work. This company wrote and illustrated humorous verse, and got up to all kind of pranks. Playing for Marshak’s closest circle was one of Yudina’s great pleasures: ‘I did so without giving a thought for the time. Like Ondine, who gradually wept her knight to death with her tears, I lulled my listeners to a dazed condition in an intimate domestic setting, uninhibited by the official atmosphere and time limits of a public concert, where by the end people’s thoughts have turned to cloakrooms, lights, transport, and fatigue. I would play Bach, Beethoven, innumerable sonatas, variations, preludes and fugues, lots of Romantic music.’³⁵

Glebova recommended herself in particular as a former violinist and fan of the organ, and for some time a lover of Yudina’s great friend, the organist Isai Braudo. Together Poret and Glebova painted a large canvas entitled The House Cut Open (Dom v razreze), using Filonov’s method of analytical realism, building up the whole image through myriad detail, informed by the spirit of its subject. The lower right-hand corner of the canvas depicts Yudina’s home, where she is seen in four humorous cameos, at the piano, at her desk, resting on a sofa, and urgently rushing out in her immutable black dress with white collar, a long cloak billowing out behind her.

Poret drew numerous humorous sketches of friends, including one of Yudina dressed as usual in her pyramid-shaped dress with a cross around her neck. As Poret narrates, the pianist brought a young girl from Siberia to her home, asking whether she could be looked after for six days until her family collected her. Yudina promptly disappeared. The girl, an avid reader, was given a camp bed in the dining room. At night she kept the lights on, devouring six or seven books simultaneously. She stayed not for six days but six years with the family!

On occasion Yudina would invite Poret and Glebova to listen to her practise at home:

When preparing for her concerts, Maria Veniaminovna spared herself not one jot, playing for hours on end in the large unheated room [. . .] We sat on the little sofa with my large dog, Hokusai, and listened, not daring to breathe. She lived then in a former mansion on the embankment, her grand piano stood in the middle of an enormous room, with its curtain-less windows thrown wide open overlooking the Neva. Gradually it started to grow dark, and Yudina asked us to turn on a lamp, then covered it with a piece of dark cloth, so that we could only see her illuminated profile and hands. Suddenly she stopped, and asked for a towel. When I approached the piano, I saw that the keys were spattered with blood – her fingertips were completely cracked from cold and had no time to heal, for she worked six or seven hours a day, and often at night as well.³⁶

From the start of her career the conductor Emil Cooper actively promoted Yudina as a musician of the future. She performed frequently as his soloist during his three remaining years as head of the Petrograd Philharmonic, in repertoire ranging from Bach to Medtner, from Beethoven to Scriabin. In January 1922 she played Mozart’s Concerto K.365 for Two Pianos with her teacher, Leonid Nikolayev, under Cooper’s direction, and a year later Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos in C (BWV 1061) with the well-known Petrograd pianist Irina Miklashevskaya. At her last concert with Cooper on 6 April 1924, Yudina took on the solo piano part in Scriabin’s Prometheus, repertoire with which she was not associated. By now the orchestra was known as the Leningrad Philharmonic – two months after Lenin’s death in January, the city had changed its name for the second time in just over a decade.

Yudina also made her mark in her solo recitals, extending her repertoire well beyond popular favourites. On 20 May 1922 she had given her first thematic recital entitled ‘Preludes and Fugues’ at Petrograd’s Small Hall of the Philharmonia, performing much of her graduation programme, with additional fugues by Pachelbel, Handel, Taneyev, and César Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue. A few days later, at a second ‘polyphonic’ recital, this time at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, she performed twelve Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Busoni’s arrangements of the D minor Chaconne and two Chorale Preludes (‘Ich Ruf zu Dir’ and ‘Herr Jesu Wachet auf’) before the interval. The second half of the programme featured Max Reger’s Prelude and Fugue in B minor and Schumann’s C major Fantasie.

