Playing with Fire

APPENDIX

Yudina was viewed by many of her contemporaries as an eccentric or a Yurodivy – a Holy Fool. Naturally many legends grew up around her name. The story of her recording the Mozart A major piano concerto K.488 in one single night for Stalin is often the only thing people in the West know about Yudina, even if they have never heard her recordings. It has entered the popular imagination and has been taken up by filmmakers and writers. It appears in the opening scenes of Armando Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin (2017). In France an interesting (if not always accurate) book by Jean-Noël Benoit has the subtitle ‘The pianist who defied Stalin’. While in Italy, two books give prominence to the presumed relationship between Stalin and Yudina: Giovanna Parravicini’s biography Marija Judina: Più della musica, which emphasises the religious aspect of her life, and a recently published novel, Complice la notte by Giuseppina Manin, belonging to the genre of fiction based on research. In all my years researching Yudina I have yet to meet anybody who heard the story from Yudina’s own lips. Here I attempt to answer the million-dollar question: is it history or legend, fact or fiction?

The story made its first printed appearance in 1979 in Solomon Volkov’s Testimony,* first published in English. Recently Volkov confirmed to me in writing that he heard the story not from Yudina, but from Shostakovich, who in turn claimed to have heard it from the pianist. At the time it did not occur to Volkov to doubt its authenticity. As far as I can ascertain, Yudina’s relatives, students (one could say disciples!) and friends – and I have spoken to many of them over the years – never heard any part of this story from Yudina herself. Shostakovich’s widow Irina Antonovna obviously knew of it, presumably from her husband. She told me that she was inclined to think it a Baika (a myth).

I also spoke with my teacher Mstislav Rostropovich about Shostakovich’s exploits as a storyteller. Apart from being the first performer and dedicatee of several important works by Shostakovich, Rostropovich was a personal friend. He too was sceptical. He knew the great composer as a wonderful raconteur, an artist able to vary a story with each telling, often embellishing it to the point of becoming unrecognizable. He quoted instances of other stories that he had heard from Shostakovich, which he didn’t for a minute believe. These were stories told as table-talk and not as documents for posterity.

I started from the premise that there is no smoke without fire, and while on a research trip to Moscow in October 2019 I tried to find some answers.

First of all the date of the Mozart concerto recording was previously given as 1944, later as 1948. In 2001, while copying the discs from 78 rpm shellac to digital, Pavel Grunberg, a sound producer for the firm Melodiya, was able to establish the precise date of the recording as 9 July 1947. The matrix was at this point restored.

Let us first examine the story itself, as told in Testimony:

Once Stalin called the Radio Committee, where the administration was, and asked if they had a record of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 which had been heard on the Radio the day before. ‘Played by Yudina,’ he added. They told Stalin that of course they had it. Actually, there was no record, the concert had been live. But they were afraid to say No to Stalin.

I and my research assistant consulted the Radio archives, trying to discover what and when Yudina played and what was broadcast. The archives gave precise details of performances, artists, repertoire and duration during the war years and up to 1946. In 1947, the year relevant to our specific research, the Radio archives abandoned methodical listing, using far less precise archival methods – times of transmission are given and duration, but not necessarily details of repertoire transmitted or even names of the performers. In every instance some information is missing. Hence, looking up the 1947 data to see when a possible transmission of a Mozart concerto might have been made, I came up with these possibilities:

a) 9 January: Late-night transmission of an unspecified Mozart concerto from studio. Unspecified performers. Duration 30 minutes: 00.46–01.16.

b) 19 January: Symphonic concert of works by Mozart and Beethoven from studio. Unspecified works and performers. Duration 54 minutes: 22.00–22.54.

c) 30 January: Mozart Romance from unspecified piano concerto from studio. Unspecified performers. (Probably second movement of D minor concerto K.466.) Duration 9 minutes: 5.20–5.29 a.m.

d) 2 March: Performance by M. Yudina from studio. Unspecified repertoire, unknown if she was playing solo or with orchestra. Duration 16 minutes: 13.15–13.31.

e) 2 April: Concert of Yudina broadcast live from Grand Hall of Conservatoire. Unspecified repertoire, not known if she was playing solo or with orchestra. Duration 1 hour 10 minutes: 20.40–21.50.

f) 8 April: Instrumental concert from the Hall of Columns, with unspecified works by Bach and Mozart. Unspecified performers. Direct evening broadcast. Duration 1 hour 35 minutes: 20.14–21.49.

g) 18 April: Chamber concert of works by Beethoven and Mozart from studio. Unspecified repertoire and performers. Duration 30 minutes: 16.15–16.45.

h) 19 May: Concert performed by Yudina from studio. Unspecified repertoire. Duration 13 minutes 59 seconds: 17.46–17.59.

i) 25 May: Mozart concerto (unspecified whether concerto was for piano, violin, horn or flute and harp), studio recording. Unspecified performers. Duration 30 minutes: 23.00–23.30.

