Playing with Fire

9

1953–1960

THE THAW YEARS

The artist’s hand is now empowered

To strip from all the dust and dirt.

Through his palette life, truth, reality,

Re-emerge with freshness and fidelity.

Boris Pasternak¹

In our [Soviet] democratization of culture there lies a great Truth. It’s a Christian Truth, only its creators don’t know the name of God.

Maria Yudina²

By a grim coincidence Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day – 5 March 1953. Yudina was not amongst the musicians like Gilels, Richter, Oistrakh and the young musicians of the future Borodin Quartet who had been commandeered to play at Stalin’s funeral. Although unable to attend Prokofiev’s – the city centre was blocked by crowds of mourners hoping to glimpse Stalin’s funeral bier – she paid homage to Prokofiev at a later memorial service organized at the Union of Composers.

The dictator’s death signalled change, a gradual process of rehabilitation. Former prisoners (Zeks) and camp inmates started returning to their homes, while the lifting of the ‘100-km ban’ allowed them to move to the large cities, providing they could get a residence permit. Many had spent most of their adult life cut off from the ‘normal’ world in conditions of extreme hardship. Yet returning to the ‘free world’, finding work, or resuming rudely interrupted studies posed many problems. Yudina made it her business to help former prisoners, with loans of money – usually borrowed from others – or in other practical ways.

In May 1953 Yudina’s old friend Milya Zalessky was liberated after a second term of imprisonment. She was overwhelmed to learn of his last-minute reprieve from execution by firing squad. ‘I sat in a pit waiting for death,’ he recounted. ‘Through a chink in the roof – a seeming coffin lid – I glimpsed the moon and clouds scudding past.’³ Now settled with a new wife in the Smolensk region, Zalessky found employment as a labourer – ‘physical work has its use for stupefying and numbing the brain!’ he wrote. Yudina commiserated: ‘Milya works as a truck loader, and dreams of finding employment on a research expedition, where he can show his qualities.’⁴ She wrote to Pavel Schultz, archaeologist and expert on Scythian culture, asking him to engage Zalessky. Schultz pointed out that archaeological digs involved hard physical labour – would Zalessky withstand the gruelling heat of the Crimean steppe?

The art historian Georgi Vagner, arrested for a second time in 1948, finally returned from the camps in 1956. He resumed contact with Yudina, yet their relationship no longer retained its spiritual intensity. The same year, the French-born pianist Vera Lothar-Shevchenko was released from the Gulag, where she had spent some eighteen years. She courageously started giving concerts again, and was encouraged in this by Yudina. They first met in Sverdlovsk in 1956, where Vera attended her concerts and was deeply moved. Their ensuing friendship, carried on through correspondence and the occasional meeting in Moscow, was cemented by a common outlook on life and music. Lothar-Shevchenko was grateful to Yudina’s generosity of spirit and equally for revealing ‘the true spirit and profundity of Beethoven’s thoughts’⁵ – something which took her back to the interpretations of her one-time teacher, Eugen D’Albert, in Vienna.

Yudina was even more affected by the fate of another musician, Sergei Valentinovich Diaghilev, for it typified the wasted lives of so many Zeks. Nephew of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev, the founder of the renowned Ballets Russes, he was also godson to Father Fyodor Andreyev. In 1937, just weeks before graduating as a conductor from the Leningrad Conservatoire, Sergei Valentinovich Diaghilev was arrested and spent the next nine years in the Gulag. After the war he was exiled to Norilsk, beyond the Arctic Circle. Here, Diaghilev was joined by his wife, Militsa Stepanova, and small daughter – they had lost touch during the war. Yudina gave Militsa hospitality in Moscow just before they set off.

In Norilsk, Diaghilev worked in whatever job came his way – bookkeeper, factory workshop manager, and digging foundation pits. He managed to put together a small orchestra, which he conducted in a few concerts before it was forcibly disbanded. Now in 1954, his wife Militsa wrote to Yudina: ‘Many are being rehabilitated and leaving – those who had survived long years in the terrible climate of Norilsk.’ Her husband was also applying to leave, ‘however, we have no idea when the authorities will get round to examining his case [. . .] He is 44 years old, his spirit is strong, and he dreams of performing Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. If only we could leave this desolate place!’⁶ Eventually Diaghilev and his family were rehabilitated. In Moscow he consulted Yudina about his options, and spoke of his enthusiasm for Stravinsky. He returned to his studies, gaining his diploma in conducting, but could only find work with a provincial cinema orchestra. As Yudina noted, ‘this is far below his musical possibilities’.⁷ In his case, however, she was unable to help professionally.

