Playing with Fire

7

1941–1945

WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

The Muses [. . .] are not silent in Leningrad. They sound in dialogue with the voices of War.

Maria Yudina¹

On 22 June 1941 the Soviet Union awoke to find itself at war with Hitler’s Germany. Within days people from all walks of life – professionals, students and workers – rushed to volunteer at recruitment centres and Party and Komsomol offices. The so-called Narodnoe opolchenie, a popular levy or militia home guard, which appeared spontaneously in moments of national crisis, was once again formed from volunteers, mostly without any military training.

The Moscow Conservatoire, like all educational and professional institutions, announced its participation in the war effort, under the banner ‘The Conservatoire – To the Front’. On 5 July a first contingent of Conservatoire students and staff joined the 24th regiment of the Krasnaya Presnaya Division of the Moscow militia. Here students were deployed at military academies for training, in the preparation of defences, digging trenches or helping on the land. Over the summer vacation, the Conservatoire remained open for basic military instruction and first-aid courses run by the Red Cross reserve. Yudina’s initial reaction was to rush off to the front; more sensibly, she decided to attend the Red Cross two-week course. She was honest in assessing her nursing abilities: ‘I had to admit that I didn’t know how to do anything. In practice I would have simply wept abundant tears over the heavily wounded and would have been no use to anybody.’² She was, however, ‘inordinately proud’ of her military pass.

In early August a first contingent of the Conservatoire’s oldest professors under their current director, Alexander Goldenweiser, was evacuated to Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria in the North-West Caucasus. Part of the group, the composers Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, paid tribute to their place of refuge by incorporating Kabardinian folk songs into their works.^* Like them, Yudina belonged to the so-called Golden Fund of the Arts and would have been eligible for evacuation. She and her ‘mother-in-law’, Yelena Saltykova, received instructions about leaving for Nalchik. ‘We both felt terribly uneasy – in this we were like-minded. We simply said to each other, “If needed, we will stay and dig trenches outside Moscow. Together with the People, we will accept only Death or Victory.”’³ Never for a moment did Yudina abandon her unswerving belief in a Soviet victory.

With the rapid advance of the Nazi troops and collapse of initial resistance, the overriding public faith in the Red Army as a well-equipped military machine disintegrated. Public perception of the war swung from resilient defiance to anxious foreboding; by the end of the summer public morale reached a low point. Events were moving with lightning speed. By early September the Nazi troops were at the gates of Leningrad, subjecting the city to incessant gunfire, air raids and artillery bombardment. The rush for evacuation started, but as the city was surrounded, ordinary citizens remained stuck in the city to endure a 900-day siege. The situation in Moscow was hardly better, and by late September the government gave orders for the evacuation of all academic institutions. In these operations of enormous logistical complexity, every effort was made to ensure institutions remained cohesive. Thus, the Central Musical School was evacuated to Penza, the Leningrad Conservatoire to Tashkent, the Leningrad Philharmonic to Novosibirsk, and the Malegot Theatre to Kuibyshev (one-time Samara), the city where its most famous wartime inhabitant, Dmitri Shostakovich, completed his Seventh Symphony. The Moscow Conservatoire, however, was split up, the largest number of teachers and students deployed to Saratov in early October. Another group, including the composers Shebalin, Glière and Kabalevsky, were transferred to Sverdlovsk. In November 1942 the first Conservatoire evacuees had to leave Nalchik, which by now had been captured by Rumanian troops. Igumnov, Goldenweiser and Prokofiev relocated to Tbilisi, Myaskovsky and Shaporin to Frunze. In fact a substantial number of teachers and students remained in Moscow, even if during the first, bitterly cold winter of the war, the Conservatoire had to close its doors.

In the first months of the war students and established artists – Yudina amongst them – formed brigades to perform in hospitals, recruitment centres, military clubs and in outdoor spaces. On occasion the performers got too close to the front line. Georgi Artobolevsky, the husband of Yudina’s former student Anna Karpeka, was shot dead by an enemy bullet while reciting poetry during a concert. Many illustrious musicians who played for the troops – the violinist David Oistrakh, the pianists Emil Gilels and Yakov Zak – had joined the Eighth Krasnaya Presnaya Volunteer Division, together with writers, historians and journalists. A good number of the 250 Conservatoire volunteers were sent to the front lines, and not all survived. An inspirational example came from the Pro-Rektor (vice-director), Abram Dyakov, the first Conservatoire musician to volunteer. An excellent pianist, a student of Igumnov’s, Dyakov was professor of chamber music between 1936 and 1941, and performed in duo with such eminent violinists as Oistrakh and Miron Polyakin, and the cellists Emanuel Feuermann and Enrico Mainardi. Although a skilled organizer, Dyakov adamantly refused to occupy an administrative position, and was determined to do active service. He participated in the Smolenshchina, the ferocious battles in and around Smolensk, which held up the German advance on Moscow. On 4 and 5 October 7,500 volunteers of the Eighth Krasnaya Presnaya Division were encircled and annihilated outside Vyazma. Dyakov was captured by the German troops, and his whereabouts were unknown for several years. Later it transpired that he was tortured and died in a Nazi concentration camp. He was honoured as the Conservatoire’s principal wartime hero.

Yudina’s admiration for colleagues and students who were called up or volunteered knew no bounds. Those like her dear comrade Dyakov and Konstantin Shotinov, an editor friend at the Radio killed in action, were fulfilling a destiny beyond patriotic duty: ‘To those heroes who lost their lives at the Front – Eternal Memory!’ she declared.⁴ Yudina sent food parcels to her students serving in the army. Lev Lyubetsky, one of the recipients, wrote to thank her, while insisting he had not merited such kindness, for he had ‘accomplished no feats!’ Yudina didn’t agree. ‘That’s how in these tumultuous times ordinary, good people [. . .] achieved genuine heroism. They laid down their lives for the Motherland. My student Lev [was killed] leaving his beautiful wife, Lida Leshchinskaya, and a small daughter Tatochka.’⁵ Yudina was already in the habit of sending food to friends in prison. Now she sent parcels to Heinrich Neuhaus after his arrest in 1941 – he was imprisoned for the mere crime of having a German surname! He worked in exile at Sverdlovsk’s Conservatoire. Thanks to the intervention of Gilels and other pupils, he was allowed back to Moscow in 1944.