In the summer of 1922 Yudina travelled to Vitebsk, where she caught up with her Nevel’ philosopher friends now living there – Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Kagan, and the younger Ivan Sollertinsky. As she reported to Leonid Nikolayev: ‘In Vitebsk I gave three Klavierabend in a week (all of Liszt’s fugues, Schumann’s Fantasie, the Chaconne and other small pieces by Bach). In all conscience I can say that it wasn’t bad! Many pieces have settled with time, and things that were uncomfortable have become natural and easy. I played with great feeling and temperament, which was transmitted to the audience. At one point it was even like the way I played at my graduation exam, and that made me happy.’ She asked Nikolayev if it was true that Busoni was coming to Leningrad. ‘I can hardly believe such good fortune. It almost frightens me to think how he must play! Perhaps it will make one regard one’s own efforts as vain and pitiful.’³⁷ Yudina informed her former teacher:

I have been thinking of leaving the Conservatoire, not only because teaching seems be a non-productive activity, which emasculates my strength, but because I want to work in the Capella in any capacity, to be involved in its choir in some way. I have immersed myself in Rachmaninov’s Vespers, and want to be initiated in the mysteries of choral music. But today other thoughts come to mind – I have made a definite decision to go abroad for a long period, to devote myself entirely to perfecting my pianism. I therefore bow before you, dear Leonid Vladimirovich, and ask you to take your prodigal daughter into your fold and give me guidance.³⁸

One might speculate that Yudina’s talk of going abroad was more connected to the current wave of expulsions of Church figures, university teachers and philosophers, than to studying under a renowned master in the West. In the event she probably didn’t even apply to go abroad. Instead, Yudina maintained her teaching position in Leningrad until she was forcibly expelled from the Conservatoire in 1930.

By the mid-1920s, with Soviet power well established and with the New Economic Policy providing a semblance of normality, Petrograd/Leningrad could again invite conductors and soloists from abroad. Already by 1924 the city could boast an unusually rich and varied musical life. Yudina asserted that her musical education was completed through attending rehearsals and concerts by such great conductors as Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Erich Kleiber. Naturally her students were also encouraged to attend. Neither was there any shortage of native talent. In March 1925 Yudina heard the ‘delightful’ Vladimir Horowitz (well before his emigration to America), and wrote of ‘Vova Sofronitsky’s charming playing’ of Chopin – the ‘diversity, inventiveness and SWEET FRAGRANCE of his performances’.³⁹

Amongst the visiting artists none made a stronger impact than Otto Klemperer, who first visited the USSR in 1924 and regularly conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic until 1936. He was largely responsible for introducing Richard Strauss’s music to Soviet audiences – his Till Eulenspiegel in particular had an electrifying effect. Yudina believed he was no less impressive in classical repertoire than in Strauss and Mahler. Klemperer became the idol of Leningrad audiences, in her opinion a ‘Rex Tremendae Majestatis’.⁴⁰ His high sense of moral duty in art and in life was something to which she also aspired. Although they formed a close friendship, they never performed together – she claimed this was for ‘subjective’ reasons, whatever they may have been. But Klemperer did hear her play and was duly impressed. He tried to set up a large concert tour of Germany for Yudina in the early 1930s, but it came to nothing. He was incredulous that ‘such a treasure’ was not displayed abroad. ‘She is pure gold,’ he exclaimed.⁴¹

Another performer greatly admired by Yudina was the Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel, with whom she developed a close friendship. In a letter to Nadezhda and Maximilian Steinberg she mentioned her discovery: ‘I was so amazed at the accidental JOY of Schnabel that I forgot to invite you to come this Monday evening.’⁴² Schnabel played two recitals, on 27 and 30 January 1925, in the small Hall of the Leningrad Conservatoire. The second programme was made up of three major works: Schubert’s B flat major Sonata D.960, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 and Schumann’s Fantasie in C Op. 17. The two pianists had shared the common experience of studying in their youth with Anna Esipova. As a student of Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna from the age of nine, Schnabel received a rigorous technical training from Esipova, Leschetizky’s current wife and assistant. Schnabel by nature was ‘a musician and not a pianist’. To Leschetizky’s credit, rather than pushing him towards virtuoso repertoire, he directed Schnabel towards Schubert’s piano sonatas at a time when they were largely unknown. Not only was Schnabel the first to bring Schubert’s piano music to the attention of the public, he also was the first to perform the whole cycle of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas.