The 1950s were a time of exciting musical ventures for Yudina. After her Bach homage, she initiated a long-term project to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, coming up in 1952. Although Yudina never played the complete cycle of thirty-two sonatas, she performed twenty-two of them, representing the best of each period in Beethoven’s life.^* She carried out her exploration over eight years in her Leningrad and Moscow recitals, repeated in towns like Tallinn, Kiev, Tbilisi and Yerevan. Apart from the sonatas, she added to her repertoire several sets of Beethoven Variations. Her interpretation of the monumental Diabelli Variations Op. 120, with its colossal structure, inherent wit and philosophical depth, became one of her notable achievements – together with the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata (Op. 106) and the last Sonata, Op. 111.

On 23 September 1953 she wrote to Skrzhinskaya: ‘I just batted off two concerts, Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto on the Radio and then on 20 September a mammoth programme, including Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 110 and my first go at the Diabelli Variations.’ The second half of the concert was dedicated to Schubert. Yudina described the concert as ‘exceptionally successful – All the way to the Nikitsky Gates people were begging for tickets [. . .] As Rostik Dubinsky,^** that wonderful violinist, said – it was “Ace” [Zdorovo!]. It wasn’t me playing, but some Higher Forces operating through me – I had humbly called upon their help.’⁸ Beethoven’s chamber music was at the centre of her teaching programme at the Gnesins’ Institute. She herself performed pieces like the Archduke Trio Op. 97 with Tsyganov and Shirinsky, and the sixth violin sonata Op. 30 no. 1 with Marina Kozolupova.

In the words of Yudina’s Russian biographer, Anatoli Kuznetsov, Mozart was ‘the Sun radiating out from the centre of Yudina’s solar system’.⁹ A live recording from a Mozart programme at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire on 6 October 1951 reveals Yudina’s full range of expression, from a shimmering lightness of touch and brilliant finger dexterity in the D major K.284 and A major K.331 sonatas, drama and tragedy in the A minor K.310 and C minor K.457 sonatas, and profound philosophical insights in the D minor and C minor Fantasias (K.397 and K.475). She also recorded other Mozart works in the studio.

While Western contemporary music was actively discouraged during this period, Yudina paid her dues to living Leningrad composers Shcherbachov, Gavriil Popov, Kochurov and Bogdanov-Berezovsky in a recital on 28 June 1953. By early August, with money in her pocket, Yudina announced to Lyublinsky, ‘I am going on a paid holiday (yes me!) at the Union of Artists’ Resort in Majori on the Riga coast! I couldn’t resist, I miss the sea so much!’¹⁰ She recounted to Skrzhinskaya some comic moments of her holiday: ‘I bathed eight times, wearing a long blue dressing gown; from the shore I heard shouted comments: “Look, a new form of Sport” or “Hey, there’s an Auntie bathing in a dress!” However, I couldn’t care less, and took the gown off when I got into deep enough water.’¹¹

She paid for the holiday (600 roubles for twelve days), from the proceeds of her recent recordings of Bach, Brahms Intermezzi and Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives made over five sessions that July. Now she informed Lyublinsky of her new hobby – the viola! She was taking lessons from a student and unofficial assistant, Lev Markiz – she wanted to understand the mechanics of string playing. Only there was no money to buy an instrument. At the Gnesins’ Institute, Yudina became the object of humorous verse: ‘Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si/Maria goes riding in a large Taxi!/Wearing her black old tattered cape/On the viola she likes to scrape.’¹²

Like Shostakovich, Yudina was still dubbed a Formalist. She heard the premiere of his new Tenth Symphony, ‘an ominous, majestic work, even if we are unlikely to hear it again soon.’¹³ She knew that the Composers’ Union had attacked the work for its ‘persistent formalism’. In the meantime Yudina had overcome her private doubts about his ‘formalist’ Preludes and Fugues.¹⁴

Not even bad health – bouts of rheumatism and arrhythmia of the heart – could undermine Yudina’s tough schedule. Nevertheless, as she told Skrzhinskaya, mortality weighed on her thoughts: ‘Lyoshenka, something extraordinary is happening to me. Probably I am about to die – I keep thinking of people who have passed away – mostly of my father. I am endlessly guilty before him. You knew him, and you are all the dearer to me for that reason.’ She was ‘working like a machine’, with thirty-one chamber music students: ‘Each plays three concerts a year – that makes ninety-three performances. I could do three times less for the same money! But I am a stickler for quality!’¹⁵ She had a punishing regime – with evening concerts followed by night-time rehearsals, and perhaps a plane to catch at dawn.