A former postgraduate student of Yudina’s, Vladimir Apresov, was currently in Baku. She wrote explaining why she was staying in Moscow: ‘I preferred to suffer deprivation and danger than run away to save my skin.’ She declared her conviction ‘of the impossibility of the damned Germans appearing on our land’, while pointedly asking him, ‘What are you doing for the frontline?’⁶ On a practical note Yudina asked Apresov to send dried fruit up from the south: ‘Sweet things are the only items essential in maintaining my strength and ability to work, I am completely indifferent to all other forms of benefit.’⁷

Yudina’s immense moral authority shone through her correspondence with the young musicologist, Viktor Bobrovsky. He had written telling her of the indelible impression made by her radio broadcast of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ sonata (Op. 31 no. 2). In her reply Yudina had declared, ‘I only respect those who serve in the army or take part in our Common cause,’⁸ words which caused great anguish to the demobilized Bobrovsky:

I lived at home, teaching at the Music School, but in the hidden recesses of my soul I could find no peace. That’s why I couldn’t reply to you, I felt I would be deceiving you. Then in the summer war burst into our town like a hurricane. Enemy bombs destroyed all that I held dear. The Germans burnt everything, even all 40 of our pianos! [. . .] I lived for six months with my wife and one-month-old son, buried alive in the grave of Fascist occupation. And your words reverberated in my head as an accusation. Then one day I saw overhead an aeroplane, painted with our red stars – it was indescribably wonderful. Four days later we saw the Red Army soldiers. My whole being was overwhelmed by profound emotion [. . .] Your words were still alive in me. I joined the Red Army, although it was difficult to leave my family, my two little children.

Bobrovsky was put to work organizing musical activities for the troops. ‘I know it is hardly heroic stuff, but if you knew how glad I am for it. Each song we learn, each minute of leisure is a blow against the enemy.’⁹

Amongst the Conservatoire students who enlisted as professional soldiers were the musicologist Pavel Apostolov and the pianist Viktor Merzhanov. Apostolov was to become a member of the Central Committee, and a ‘Party activist’ at the Union of Composers, who hounded Shostakovich in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When Apostolov was struck down with a heart attack during the first ‘closed’ performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony in June 1969, it was seen as just retribution.

Merzhanov, a budding virtuoso, enlisted in the summer of 1941 after graduation. He joined the Tank Academy in his native Tambov, quickly attaining the rank of commander. He never saw action: ‘Your front line is here – playing for the people!’ he was told.¹⁰ Merzhanov learnt to play horn and percussion, skills which enabled him to join military bands. He was demobilized just in time to get himself back into pianistic form and to participate in the All-Union competition in December 1945, where he shared first prize with Sviatoslav Richter. His ‘legendary’ performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto earned him accolades.

By October, with German troops literally on the outskirts of Moscow, the government was hurriedly relocated to Kuibishev under Vyacheslav Molotov, with the diplomatic corps in tow. Stalin’s strategic decision to remain in Moscow signalled to the world that life was going on as usual; instructions were given to open concert halls, cinemas and theatres – although they remained unheated. On 4 October David Oistrakh opened the season with a performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto in the new Tchaikovsky Hall.^* On 12 October, in the same hall, Yudina played a marathon concert of three concertos – Mozart’s K.488, Beethoven’s Fourth and Tchaikovsky’s First under Gorchakov’s direction. These performances occurred at the height of ‘Operation Typhoon’, the ferocious German assault on Moscow.

By mid-October the enemy had reached a point only twenty-two kilometres from the city centre, well within Moscow’s present-day boundaries, now marked by a memorial of heavy crosses representing a giant tank trap. It was here that Nazi forces were decisively repulsed by Soviet troops. Yet at the time, the outcome seemed so uncertain that Moscow was seized by panic; factories closed, Communist Party offices burned their archives, while private citizens got rid of portraits of Party leaders and destroyed their Party cards, to avoid reprisals should the Germans occupy the city.

It was precisely during the war years that members of the Soviet intelligentsia and the most eminent musicians joined the Communist Party out of patriotism, amongst them David Oistrakh, the conductor Kirill Kondrashin, and the pianists Yakov Flier and Yakov Zak. Although equally patriotic, Yudina rejected out of hand any involvement with the Bolshevik Party, which had so mercilessly persecuted her fellow believers. Now, during the war, religious repression was eased, for the Church was useful to the Party in galvanizing patriotic war efforts.

Apart from Yudina, a handful of musicians stayed in Moscow, including David Oistrakh and the Beethoven String Quartet, and her friends ‘the conductor Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov – an incredibly kind-hearted, sympathetic person [. . .] the renowned singer Natalia Rozhdestvenskaya, the violinist Marina Kozolupova, and the baritone Sergei Migai, still in complete possession of his magnificent voice!’¹¹ As she recalled, Sviatoslav Richter’s star was in the ascendant.

Until 1943 the only orchestra left in Moscow was the All-Union Radio Orchestra. Music was largely in the hands of the Radio; it sounded throughout the Soviet Union for the duration of the war, except for the first two months when it seemed an irrelevancy. The musicians remaining in Moscow trekked to the famed DZZ (Dom Zvuko Zapisei – House of Sound Recordings) on Kachalov Street^* to make broadcasts. The daily programmes were made up of a mixed bag of live transmissions and recorded music, classical music side by side with military marches, poems praising Stalin, and patriotic songs. Felix Mendelssohn’s music featured frequently to counteract the Nazi ban on the composer. Rachmaninov, now no longer condemned as an émigré but praised for his donations to the Red Army from his benefit concerts in the USA, became incredibly popular. Yudina made an average of six direct broadcasts a month from the DZZ’s Studio 15, given in slots of ten or twenty minutes. Very rarely, she could extend the time limit, with a work like Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata, which lasted twenty-three minutes. In a handwritten list of 153 pieces that she broadcast from July 1941 to June 1943, we see how her repertoire emphasized the patriotic, from Glinka to Rachmaninov, from Borodin to Prokofiev. She also played Chopin and Beethoven regularly; she noted that she deliberately ignored Schumann – who knows, perhaps one of his descendants was fighting with the Nazi troops? There were also special broadcasts to Allied countries: for instance, Yudina chose to acquaint British audiences with Shaporin’s Second Piano Sonata.

Yudina’s popularity was at its zenith during the war, on a par with David Oistrakh’s – or to draw a different analogy, with Myra Hess, whose inspirational National Gallery concerts in London were a beacon of light during and after the Blitz. Early in 1942 Oistrakh wrote to his wife, Tamara, and son, Igor, who had been evacuated to Sverdlovsk, describing his visits to the Radio during curfew. Armed with special passes, artists had to make their way on foot – all transport stopped functioning as darkness set in.¹² Many broadcasts, particularly those relayed abroad, were programmed after midnight. The abnormally low temperatures of the Russian winter of 1941–2 made performing concerts and teaching particularly difficult.