Mozart’s A major concerto has a duration of 23.38’ in Yudina’s recording. Possibly in concert performance it lasted a minute or so longer, if she took slower tempi in the outer movements. We can immediately exclude c), d) and h). Of the listed broadcasts only three – e), f) and g) – come from live concerts, of which Yudina is definitely also playing in e), but we are unsure if an orchestra is also playing. Possibly Yudina played the work in studio broadcasts a), b) and i).

The nearest date to the recording of 9 July is i), 25 May. Possibly Stalin heard this broadcast – possibly it was the A major concerto K.488 and possibly the pianist was Yudina. If the story is true and Stalin rang the Radio Committee after the concert, that would have left a good six weeks between the concerto being heard on the radio and its being recorded – hardly a panicked overnight job as claimed in Testimony:

The committee panicked. But they had to do something. They called in Yudina and an orchestra and recorded that night. Everyone was shaking with fright, except Yudina naturally [. . .] Yudina told me they had to send the conductor home, he was so scared he couldn’t think. They called another conductor, who trembled, and got everything mixed up, confusing the orchestra. Only a third conductor was in any shape to finish the recording [. . .] Anyway the record was ready by morning. They made one single copy in record time, and sent it to Stalin.

The Radiohouse (DZZ) owned its own studios, large enough for an orchestra and soloist, and with good acoustics. So the least of the problems would have been finding a studio.

The orchestra used for the recording was not the Radio Orchestra, as one would normally expect in a recording made for the Radio Committe. Rather, the orchestra that played was the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, known as Gosorkestr, Moscow’s most prestigious orchestra. It is hardly possible that the Radio Committee could have called up this orchestra to their studios at the last minute, whereas the Radio Orchestra musicians as employees of the Radio, would have been more likely to oblige out of duty.

Musically Alexander Gauk was an obvious choice to conduct the concerto. He knew Yudina well, and had performed Mozart’s K.488 with her. He was chief conductor of the State Orchestra (Gosorchestra) from 1936 to 1941 (succeeded by Nathan Rakhlin, 1941–5, and Konstantin Ivanov, 1946–65), and worked regularly with the Radio Orchestra, becoming its chief conductor in 1953. He was dismissed as chief conductor of the Gosorchestra at the beginning of the Second World War because of his German surname (Gauk or Hauk), and taught at the Tbilisi and later Moscow Conservatoires in the intervening years. Even in a wartime military economy one doubts whether there was the possibility of recording and producing discs overnight. The Mozart concerto recording was made on shellac in 78 rpm. The ‘single copy’ would have comprised four discs, each with two sides – seven sides of the concerto, the eighth side being an extra, the finale of the Mozart C minor sonata K457. Testimony continues the story:

Soon after, Yudina received an envelope with twenty thousand roubles. She was told it came on the express orders of Stalin. Then she wrote him a letter [. . .] Yudina wrote something like this in her letter. ‘I thank you Iosif Vissarionovich for your aid. I will pray for you night and day and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the Church I attend.’

Yudina stopped attending church services in 1927, when the schism occurred between the main Orthodox Church and the Josephite movement to which she belonged. The Josephites were literally decimated. For Yudina, the acting Patriarch Sergei was a traitor, and she broke all ties with the official Church, considering it to be infiltrated by Bolsheviks. She resumed attending Orthodox services and confessing only in 1956.

As for the letter supposedly sent to Stalin, her friends and relatives believe that had she written it, it would have been suicidal. In other instances when addressing official institutions and personages, she used caution, and was careful in her wording, often simply because she wanted to protect her colleagues and friends. Yudina herself never lacked courage. Another argument I have heard from people close to her was that had she indeed written such a letter, she would have been unable to resist boasting about it, particularly after Stalin was exposed by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.

While in Moscow I visited the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social-Political History), which houses a large part of Stalin’s archive, scattered between various organizations. I spoke to the very helpful archivist, who informed me that their archive held no letters from Yudina to Stalin and had no information of their existence. I was put in touch with Oleg Khlevnyuk, who as a recent biographer of Stalin apparently had the greatest knowledge of the Stalinist archives. He confirmed that over his years of research he had never seen any mention or trace of correspondence between Yudina and Stalin. I realise that many Russian archives withhold material relating to Stalin from foreigners as a matter of course. It would have taken me a few years to visit them all. In addition, it is known that certain material relating to this period has either been deliberately destroyed or not been preserved in the archives. Testimony continues thus:

They say that her recording of the Mozart concerto was on the record player when the leader and teacher was found dead in his dacha. It was the last thing he listened to.

In a film made for Russian TV on Kanal 1 (Channel 1, ‘Legends of our Time’) in 2010, its director and script writer Olga Kuznetsova visited Stalin’s dacha in Kuntsevo where he died. She found the catalogue (card index) of his phonographic collection, but no record of Yudina’s was listed amongst its contents, let alone the 78 rpm recording of Mozart’s A major concerto.

All this leads me to believe that the story is untrue. At best it is a legend only partly rooted in truth, which through gross exaggeration has become unrecognizable.