A highlight of her 1953/54 Moscow season were three performances in March of Mozart’s D minor Piano Concerto K.466 with Kurt Sanderling. ‘My precious Mozart had a loud success,’ she announced to Boba Zalesky. Physically she felt overstretched. ‘Only my hands, made of steel, withstand the pace.’ Yet, however much Yudina earned, she remained constantly in debt. Borrowing and paying back money was a constant theme of her life. She spent next to nothing on herself, was far too lightly dressed in winter, without a proper overcoat or adequate shoes. Most of her salary was given to her family – her brother Boris was a regular beneficiary. Yudina excused him as ‘chronically unlucky’. He had no qualifications and suffered mental health problems. He stuck doggedly to writing scenarios nobody needed. His wife worked as a seamstress for a pittance. To add to Boris’s troubles, he was expelled from the Party in 1952 although reinstated a year later.

More tiresome was dealing with her ‘mother-in-law’, Yelena Saltykova, whose health was rapidly declining. As Yudina wrote to Skrzhinskaya, ‘She is going out of her mind [. . .] Her condition is awful, her future is unclear. Her care costs a small fortune, and it’s beyond my strength to sit with her.’¹⁶ Life got easier when spring came with warmer weather. She told Zalesky, ‘I have paid for two-thirds of my winter coat, I no longer need logs for the fire, and I have water again. AT LAST, I’ll be able to pay back my debts.’¹⁷ Yudina was grateful for his constant friendship – ‘It’s not just a question of your systematic help in my chronic troubles, but a deep common understanding of life.’¹⁸

Her friend Lyublinsky (now no longer ‘Miaouiya’ – but VEES, from his initials, Vladimir Sergeyevich) was another source of support. In July she wrote to thank him for a money loan, which had arrived at a critical moment. Totally unexpectedly, she had been offered a concert tour of Poland:

On 2 July, the department for Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Culture informed me that I was urgently being sent abroad. Then as suddenly as it was proposed, the tour was postponed – supposedly ‘temporarily’. Poor Mikhail Waiman, the violinist, was summoned from Leningrad only to have to return immediately [. . .] Can you imagine, my feverish practising of Mazurkas, Nocturnes and Preludes in elephantine doses, while temperatures outside soared to 40°C and I was devoured by the most ferocious mosquitoes. Practice ceased only for moments of vanitas vanitatum – photographers, reporters and trying new outfits. All my money was swallowed up for concert attire [. . .] Now my new shoes are stored in the attic, and my new concert dress risks the same fate as my wartime gown, its white lining, stained yellow by mothballs.¹⁹

That summer Saltykova fell ill again: Yudina decided to sell her upright piano to pay for the medical expenses. ‘My gracious Princess was discharged from hospital in the midst of my frantic preparations for “Non-travel!” ’ Yelena Nikolayevna stayed with Serafima Bromberg a few days before moving to Yudina’s home. ‘These last two weeks my home has become a clinic [. . .] One cannot but pity her, she has almost entirely lost her vision and ability to walk, but not her appetite, all her biological functions work normally.’²⁰ Most irritatingly, Saltykova’s other relatives had vanished, leaving Yudina a slave to Yelena Nikolayevna’s whims. ‘My summers are caricatures of winters,’ she told Lyublinsky, paraphrasing Pushkin.

