Playing with Fire

6

1936–1941

THE MOSCOW CONSERVATOIRE AND MUSICAL PROJECTS

And Schubert on shimmering water, Mozart in the twittering of birds,

Goethe whistling on the winding path,

And Hamlet – pondering in fearful footsteps,

All felt the pulse of the crowd, taking it on trust.

Osip Mandelstam¹

In the autumn of 1936 Yudina took up her duties as professor of piano at the Moscow Conservatoire, renowned in particular for its superlative piano faculty. She was fortunate to do so while Neuhaus occupied the position of director between 1935 and 1937. A teacher of immense popularity, his Conservatoire career had started with his arrival in Moscow in 1922 as a protégé of Felix Blumenfeld, and was to last for forty-two years. Senior to him were Konstantin Igumnov, considered the doyen of piano teachers, and Alexander Goldenweiser, no less famous for his scholarship and his connections with Lev Tolstoy.

Appointing a renowned performer as Rektor (director) of the Moscow Conservatoire had become a tradition that was started in 1866 by its founder, the composer and pianist Nikolai Rubinstein. His successors included the renowned composer/pianist Sergei Taneyev, and more recently Goldenweiser and Igumnov. On the other hand, Neuhaus’ direct predecessor, Stanislav Shatsky, a distinguished teacher, is chiefly remembered for founding the Central Music School, a hothouse of precocious, musical talent and a springboard for the Conservatoire itself. During his incumbency as director, Neuhaus’ personal life was complicated by his own illness and the death of his parents. In 1937, when his elder son Adik was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone, he asked to be released from his duties.

Neuhaus was a generous colleague and amongst his students a much-loved pater familias – his classes were always overflowing with listeners. His pupils included such renowned pianists as Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, Yakov Zak, Stanislav Neuhaus (Heinrich’s son), Lev Naumov, Eliso Virsoladze and Alexei Lubimov. With his wide-ranging interests and erudition Neuhaus was less interested in technical perfection than in musical vision – in this he differed from the pianistic lions of the day. In the words of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Neuhaus was ‘simple, full of humanity and wit, altogether natural – a far cry from the conventional image of mentor’.²

While greatly esteemed as a teacher, Yudina never achieved quite the same renown as Neuhaus; neither did any of her students attain the status of a Richter or Gilels. The older Professor Igumnov’s rival school had produced a plethora of wonderful pianists including Lev Oborin, Yakov Flier, Naum Shtarkman and Maria Grinberg. Even the more pedantic Goldenweiser produced pianists like Dmitri Bashkirov and Rosa Tamarkina, a mercurial talent with a prodigious technique and a free spirit. According to Gavriil Yudin, Goldenweiser had no time for Yudina: ‘He was a dry old stick, an envious person.’³

Igor Zhukov, an Igumnov student, recalled his professor:

. . . going to all Yudina’s concerts and being outraged. ‘What is she doing? How is it possible to play like this?’ And yet he would go again and again to hear her. We asked, ‘Konstantin Nikolayevich, why bother to go if you don’t like her playing?’ He would answer, ‘How could one not go? She is a real musician!’⁴

Neuhaus had presented Yudina to Pasternak as ‘a much better pianist’ than himself. Yet as time went on, he found her performances too wayward. In moments of extreme exaltation she completely ignored the composer’s markings, often investing the piece with the heroic rhetoric of the times. Neuhaus found this exasperating, as Gavriil Yudin witnessed: ‘Once Maria Veniaminovna played Mozart’s Lacrymosa from the Requiem in Saltykov’s transcription and played five fortes. Neuhaus, who was sitting near me in the hall, raised his hands in mock horror and exclaimed “Perché?”’⁵ Similarly, at a concert given during the Second World War, Yudina played some Bach Preludes and Fugues with enormous fervour. Afterwards Neuhaus asked her, ‘Maria Veniaminovna, why did you play everything fortissimo?’ She retorted, ‘But Genrikh Gustavovich, we’re at War!’⁶ Other musicians recalled her wartime performances as having such conviction that ‘one imagined Berlin had just been captured!’ Yudina often put down her idiosyncratic interpretation to a particular stimulus, perhaps to vivid images of Faust and Mephistopheles or to Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman.

Pianists who played too loudly were treated by Neuhaus with disdain – ‘they should be called fortists, not pianists’. Yudina would doubtless have agreed with his definition of a good pianist as a ‘crescendo-diminuendo-ist’. Her own dynamic range was enormous, and her quiet playing had rare intensity. Neuhaus was renowned for the beauty of his rounded cantabile, a hallmark of his school of playing. His emotional approach to music was tempered by masterly control of rubato and dynamics, and in contrast to Yudina he favoured the quieter end of the sound spectrum. In fact, he and Yudina had a fundamentally similar approach to music; any differences did not interfere with their friendship.

Neuhaus’ cosmopolitan outlook and his broad European culture were a result of his upbringing as a citizen of the Russian Empire of mixed Polish, Ukrainian and German extraction. He was steeped in the traditions of Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, instilled by teachers such as his uncle Felix Blumenfeld, Karl Barth (a pupil of Liszt’s) in Berlin and Leopold Godowsky in Vienna. Neuhaus was close to his cousin, the composer Karol Szymanowski, whose third piano sonata he premiered, remaining its only interpreter for many years. He also spent eighteen months living in Florence, and spoke five European languages. Neuhaus moved with ease in literary and artistic circles.

Like Yudina, Neuhaus became a close friend of the poet Boris Pasternak. The circumstances behind their friendship were most unusual. The two men and their respective wives had met in the late 1920s, when Neuhaus fell under the spell of Pasternak’s poetry. In 1931 his first wife Zinaida, the mother of his two sons Adrian (Adik) and Stanislav (Stasik), left him to marry Pasternak. Neuhaus himself already had a daughter by Militsa Borodkina, who became his new wife. Despite these complicated arrangements, the Neuhaus and Pasternak families maintained a close friendship throughout their lives.

Like Neuhaus, Yudina tended to pass on the interpretation that she had worked out as a performer. Yet if she saw her ideas didn’t work, she did not insist, understanding that a student should not be forced to go against their convictions. Yudina’s one-time student Anna Artobolevskaya, later to become a highly successful piano teacher in Moscow, claimed that she lacked the obsessive quality necessary for teaching⁷ – the reserves of patience to follow things through. Indeed, Yudina would complain that training pianists as soloists involved loathsome drudgery, nevertheless she conscientiously equipped her students with technique, particularly in such aspects as sound production, articulation and phrasing. She invented special exercises to help them develop a richer sound palette, always drawing analogies with orchestral colour – what she dubbed ‘Sympho-interpretation’.⁸ It was also through sound that mood and character were conveyed.⁹

While the learning process entailed constant checking against the musical text, it also involved searching for meaningful insights between the lines of the score. Here Yudina liked to quote from E.T.A. Hoffmann: ‘Music speaks through wonderful and mysterious sounds, which we try in vain to encapsulate in signs. Yet these artificially formulated sequences of musical hieroglyphs only retain a faint hint of what we have just heard.’¹⁰ Thus Yudina taught her students to understand music as part of a metaphysical system, where ‘a musician’s task is to arouse the listener’s spiritual interest, to achieve a relationship to the music which acts as an impetus for a new understanding of reality’.¹¹ A synthesis of symbolic ideas – literary, philosophical and visual – inhabited her perception, at whose centre lay Man as the carrier of the Idea, whose journey and quest gave sense to the musical narrative. Years later she explained to Metropolitan Filaret Vakhrameyev that her interpretations offered a unique theological and philosophical understanding of the world, while the true face of music remained hidden from most people, even musicologists.¹²