Vadim Borisovsky, the viola player of the Beethoven Quartet with which Yudina performed frequently, described the atmosphere at their concerts in unheated halls: ‘The audience sits in its fur coats and felt outdoor boots. It’s very cold in the hall, about 4°C. The success was enormous, and public and performers alike are in excellent spirits. The audience really appreciate that musicians have remained in Moscow to share its hardships, sorrows and joys.’¹³

Yudina put it slightly differently to Viktor Apresov: ‘We are freezing here, and the heating is minimal. I personally live and play in temperatures between –1° and +3°C. But this is of no consequence as long as Victory comes. And all the more so as these strong frosts are after all useful to us! It puts one to shame before the Armed Forces to be living under one’s own roof, at home, getting on with one’s work. (I speak of myself, of course, not you!)’¹⁴ To the Steinbergs, now evacuated to Tashkent with the Leningrad Conservatoire, Yudina announced that she was alive and ‘diminished in weight and volume, no bad thing for me’. She went on to confide: ‘I nearly left for Tashkent when everybody around me was upping sticks, but I considered it superfluous to leave. There was no point in going to Saratov – in my view it would have been simply undignified under such a Conservatoire director as Stolyarov^* – a form of madness! In Saratov there are only 50 students, while here in Moscow there are 270 – but they don’t allow us to start lessons, because of the terrible cold and lack of heating. But then one remembers that at the front line it’s much colder, and that with spring victory will come!’¹⁵ Yudina may not have missed the ‘rubbishy’ director Stolyarov, but she greatly missed Yavorsky, now in evacuation to Saratov. Dedicated teachers like Yudina and Oistrakh simply taught their students at home, waiting for the Conservatoire to reopen. As the latter wrote to his wife on 8 December, ‘It’s cold in our flat, there’s been no heating for two days. I have to work with my students here, as at the Conservatoire it’s like being inside a refrigerator or on an ice-rink.’¹⁶

It was at this time Yudina started teaching part-time at the Gnesins’ Institute, a position which was formalized in 1944. From mid-March, as the days grew longer and temperatures became bearable, the Conservatoire started functioning again. Its main Moscow branch boasted a strong teaching staff, including Yudina, Lev Oborin, Oistrakh and members of the Beethoven Quartet. Only at the end of winter 1942–3, when the battle for Stalingrad was decisively won, was the Conservatoire reunited in Moscow under Vissarion Shebalin’s directorship.

Yudina saw in the New Year of 1942 with a daytime recital at the Tchaikovsky Hall, performing Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor, Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue, and pieces by Chopin, Bach and Mussorgsky. During the preceding days she had stayed with the Yefimovs, where she could practise as long as she wished. Nina Simonovich-Yefimova wrote to her geologist son, Adrian, about Yudina’s preparation: ‘Of course she knows everything already, she is just exercising her fingers. She plays wonderfully, sometimes so lightly, that the sounds merge into each other – like drops of water in a single stream, like milking a cow, when the jets of milk resound off the bucket: Vj-j-j, Vj-j-j, or like an elf, swift and smoothly fleeting [. . .] M.V. says she works well here – it’s as quiet as at the bottom of a well. Nobody rings the doorbell, nobody phones us – simply, nobody’s left in town.’¹⁷ Yudina stayed overnight to avoid the long walk home – trams stopped running at 10 p.m., although the curfew had been extended for New Year’s Eve until 3 a.m.

On 22 January 1942 Yudina attended the ceremonial reopening of the Tchaikovsky Museum at Klin. The Nazis had taken the town on 23 November 1941, and during their three weeks of occupation had billeted one hundred soldiers in the museum, the composer’s last residence in the town. Scant respect was shown for the property, and soldiers used whatever came to hand to heat the stoves. Fortunately, the museum’s treasures, including Tchaikovsky’s piano and his manuscripts, had been removed to safety in September. Just before the New Year, Soviet troops recaptured Klin, and only four days later the Soviet authorities arranged a visit by a delegation headed by the British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, to see the devastation caused.

Klin now acquired a symbolic significance, both as a national shrine to Tchaikovsky and as the first Soviet town to repulse the Nazis. On 1 March Yudina performed at the first concert held there, together with members of the Beethoven Quartet, the singers Rozhdestvenskaya and Migai accompanied on piano by Anosov. Yudina and her colleagues from the Beethoven Quartet, Dmitri Tsyganov and Sergei Shirinsky, performed the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, entitled ‘In memory of a Great Artist’. Yudina wept as she played, unable to fight back her tears. M. Rittikh, the vice-director of the museum, recalled: ‘She barely managed to wipe them off the keyboard with a handkerchief during the pauses.’¹⁸

During 1942 Yudina played no fewer than six solo recitals in Moscow’s two most prestigious venues, the Tchaikovsky Hall and the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire. She programmed Beethoven’s most popular sonatas, Chopin’s cycle of 24 Preludes, a recital dedicated to Bach, and as a patriotic gesture one concert consisting entirely of Russian music from Glinka to Prokofiev. Yudina continued advocating the great German masters, whose music, she insisted, transcended national significance. Although she understood that she provided comfort to her large audiences through her art, Yudina still dreamed of going to the front line. She wished to emulate her elder sister Flora, who worked as a military doctor: ‘Flora was with the Soviet Army, both in retreat and in attack, working in various medical capacities, not least in the sanitary trains which were subject to all kinds of catastrophes. She survived unharmed, and from inherent modesty never wore her military decorations.’¹⁹ Likewise, Yudina’s elder brother Lev served as a military doctor at the front lines.

Yudina’s thoughts were steadfastly with Leningraders – the siege was claiming so many casualties, amongst them her personal friends. In particular, she grieved the loss of Yulia Veysberg, composer and second wife of Rimsky-Korsakov’s son, Andrei: ‘[Their son], Volik was one of the first victims of hunger during the siege, when tall young men were particularly prone to perish, suffering turbulent and agonizing deaths.’²⁰ Holding out hopes that her son was alive somewhere in the city, Veysberg went in search of him, only to be killed by enemy artillery fire. ‘It’s a terrible sorrow for me,’ Yudina lamented to the Steinbergs. ‘I loved them very much, and over the last years we always met with the greatest joy.’²¹

She ached to be in Leningrad, where she surely could be useful. ‘I wanted to carry provisions over Lake Ladoga. I could have helped many people, but I met with indifference from the Committee on the Arts and the Union of Composers.’²² To Yudina’s mind, being the provider of art was not enough. When it became possible to send things to Leningrad across Lake Ladoga, she took immediate action:

Somehow, through the Union of Composers, an enormous quantity of nutritional bars of Hematogen (known as ‘Blood Candy’) was obtained to send to Leningrad. Together with the splendid old janitor, Pyotr, we dragged a load to some river harbour from whence it was to be delivered by water^* to give succour to the dying, and resuscitate those still stoically clinging on to life. Did the Hematogen reach its destination? Did other things sent to the besieged city arrive? When it was impossible to help many, then we helped a few. Kind, willing and courageous pilots were happy to take small packets and bundles. We managed through mysterious channels to seek them out, and they in turn tracked down the addressees, if those had not in the meantime been transformed into frozen corpses in glacial rooms of empty, half-destroyed homes.²³

Echoing Father Pavel Florensky, Yudina believed in the vital role of personal conscience – ‘one often has to renounce the heroic and merely carry out one’s duty, to be submissive’.²⁴

Yet Yudina was irrevocably attracted by the heroic. In attending the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh, ‘Leningrad’, Symphony in Moscow, some three weeks after its premiere in Kuibyshev,^* she immediately understood its significance. After the concert she sought out Shostakovich and asked him to use his influence to get her to Leningrad. ‘Dmitri Dmitreyevich wanted to help me serve the People and the Fatherland, and thought it essential for me to talk to General Milovsky, who [as chief of the Home Front] could have commandeered me to Leningrad for some useful purpose. Alas, our paths never crossed, and Dmitri Dmitreyevich returned to Kuibyshev. On my own, I was unable to achieve any form of “mobilization”’.²⁵

While Moscow’s ordeal could not compare with Leningrad’s, the city nevertheless suffered considerable damage. A bomb fell on the house where Yudina had lived near the Bakhrushin Museum and destroyed it. On the outskirts of Moscow such damage was far more widespread. She informed Apresov, ‘The house just outside Moscow where we used to meet no longer exists, and many, many other places likewise.’²⁶

It was certainly nothing to the devastation that afflicted her home town of Nevel’, which was taken by the enemy on 16 July 1941, right at the beginning of the war. Her father, Veniamin, tried to persuade all Jewish citizens to leave the town straight away. However, many refused to believe that the Germans would harm them and perished. On 6 September 1941 some 2,000 Jews (including many women and children) were shot – after digging their own graves – at the ‘Blue Dacha’, just outside Nevel’. Veniamin Yudin and his family avoided extermination, by escaping at the last minute to the provincial capital, Kalinin. From there they relocated to the town of Molotov (as Perm was called between 1940 and 1957). On their hazardous journey they were ‘robbed to their last thread’.²⁷ Their dreams of joining Maria in Moscow remained unrealized. Having devoted his life to working as a doctor and social organizer in his home town, Veniamin Yudin died heartbroken on 2 June 1943.

The atrocities committed against the Jews made Yudina deeply aware – and proud – of her Jewish roots, and this did not conflict with her Christian beliefs. It was something she discussed with Solomon Mikhoels, the great Jewish actor and founder of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre. Yudina admired Mikhoels’ gifts enormously – initially they were much taken with each other. When she wrote to congratulate him after seeing his theatre’s production of Freylekhs, she complained that ‘you have become more indifferent to me’. He obviously deplored her conversion to Christianity, but she defended her position: ‘Did it not occur to you that for me it was no easy matter to turn my back on Judaism in these years? Yes, it might have been “easier” – but to do so would have been morally as great a crime as denying Christ, something which was often expected of me.’²⁸ Certainly her baptism into the Orthodox Church did not loosen her ties with her family. Yudina was still supporting her brother Boris and her sister Anna, as well as Yelena Saltykova. The latter, it transpired, was something of a spendthrift; Yudina did not deny her ‘mother-in-law’ anything, but privately started to complain, not least of not being able to practise in their shared home. Yudina’s own health was under stress: ‘I am working in many fields, busy from morning to night. I keep my spirits up. Thank God I still have enough strength, despite immense fatigue.’²⁹

Getting to Leningrad remained Yudina’s strongest desire, while getting others out of it was her duty. Thus she saved ‘the last fragments of a family – mother and daughter, who are very close to me’,³⁰ a reference to the philologist Yelena Sosnovskaya and her daughter Masha. Sosnovskaya, a fellow Josephite and close friend from the 1920s, was married to the religious thinker, founder of the Seraphim Brothers and psychiatrist, Ivan Andreyevsky, who had recently been captured by the Germans. After the war was over, Andreevsky chose not to return to the Soviet Union, and emigrated to the USA. Sosnovskaya and her two small daughters, Masha and Lyolya, knew nothing of his fate, and now, in besieged Leningrad, were gradually dying of dystrophy – the younger daughter could not be saved. Yudina turned to the writer Samuil Marshak on the basis of their Leningrad friendship. Before the war, as head of Detgiz, the State Children’s Publishing House, he had taken under his wing unemployed Leningrad artists and writers, including Kharms and Zabolotsky. Now living in Moscow, he used his considerable influence to rescue Leningraders from the besieged city. ‘The wartime Marshak was quite something,’ Yudina exclaimed. ‘Papa Sam [. . .] took infinite trouble over the lives of others.’³¹

When Yudina informed Marshak that Sosnovskaya was a goddaughter of the writer and human rights activist, Vladimir Korolenko, he interrupted her: ‘After thinking for a moment, he exclaimed, “I know, we’ll turn the goddaughter into a niece!” And there on the spot he dashed off a written dispatch to be sent to the highest authorities in Leningrad. Afterwards we chatted a bit more, and to end our meeting I played a Bach fugue. Then I rushed to the Central Post Office. Marshak’s signature was worth a lot – it evoked absolute trust; nobody questioned me about the document’s authenticity.’³² In her eagerness to send the telegram, Yudina absent-mindedly left a large sum of money on the counter. An air force officer returned the bank notes, ‘new and crackling’, which she had just received from the Radio. Honesty was another feature of the war years!

Marshak’s letter did the trick, and Sosnovskaya and her six-year-old daughter were flown out of Leningrad. The usual route for evacuees across Lake Ladoga involved manifold risks and was restricted to carefully selected civilians. Saving young children was a priority, but good work qualifications also played a role. Thus, Yudina’s closest friend Yelena Skrzhinskaya and her small daughter Marisha became eligible for evacuation and left Leningrad in May 1942. On arrival in Moscow, Skrzhinskaya gained immediate employment at the Archaeological Institute attached to the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The privations and stress of evacuation took their toll in the war-torn country. Leonid Nikolayev, Yudina’s one-time piano teacher, died from typhoid fever in Tashkent in October 1942. Shostakovich, likewise his student, wrote his Second Piano Sonata in his memory, paying homage in quoting from Nikolayev’s compositions. The sonata soon became pivotal to Yudina’s repertoire. Only a month later, Boleslav Yavorsky died from a heart attack in Saratov. For Yudina the death of her mentor was an irreparable blow. During the last fifteen years nobody else in her orbit – apart from Prokofiev – had held such high musical authority. Just before his death on 26 November 1942, Yavorsky had conducted two immensely successful seminars – the first an extended analysis of both volumes of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, while the second was devoted to Liszt’s Réminiscences de Don Juan. As discussed in Chapter 3, Yavorsky and Yudina shared opinions about the religious and symbolic significance of Bach’s music. Yavorsky’s notes and lectures for these seminars were seen as his legacy, yet to be comprehensively published.