Yudina wrote to Anna Rugevich, asking that she commandeer Saltykova’s friends and relatives to help with the care: ‘I am alone – they are a whole family [. . .] If my concert activity and my trip to Poland is rescinded, it’ll be the end of me! I am desperate, dropping from fatigue.’²¹ A few days later Yudina decided to repudiate Saltykova, while continuing to provide 700 to 800 roubles a month: ‘Let others use this money to organize some form of human life for her [. . .] If not, I will perish as an artist.’²²

The forthcoming trip to Poland inspired Yudina to return to Chopin’s Preludes Op. 28. ‘They are immeasurably great [. . .] You see how right I was to teach chamber music instead of solo piano, for now I rediscover the piano literature with childish glee.’²³ Yudina arrived in ‘Frédéric’s homeland’ on 7 September. Her ‘fairy-tale journey’ started in Katowice with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto conducted by the Czech conductor Václav Smetáček. The tour continued in Warsaw, Białystok and Łódź where she played the same concerto with Witold Krzemieński. Her last concerts took place in Lublin on 24 and 26 September performing Mozart’s D minor concerto under Olgierd Straszyński. In Warsaw she partnered Mikhail Waiman in violin sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms, and played works by her compatriots Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as well as Bach and Schubert in a solo recital. Yudina met Poland’s most interesting composers, amongst them Grażyna Bacewicz and Kazimierz Serocki, who together with Tadeusz Baird was to found the Warsaw Autumn contemporary music festival in 1956. She befriended Witold Lutosławski – ‘an amazing, unusually refined gentleman and Poland’s leading composer’.²⁴ He presented her with his Variations on a Theme of Paganini for two pianos.

Yudina returned to Moscow, her suitcases bulging with scores by Polish composers whom she wished to promote. Chopin had hitherto never been essential to her repertoire, although during the war she regularly broadcast his more popular works, as a sign of solidarity with the Polish people. Now she regularly programmed the complete cycle of Chopin Preludes with other Polish works like Szymanowksi’s Op. 3 Variations, Lutosławski’s Paganini Variations for two pianos, or Kazimierz Serocki’s Suite of Preludes for solo piano. Viktor Merzhanov attended such a concert on 26 May 1955 at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire: ‘I wish to thank you once again for your Chopin Preludes, which have remained with me for long afterwards. There was a rare unity of the cycle, where almost every Prelude spoke so much. The Lutosławski Paganini Variations with Yuri Ponizovkin produced a strange impression, with such artificial harmonies heaped onto Liszt’s etude. However, it sounded very effective.’²⁵

In Yudina’s view, Chopin’s Preludes were still misunderstood; they carried a philosophical, revelatory meaning – ‘Death and Resurrection’. Previously, she had written in a student’s score the key or psychological mood, which served to unlock the image or symbol for each of the twenty-four Preludes. While excluding a narrative, she conceded concrete images. Thus, the second, A minor Prelude was ‘An empty Chapel – a numbed condition of the spirit’, the third Prelude, in G major, was ‘A Burbling stream. Patterns of birds in flight against an evening sky’. And number seventeen in A flat represented no less than Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Yudina’s well-trained memory allowed her to hold an enormous number of works in her head and hands. In the six months between December 1954 and May 1955 alone she programmed some twenty-six major recital works, not to mention concertos and a large number of chamber music pieces. At the end of 1955 and the first months of 1956 she devised a concert series entitled ‘Sonatas’, working her way from Scarlatti and Haydn to Prokofiev and Shcherbachov, and adding to her repertoire Carl Maria von Weber’s Second Sonata, Schumann’s Second Sonata and Chopin’s Third Sonata. Nina Zbruyeva wrote to Yudina after the first concert on 14 December 1955: ‘How amazing that an artist can be so mistaken in evaluating his own playing [. . .] Yesterday you were dissatisfied – but in reality, yesterday’s performance was superb and perfect. Even your slightly angry Haydn (E minor sonata Hob. XVI/34). As for Mozart (A minor sonata K.310), Beethoven (Sonata no. 4 Op. 7), Schubert (D.960) and Prokofiev (Sonata no. 4) you achieved heights unattainable by any other artist. Surely you can’t think that some insignificant error could cast shadows on your magnificence? [. . .] People change in front of one’s eyes as they listen to you! You bring to the surface the very best in them, their everyday faces are illuminated and transformed!’²⁶

By the second half of the 1950s, Yudina’s repertoire revealed a significant shift towards contemporary music. She explained to Lyublinsky, ‘The great majesty of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music has already been uncovered and experienced, its problems solved.’ She often declared: ‘In the age of Einstein one cannot live according to Krayevich’s^* textbooks.’²⁷ The poet Osip Mandelstam had expressed similar thoughts on the author of the standard physics textbook of 1897, saying that Krayevich could never lead to new ideas.