Yudina insisted that her students attend Schnabel’s concerts and rehearsals. She arranged free passes, announcing to the lady ticket controllers, ‘These are my young stars, soon they too will be playing concerts here!’ All the staff at the Conservatoire and the Philharmonia, from the cloakroom attendants to the ticket controllers, adored Yudina; exceptionally, they would even stay on to listen to her concerts. She invited Schnabel to her class to advise her students. Artobolevskaya recalled his chief exhortation was to be natural: ‘Place the hands on the keyboard, just as you lay them on your knees.’⁴³

Yudina and Schnabel shared a similar approach to interpretation, where intellectual rigour was combined with emotional impulsiveness. Schnabel, who introduced Russian audiences to Schubert, made an enormous impression with his performance of the great B flat Sonata, and inspired Yudina to learn it. At this time she was often called ‘Schnabel in a skirt,’ while her student Yuli Kremlyov was dubbed with the faintly ridiculous diminutive Schnabelyonok, because of his adoration of the great pianist – he even copied his grimaces. Yudina would say, ‘Yulik, imitate Schnabel in everything EXCEPT his making faces!’⁴⁴

Like Schnabel, Yudina believed in being faithful to the spirit, and not the letter, of the score. She sometimes went one step further, turning fortissimos into pianissimos, Andantes into Prestos. Her unorthodox interpretations were born of her questing nature, where a personal sense of narrative and spiritual striving dominated her vision. As her cousin Gavriil Yudin recalled, the sheer force of her conviction was equal to a ‘Categorical Imperative!’ In this he compared her to ‘the prophet Isaiah, the most militant of the prophets’. According to Gavriil, this was particularly evident when she played Medtner, at a time ‘when we were used to the playing of his Moscow pupils, which tended towards intimate, chamber dimensions. But Maria Veniaminovna was exalted and strong, one could say even Beethovenian in her approach.’⁴⁵

An overview of Yudina’s recital repertoire over the next decade points to her focus on polyphonic music on the one hand and new music on the other. Not that she ignored classical or nineteenth-century repertoire; indeed she usually included in her programmes one of the grandest pieces by Beethoven, Schumann or Liszt. In this period Yudina nurtured particular reverence for Taneyev, Russia’s great master of polyphony. His detailed study of the Flemish polyphonists, Jean de Ockeghem, Josquin des Prez and Orlando di Lasso, meant that Taneyev approached Bach as the apex of strict polyphony. Bach’s music in turn cast long shadows on the great classical fugue-writers from Mozart to Brahms. One of Yudina’s great achievements was her interpretation of Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor Op. 29. The Prelude was conceived as a homage to Chopin, although harmonically indebted to Scriabin, Taneyev’s one-time student. The Fugue, with its chromatic theme worthy of Bach, is a virtuoso tour de force with its intricately interwoven three-voice counterpoint compressed into less than four minutes.

Side by side with her pianistic career, Yudina developed an interest in vocal music. She loved to accompany singers and was passionate about choral singing. In December 1923, within a three-concert cycle dedicated to Bach at the Petrograd Philharmonia, she performed Bach’s Concerto for Two Pianos in C major BWV 1061, and various solo keyboard works, and initiated a duo with the renowned soprano Kseniya Dorliak, accompanying her in cantata arias. Of noble German ancestry, Dorliak had studied singing at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and made her debut in various Wagnerian roles at the Paris Grand Opera during the 1911/12 season. Her operatic career was cut short on the death of her husband in 1914. Dorliak stayed at home to look after her children, but started giving recitals, proving herself a chamber musician of extreme refinement. Yudina recognized her as a truly great artist, ‘a woman with an amazingly strong, heroic personality. At the same time her soft, tender visage could melt your heart.’⁴⁶ Rehearsals took place at Dorliak’s house, where Yudina made friends with the soprano’s children (Nina was to become a wonderful chamber singer and wife of the pianist Sviatoslav Richter) and Caro, an enormous friendly St Bernard dog, who would place his paws on her shoulders and lick her face.⁴⁷

Dorliak and Yudina built up a large repertoire ranging from Bach and Beethoven to contemporary music. Dorliak had a particular affinity with the Leningrad composer, Vladimir Shcherbachov, whom Yudina admired as ‘a wonderful person, tragic and fraught, with a prickly character and elevated outlook, but completely irresistible’.⁴⁸ From 1923 Yudina started championing Shcherbachov’s Piano Sonata, and six years later performed his Piano Concerto. Shcherbachov’s identification with Blok’s poetry resulted in various settings, including the Romances dedicated to Dorliak. Yudina recalled that ‘whether you wanted to or not, it was impossible to hold back tears when Dorliak sang the Blok Romances [. . .] Shcherbachov’s music gave wings to the poetic text.’⁴⁹