Naturally Yudina participated in the first concert held in Yavorsky’s memory at Moscow’s Scriabin Memorial Museum, no. 11 Vakhtangov Street, an event that became an annual tradition. The museum was run by enthusiasts^* – ‘by those who revered Scriabin, Sofronitsky and Yavorsky. It was here that Scriabin’s archive was guarded and that Sofronitsky loved to play.’³³ Many recordings from Yudina’s performances at the museum over the years have survived.

The New Year of 1943 started with the news that Soviet troops had encircled twenty-two German divisions in Stalingrad. Shortly afterwards, on 18 January, the blockade of Leningrad was broken, when the Red Army took Shlisselburg and freed up a corridor of approximately eight to eleven kilometres on the southern shores of Lake Ladoga. Now at last transport and supplies (and people) could pass on ‘dry land’. The Committee on the Arts – the future Soviet Ministry of Culture – decided to send three brigades of artists to entertain the exhausted civilian population of the besieged city. Yudina was amongst them, at last able to visit her ‘second, spiritual home’. Her willingness ‘to die at the walls of Leningrad’ was now put to the test. On the eve of her departure the All-Union Bureau for Concert Tours signed the authorization for her visit to Leningrad from 11 February to 1 March, a document essential to justify her absence from her official place of work. Yudina had already informed her friends that she would take messages and packages to relatives. On 2 February she urged Skrzhinskaya to come with her messages: ‘I haven’t got time to rush over to you, I don’t even know if I’ll manage to get to the airport and catch the plane, I have so many responsibilities and duties.’³⁴

Typically, Yudina’s brigade was made up not only of musicians but of actors, singers and speakers: amongst them the mezzo-soprano Irma Yaunzem, her husband, the actor Grigori Appolonov, as well as the immensely popular actor Vladimir Yakhontov and his pianist Elizaveta Loiter. ‘We flew over Lake Ladoga, with a machine gunner. We were shot at by the Germans, but survived intact,’ Yudina recalled.³⁵ Oistrakh’s brigade included the pianist Yakov Zak, who later recounted his impressions of their journey for the radio: ‘We flew at night, low over the ice, stopping at Tikhvin.^* David Fyodorovich never lost his sense of humour, and pointing to the machine-gunner’s nest which towered above our heads, remarked, “I have never flown in such stupendous company.”’³⁶ The pianist Yakov Flier, in another brigade, got stranded in Tikhvin for several sleepless days and nights.

Witnesses recall the unforgettable sight of Yudina arriving at Leningrad’s military airport, with an enormous soldier’s kit bag slung over her shoulders, stuffed full of provisions. Zak recalled her ‘in a soldier’s greatcoat, with a stick, bold in life as in art, not bothering to take cover from shooting and bombing. Her smile expressed a challenge to the enemy and derision of danger.’³⁷ All that Yudina saw and learnt in these days filled her with awe. David Oistrakh was similarly impressed, as he wrote to his ten-year-old son, Igor on 23 February 1943, ‘The town has been under the Fascists’ siege for nearly a year and a half [. . .] They have encircled [it] in a tight ring and are trying to starve out the population through hunger and cold. They are destroying [Leningrad] with daily bombardments from long-range artillery cannons. And despite this, the city continues to live, to work, to fight the enemy, and to entertain itself. Art and music are essential to man [. . .] You can imagine what joy I get from performing in this “hero-city” for the soldiers and commanders defending it, and to visit enormous ships which engage in mortal battle with the Fascists, to play, knowing that my music brings them joy during their hours of leisure.’³⁸ Naturally, as a father writing to a child, Oistrakh avoided depicting the distressing realities that Leningraders recorded in their siege-time diaries.

Yudina will have heard many accounts of the abnormally cold first winter of the war, where people were tormented by frostbite and suffered hallucinations of food. Boris Pasternak’s cousin, Olga Freidenberg, left searing diary records of the devastating effects of the bombing and starvation in the city. ‘Hunger destroyed our nerves, memory, willpower. All of us were overwrought and half-crazy. Women in the shops shouted, wept, struck one another, went into fits of hysterics [. . .] People died in droves. No epidemic, no German bombs and shells could have killed so many people.’³⁹ In a fast-deteriorating situation even the Soviet propaganda machine stopped talking of the heroic resistance of the city, while citizens were forbidden to complain or appeal for help. Freidenberg believed that the problem of starvation was in part due to an uncaring Soviet leadership. Stalin’s hostility to Leningrad was notorious.

In the summer of 1942, when things had eased somewhat after the cruel winter, Freidenberg reported: ‘We feed on wild herbs and grass, we make our own fires by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils our tea kettle for us. A parquet floor makes the best fuel. There is no “tomorrow” for us.’⁴⁰

Yet the planning involved in organizing a performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in the city to which it was dedicated showed that the authorities did indeed have thoughts beyond tomorrow. Concentrated efforts by the conductor Karl Eliasberg to find the players to swell out the remnants of the Radio Orchestra, to feed those otherwise too weak to blow or scrape their instruments, resulted in an extraordinary concert on 9 August. For the two hours’ duration of the concert, Soviet troops kept up an intense bombardment of the German forces to ensure that the musicians and their audience were safe from air raids and artillery attacks. The symphony was not only heard in the Philharmonia, but broadcast throughout the country.

By February 1943 the Radio Orchestra under Eliasberg’s direction was functioning full time, and it accompanied guest soloists. Yudina could not praise the orchestra and its director highly enough: ‘Whoever, like myself, had the honour to play with the Radio Orchestra can state that the force of the human spirit is indomitable. In its discipline and sense of purpose, its steady dedication to work and culture, this collective [. . .] manifested all the features of high symphonism, the absolute fundament of all musical life.’⁴¹

David Oistrakh was equally impressed, not least by Eliasberg’s sangfroid. ‘Despite the vicinity of the front line and the continual danger, he rehearsed the orchestra, working in scrupulous detail on phrasing and on sectional intonation, remaining oblivious to all else.’⁴²

Oistrakh recalled performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in the freezing cold, packed-out Grand Hall of the Philharmonia: ‘As I was playing the second movement, Canzonetta, the sirens started wailing, indicating an attack from the air. Not a single person in the hall even stood up, and I played until the end. I was amazed that here in Leningrad, with the enemy at its very walls, there were so many people who loved music. Tchaikovsky’s melody flew over the hall like a song predicting victory.’⁴³

Yudina’s concert with Eliasberg and the Radio Orchestra took place in the same hall on 27 February, with performances of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’. Before that she had given two recitals, again at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia, on 20 and 24 February. The first was a repeat of her Moscow ‘Russian programme’, with Borodin’s Little Suite, Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet pieces as their centrepiece. She concluded with the Russian Dance from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, ignoring the unspoken ban on his music.