Yudina endorsed the principles behind Vladimir Favorsky’s art, whereby a conscious rejection of illusory – and conversely ‘faithful’ – reproduction allowed Favorsky ‘to discover inner laws and connections between a large sphere of phenomena’.¹³ The essence of an image lies in its connective force, not in the visualization of the depicted object – analogous to a ‘photographic reproduction of the notes’.¹⁴ Yudina also subscribed to Pavel Florensky’s ideas expressed in his essay Reverse Perspective: the more a work of art is created along ‘correct’ parameters (he was referring to icons), the more it tends to exude coldness and loses connection with reality. ‘Being “correct” does not guarantee the vitality of creation, but contradicts it.’¹⁵ Applying this maxim to music implied a continuous search for symbolic meaning, something which became for Yudina a lifetime’s preoccupation, not least in her understanding of Bach. While the study of The Well-Tempered Clavier was obligatory for Yudina’s Leningrad students in the 1920s, the pianist Lev Oborin, her colleague at the Moscow Conservatoire, recalled that she excluded Bach altogether from her Moscow students’ repertoire, believing his music was too difficult to comprehend at a sufficiently deep level. Instead, she set them polyphonic works by earlier composers, or by later nineteenth-century Russian and German composers.¹⁶

Yudina’s class with its atmosphere that encouraged discussion was also popular with outsiders. A regular visitor was the wonderful pianist Maria Grinberg, a student of Blumenfeld and Igumnov. She was set for a grand career after winning second prize at the All-Union competition in 1935. But two years later her father, the Hebrew scholar Izrael Grinberg, and her second husband, Stanislav Stand, a Polish poet and convinced communist, were arrested and shot as enemies of the People. Grinberg was dismissed from her position as soloist with the Moscow Philharmonia and earned a scanty living by playing for amateur ballet classes. While Yudina had no delusions about the Soviet system, Grinberg believed in it. Tormented by doubts that her husband might really have been ‘an enemy of the People’, she reputedly wrote to Stalin – foreseeably without getting a reply. Yudina could not understand such naivete – it was tantamount to a truce with officialdom.¹⁷ Her relationship towards Maria Grinberg was coloured by ambiguity. When Grinberg was finally permitted to return to the concert platform, Yudina sent flowers, but did not attend her recital at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire. Later they became close colleagues at the Gnesins’ Institute. Yudina declared that Grinberg was the one person she wanted to play at her funeral.¹⁸

Grinberg found Yudina’s classes of enormous interest but did not believe she was a natural teacher – ‘her forceful, almost combative nature crushed anybody who had dealings with her’.¹⁹ A later student and biographer of Yudina’s, Marina Drozdova, the niece of Yudina’s own teacher, Vladimir Drozdov, disagreed. Students were inspired rather than crushed by Yudina’s powers. It was difficult not to respond to her kindness and her desire to impart spiritual knowledge.²⁰

In 1937, at the suggestion of the head of the voice faculty Anatoli Dolivo, Yudina took on a class of vocal chamber music. Since the days of her duo with Kseniya Dorliak, she had been passionately interested in singers and the lieder repertoire. Dolivo believed that young vocalists would benefit immensely from contact with such an exceptional musician, and indeed Yudina exceeded his expectations in the imaginative way she approached her work. Between 1937 and 1945 she held special courses on vocal repertoire for teachers and compiled a report for the Opera Studio’s Chamber section,²¹ outlining five important principles: the first was for composers and interpreters to work together to create new repertoire; the second was to choose good poetic texts; the third was to commission dependable translations (of German lieder in particular) into Russian; the fourth principle emphasized the interplay between creative, theatrical and philosophical aspects of vocal literature; while the fifth dealt with thematic programming. A programme could be built around a general subject, such as ‘Nature’ or ‘the Ballade’, or it might highlight an individual poet like Goethe – or alternatively different composers’ settings of the same poetic text.

Yudina’s ideas about vocal chamber music largely coincided with Yavorsky’s principles, which were conceived through his experience of working with singers. The historical cultural background should define musical style and the conceptualized imagery. Cantilena and bel canto were skills as necessary as articulation in recitative and conviction in narration, where dramatic talent was combined with technical control. Yudina’s class became a laboratory for discussing all manner of problems. Performance was essential to the course; Yudina herself accompanied her students at concerts and in radio broadcasts. Beforehand, she would briefly introduce the texts and their settings. Like Yavorsky she believed in the supremacy of the words over the music – how they were set remained a secondary consideration.²²

Yavorsky’s profound social principles were based on the idea of universal music education. With the support of Lunacharsky, he founded the First Music Technikum in Moscow in 1921, where his educational theories were put to the test, working with students of all ages, from small children to adults, professionals to amateurs. In Yavorsky’s view the aspect of ‘active listening’ had been systematically neglected, so he added courses on musical appreciation to conventional disciplines, such as composition and conducting. His brilliant seminars on a variety of musical topics were a highlight of the courses both for Technikum students and outside listeners – not least from the Conservatoire.

In the mid-1920s Lunacharsky asked Yavorsky to reform the Moscow Conservatoire’s curriculum. Yavorsky met with significant resistance from staff members and found the Conservatoire’s ideological slant deplorable. Dismissed from the Technikum in 1930 for his advanced views, Yavorsky found work on the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theatre and as the main editor at the music publishing house, Muzgiz. Such was his authority within the profession that in 1937 Shostakovich – by then an established and highly successful composer – asked Yavorsky to give him private composition lessons.

To Yudina the exclusion of such a brilliant mind from the Conservatoire seemed criminal. She persuaded Neuhaus to issue an invitation to Yavorsky to teach, seconded by the musicologists Grigori Kogan, Isaak Rabinovich and Viktor Zuckerman. Next she had to use her powers of persuasion to make Yavorsky accept the proposal: ‘You are so necessary to us, all the best people here think so [. . .] Remember, that even those not well disposed towards you in the past can correct their errors.’²³ Quoting Pushkin, she urged: ‘To praise and slander be indifferent – And never argue with a fool!’^*

Yavorsky set out his conditions – he would create his own course programmes, and Sergei Protopopov was to be appointed professor of choral studies. Protopopov, as a student of Yavorsky’s in Kiev, was the most assiduous disciple of his musical theories, exemplified in his three ‘modernist’ piano sonatas whose harmonic language echoed late Scriabin. From 1918 Protopopov and Yavorsky lived openly as partners until the latter’s death in 1942. The fledgling Soviet state promoted sexual freedom, easily obtainable divorce and abortion, and legalized homosexuality in December 1917. By the early 1930s the situation had regressed dramatically. Under Stalin, ‘bourgeois’ family values were reintroduced, and in 1933 homosexuality once again became a criminal offence. The following year, Protopopov was charged with practising homosexuality and sent into exile, until the accusations were dropped in 1937. Yavorsky’s tastes in this direction were well known (as indeed were those of such eminent piano professors as Igumnov and Nikolayev). In the mid-1920s Shostakovich, who sometimes stayed in Yavorsky’s Moscow apartment, left comic descriptions of barricading himself in his room to rebuff his mentor’s presumed advances.