Yudina herself had a nice singing voice, and in 1920 she joined the Kazan Cathedral choir, known for its excellence under its director Vasili Fateyev. After its closure she sang with the renowned choir of the Church on Spilled Blood from 1922 to 1925. Through its choirmaster, the much-respected Alexander Rozhdestvensky, Yudina became acquainted with ancient Russian liturgical chant. ‘We sang Kastalsky, and polyphonic arrangements of Znamenny Chant, both in the Kiev and other versions,’ she recalled.⁵⁰ Through the combined influence of Klimov and Rozhdestvensky, Yudina made a close study of ‘znamenny chant’, learning the ‘Stolp’ form of notation with its hook symbols (kryuki). Yudina believed that knowledge of the sources of ecclesiastical music gave deeper insights into more recent Russian music, not least the piano pieces of Borodin and Mussorgsky that were particularly dear to her. She condemned the Conservatoires for depriving students of the possibility of studying these important roots of national music. It was with Rozhdestvensky’s choir that Yudina studied and sang Bach’s great masterpiece, the St Matthew Passion. She already knew the work from Mikhail Klimov’s annual performances with the Capella, as well as his performances of Bach’s B minor Mass, which had its first complete performance in Russia in 1910. Yudina’s new idol, Klimov, became director of the Leningrad Academic Capella in 1917. It became for her a second musical ‘home’ and an example to be followed. In 1921 she created a ‘singing circle’ at her home, where she directed a small choir, ‘to study the old masters of choral singing, as well as the ancient Russian choral art, and its palaeography under Alexander Preobrazhensky (Klimov’s consultant on ecclesiastical music)’.⁵¹ Two years later, at Yudina’s initiative, a ‘Bach Circle’ headed by Boris Asafiev was created in Petrograd with the aim of studying the Cantatas, as the largest body of Bach’s religious work.

In the meantime, when her other ‘idol’, Cooper, left the Soviet Union, Yudina lost an important supporter. On 2 and 3 March 1924 she appeared with the Leningrad Philharmonic under the German conductor Oskar Fried as soloist in Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, the first concert of a complete Beethoven cycle. Fried, the first Western conductor to visit Soviet Russia, was – according to legend – met at the station by Lenin himself in 1922. Fried’s chequered career from dog-trainer to the first conductor to record Mahler was colourful by any standards. As a convinced communist and refugee from the Nazis, Fried had fled from Germany to the Soviet Union in 1934. He died in Moscow on the eve of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Otto Klemperer dubbed him ‘a brilliant conductor, an extremely gifted composer, and a most original personality’.⁵²

In the Fourth Piano Concerto, Yudina substituted Beethoven’s original cadenza with another, unidentified one. Fried treated her condescendingly at the rehearsal – evidently he strongly disapproved of her choice of cadenza. During the concert performance he made deprecating grimaces, and as she started the cadenza he threw the score loudly on the floor in a gesture of disgust. Yudina was indignant and refused to play the repeat concert. A group of respected musicians, including Nikolayev and Steinberg, wrote an open letter to ‘Citizen Fried’,⁵³ complaining of his attitude. ‘We see in your behaviour a lack of respect to those working in musical art and consider it our duty to respond to your “open” actions through an open expression of disapproval.’ Whatever their artistic differences, Yudina and Fried certainly did not see eye to eye ideologically.

Cooper’s successor as principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra was Nikolai Malko, whom Yudina knew from her years in Nikolai Cherepnin’s conducting classes. After making his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1909, Malko was active conducting in Kharkov and Moscow, and more recently in Vitebsk. He joined the teaching staff of the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1923, two years before becoming director of the Philharmonia. Shostakovich declared at the time to his mentor Boleslav Yavorsky, ‘Malko is the best Russian conductor I know [. . .] However, Emil Cooper was a better conductor than Malko, but he’s buzzed off abroad, and is now conducting in Spain. Malko is terribly dry, but his dryness is preferable to the temperament of a conductor like Saradzhayev.’⁵⁴

Yudina’s first appearance with Malko and the Leningrad Philharmonic took place on 16 October 1926, when she performed Krenek’s Piano Concerto. Malko noted in his diary with barely hidden sarcasm that Yudina was a difficult soloist: ‘She is the very impersonation of self-sacrifice [. . .] it gets on my nerves. She is ready to get down on her knees and wash the floor, in order to receive another hour of rehearsal tomorrow. I said it’s not necessary. She has an adverse effect on me, as I cannot perceive the boundaries between where she is right and where she doesn’t understand orchestral sound, since she is used to the accompaniment of piano. Mitya Shostakovich told me that sometimes she drowns the orchestra.’⁵⁵ Shostakovich had accompanied her on second piano in preparation for the orchestral rehearsals.