Lyubov Shaporina attended Yudina’s second recital on 24 February: ‘She played marvellously – some Bach Preludes and Fugues, Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ [and Chopin’s F minor Fantasy and 4th Ballade].’ However, one of Shaporina’s acquaintances, a certain Golubyev, was unhappy: ‘he could not bear to see all these badly dressed people in their overcoats and felt boots and the dilapidated chandeliers’. Furthermore, he disliked Yudina’s Chopin. For Shaporina the external circumstances which repulsed Golubyev were the very things that touched her most:

People suffer from cold and hunger – and Yudina plays! She warms her hands on an electric stove, placed on a chair nearby her piano stool. And we come in our fur coats and felt boots to hear her, and return home in complete darkness. Not that the great concert artist is provided with transport – she too returns to the Astoria Hotel on foot. Poor little people, having sat out the siege for 20 months, having experienced its innumerable horrors, still have the courage and fortitude – and most importantly – the DESIRE to listen to Yudina’s inspired playing. One should bow down before them!⁴⁴

The historian, literary critic and expert on Voltaire, Vladimir Lyublinsky, attended all of Yudina’s concerts. Her playing left a shattering impression on him, and he sought her out after the first concert. They already had a nodding acquaintance, going back to their participation in Karsavin’s seminars at Petrograd University. Ten years after meeting her in besieged Leningrad, Lyublinsky recalled ‘the joy of our conversations after the concerts, the many meals and festivities, our expeditions to Krestovsky Island and other amazing events in those last days of February 1943!’⁴⁵ Initially they established a ‘tender relationship’ built on very strong mutual attraction. Lyublinsky was married to a highly intelligent woman, the historian Alexandra Dmitreyevna (née Stefanovich), and from the start it was understood that he would not sacrifice his marriage. Rather, he took upon himself the role of adviser and confidant, a figure lacking in Yudina’s life. Their friendship lasted until his death in 1968 and was enshrined in a lively correspondence, full of feline endearments. (She addressed him as ‘Dear Miaou’ while he called her ‘Dear Myava’ or ‘Myavenka’.)

On 1 March Yudina returned to Moscow and to teaching at the newly reunited Conservatoire. She continued performing concerts and making radio broadcasts, and cemented her duo partnership with the violinist Marina Kozolupova. But she longed to be back in Leningrad, because this, she felt, was where she was needed. She found an ally in Boris Zagursky, recently retired from his position as Director of the Leningrad Conservatoire to head the Leningrad City Council’s Management for Artistic Affairs. Zagursky organized the necessary permits, and on 28 June signed the official authorization for Yudina’s two-month visit. Four weeks later he arranged to extend her stay, so she could give consultation lessons to Conservatoire students and teachers. Zagursky also ensured ration cards and dining rights at the mess, and arranged safe-conducts for her concerts in military zones, on naval vessels, in clubs and hospitals. On 1 September the Leningrad Radio requested that her Leningrad ‘registration’ be prolonged until the end of October.⁴⁶ By mid-October, Yudina was receiving threatening letters from the Moscow Conservatoire, demanding that she return immediately to her teaching duties. Again it was Zagursky who defended her, and guaranteed her return to Moscow by 1 November.

At the start of this second visit, Yudina broadcast a remarkable speech to Leningraders, declaring solidarity with the city:

Each person honoured to visit LENINGRAD first and foremost feels here a General UNIVERSALITY. There is no front line and no rearguard, no dividing lines between the military and civilian, between primary and secondary things, between ‘my own’ and that of others. There are no residents, only citizens. Each Citizen is a Warrior. Your faces are tempered by suffering, scorched by lines, recording the casual and the trivial, and illuminated by hope and by that quiet certitude that the common goal is victory, the smashing of the enemy. Here all are equal, the soldier, the shop assistant, the manager, the nurse, the policeman, the musician.⁴⁷

Her rhetoric adhered to essential communist principles, yet it was softened by warm individual tributes to those musicians and organizers who had stayed in Leningrad, ensuring that ‘the Muses were not, and are not silent in Leningrad. They sound in dialogue with the voices of War, sirens, bombs, the blasts of artillery, and the roar of aeroplanes.’⁴⁸

Yudina started by making live broadcasts from the Leningrad Radio House. On 15 July she performed music by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and the following evening performed in direct transmission the Tchaikovsky concerto with Eliasberg and the Radio Orchestra. A month later, on 15 August, they performed the concerto again at the Grand Hall of the Philharmonia. The day before she gave a benefit concert in the same hall to collect money for rebuilding a theatre in Stalingrad. This was followed by a marathon solo programme on 19 August of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Scriabin’s Third Sonata, Prokofiev’s Fourth Sonata, and Liszt’s Variations on a Theme of Bach. Her next complete solo recital on 3 October consisted of music by three Romantic composers, Franck, Chopin and Liszt. During her stay Yudina encouraged Leningrad composers to write for her: Bogdanov-Berezovsky produced a piano sonata, whose first movement she broadcast on 28 September.

Shaporina saw a lot of the pianist during the summer. She advised Yudina to leave for Moscow as the bombardments were so heavy, Yudina had no money, and the Astoria Hotel was expensive. ‘I won’t leave,’ Yudina insisted. ‘I am staying here – it’s important for my biography.’⁴⁹ Shaporina noted that Yudina lived by selling her books. ‘She goes around in sandals with bare feet, a black velvet beret, a black, silk, ankle-length dress and a dark-grey jacket, in her pocket a green-edged kerchief! On 5 August she will play at the Philharmonia.’ Yudina responded negatively when Shaporina asked whether she would play Bach:

I told her, ‘In these terrible times, Bach is the closest of all to me – his music is uplifting and sustaining. Audiences associate you with Bach – your inspired spiritual nature is best suited to him.’ Yudina did not agree. ‘The more I am asked to play Bach, the longer I will desist,’ she reiterated. She is very stubborn – like with her former obsession with drawing, for which she wanted to give up music. Now she is longing to go to the Front.⁵⁰

Soon Yudina’s wishes were fulfilled through supervised front-line visits to naval vessels and submarines at Leningrad’s port. Here she played on upright pianos, unscrewing the front panels as Alexei Tolstoy had taught her. Photographs show Yudina socializing with naval officers, hearing their stories of naval battles. She obviously enjoyed being a woman in this predominantly male world.