The so-called ‘Thaw’ saw the gradual relaxation of restrictions at home and a cautious policy of cooperation with the West. However, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 in a ‘secret’ speech, it had shattering repercussions. Its liberating effects in Soviet society were counterbalanced by Party hardliners’ claims that the political situation was being destabilized, allowing popular revolts to explode in satellite countries. The Soviet military invasion of Hungary in November 1956 shocked the world, but surprisingly did not greatly affect cultural exchanges, which were instrumental to both East and West in promoting international prestige. Companies like the Bolshoi Theatre travelled to the West, and in return the Comédie-Française and Royal Shakespeare Company came to Moscow and Leningrad in 1954 and late November 1955 respectively. Soviet instrumentalists – David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Leonid Kogan and Mstislav Rostropovich – made their debuts in Western Europe and America in 1955 or 1956 to enormous acclaim, upholding the supremacy of the Russian School. Two notable artists were missing from this list: Sviatoslav Richter, who made his Western debuts in 1960, and Maria Yudina, who never travelled outside the country after her Polish trip. Richter’s ban was due to his mother living in ‘hostile’ West Germany, having escaped from Odessa during the war. Yudina was too unpredictable, too apparently ‘un-Soviet’.

Although unable to travel abroad, Yudina kept abreast of Western cultural developments. She confided to Lyublinsky:

I crawl along to the Lenin Library – the times when I took taxis are long past – hopefully not forever. There I look up foreign music journals, and much becomes clear [. . .] There is a composer of enormous significance, Carl Orff; he lives in Vienna, but to his shame, he befriended fascism [. . .] Over here a Yugoslav choir and orchestra played – guess what – his Carmina Burana, grounded in the Middle Ages – or mythology. Bohuslav Martinů lives in America (his legs are paralysed) – the Czechs now claim him as theirs. ‘My friend’ Hindemith is at the zenith of his fame, and his new works are performed everywhere. In a word, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich is not the only composer in the world, and that makes life easier to bear – it would be too hard to live only with his perception of the world.²⁸

Discovering this parallel musical world gave Yudina the intellectual stamina to sustain ‘the hopeless struggle for minimal comforts, like pacifying one’s neighbours [. . .] One must assume a youthful romanticism, banishing forever all unattainable dreams of material well-being,’ she explained to Lyublinsky. However, material necessity required replacing her lost glasses, and enduring physical pain. ‘Yesterday my legs were so sore I was reduced to tears.’²⁹

On 21 January 1956 Yelena Saltykova died in Moscow’s Botkin Hospital. Writing to the composer Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Yudina described how they buried her in temperatures of minus 32°C on 23 January ‘with splendour and pomp next to her husband and son’. Her open coffin was carried by some twenty-five of Kirill’s old friends. ‘Her face had a triumphantly joyful expression, and her body was adorned with flowers and green foliage – she looked splendid.’³⁰ The Saltykovs’ grave, where Yudina too would be laid to rest, was embellished by a marble monument donated by Boris Zalesky and sculpted with a cross and the Vine of Truth designed by Favorsky.

‘Things have come full circle, and once more I am alone,’ she wrote to the Bakhtins. ‘The only thing that truly interests me is the life of the soul after death, and all feelings and actions associated with this. Maybe I am on the right path – God calls me in the Name of Eternal Life from the abyss of life’s vanity, bustle, careerism and other such nonsense [. . .] Even if I end up in hell, it doesn’t matter as long as I can see Yelena Nikolayevna from afar – in bliss, discoursing perhaps with her idol, Pushkin – maybe she will forgive me!’³¹

Fortunately, Yudina still had people to care for – ‘otherwise there would be nothing to live for,’ she wrote to Florensky’s daughter, Olga Trubachyova. ‘However, my only spiritual solace comes from your family – particularly from you.’³² Friends such as Zbruyeva and Milya Zalessky tried to stop her relentless self-castigation, which made her grief even harder to bear.