In the new academic year of 1938/39, Yudina greeted Yavorsky’s ‘triumphal entry into the Conservatoire on a White Horse’.²⁴ She no less warmly welcomed Protopopov to the teaching staff, praising his gifts as choirmaster and his conscientious precision as a musician. As she pointed out, attention to minutiae was the hallmark of scrupulous craftsmanship, necessary for the creation of masterpieces, whether musical compositions, medieval cathedrals, or Russian icons.²⁵ After all, ‘a great artist risked perishing in medias res!’ The meticulous Protopopov made a good foil to the passionate Yavorsky, whom Yudina compared to Mahler in his ‘fanaticism, self-igniting flame, and absolutely uncompromising attitudes!’²⁶

In reality, Yudina displayed this same fanaticism. When she developed a passion for architecture, inspired by her albeit unsuccessful relationship with the architect Vladimirov, she was ready to give up everything else. Her friends were highly alarmed! In the autumn of 1936, Lyubov Shaporina visited Yudina in Moscow and confided in her diary:

M[aria] V[eniaminovna] has started studying art and drawing, and dreams of becoming an architect. Her drawings are very naïve, very poor. One could start like that at 15 years of age, not at 36. I said this to her, adding that every form of Art demands complete sacrifice. MV feels she has squeezed all she can out of her musical career and money doesn’t interest her. To feel alive, she needs to explore new horizons, and cannot live without this. It’s a vice, a worm, and it’ll prevent her from becoming one of the world’s greatest pianists. [. . .] She says, ‘Just look at all those famous names – they have a tiny repertoire, go on tour and travel abroad, always playing the same old pieces. I couldn’t do that.’ However, nothing will come of her painting.²⁷

In 1937 Yudina took on a ‘clerical position’ at the Museum of Architecture where she sorted and catalogued photographic material. An architect colleague, M.V. Budylina, recalled how the pianist dreamt of producing a book – a synthesis of literature, painting, monumental architecture and music. She had in the meantime chosen as her study theme ‘The Architectural Ensembles of the Country House and Park’. In Yudina’s words, ‘it was a relatively unexplored field, to which I believe I have something to contribute’.²⁸

Apart from her drawing lessons, Yudina studied the Bauhaus architects and the great masters, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. She nurtured a particular sympathy for the multi-disciplined artist László Moholy-Nagy, who was closely associated with the Bauhaus. His maxim ‘Man, not the product, is the end in view’, struck a deep chord: ‘this could have been written just for me’.²⁹ While believing that Art should serve Man, Yudina extended Moholy-Nagy’s premise – Art should also glorify God, illuminating the divine element in Man. Towards the end of the decade, Yudina’s interest in architecture waned, as other events in her life took precedence. In the meantime, she applied architectural laws to musical structure, no doubt thinking of Florensky’s devotion to the Golden Mean. This mathematical law, Father Pavel explained, related not just to architecture and the visual arts but also to music; Beauty and Elegance became an objective expression of a unified whole. ‘Each time we met, Father Pavel would ask, “When are you going to apply the Golden Mean to music?”’³⁰ Yudina recalled. Now, belatedly, she was executing his wish, perceiving the function of the Golden Mean as relevant to a person’s inner life and concordant with the principles of Alexei Ukhtomsky’s ‘Theory of Dominance’.

After a lean period without concerts, Yudina returned to performing, largely thanks to the Austrian conductor Fritz Stiedry, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra’s chief conductor from 1934 until 1937. She played Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto on 6 April 1936 at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, and in October that year Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, all under Stiedry’s direction. In March 1937 they performed together Mozart’s A major concerto K.488, and at another concert Bach’s D minor concerto and the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto. In 1936 she made her first shellac recording (on 78 rpm) of Bach’s C minor Toccata BWV 911, available today digitally. Between March 1937 and January 1939 Yudina played no fewer than ten concerts at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia. This was in stark contrast with Moscow, where she remained absent from the concert stage between April 1935 and November 1938.

Despite having a professor’s salary, Yudina remained chronically short of money; certainly her architectural job did nothing to allieviate her finances. The Leningrad Conservatoire observed its 75th anniversary in the 1937/38 season. Yudina and Prokofiev were amongst the graduates invited to participate in the celebrations. On 7 January 1938 she wrote to the composer suggesting they perform his Schubert Waltz Suite for two pianos. ‘If you played them with Kamensky, perhaps you can also play them with me?’³¹ Now, she had to beg the money to get to Leningrad; she could not afford the train ticket. She asked Steinberg, her former composition teacher, whether the Conservatoire would provide the promised travelling expenses: ‘At some point I will have to leave the city and I will need the means to do so.’³² Yudina was staying at her partioned room on the Palace Embankment, and suggested to Steinberg, half-jokingly, ‘Why can’t the Conservatoire pay me a per diem?’ – after all they hosted their other guests. ‘So, am I worse than them? A hotel room would cost the equivalent of a train fare.’ She assured him that she would ‘not bolt the money down greedily like some Gargantua!’ This was merely a practical solution: ‘Please don’t think that Marusya Yudina is developing commercial interests. Alas, I am forced into this by disastrous turns in my life.’³³ The latest in the ‘disastrous turns’ was the arrest of Vladimir Rugevich, husband of her doctor friend Anna Sergeyevna Rugevich, who had introduced her to Fyodor Andreyev. An ‘ideal personality’, Anna Rugevich was also an intimate friend of Bakhtin’s – they had all met as members of the Voskreseniye circle. Anna now anticipated imminent arrest and had her possessions transported to a place of exile, but she lost everything in the process. Yudina devised a plan, exploiting the fact that Anna was the granddaughter of Anton Rubinstein, founder of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. The Conservatoire’s 75th anniversary was attracting much publicity, and Yudina mobilized colleagues like Igumnov, to write of Anna Rugevich’s relationship to Rubinstein. An investigating Leningrad official demanded, ‘Is it true that you are Anton Rubinstein’s granddaughter, who lived on Rubinstein Street?’³⁴ It was true, Anna replied, although Rubinstein had lived on Troitskaya Street, which was renamed in his honour after his death in 1894.

On 28 November 1938 Yudina made a spectacular return to Moscow concert life, performing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, conducted by the composer. Their performance was rapturously received, and they repeated the Scherzo (a vivace moto perpetuo with hands in octave unison) as an encore. Finally, Yudina played Montagues and Capulets from Prokofiev’s recent transcriptions of Romeo and Juliet. The pianist Yakov Zak found her immensely dramatic interpretation to be completely her own, not necessarily complying with Prokofiev’s demands to follow his indications closely. ‘The music had immense power, permeated by relentless rhythm, unwavering emotional discipline, and great turmoil of spirit. The impression was stunning. The listeners’ faces lit up, and the composer himself applauded enthusiastically.’³⁵ Apart from Zak, other pianists came to hear the concerto; some said that Yudina was showing prize-winners like Gilels and Oborin how to play.