Just before she left for Leningrad in late June, Yudina joyfully informed Boris Zalesky that ‘the Bakhtins have been found’.⁵¹ After a long period of silence two letters arrived from them; they were still in Savyolovo, some 125 kilometres from Moscow. Although perilously near the front line, the town had remained in Soviet hands. Yudina immediately sent the Bakhtins money and mobilized her friends to collectively guarantee the couple 300 roubles a month. Yudina also sustained her friend Milya Zalessky, who had miraculously survived prison, the camps, fighting in front-line brigades, and being wounded. He was particularly downcast at the loss of all his possessions, not least his precious library for a second time – it included such treasures as signed books by the Futurists and Anna Akhmatova.

With telephones cut off and postal services reduced to a bare minimum, many people lost contact with each other. Relatives and friends of Leningraders did not know whether their dear ones were dead or alive, whether they had been evacuated, or were holed up in the city, famished and dying of cold, or at the mercy of enemy fire. Yudina well understood the anguish suffered in such desperate situations. At Pasternak’s instigation she sought out his cousin, Olga Freidenberg. Their letters to each other had remained unanswered for over a year – Pasternak assumed that Olga had been evacuated with the university to Saratov. Now Yudina transmitted the news that she and her mother had never left Leningrad, and that Olga had been seriously ill that winter with scurvy. On discovering Yudina was going to Leningrad, Anna Akhmatova wrote to her from Tashkent, asking her to track down the pathologist, Vladimir Garshin, to whom she was romantically attached. Evidently his letters had not reached her in Tashkent. Yudina was now able to deliver Akhmatova’s letters to Garshin, as well as small food parcels sent by the Tomashevsky family, now relocated in Moscow.

Years later, Freidenberg was commissioned to write about the heroism of Leningrad women:

I had no wish to write about those [. . .] whom officialdom had loudly proclaimed heroines.^* I was interested in the little people. With two of these women I formed a lasting friendship. One of them was Maria Yudina. I had heard of her long ago [. . .] when we had supplied her with books on antiquity from our department library. Later I learned she was a friend of Borya’s and Zhenya’s [. . .] She would come all the way from Moscow to give concerts in Leningrad. Her heroism was genuine. One had to have a mighty and unbending spirit to choose to come to our grim city, risk the deadly bombardments, and return to a room on the seventh floor of the Astoria Hotel, in the pitch blackness of Leningrad nights. Mother was enchanted with Yudina; she immediately felt an affinity with her that was almost familial.⁵²

This new friendship brought Yudina closer to Pasternak. Gratefully, he informed Freidenberg that ‘Yudina found you some days ago and gave you back to us again.’⁵³ A second letter written three days later, on 8 November 1943, reported how ‘Yudina’s messages brought me joy beyond words [. . .] She told me a great deal and reassured me [about your health].’⁵⁴

Back in Moscow, Yudina’s next concerts celebrated a flurry of anniversaries. In Klin, to honour fifty years since Tchaikovsky’s death, she once more joined Tsyganov and Shirinsky in the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Trio on 21 November. At the Conservatoire’s Small Hall, she celebrated the ‘Twentieth Birthday’ of the Beethoven Quartet on 25 December, in the company of pianists Igumnov, Goldenweiser, Oborin and Richter. With the ‘Beethovens’, Yudina performed the Largo from Taneyev’s Quintet. Earlier, on 8 December, she had participated in another collective concert entirely dedicated to Prokofiev’s music. Here for the first time Yudina played the composer’s own arrangements of Waltzes from his ballet Cinderella, and from War and Peace.^* Prokofiev had just completed his first revised version of the opera, which was to undergo three more revisions before receiving authorization to be staged.

At a concert of Soviet Music on 13 February 1944, at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, Yudina devised her programme as a showcase for Leningrad composers. To Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Yuri Kochurov, Orest Yevlakhov, she added Prokofiev and Shostakovich, both graduates from the Petersburg/Leningrad Conservatoire. She again played selected pieces from Prokofiev’s Op. 97 Cinderella Suite and the whole of the Op. 96 Suite (Prokofiev had added a Contradanza and Mefisto Waltz from the film Lermontov to the Waltz from War and Peace). The principal offering was Shostakovich’s recent Second Piano Sonata Op. 61, which was composed in evacuation in Kuibishev in the spring of 1943, while the composer was recovering from typhoid fever. Dedicated to the memory of Leonid Nikolayev, Shostakovich incorporated references to Nikolayev’s own compositions, the Suite for two pianos in particular. Within its basically traditional structure, the sonata offers much that is original. The toccata-like textures of the opening movement, with its baroque-like clarity and rigour, are in contrast to the second movement’s bizarre, slowed-down Waltz, which recalls the early atonal pieces of Schoenberg. The final movement, a set of elaborate Variations based on a theme of Russian intonations, places the work in a national context. The composer himself gave the premiere of the sonata on 6 June 1943. Within six months both Gilels and Yudina were performing it. With the latter, the sonata suited her polyphonic bent, and she enhanced its Bach-like transparency through sparing use of pedal. If Gilels’ interpretation favoured beauty of sound and faster tempi, Yudina’s underlined the conflict and acerbic quality of the work.

By New Year 1944 the smell of victory was in the air. The closer it came, the more histrionic the tone of the press and leaders’ speeches. It became obvious that Stalin would acquire unlimited power, which he could dangerously misuse. The arts risked serving as a panegyric to elevate his achievements. In spring 1944, glad to get out of the capital, Yudina set off on a fifteen-day visit to Novosibirsk, where the Leningrad Philharmonic had been evacuated. The orchestra had been musically active under its artistic director Ivan Sollertinsky and chief conductor Yevgeni Mravinsky. In Novosibirsk she performed eight concerts within a fortnight, including three concertos (Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, Mozart’s C minor K.491, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s) with the Leningrad Philharmonic, under the direction of Kurt Sanderling rather than Mravinsky. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Sanderling was now working as the orchestra’s second conductor. He and Yudina established a warm musical understanding and sincere friendship.