Malko’s strenuous programme also included Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Honegger’s Pastorale d’été, so probably his rehearsal time was limited, to Yudina’s distress. Notwithstanding his cryptic remarks about her, Malko was sufficiently impressed to invite her to perform with him in Vienna, an invitation she refused because of family difficulties. At the time she had assumed there would be other such opportunities.

In the next decade Yudina added to her repertoire with orchestra Bach’s D minor concerto, three of Mozart’s concertos (K.466, K.488 and K.491), Schumann’s concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Concerto no. 1 and Prokofiev’s Concerto no. 2. Additionally, she played single performances of concertos by Scherbachov, John Ireland and Alfredo Casella. In 1938 she performed Rachmaninov’s Concerto no. 2 – with considerable reluctance – and during the war Rimsky-Korsakov’s concerto. Essentially Yudina only played representative masterpieces from the classical repertoire; she disdained Beethoven’s first two concertos and Grieg’s famous warhorse of a concerto. In the early 1960s she learnt and performed two other great works for piano and orchestra – Brahms’ first concerto and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds.

Yudina’s devotion to Stravinsky began in the 1920s, when his music was still actively performed in the Soviet Union, particularly in Leningrad. At GATOB, his ballets Firebird, Petrushka and Pulcinella were staged, and works such as Mavra, Renard, Le Chant du Rossignol, Les Noces and The Rite of Spring were given in concert performances. The pianist Mikhail Druskin did much to propagate Stravinsky’s music in his recitals, giving the Soviet premiere of the Serenade shortly after it was written.⁵⁶

Klimov was no less active in promoting Stravinsky’s works than Bach’s. Yudina had always been Klimov’s fervent admirer: she particularly appreciated his annual performances of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and the B minor Mass in the years after the Revolution.⁵⁷ He became a reference point for Yudina in his courageously eclectic repertoire, ranging from ancient Russian ecclesiastical chant to Kastalsky, from Taneyev to contemporary works like Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex and Honegger’s Antigone. It was Klimov who invited Yudina to participate in performances of Stravinsky’s Les Noces (Svadebka) for choir, soloists, four pianos and percussion, asking her to choose the other three piano soloists. Yudina played the first piano part and invited Isai Renzin, a former Nikolayev student, and her own student Alla Maslakovets as partners. As she recalled, ‘Mitya Shostakovich played the third piano part at our first performance. He was very young, a novice composer, and he played the piano superbly. His star was in the ascendant – like Lord Byron he became famous very early on.’⁵⁸ When Shostakovich left for Warsaw to participate in the Chopin Competition in January 1927, he was replaced in Les Noces by another talented composer and Nikolayev’s piano student, Gavriil Popov, known for his veneration of Stravinsky.

The first Russian performance of Les Noces under Klimov’s direction was given at the Leningrad Capella on 12 December 1926, only three and a half years after the world premiere in France, while the final Russian performance took place in Moscow in 1935 – one of the last times Stravinsky’s music was heard in Soviet Russia until the late 1950s. The ousting of religious music and music of ‘decadent bourgeois’ character from the repertoire at this time was connected with stricter Party control of the arts and the imposition of Socialist Realism. However, a special case was made for Bach, whose music had been seen as a contemporary phenomenon of relevance in the years following the Revolution, when his religious works were still performed. In the early 1930s, when anti-religious campaigns reached new heights, ideological justification was sought for Bach’s music. Its historical significance was interpreted through the lens of Marxism, which saw Protestantism in northern Germany as a social movement, taking Germany forward from feudalism and breaking the power of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy. Marxist critics could twist the ideological arguments to demonstrate that religion was actually not very important to Bach and his contemporaries Handel and Telemann. Sollertinsky even claimed that Bach’s music belonged to the proletariat. This was in marked contrast with Soviet attitudes to Russian religious music, which was considered dangerously close to the Orthodox liturgy. Whereas Bach and Handel were celebrated through performances of their oratorios and passions in 1935 – the 250th anniversary of their births – as noted by the musicologist Pauline Fairclough during a sort of ‘Bach revival’,⁵⁹ music such as Taneyev’s At the Reading of the Psalm, Tchaikovsky’s liturgical music and Rachmaninov’s Vespers were effectively subject to a ban. After all, in 1932 the Soviet Union had declared itself an atheist state. Bach’s music, however, faded from the repertoire after the anniversary celebrations, although a smattering of religious cantata arias were performed in 1950, for the bicentenary of the composer’s death.