Already the previous year Yudina had lost many friends – her one-time neighbour in Leningrad, Yevgeni Tarlé, the Dante scholar Lodzinsky and his wife, the writer Mikhail Privshin, Olga Freidenberg and Sofia Vasilyevna Shostakovich, the composer’s mother, ‘whom I will miss above all, when I come to Leningrad’.³³ She also learnt, after some three years’ delay, of Lev Karsavin’s death in the camps. ‘God grant his Kingdom to this martyr, great thinker, stoic, and knight.’³⁴

These losses affected Yudina so deeply that she started doubting the usefulness of her existence. Zalessky, whose life had been maimed by repression, sternly rebuked her: ‘No, my dear Maria Veniaminovna! You cannot bring back what is lost! But this shouldn’t kill our hopes of knowledge, love and joy, the pleasures of creative art, of nature. No, I say – thrice NO! You are a great person, and [. . .] cannot deprive those who love your playing of that which helps them live – your playing is dearer to them than daily bread!’³⁵ Yudina alleviated her sorrow through religion. She celebrated the forty-day remembrance Panikhida at a ‘wonderful monastery’ in Vilnius, and organized a memorial concert for Saltykova of poetry and music at the Scriabin Museum.

For Yudina, consolation came principally from Pasternak: ‘After visiting your house, I am satiated with happiness, radiant luminosity, lightness and cheer,’ she confessed. ‘One sees God’s world differently through your creations – it’s as if you had erased the dirt from the opaque glass of our everyday, mundane perceptions. It’s not just your poetry, it’s you yourself, your dazzling, sparkling “Major key” that instructs us spiritually, for it is said “Rejoice evermore!”’³⁶ Pasternak was probably irritated when Yudina grandiloquently named him ‘Genius Poet’, but he never doubted her sincerity. At his home in Peredelkino, Yudina met the ‘majestic’ Anna Akhmatova, and the young poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko. The latter recalled how ‘Yudina would look at Pasternak adoringly, as if he had walked out of an icon [. . .] She seemed an eternal schoolgirl – people found her slightly ridiculous.’³⁷ She developed a touching relationship with Pasternak’s youngest son, Leonid (Lyonya), who wished to study music but felt overshadowed by his pianist half-brother Stanislav (Stasik) Neuhaus. She gave Lyonya piano lessons, wanting him to gain pleasure from music, without taking it up professionally.

Early in 1954 Pasternak presented Yudina with his ‘beautifully inscribed’ translation of Goethe’s Faust, Parts I and II. ‘I could not tear myself away from reading it,’ she wrote. ‘However, I am scared of Faust – evidently my spiritual strength is insufficient – I cannot read for long of the incarnation of Evil, so cleverly, wittily, even at times brilliantly declaimed. It’s difficult to explain, but it makes me want to affirm: “Christian forces are on our side – Shoo, Get Thee gone!” How were you able to withstand it? For me the Word is absolute reality.’³⁸ Within three days Pasternak replied: ‘Nobody apart from you could so astutely and exhaustively define and understand the root problem with Faust, the reason why all flights of fantasy are so heavily weighed down. Here lies the fundamental hurdle I faced when translating – its essence was a mystery that remained hidden from me, while you were able to name it so easily and precisely. I was devastated by these unthinkable, inexplicable, impermissible examples of a sudden drooping of wings after such dizzily conquered summits, the pages of filth and vulgarity that supersede the images and tragedies of purity and tenderness, the vacuous scholarship, which far from being outstanding is infused by gentlemanly conceit [. . .] I deeply admire your perspicacity and cannot help but express my delight!’³⁹

By the summer of 1956, Pasternak had completed the second part of Dr Zhivago, and sent out the novel to various literary magazines, despite being pessimistic about it passing censorship. He had copies made for friends, and ensured a typescript was made available to Yudina: ‘Read it at your leisure, without stealing time from your work, and without forcing yourself. Keep it as long as you wish, but if your schedule is busy for long, then give it to somebody, so it doesn’t lie around without being read.’⁴⁰

On 3 September Yudina wrote to Pasternak giving her reactions:

It made the same shattering impression on me as did Die Walküre and Parsifal in my youth, and later Shostakovich’s Symphonies and [Mahler’s] Song of the Earth – when a work of art crashes down and overwhelms you. It’s impossible to understand how a person can create something like this on his own [. . .] How could you achieve this grand scale and withstand such sorrow? To me your novel is superior to Dante [. . .] No one has returned from the shores of Hell; but you, our Pasternak, our contemporary, have documented such things that make one’s hair stand on end – on this side of the shore.⁴¹

Yudina compared the novel to the Iliad or the Odyssey. She also voiced her reservations: why was Lara of French origin, without a drop of Russian blood? Personally, Yudina disliked this central female character, and was also puzzled by Zhivago’s mysterious brother, Yevgraf. However, the overall effect was overwhelming: ‘Never before have I felt so strongly how little I am worth.’ She begged a manuscript copy for an unnamed person, obviously Bakhtin. ‘If I write of your incredible Polyphony in this book – it’s precisely [Bakhtin’s] terminology I use!’⁴²