Exactly a month before Yudina’s arrival, Sollertinsky had died in Novosibirsk of a heart attack on 11 February at the age of forty-two. Her last recital on 24 March with two ‘Second Sonatas’, by Shcherbachov and Shostakovich, may well have been intended as homage to the brilliant polymath, whom she had met through Bakhtin and Pumpyansky in the days of Nevel’ and Vitebsk. At the end of the year, Yudina became one of the first soloists to play with the Leningrad Philharmonic back at their home base. Shaporina attended this concert, featuring Mozart’s C minor concerto K.491 and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. ‘Sanderling conducted very well and Yudina played marvellously. What a brilliant, sparkling occasion; the Philharmonia, with its diamond-cut candelabras, created a haven isolating us from the outside world. What a difference too, remembering how the hall looked in 1942 and 1943. Now it is heated, full, and the audience well dressed. The war has receded far away from us into the distance.’⁵⁵

It pained Shaporina that the war was so quickly being forgotten by Leningraders, while those returning from evacuation could not even imagine what the ‘blokadniki’ (those living through the siege) had been through. ‘Only a priest prays for warriors, yet on the battlefield, women of all ages stand and weep – it is they that take away the dead. Today I went to Church, remembered my friends by name, those who died in 1941–2 and saw the eyes of women who haven’t forgotten the war.’⁵⁶

If Shaporina bemoaned the shortness of collective memory, she was equally overwhelmed by revulsion at the rising hysteria of Soviet propaganda, which grew in proportion to the nearing approach of victory. ‘26 December. It’s cold in the room. It’s terrible to be ill and on one’s own in our Soviet conditions. As I crawled across the room, I picked up the newspaper – suddenly I was seized with a stabbing, painful realization that this enormous country has only one newspaper, one way of thinking, one political understanding, and even in literature, music and history there is only one point of view.’⁵⁷ She confided these thoughts to Yudina, who dismissed them as something not worth discussing: ‘If you start thinking like this, then you cannot live, you have to die. I haven’t read the newspapers for months. One has to create a kind of aristocratic isolation around oneself, that is the only way to exist.’⁵⁸

‘Aristocratic isolation’ was famously adopted by Anna Akhmatova as the only honourable mode of defence. All the more so when in August 1946 she came under assault through publication of the Central Committee’s Resolution, condemning the Leningrad journals The Star and Leningrad where her work had recently appeared. The architect of this attack, Andrei Zhdanov, singled out Akhmatova and Zoshchenko as writers of an ‘anti-Soviet’ outlook, turning them into unpublishable authors. On her next visit to Leningrad, Yudina made a point of looking up Akhmatova, and bringing Zoshchenko an enormous bouquet of flowers.

Writers were more vulnerable to attack than composers – provided they refrained from setting texts. Now Shostakovich was subject to enormous pressure to compose a grandiloquent glorification of Victory in his next symphony, his Ninth. Instead, in a paradoxical manner typical of the composer, he wrote a work of sparkling wit and irony, with only brief reference to tragic themes. The cultural authorities attacked the Ninth Symphony for its light-heartedness, and for having not extolled the momentous Victory under Generalissimo Stalin’s leadership. It was soon removed from the repertoire.

By coincidence, just within a month of the surrender of Nazi Germany on 9 May 1945, the first concert performances of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace took place at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall with the forces of the Bolshoi Theatre under Samosud’s direction. The work surely symbolized everything that Russians felt about the war years, and their hopes for a better future. Yudina attended the premiere and two days later, on 9 June, she wrote to Prokofiev:

Dear, most treasured Sergei Sergeyevich, even three days afterwards, my state of shock is so great that I couldn’t write straight away to express my gratitude. It’s hard to do so even now [. . .] but it’s essential to say at least some things of fundamental importance. You have created not just an epos, something possible in the world of opera – but you have done this for the very first time in opera’s history [. . .] You have achieved Tolstoy’s aims in the patriotic and historical concepts, solved the psychological and dramatic issues, and you have proclaimed – for those with ears to listen – the triumph of good and of love. You make this affirmation of life with its universal values, notwithstanding all the malevolence that negates it, and despite the fact ‘that the earth is besmirched with evil’. How did you manage to create it, with what? The concept both in its entirety and in its minutiae – the transformation from the personal into the general through use of melodic motifs and orchestral palette – represents the summation of your thinking and musical language. Not that this surprises me, since for a long time I have perceived the voice of Eternity in several of your works.⁵⁹

Yudina attended the two subsequent performances in the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, and was dismayed to discover that the whole of Scene 9 had been removed. She wrote an open letter to Vladimir Vlasov, the director of the Moscow Philharmonic, to express her outrage. ‘How could you raise a hand to cut a single note of this masterpiece?’ She considered this scene to be one of the opera’s best, ‘in its concept, in the brilliant dramatic and compositional solutions and the inventiveness of the orchestration’.⁶⁰ She asked if the cut was an expedient to shorten the opera’s duration? Vlasov admitted as much in his reply, saying while he agreed with her, nevertheless an audience could not be expected to sit through five hours of music and then get home after public transport had stopped running.

While her sincerity was never in doubt, Yudina was also not afraid to ‘blurt out’ unpleasant truths, as Prokofiev joked. She considered his music for Cinderella lacked this ‘highest quality’ – apart from the famous Adagio – because of the ‘over-luxuriousness’ of orchestral texture. Now War and Peace was another matter: ‘it burst in on us with incredible force – like the rising sun – fistfuls, bucketfuls – whole sheaves of blinding golden rays, which you scatter with abundance over us, your contemporaries and people of the future, heralding the triumph of the Good that stands firm and resists every kind of trial! [. . .] And to create something like this NOW!’⁶¹

Her prediction of the power of Good would have carried less force had she known what was awaiting Prokofiev – and others of the Soviet intelligentsia during the last repressive period of Stalin’s rule.

* Prokofiev’s Second String Quartet and the finale of Myaskovsky’s Twenty-Third Symphony.

* The Tchaikovsky Hall was conceived for Meyerhold’s Theatre. After Meyerhold’s arrest, it was turned into a concert hall, which opened in 1940.

* Now reverted to its pre-revolutionary name, Malaya Nikitskaya.

* Grigori Stolyarov, professor of conducting, acting director of the Moscow Conservatoire in evacuation.

* Moscow is connected to Leningrad through the canal and river systems.

* The world premiere at Kuibyshev under Samuil Samosud was on 5 March 1942. The Moscow premiere on 29 March at the Hall of Columns, was performed by the Radio Orchestra reinforced by musicians from the Bolshoi Theatre.

* The sisters Tatiana and Anastasia Shaborkina, and Scriabin’s daughters, Yelena and Maria, from his first marriage.

* Tikhvin, the strategic railway junction town 200 kilometres east of Leningrad, played a vital role in getting supplies to the city through Lake Ladoga.

* Referring to Olga Bergholz and Vera Inber, writers renowned for their Radio broadcasts from besieged Leningrad.

* Not to be confused with the popular ‘Natasha’s Waltz’ written for a later version of the opera.