This ban on religious and modern Western music was gradually lifted from the 1960s, meaning that for nearly three decades all the great oratorio and religious cantata literature was woefully missing from Soviet musical life. I can testify that even when I was studying at the Moscow Conservatoire in the mid-1960s, Bach was studied as a composer of secular vocal works, like the Hunting and Coffee cantatas (BWV 208 and BWV 211), while works like the two Passions and B minor Mass started to be performed only at the end of the decade.

Exceptionally, in the 1950s Yudina set her singing students at Moscow’s Gnesins’ Institute Bach’s religious cantatas for performances. She fervently believed that knowledge of Bach’s choral music was fundamental to an understanding of his keyboard music. While Yudina became renowned for her Bach interpretations, she was not alone, and her achievement in learning both volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory was matched by the fine Bach interpreter, pianist and composer, Samuil Feinberg, who first played the whole cycle in 1911. Earlier still, Yelena Bekman-Scherbina, a pupil of Safonov’s, performed both volumes in 1899, and it is reputed that Dmitri Shostakovich learnt both volumes of the Preludes and Fugues as a twelve-year-old boy. Certainly his deep knowledge of Bach shone through his own cycle of Preludes and Fugues Op. 87, composed in 1950–1. When Yudina started playing Bach, Busoni’s interpretations still held sway, with their roots in the Romantic tradition of Liszt. The two editions of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier available at the time in Russia were Czerny’s and Busoni’s; the former (described as ‘elegantly sentimental’ by Mikhail Druskin) was more commonly used, whereas the latter only existed as volume I. Yudina frequently programmed both Liszt’s and Busoni’s transcriptions of Bach’s music – the organ preludes in particular. Her Bach interpretations were indeed influenced by her study of the organ and specifically by her friend Isai Braudo, the country’s foremost organist and Bach scholar.

Later Yudina deepened her theoretical knowledge of Bach through her friendship with Boleslav Yavorsky, the great music theorist, composition student of Taneyev and expert on Scriabin. Yavorsky’s theory of Ladovoy Ritm, approximately translated as ‘Modal Rhythm’, won him renown at home in the early 1900s. Its fundamental premise related to ‘gravitational attractions’, whereby modes, scales or other systems function according to specific time and spatial factors subject to harmonic (‘modal’) pull, creating a dichotomy between the ‘unstable’ and the ‘stable’. If in diatonic systems the unstable usually resolves into the stable, the reverse is true in late Romantic music, particularly in Scriabin. Here heightened chromaticism or quasi-dissonance undermines the whole harmonic structure. In the margin notes to his own music, Yavorsky leaves a key to the ‘gravitational attraction’, showing the fundamental tritones with their various possibilities of harmonic resolution. To use other terminology, the issue of tension and relaxation affects specific aspects of music like tempo and structure, and likewise influences the performer’s use of dynamics, colour and rubato. This relationship between the unstable and stable operates not just in short phrases and periods, but on much larger scales, as Shostakovich, another of Yavorsky’s admirers, proved with great mastery in his symphonic developments.