Pasternak was indirectly responsible for Yudina’s return to the fold of the Orthodox Church through introducing her to the sisters Yekaterina and Maria Krasheninnikova, both deeply involved in Church matters. Yekaterina recalled, ‘At our first meeting, we sat down at table and not very confidently sang a hymn to one of the saints [. . .] I told MV (Maria Veniaminovna) of what we had learnt about her – she was a Catholic and slept in her coffin, wearing chains.’⁴³ Yudina was much amused: ‘I knew about being called a Catholic, but sleeping in a coffin – that’s a new one on me!’ Yudina admitted that she had not confessed since the schism of the mid-1920s – she refused to recognize Patriarch Sergei. ‘How is this?’ countered Yekaterina, ‘Patriarch Sergei is long dead, and his successor Patriarch Alexei has broken none of the Church canons, although he continues Sergei’s policies.’ Yudina’s eyes flashed angrily as she retorted, ‘In the Church there are many false Priests.’⁴⁴

The sisters cited examples of clerics who had lived through imprisonment and repression, and taken their congregations ‘into the catacombs’, only to accept that Patriarch Sergei had acted justly in saving the Orthodox Church. They told Yudina categorically that to be a true Christian it was necessary to confess. After lengthy discussions, Yudina concluded that the Church offered salvation. She agreed to talk to Father Nikolai Golubtsev, Krasheninnikova sisters’ confessor, and decided to attend his services at the Church of the Deposition in the Donskoi Monastery. Golubtsev not only became her confessor but a firm friend until his death in 1963.

Yudina’s life now centred around her teaching. She acquired wonderful young assistants, graduates from the Moscow Conservatoire at the start of their professional careers – the violinists Rostislav Dubinsky, Maria Grossman, the cellist Lev Yevgrafov and the pianist Yuri Ponizovkin. A first-year violin student of Yuri Yankelevich, Lev Markiz was asked to replace a sick student in a performance of Shostakovich’s quintet led by Dubinsky with Valentin Berlinsky as cellist (both members of the future Borodin Quartet). The first rehearsal took place in Yudina’s chamber class. She immediately won Markiz over. Now chamber music became his passion, to the chagrin of his violin professor. Soon he was working as one of Yudina’s assistants. His official appointment to the position was hindered because he was registered as a Jew at a time when ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’ was still in force.

Markiz described the atmosphere in class. Yudina would sit beside the piano in an armchair, listening to her students. She spoke little, occasionally demonstrating a phrase at the piano. ‘One learnt from example, from her wide culture, and the aura of her presence,’ he recalled. Yudina was unstintingly generous with her time and was the last to leave the building in the depths of night. The students learnt most from playing with Yudina herself and her wonderful assistants. At one point she decided to create a chamber orchestra and wished to involve Markiz. On discovering that Rudolf Barshai was starting the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, she saw no point in competing and pragmatically suggested that Markiz join forces with Barshai.⁴⁵

Yudina believed musical education should include philosophy and the arts in general. She proposed to the Gnesins’ Institute a series of lectures from illustrious persons working in the humanities. Her suggestions were ignored. Nevertheless, she brought Mikhail Bakhtin to the Institute to talk about the literary and musical significance of the Ballade. Altogether, she was proud of the high level achieved by her students. To Lyublinsky, she wrote of her class concert in April 1953: ‘The Gnesins’ Institute Hall was full to bursting, we had three hours of wonderful music, almost all magnificently played. Our [chamber music] faculty is truly superlative. I have gathered together some truly outstanding students – creative love reigns between us.’⁴⁶ Two years later she boasted to Skrzhinskaya of another chamber concert, devoted to Shostakovich. ‘I played with my pupils the Trio [no. 2] and the Cello Sonata, while the Piano Quintet and Concertino were performed by students. It was really a triumph, even more than the last time you came.’⁴⁷ Yudina’s friends, including Boris Zalesky, Pasternak and Favorsky attended these class concerts regularly. The latter made a wonderful woodcut print of students performing the Shostakovich quintet. Pasternak in profile is easily distinguishable in the audience.