Only the composer Nikolai Myaskovsky deemed Yudina’s performance to have been ‘unsuccessful’.³⁶ Perhaps he preferred Prokofiev’s own interpretation. Yet when Prokofiev had performed the concerto recently in London with the BBC orchestra under Ernest Ansermet, he got into a terrible mess – his fingers no longer retained the music.³⁷ Indeed the Second Piano Concerto requires enormous energy and technical stamina from the pianist, particularly in the exhilarating but fiendishly difficult cadenza. This first occasion in Russia when Prokofiev had conducted rather than played one of his piano concertos saw him gradually relinquishing his role of pianist for that of conductor.

Just a few months earlier, on 19 March 1938 at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Yudina had given the world premiere of Prokofiev’s Suite no. 2 for piano from Romeo and Juliet, which she played from the manuscript in a mammoth programme, including Brahms’ Handel Variations, Scriabin’s Third Piano Sonata and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Sonata. Prokofiev had extracted two orchestral Suites from his Romeo and Juliet in 1936–7, but apparently at Yudina’s suggestion he also transcribed those pieces from the Suites suitable for piano. Yudina chose to play this Suite no. 2 containing five of the most popular pieces from the second orchestral Suite. Shortly afterwards Prokofiev rearranged ten of the pieces from the two orchestral Suites, giving them a new title and opus number (Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet Op. 75), in this manner making a chronological narrative of the story. Confusion over names was perpetuated by Yudina’s continued use of the title ‘Second Suite’ when playing the five piano arrangements which also feature in Op. 75.

Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet as a ballet had encountered serious obstacles in getting staged in the Soviet Union, and was premiered abroad, in Brno (Czechoslovakia) in December 1938. The orchestral Suites and piano transcriptions allowed parts of the ballet to be heard in Soviet Russia. By the time the ballet received its first national performance at Leningrad’s Kirov Theatre in 1940, much of the music was already familiar.

Now Prokofiev’s works were at the forefront of Yudina’s repertoire, which already included his Visions Fugitives Op. 22, and Piano Sonatas numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5. In 1936 Prokofiev presented Yudina with a gift copy of Chose en soi Op. 45a, inscribed ‘To Maria Veniaminovna. In memory of her performance of the Second concerto’. There were in fact two separate Choses en soi (Op. 45a and Op. 45b), dating from 1928. Their title referred to Immanuel Kant’s concept of the empirical ‘Thing in Itself’, well suited to Yudina’s philosophical bent. Yudina only performed the first Chose en soi much later, in 1965, when she also recorded it. However, on 7 April 1937 she gave the first Soviet performance of another Prokofiev work, Pensées Op. 62 (Mysli), at the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The cycle, consisting of three short pieces – Adagio Penseroso/Moderato, Lento and Andante – was written in Paris shortly before Prokofiev’s relocation to Moscow. The music is a world apart from his piano sonatas, more cerebral and darkly introspective. That Prokofiev entrusted Yudina with these performances was a compliment; evidently such rising stars as Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak preferred the brilliance of his early piano works and the immediacy of the sonatas, as did the Soviet critics. It is difficult not to associate the atmosphere of grim foreboding in Pensées with Prokofiev’s relocation to the Soviet Union in 1936, of hopes raised and dashed.

By the time Prokofiev came to write his next three Piano Sonatas, numbers 6, 7 and 8, composed between 1940 and 1944, he no longer felt up to performing them. Gilels gave the first performance of Sonata no. 8, and Sviatoslav Richter of Sonatas no. 6^* and no. 7. The last of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, Sonata no. 9, was written in 1947 and dedicated to Richter. Although Yudina was not a ‘first performer’ of these sonatas, she quickly learnt the eighth, which she recognized as ‘a work of genius’.

In her Conservatoire class Prokofiev’s works were assiduously studied. When Yudina taught the Second Piano Concerto to her talented student, Rosa Chernobrova-Levina, she asked the composer if he would listen to her. Yudina apparently had scrawled as a reminder at a particularly difficult place just one word in the margin of the score: ‘Think!’ Prokofiev was intrigued: ‘Think? In this of all places! Shouldn’t one always think?’³⁸

During Yudina’s first years at the Moscow Conservatoire, she was able to realize a cherished project – a semi-staged performance of Taneyev’s opera Oresteia, based on Aeschylus’ tragedy. She had first nurtured the idea of presenting the opera in the early 1920s, a reflection of her high esteem for Taneyev. The subject also appealed to her ‘as a classicist who never completed my studies’. Now, furthermore, she could involve many esteemed colleagues in the Oresteia production. ‘It was easy and joyful working at the Moscow Conservatoire, where “events of wide significance” were encouraged. Before the War the two directors I worked under – our inimitable Heinrich Neuhaus and his successor, Valentina Shatskaya – complemented each other, despite their different approaches.’³⁹ Yudina substituted the orchestra on the piano and worked with the soloists on their roles. Dolivo recruited singers from his class as well as hers. Her superlative team of collaborators saw Yavorsky as consultant, Protopopov as director of the student choir, and Vladimir Favorsky as set and costume designer. ‘Vladimir Andreyevich created provisory symbolic costumes for the female roles. He designed rotating shields depicting various subjects, and a multi-function stage curtain which served to hide the organ in the Conservatoire’s Small Hall.’⁴⁰

Finding a director was more difficult. Yudina and Yavorsky wanted to invite Vsevolod Meyerhold, but his theatre had been forcibly closed in January 1938. In Yudina’s words, ‘Our precious Meyerhold felt downtrodden and depressed. I wanted to elevate the student forces under his directorship and in turn to revive his spirit.’ Early in 1938, Stanislavsky invited Meyerhold to work as his assistant. He was then appointed director of Prokofiev’s still-unfinished opera, Semyon Kotko, based on the novel, I, Son of the Working People by Valentin Katayev. On 20 June 1939, just a week before Prokofiev completed the piano score, Meyerhold was arrested. This unrealized collaboration between Meyerhold and Prokofiev was just one in a long list of ‘might-have-beens’, starting with the production of The Gamblers at the Mariinsky Theatre in 1916–17. More recently a Meyerhold production of Pushkin’s verse play, Boris Godunov, with incidental music composed by Prokofiev, was banned just before the opening. Some days before his arrest Meyerhold had spoken his mind at a Conference of Theatre Directors in Leningrad, declaring ‘In hunting down formalism you have eliminated Art.’⁴¹ Meyerhold disappeared without trace – for the next two decades even the date of his death was unknown, let alone the details of his interrogations and torture. Friends and colleagues were deeply shocked when, a month later his wife Zinaida Raikh was brutally murdered. Only now Prokofiev did understand the enormity of his miscalculation in returning to the Soviet Union.

Yudina and Yavorsky now addressed the conformist ‘socialist’ director, Serafima Germanovna Birman, who objected to the Oresteia for not being contemporary, and hence irrelevant. Birman, one might add, took over from Meyerhold as director of Prokofiev’s Semyon Kotko. It was her bad luck that the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-aggression pact on 23 August 1939 had a negative impact on the opera. Much had to be changed – not least the villainous German soldiers had to be substituted by a different enemy, namely Ukrainian nationalists with monarchic tendencies. In the end Minas Gevorkyan, a lecturer at the Gnesins’ Institute and the Theatre and Arts Institute (GITIS), took over the direction of the Oresteia. In reality, it was Boleslav Yavorsky, himself a composition and counterpoint pupil of Taneyev’s, who exerted the greatest influence on its staging. He and Yudina explored questions of dramatic convention, much influenced by Meyerhold’s theory of ‘conditional theatre’, based on symbolic or non-representational theatrical devices.