Yavorsky believed that the theory could equally be applied to Bach and Mozart – both used chromaticism for heightened expression or to convey harmonic ambiguity. Yavorsky’s ideas about the semiology of The Well-Tempered Clavier were close to Yudina’s heart, since they were rooted in the Gospel narrative. His principles of musical rhetoric in Bach also influenced Yudina’s interpretations of the Preludes and Fugues, and also of works like the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. Here recitative was conceived in terms of public oratory, although equally it could be transformed into private meditative prayer. Yudina saw Bach’s music as a spiritual metaphor for striving towards the intangible, a very Russian concept dating to the Silver Age (1890–1917) and Vladimir Solovyov’s mystical philosophy. Her belief that music had symbolic meaning gained substance from the knowledge that Bach himself favoured the idea of symbol-motifs. Yudina shared Klimov’s view that language and style in Bach’s vocal oeuvre were embedded in its poetic and spiritual metaphors.

Years later, Yudina recalled her discussions with Yavorsky:

He quite rightly demanded from musicians not a reproduction but the spiritualization of musical elements and symbols [. . .] Music, after all, does not copy emotions, does not ‘duplicate’ them, but through its symbolic action, it helps point towards them. There is no sense at all in serving up a replica of second-hand ‘real’ emotions (and in ordinary life they are usually quite superficial). A truly inspired artist does not imitate emotion, but creates its symbol, whose emotional calibre is essentially a means of symbolic expression. Therefore ‘truthfulness, honesty’ and other such qualities are superfluous and do not apply to musical performance.⁶⁰

Many of these theories originated with Albert Schweitzer, ‘the truly great aesthete and scholar’ as Yudina called him.⁶¹ Schweitzer’s monumental two-volume work on Bach, first published in 1908, only appeared in Russian in Mikhail and Yakov Druskin’s translation in 1964. Yudina probably read Schweitzer’s book in German, and would certainly have discussed his ideas on pictorial and symbolic representation in Bach’s music with Braudo and Yavorsky. Her interpretation of the Chorale Preludes had a similar theological colouring, where the musical imagery reflected the words of the Lutheran hymns on which they were based. Likewise she associated Bach’s music with imagery derived from great paintings and literature.

In his Bach seminars Yavorsky extended Schweitzer’s premise that the chorale lies at the heart of all Bach’s instrumental output. In The Well-Tempered Clavier, Yavorsky systematically developed a table of images and biblical associations to illustrate the cycle’s relationship to the Christian calendar. His propositions are each backed with literally hundreds of detailed musical examples from all of Bach’s musical output, with theoretical and musicological commentary backing his arguments. Thus each Prelude and Fugue in Yavorsky’s overview is associated with a specific Gospel text. Undoubtedly Yudina will have talked about these issues with Yavorsky. In addition, she frequently illustrated his ideas at the piano at his Bach seminars.

Yavorsky was still working on The Well-Tempered Clavier during his last Bach seminars in Saratov in the early years of the war, shortly before his death in 1942, evidently preparing his thesis as a book. It is hardly credible that he could have envisaged publication at a time when all forms of religious discourse were forbidden. Such paradoxes were part of life in Stalin’s Russia, when associating Bach’s instrumental music with the Gospel was a daring, if not a seditious act. We now have access to Yavorsky’s ideas on the cycle in the Russian scholar Roman Berchenko’s book reconstituted from his notes.⁶²

Although the two volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier were created at different periods in Bach’s life, Yavorsky saw them both as a continuous narrative of Christ’s life, although without a systemized chronology. The opening C major Prelude and Fugue is associated with the Annunciation.⁶³ The bright key of D major in volume II was seen as a symbol of faith (the Credo), and the E flat major in both volumes is linked to the Trinity, where the three flats of the key signature already constitute a symbol. The great minor Preludes and Fugues refer to the drama and deep sorrow of the Crucifixion. The B minor Fugue from volume I is a typical example, with its sighing chromatic theme, made up of an open, descending triad followed by coupled semitones, which through their criss-cross melodic pattern represent a symbol of the Cross.