In preparation for the concert performance, Yavorsky recounted his meetings with Taneyev in a series of packed-out lectures for Conservatoire students and the opera’s participants. Taneyev’s was the only Russian opera to be written on a classical subject, where profound emotions and intense musical expression are channelled through myth. Yavorsky recounted the paradox in Taneyev, who was by nature a conservative, yet endowed with inordinate musical curiosity about compositional innovation. This objectivity allowed him to accept in others what was alien to him, not least in his very dissimilar students, Scriabin and Rachmaninov. Taneyev had a grudging admiration for Wagner, but preferred Handel or Mozart. Yet Taneyev’s views on Wagner were equivocal; he disliked the music dramas, while admiring the daring harmonic language and prowess in orchestration. His famous quip to his one-time teacher, Tchaikovsky, that ‘much could be learnt from Wagner, including how not to write operas!’,⁴² must be seen in the context of Taneyev’s profound knowledge of Wagner’s Ring cycle. As he was writing the Oresteia, Taneyev was completely immersed in analysing Siegfried, and he borrowed from Wagner such features as construction of through-drama, a densely chromatic harmonic language, and reliance on archetypal mythology and leitmotifs as a form of premonition and reminiscence.

Protopopov wrote of the significance of the denouement in the finale of the Oresteia, where catharsis is reached ‘through founding a new order, bringing truth, justice and peace under the protection of the law’.⁴³ This moral concept characterized the emergence of social concerns in late nineteenth-century Russia, but had glaring relevance in a society where the law no longer protected its citizens. Protopopov trained the student choir in its traditional role of commentator in a Greek Chorus, for which Taneyev had written music of great polyphonic complexity.

Yudina valued Yavorsky’s active participation in the rehearsal process: ‘Sometimes we had heated discussions or arguments about the tempi and the characteristics of the leading roles. Yavorsky was implacable in his views, but I too could be equally unyielding, having formed my judgements during my classical studies at Petrograd University.’⁴⁴ Yavorsky’s understanding of the Oresteia, according to Yudina, resulted from his ‘identification with the eternal through the temporal, the uniting of distant voices with their opposites, the inexorable advance to the crux of the tragic conflict. In the context of despair caused by the sequence of murders, Pallas Athena (Goddess of Truth and Wisdom) and Apollo transport the maimed heroes to light and redemption.’ Yudina recognized the immense scale of Taneyev’s opera, ‘Yet at the same time it often lacks tension in the rhythmic structure and ordered harmonic flow. So what saves the work? Without doubt, its connection to antiquity [. . .] distracts from the music’s weaknesses – like a person who loves an ugly face lit up by some spiritually precious quality!’⁴⁵ Certainly the principal features of Greek tragedy – doomed heroes, horrific atrocities and reprisals – seemed to mirror what was happening in the Soviet Russia of this period.

Yudina’s semi-staged production of the Oresteia was triumphantly received at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire on 6 May 1939. Yavorsky congratulated all involved on the shared success of the venture. ‘In the crowded small green room he gave his verdict: “The Dead have opened the eyes of the Living.”’⁴⁶ The director of the Opera Studio, Nazary Raisky, declared that Yudina had ‘created a monument to Taneyev’.⁴⁷

Even when taken up with rehearsing the Oresteia for the first half of 1939, Yudina did not cease her concert activity. On 16 February she performed four concertos in one evening at Moscow’s Hall of Columns under Abram Stasevich’s direction. This pianistic marathon was to consist of Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, Mozart’s Concerto in D minor K.466, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds (1923–4), which Yudina had learnt for the occasion. Two decades later she recalled that at the time ‘the Stravinsky score was nowhere to be found in Moscow or Leningrad, so to my eternal shame I played instead Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto!’⁴⁸

Later that year she repeated the ‘shameful’ concerto in Leningrad with the Radio Orchestra under Karl Eliasberg. In fact, despite his émigré status, Rachmaninov was coming back into fashion in Soviet Russia. Yudina nursed a colossal prejudice against his music; in the last decade of her life while busy promoting contemporary music, she branded Rachmaninov as synonymous with everything retrograde. Admittedly she loved his religious choral music. Now on 5 March Yudina performed a mixed programme at the Moscow Conservatoire’s Grand Hall, designed to appeal to public taste: a group of Rachmaninov’s Preludes and Études-Tableaux, Bach’s C minor Toccata, Mozart’s A minor Rondo, and Liszt’s variations on Bach’s cantata ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Sagen’ (of which Sviatoslav Richter proclaimed her performances were ‘phenomenal’), as well as various transcriptions – Bach–Busoni Chorale Preludes, Rameau–Godowsky’s Élégie and Schubert–Liszt’s Doppelgänger.

A novelty in that programme was an arrangement for piano of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem made by Kirill Saltykov, a young student who had joined Yudina’s class the previous year. She had first played the piece in Leningrad’s Grand Hall of the Philharmonia on 25 December 1938, together with Haydn’s F minor Variations, Brahms’ B minor Intermezzo from Op. 119, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and Prokofiev’s Second Piano Sonata and Romeo and Juliet pieces (‘The Second Suite’). She was to programme Saltykov’s Lacrimosa transcription frequently, and often played it as an encore.

The addition of a male pianist to Yudina’s class served to break the monopoly of female students. In contemporary photos the girls appear like disciples, dressed simply in black with white collars. Kirill Saltykov was a man of many talents. By profession he was a constructor of aeroplanes; now he was studying to become a composer and pianist; his former piano teacher, Vladimir Belov, had been arrested earlier in 1938. Notwithstanding the fifteen years’ age difference, Saltykov and Yudina developed an intense attachment. Possibly Yudina read more into the relationship than he did; in any case she considered herself betrothed by the end of 1938.

When she performed Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto under the composer’s baton, she confessed that this ‘resurrection’ in her playing was not because she played for him or the audience, but because she performed for one particular person, her new fiancé Kirill Saltykov.⁴⁹ She described him as ‘a person of great education and rare spiritual beauty, and also of extreme daring and knightly courtliness’.⁵⁰ Bakhtin confirmed her view: ‘Kirill was an absolutely charming young man, slender and handsome.’ Yudina and Kirill visited Bakhtin and his wife in Savyolovo, bringing books necessary to his work. Even Yudina’s closest friends were not sure of Kirill’s status. Yelena Skrzhinskaya declared: ‘Kirill was never a fiancé. MV [Maria Veniaminovna] got it into her head that they were engaged.’⁵¹ Her sister Irina recalled Kirill as ‘a degenerative type, with a prominent forehead, a flattened nose and rough facial features. He was tall, lanky and uncoordinated. I saw him first at his father’s funeral. MV first buried Kirill’s father, then Kirill himself.’⁵²

A close friend of Natalia Andreyeva and schoolmate of Kirill’s, Kseniya Grishtayeva believed the whole affair was imagined by Yudina. A one-time piano student and ardent admirer of Yudina’s, Grishtayeva was involved in looking after Andreyeva’s twin daughters while Yudina was acting as their guardian, and she was remembered for her infectious charm.⁵³ Grishtayeva now accused Yudina of destroying her possibilities of becoming a pianist. While hardly an objective witness, she spoke of Yudina’s ‘strange fantasies’ of marrying Kirill Saltykov. According to her, Yudina had demanded that he give up music to dedicate himself to profound meditative prayer.⁵⁴ Yudina’s letters provide proof to the contrary – if one of them was to give up music, it would be she and not Kirill.

In early June 1939 Kirill, a keen amateur alpinist, left Moscow for Nalchik to take part in a climbing expedition in the North-West Caucasus. Shortly after his departure, Yudina succumbed to a particularly acute attack of rheumatic fever, while staying outside Moscow in rented rooms in the village of Nikolskoye. ‘The first night of illness was particularly terrifying. My friend Nastya was staying, but I sent her downstairs thinking I might be infectious. I remained alone. In the morning, when they started driving the cattle to pasture, after a night maddened by pain and sleeplessness, I crawled on my knees to the balcony and implored the herd owners to call a doctor, but they refused. Then I crawled to the stairwell and decided to wake somebody. Then I experienced great kindness and was given home-made remedies.’⁵⁵

Her doctor-brother, Lev Yudin, arranged her admission to the civil aviation hospital in Moscow. In a letter to the musicologist Grigori Kogan written three weeks later, she lamented, ‘To start with my legs were in agony [. . .] then my whole world collapsed, as if I had been hurled to the ground by a storm [. . .] I am told I cannot get up, because of the danger of infection spreading and damaging the heart.’⁵⁶

Yudina’s letters to Kirill reflect her mood of hopelessness: And the days passed without any letter from him. ‘My Kisinka, darling! Today is the third day that the post brings nothing from you. Zigi [her name for herself] with tears trickling down her cheeks says to herself: “God gives and God takes away.” What else is left if Kisa forgets me?’⁵⁷ A visit from Yavorsky and Protopopov did not bring comfort – they bore the chilling news of Meyerhold’s arrest and his wife Zinaida Reich’s subsequent brutal murder.

In the meantime, Yudina felt mounting concern for Alexander Meier’s second wife, her friend Kseniya Polovtseva. After being released from the Gulag in 1935 and 1933 respectively, the couple had moved to Dmitrov where Meier worked as a hired labourer on the Volga–Moscow River canal. Now he lay dying in a hospital in Leningrad.^* Banned from the big cities as a former Zek,^** Polovtseva was unable to see her husband. Yudina informed Kirill that she would shortly visit Kseniya in Dmitrov. ‘I will suggest she comes to stay with me, both when I am at home and when I am away.’⁵⁸ As it was, illness prevented Yudina from going anywhere in this period – she was not discharged from hospital until early August.

The six weeks of separation were intended to test Yudina’s and Saltykov’s feelings for each other. Yet she was full of foreboding: ‘My feeling of Terror has been growing. I have stopped thinking that you don’t want to write to me, supposing that some catastrophe might have befallen you. Yesterday I was in despair – can you begin to understand this? It was as if all my life, my hopes, my happiness with you, was disintegrating – every fibre of my being trembles as if hanging by a single hair!’ Yudina asked herself if life was worth living should Kirill leave her. The alternative was ‘to live for those who might need me’. She thought of the altruistic professions, perhaps to become a nurse. As for music, she would only play the most abstracted music possible. ‘I will quietly live out my days, burning slowly like a one-kopek church candle and then snuff it out, my heart’s thoughts for my handsome Kirillushka.’⁵⁹ Two days later, his long-awaited letter arrived but it brought no relief, showing ‘hurry and indifference’. Yudina saw his destiny embedded in his character. ‘Kirill asked me to “release him” to go to the mountains just one last time before we married and got involved in looking after our children, for we both dreamt of having a large family. Had his mother and I been more prescient and cautious, we would not have allowed him to depart for these ill-fated mountains.’⁶⁰ Yudina had only recently heard of alpinists who had perished on the slopes of Mt Elbrus. These mountains were treacherous. Yet only a month or two earlier, she had dreamt of joining Kirill in the Caucasus, to climb, ski or simply to indulge in the communion of spirits against the backdrop of Europe’s highest peaks.

On 28 July three members of the student party, including Kirill, were swept up and buried in an avalanche when climbing the peak of Bzhedukh on the borders of Kabardino-Balkaria and Georgia. For Yudina the death of Kirill marked a closed chapter in her life. His body was recovered and transported to Moscow, where he was buried on 7 August at the Vvedensky or ‘German’ Cemetery. Yudina may have derived comfort from the belief that they would be reunited in the next world; in just over thirty years’ time she would be buried next to him.

Through their shared grief Kirill’s mother, Yelena Nikolayevna Saltykova, and Yudina overcame their mutual diffidence. Yudina now took over Kirill’s responsibilities as a son, regarding Yelena Nikolayevna as her mother-in-law. To start with she moved into Saltykova’s Moscow apartment at Sytinsky Tupik and occupied Kirill’s room. Even when they weren’t living under the same roof, Yudina included Yelena Nikolayevna in all aspects of her life and looked after her until the end. She could only make sense of her existence by living her life as a memorial to Kirill: ‘My earthly life is over. This is an about-turn of 360°, away from life, towards death.’⁶¹ She prayed: ‘Lord, let me bear the Cross of repentance, help me bear the void in my life without him, without everything which gave my existence sense, strength and joy when he was here [. . .] Give me fortitude to atone for my sins towards his mother through acquiring love for her.’⁶²

Yudina’s friends urged her to resume her musical activities. ‘When I left the clinic, hardly able to stand on my legs, I had lost that which was most precious to me [. . .] Yavorsky cajoled and cursed me and insisted I continue my work. “You are an artist,” he said. “You must not allow yourself to be consumed by grief.”’⁶³ Yet music gave no comfort, and Yudina cancelled all performances for the next year. She even handed over her role of pianist/producer in a repeat performance of the Oresteia. ‘It slipped off my shoulders like a mantle.’ At a small gathering in the Conservatoire director’s office in memory of Kirill and the two other students who lost their lives, Yudina performed in their honour. In 1940 she gave a single public concert on 24 March, performing Mozart’s D minor concerto under Nikolai Rabinovich at the Leningrad Philharmonic Hall.

On 10 October 1939 she wrote to Prokofiev with a ‘crazy and terrible’ request to write a Requiem for Kirill: ‘I seem fated to have your works appear as symbols of the most important events of my life. And now, it is immeasurably more serious than five years ago! I remind you of that “Prelude to Catastrophe” only from fear you might do so yourself. And another of your great works, Romeo and Juliet, was a threatening symbol for us.’ Kirill was an immense admirer of Prokofiev and kept his photograph on his desk. Yudina saw similarities between their personalities – ‘profound, with hidden tenderness and gentleness, and actively striving forward’. A possible Prokofiev Requiem would be ‘not just for the departed life, but in some measure for me – of course there is no return now to earthly life, the gates to Eternity are thrown wide open [. . .] I think I merit a response to my request: maybe other pianists play your works better than I, but few play them as I do, as if for the first and last – the only time.’⁶⁴ Yudina could not help remembering that Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, which she adored ‘with her life’s blood’, was written as a memorial to the composer’s close young friend Max Schmidthof. Prokofiev never wrote that Requiem, but in his next work, the Sixth Piano Sonata, the unleashed fury of the first movement and the clear associations with his Romeo and Juliet in the second movement were possibly related to Yudina’s request.