To give some less obvious examples, in Yavorsky’s view the Prelude and Fugue in B flat major from volume I relates to the Adoration of the Shepherds, as narrated in St Luke’s Gospel 2:8–20, where the angel appears to them with news of Jesus’ birth.⁶⁴ Yavorsky related the Prelude to Bach’s chorale prelude with its fugal theme ‘Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland’, BWV 62. He also linked pictorial images to the subject, pointing to nativity paintings by Giotto, Botticelli, Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, Tintoretto and El Greco. In his interpretation the Prelude opens with flights of angels and playful games anticipating the angel’s Annunciation to the Shepherds. In key and mood the Prelude can be associated with the New Year Cantata BWV 143, ‘Lobe den Herren, meine Seele’. The dotted broken chords that interrupt the flow towards the middle, three times in quick succession, represent texts: ‘Gloria’ (bar 11), ‘In Excelsis Deo’ (bar 13), ‘Et in terra pax’ (bar 15) – these latter words are spelled out in the cadential bar 17, which is preceded by a passage of demisemiquavers, ending with a descending series of decussating semitones, an accepted symbol of the Cross and Crucifixion. Yavorsky interpreted the Fugue, with its allemande-like character, as the shepherds’ greetings. The theme opens with a gesture of the hands in the first four notes, followed by bowing in homage to Jesus in the descent of the 5th and 6th notes. The imitation of shepherds’ pipes is taken, in Yavorsky’s opinion, from a series of chorale preludes in the Orgelbüchlein, which include ‘Herr Christ, der ein’ge Gottes Sohn’, BWV 601, and ‘In Dulci Jubilo’, BWV 608. His indication to play the Prelude’s figuration smoothly is executed to perfection in Yudina’s existing recording.

Nevertheless Yudina’s own system of imagery in The Well-Tempered Clavier did not always coincide with Yavorsky’s. She structured volume I through more generalized themes, starting with the opening C major Prelude and Fugue as the Annunciation or the creation of Man, while the second (C minor) represents Evil. Naturally the famous fourth pair in C sharp minor (with the famous Kreuz Fugue) represents the Crucifixus. Passing through a series of evangelical subjects, she defines the concluding B minor Prelude and Fugue as the Pietà.

In the early 1960s Olga Nikitina, Florensky’s granddaughter and a student of Anna Artobolevskaya, came to play for Yudina, presenting Bach’s F sharp major Prelude and Fugue from volume I. ‘Ah, the New Year Prelude,’ Yudina exclaimed. This accorded with Yavorsky’s association with the holiday of ‘the Lord’s Circumcision’, the first day of the Christian New Year. The rocking, lullaby motifs derive from Bach’s chorale preludes in the Orgelbüchlein representing the Christmas period.^* Additionally the composer refers to the soprano aria, ‘Süsser Trost’, from the Christmas Cantata BWV 151, expressing wonder at the miracle of new life. The Fugue’s main theme is borrowed from the Lutheran Creed ‘Wir glauben all an einen Gott’, its second theme from the Cantata aria, ‘Jesu, der du meine Seele’ (BWV 78).⁶⁵ Olga recalled how Yudina played these particular works herself, ‘rather simply in a dry manner with no pedal’. She then asked Olga what other Preludes and Fugues she played:

I answered the G minor from volume II. Yudina’s reaction was instantaneous: ‘That is the flagellation of Christ.’ When I asked why, she explained the association with the St Matthew Passion. She then started playing the Prelude very slowly, emphasizing the pointed dotted rhythm. Initially, her sound seemed so massive that it was difficult to follow the connection between the notes. It produced the impression of an enormous object, which cannot be grasped at once, where one glimpses only the details and not the whole. Gradually as one adapts to this tempo, one can make out a procession moving tortuously, firmly treading a predestined path, its movement impossible to halt or tear oneself away from. Her reading gave the strongest impression of inevitable tragedy.⁶⁶

Bach was fundamental to Yudina’s teaching at the Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire. One of the first things she asked of her students was to study the Preludes and Fugues, thereby introducing them to polyphonic techniques, while stimulating the quest for spiritual imagery. One of her former students, the pianist and composer Boris Bitov, recalled, ‘Just as every composition student of Maximilian Steinberg had a lifelong fidelity to the purity of voice leading, so every student of Yudina carried a heartfelt devotion to Bach’s polyphony.’⁶⁷ Her attitude to Bach was uniquely embedded in the belief that pianists should only study Bach’s keyboard music after having sung his choral works.

* Originally for solo piano, Taneyev later arranged it for two pianos.

* The Prize was named after the pianist and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Anton Rubinstein.

* Her students included such illustrious pianists as Alexei Nasedkin, Alexei Lubimov and Yevgeni Korolyov.

* Acronym for Ob’edineniye Real’nogo Iskusstva (The Union of Real Art), literary movement founded in 1927.

* ‘Der Tag, der ist so freudenreich’ BWV 605, ‘Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich’ BWV 609.