Giving vent to her sorrow, Yudina sought comfort from the Florensky family – in particular from Olga, Father Pavel’s daughter. It was as if she needed to cling to those who understood the full meaning of loss. The family still nurtured faint hopes that Florensky might be alive – they were informed of the date of his death only many years later. On the first anniversary of Kirill’s death Yudina wrote to Florensky’s widow, Anna Mikhailovna, asking her to pray for herself and Kirill (‘Your prayers surely find their way to God!’). Her pain was unbearably acute – it felt as if Kirill’s death ‘happened only yesterday. I can only thank God that my grief does not heal!’⁶⁵

At the same time Yudina rejected any form of pity. When her well-meaning piano students decided to petition the Conservatoire director to give their beloved professor a proper living space, she was beside herself with fury. The students were probably unaware of her new living arrangement with Kirill’s mother, and addressed various influential people, including Prokofiev amd Nikolai Myaskovsky. Yudina immediately wrote to both composers: ‘Only three days ago I discovered the outrageous interference in my life on the part of my students and of their incredibly “tactless” collection of signatures. Fortunately, I discovered this from a good friend of mine to whom they had confided their “good deeds”. I beg your forgiveness on their behalf [. . .] They could not have caused me greater moral harm if they had tried, for all my life I have been beholden to nobody.’⁶⁶ The students had not understood that Yudina’s independence was sacred, as was her complete disregard for material possessions.⁶⁷

Towards the end of 1940 Yudina fractured her leg and spent most of November in hospital – this time at the Moscow University clinic, where the leg was operated on and put in plaster. In answer to a telegram from Yavorsky, sending wishes for a quick return to the ‘blossoming’ of her artistic life, she wrote, ‘Thank you for your telegram, whose text displays a certain venom! My leg hangs like a clock’s pendulum on a Rathaus tower in one of the fast-disappearing towns of Europe. You might be reminded of a leg of a Red October^* piano – indeed, my leg weighs as much as the rest of me! The next stage will be crutches – so a rapid “blossoming” is not foreseeable.’⁶⁸

Once out of hospital, Yudina was soon back on the concert platform. On 12 February 1941 she performed Mozart’s A major concerto K.488 with the Leningrad Philharmonic under Nathan Rakhlin. A professor of musicology at the Leningrad Conservatoire, Yekaterina Ruchevskaya recalled ‘Maria Veniaminovna walking across the stage to the piano on crutches, her leg still in plaster; however, this in no way impeded the enormous impression her playing made on me.’⁶⁹ Yudina retained a slight limp for the rest of her life.

With only one more concert to play that season, Yudina’s thoughts turned to Schubert, whose lieder represented the ideal combination of poetry and music. Her profound knowledge of German poetry underscored her passion for German-Austrian lieder. Like Shostakovich she did not believe in singing in a language that was not understood – it risked becoming a phonetic exercise. Hence, translations of quality were fundamental, ensuring easy comprehension and the coincidence of poetic and musical stresses. ‘Innumerable times I was struck by the imperfection of the texts of vocal works, not to speak of the very mediocre quality of Russian poems set by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov (settings of forgotten poets like Rathaus, Apukhtin, Galina!),’ Yudina confessed. ‘Particularly vexatious were the old-fashioned translations of lieder by Schubert, Brahms and Schumann. And there are simply no modern translations of the marvellous song literature in French, German, Polish, such as the complete lack of translations of Carl Loewe’s Ballads.’⁷⁰ She decided to initiate a project commissioning isometric translations of Schubert lieder, where not one note of the music would need adjusting. An antecedent lay in Dolivo’s recent anthologies of Beethoven songs, with excellent translations by Andrei Glob. Yudina also knew Sergei Zayaitsky’s excellent contemporary translations of Wilhelm Müller’s texts in Schubert’s Winterreise and Schwanengesang. Two enlightened people, the Conservatoire’s administrative manager and the director of the Gnesins’ Institute, supported Yudina in helping her find funds for the project.

Paradoxically, censorship ensured the extremely high standard of literary translation in Soviet Russia. Poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, unable to publish their original work, resorted to translation in order to earn money. From the late 1930s Pasternak became known for his brilliant translations of Shakespeare’s plays, and later of Goethe’s Faust. The poets may have resented the time taken from their own work, yet Soviet readers reaped great benefit from their wonderful translations.

The first translator whom Yudina addressed was Boris Pasternak. In late 1940, the Moscow Arts Theatre decided to use his translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which went into production, although it never reached the stage. Although terribly busy with rehearsals, Pasternak was interested in Yudina’s idea. In early February he wrote: ‘Dear Maria Veniaminovna! I had a completely crazy January, which might explain my seeming carelessness. At the beginning I gave my agreement to your proposal, but largely because it was you asking me, and you who needed it. My wish to do something for your collection has the same lack of obligation, which deprives me of willingness to partake in anything of significance. Look at it like this. From the practical point of view my promise is worthless. Consider me as one of your reserve team of contributors, not as an active participant. Believe me, in this role I am never late.’⁷¹ Work on the Schubert anthology was to be interrupted by the Second World War. Some of Yudina’s contributors were to be called up; others, like the poet Nikolai Zabolotsky, were languishing in Siberian exile. In the spring of 1941 Pasternak and Neuhaus suggested involving Marina Tsvetayeva as a translator – the poet was multi-lingual: her famed correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke was written in German. Pasternak in particular was well aware of Tsvetayeva’s desperate plight since returning to Russia from exile in France with her son. Her daughter Ariadna (Alya) and her husband, Sergei Efron, preceded her to Moscow; both were arrested shortly after Tsvetayeva’s return. Efron, a compromised figure, was shot in 1941. Ariadna was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag. In desperation, Tsvetayeva hanged herself in August 1941 in Yelabuga. Her son Georgi (Mur) was killed in action during the Second World War.

Yudina confessed to knowing very little of Tsvetayeva’s poetry at the time. Now in February 1940 she arranged to go and see her:

In preparation for the meeting with Tsvetayeva my head was filled with thoughts of Pasternak’s ‘Maria Ilina’ in [his verse novel] Spektorsky. A rickety staircase led up to a dark attic room. One was immediately overcome by an atmosphere of heart-rending melancholy, of disarray, of impending catastrophe. A mutually alienated greeting – I see an elderly, broken woman – I try to be respectful, courteous, and kind [. . .] I sit on the edge of the chair and show her the Schubert lieder. ‘Well, if anything, then only Goethe,’ Tsvetayeva said with severity. ‘Of course,’ I answer, ‘he is the best.’ To start with I suggested ‘Mignon’s Song’, and the ‘Harpist’ from Wilhelm Meister. She agreed absent-mindedly, and I hurried away. From some door or other her youthful, handsome son appeared.

1. Maria Yudina, a year after her debut in Petrograd in 1921, as newly appointed professor of Petrograd Conservatoire. The skull on her desk indicates her studious interest in philosophy and all things spiritual.

2. Maria’s father, Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin: a doctor and social organiser, co-founder of Nevel’ hospital.

3. Maria’s mother, Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina.

4. Anna Yesipova, concert pianist and professor of St Petersburg Conservatoire, where Yudina was her pupil for just over a year.

5. Bakhtin’s circle recreated in Leningrad, c.1924–6. (L–R) sitting: Yudina, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Pumpyansky, Pavel Medvedyev, unidentified woman; standing: Vaginov’s wife, Konstantin Vaginov, Bakhtin’s wife Alyona, unidentified man.

6. Yudina at piano, late 1920s/early 1930s.

7. Detail from Alisa Poret and Tatiana Glebova’s composite oil canvas The House Cut Open (1931). This is the bottom right-hand corner of the painting: Yudina at home.

8. Yudina playing for naval officers in besieged Leningrad, summer 1943.

9. Concert in wartime Moscow with conductor Nikolai Anosov at the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, 8 June 1943.

10. Poster for Yudina’s recital at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia in besieged Leningrad, 3 October 1943. Her programme features works by César Franck, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt and Sergei Prokofiev.

11. Pencil drawing of Maria Yudina by Vladimir Favorsky, January 1949.

12. Yudina with Igor Stravinsky at the opening of the exhibition in his honour at the Leningrad House of Composers, 6 October 1962.

13. Stravinsky receiving applause at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. Beside him (L–R): Kirill Kondrashin, Tikhon Khrennikov, unidentified woman, Aram Khachaturian, Maria Yudina (in white scarf ), Karen Khachaturian (in dark glasses). Moscow, September 1962.

14. The Union of the Composers First Secretary Tikhon Khrennikov and Maria Yudina. Moscow, 1962.

15. Yudina’s desk-cum-dining table at her flat on Rostovskaya Embankment, 1967. Her cat Malva playfully bites her arm.

16. Yudina reading from the Gospel at Pasternak’s grave on the 10th anniversary of his death, 30 May 1970 – four and a half months before her own death. Behind her in glasses is Yudina’s Russian biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov.

But I should have thrown myself at her feet, kissed her hands and washed them with hot, bitter tears. I should have removed some burden or other to lighten her load. It’s hard for me to understand why I was so reticent, even indifferent. Perhaps because I bore on my shoulders the fate of so many people, old and young, sick, torn from their homes through exile and the onset of war. All these people had to be fed, I had to think of everybody [. . .] Yet there was no justification, my sin was that of insufficient love.⁷²

Yudina returned to examine the translations that Tsvetayeva had completed. They proved to be unusable, for the words did not fit with Schubert’s music. ‘When I quietly explained this to Tsvetayeva, the poet simply did not hear me. There was nothing left but to go away!’⁷³ Many years later Yudina wrote to Pierre Souvchinsky: ‘Hers is not my poetry, although Tsvetayeva had unlimited talent, was innovative – a poet worthy of the greatest respect and compassion. But everything is pronounced in fff, and the whole world is proclaimed guilty before her – even before she met her terrible fate. All this is alien to me [. . .] Now Mandelstam – he’s my poet!’⁷⁴

Yudina needed a literary consultant for her cherished Schubert project – Mikhail Bakhtin, or ‘Mikh Mikh’ as she referred to him, was the obvious choice. Yudina had kept in close touch with him during his years of exile, first in Kustanai in north-west Kazakhstan, where he worked as a bookkeeper, and then from September 1936 in Saransk in Mordovia, where he found employment at the Mordovian Pedagogical Institute. But as the purges of 1936–7 extended outwards from the capital cities to the provinces and outlying regions, Bakhtin and his wife rightly foresaw that the Pedagogical Institute would be ‘cleansed’, and they therefore decided to leave Saransk. They moved to the small town of Savyolovo, a railway junction on the banks of the Volga. Here they rented accommodation just outside the obligatory 100 kilometres from Moscow, the nearest distance permitted to former ‘exiles’. Savyolovo was already full of ‘100-kilometre’ people in positions similar to theirs – Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam had been living there for a few months, Polovtseva was not far off in Dmitrov, and Emilyan Zalessky, their friend from Leningrad days, recently released from prison, was in Kimri, on the opposite bank of the Volga.

In the meantime, Bakhtin suffered from a deterioration of his osteomyelitis, necessitating the amputation of his right leg in February 1938. A survivor by nature, Bakhtin was determined that this impediment would not hinder his work. In Savyolovo he returned to his writing, aided by Zalessky and other members of his Circle, Ivan Kanaev and Matvei Kagan, in gaining access to libraries and books, which were unobtainable in provincial exile. Soon Bakhtin was being offered occasional paid work, and participated in a Shakespeare conference in Moscow’s House of Literati in April 1940. Yudina regularly sent money and books to Bakhtin, and used her contacts in academic circles to facilitate the acceptance of his doctoral thesis on Rabelais. Amongst the potential reviewers, interlocutors and examiners she sought out was Leonid Timofeyev, a member of the Academy of Sciences and department head of Soviet Literature at the Gorky Institute of World Literature. Timofeyev gave his full support to Bakhtin, thereby opening the doors for the presentation of his thesis at the Institute. In September 1940 Yudina wrote to Bakhtin, saying she had ‘unexpectedly found a direct route to a certain Professor Isaak Nusinov [. . .] Let me know at once if he is necessary to your work, and if so, who should approach him.’⁷⁵ It transpired that Nusinov’s sister-in-law was the pianist Esfira Fedorchenko, married to Yudina’s singing student Pyotr Derevyanko – a participant in the Oresteia performance. Nusinov, a specialist in French literature, acted as one of the three official examiners at Bakhtin’s presentation of his doctoral thesis in November 1946.

Yudina continued consulting Bakhtin on her Schubert project. She had just met the poet Mikhail Lodzinsky in Leningrad: ‘A delightful and most honourable person! Notwithstanding his illness and busy schedule, he promised to read the Schubert song texts.’⁷⁶ However, Lodzinsky was now exclusively occupied with his magnum opus, a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and could not participate. Yudina implored Bakhtin to write a short essay on Goethe’s significance to composers as an introduction to a radio broadcast on ‘Goethe in Beethoven and Schubert’. All these small jobs paid decently – Yudina sent Bakhtin 200 roubles as an advance for the Goethe piece. ‘But best of all if you were to come to Moscow,’ she wrote. ‘Then we could invent all kinds of work, great and small! What’s holding you back?’⁷⁷

There was good news too – Muzgiz (the State publishing house) would publish the Schubert anthology. In the meantime Yudina was busy with friends and relatives. On 29 March she wrote to her ‘dear Mikhis! We haven’t gone mad because we didn’t answer – it’s been pandemonium with friends and relatives all descending simultaneously.’⁷⁸ Kseniya Polovtseva had been visiting, Yelena Nikolayevna’s sister was admitted to hospital, and her own sister, Anna, was operated on for a hernia.

Between one thing and another there was little space left for performing. Yudina’s musical activity during the 1940/41 season was reduced to a mere four concerts. From that point of view, things changed emphatically for the better with the start of what became known as the Great Patriotic War in June 1941. Yudina performed concerts and became one of the country’s most active radio broadcasters, reaching a vast circle of listeners from front-line soldiers to those under siege or in far-off exile. She found a new sense to her existence in fulfilling her heroic destiny.

* Quoting Pushkin’s poem ‘Exegi Monumentum’.

* Prokofiev gave the first performance of Sonata no. 6 as a radio broadcast.

* Meier died on 19 July 1939.

** Zek is slang derived from zaklyuchyonny, meaning prisoner/camp inmate.

* A make of Soviet piano of dubious quality, with ugly stout legs.