In May 1957 Yudina bought tickets for a concert given by an unknown twenty-four-year-old Canadian pianist in Moscow, and invited Boba Zalesky to accompany her to hear some ‘extremely interesting repertoire’. In the event because of her sister’s illness, she could not go. The pianist was of course Glenn Gould, who created a furore in the Soviet musical world. At his debut on 7 May, playing part of Bach’s Art of Fugue, the hall was half-empty – the wider public considered Bach was ‘boring’. The audience was stunned by his artistry and rushed out in the interval to call friends: ‘Come immediately to the Grand Hall – it’s incredible!’ By the end of the concert the hall was full to overflowing! At the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire Gould’s ‘interesting repertoire’ included Berg’s Sonata, Webern’s Variations Op. 27 and Krenek’s Third Sonata – each work introduced by the pianist. His improvised lecture on atonal Viennese composers caused some of the officials to walk out, loudly banging their seats.

Gould’s brilliant, intellectually argued interpretations of Bach’s Art of Fugue and Goldberg Variations created a new yardstick in Bach interpretation, and contrasted with the more Romantic traditions favoured in the Soviet Union, notwithstanding that pianists like Yudina and Samuil Feinberg were superb Bach interpreters in their own right, as was the younger Tatiana Nikolayeva. Yudina was offended that audiences appeared to have no idea who Krenek was; after all she had been playing his music in Leningrad in the 1920s! Perhaps the most important consequence of Gould’s visit was the apparent legitimizing of dodecaphony and the New Viennese School – forbidden fruit to Soviet musicians for nearly three decades – yet in reality Soviet musicians were still unable to follow his path. Yudina was one of the few ready to take this step, recklessly plunging into avant-garde ‘Western’ music!

Although she never heard Gould play live, Yudina intuitively recognized him as a brilliant and original musician, who possessed a spiritual quality connected to the experience of physical suffering – Gould as a boy had overcome a serious spinal injury, which she wrongly believed was poliomyelitis. Lyublinsky wrote to Yudina after hearing Gould in Leningrad: ‘I am in the full sense of the word shaken. And this happens so seldom in life – for me not since February 1943!^* And he is still just a boy!’⁴⁸

Within months of Gould’s departure from Moscow, Yudina was programming repertoire similar to his – Krenek’s Second Sonata of 1928, an arresting work, rooted in semi-tonality and striking idioms, and Hindemith’s Third Sonata, one of the composer’s most inspired works, with its colossal fugue-finale. At her recital in Kiev on 14 October she wrote to Lyublinsky: ‘I played the [Hindemith] not ideally, but well, some things exceptionally well.’ Recently, her friend the Academician, Abram Alikhanov, had brought back from abroad a score of Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1, which Yudina immediately set about learning. ‘So, just like Pushkin,’ she announced to Lyublinsky, ‘without leaving the country, I am more European than those who travel and are interested in nothing besides stupid pleasures and cuts of meat.’⁴⁹

Another momentous event of 1957 was the ‘Sixth World Festival of Youth’, held in Moscow between 28 July and 11 August. Organized by the Soviet Komsomol, the festival was attended by some 34,000 people from 131 countries. A whole range of cultural and sporting events were held under the festival’s umbrella, including ‘Youth competitions’ for classical musicians. For the competitions’ chamber music category, Yudina prepared two excellent groups from her class. One ensemble led by the pianist, Viktor Derevyanko, a Conservatoire student of Heinrich Neuhaus, presented Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet. At her request the composer agreed to listen to the group before the competition. Yudina was mortified that they had come without flowers to thank him. In an impulsive gesture she plucked from her pocket a cameo of Christ’s head by Guido Reni, a gift to her from Lyublinsky. She wrote to VEES, explaining: ‘I told Dmitri Dmitriyevich about the flowers. “Quite right, cut flowers fade,” he quipped. Then I blessed him with this symbolic object, which I always kept with me [. . .] Now it will be forever connected to our great contemporary. I think he was glad, linking the gift with his Mother, the late Sofia Vasilyevna.’⁵⁰ Derevyanko’s group went on to win first prize at the competition, her other students taking second place.

Shortly after the festival began, Yudina was urgently requested by the Organizational Committee to learn a piano concerto by a young Belgian, Paul Danblon. Within days she had mastered the score, but as she reported to Lyublinsky, ‘I had to play with such an irresponsible conductor and horrendous orchestra that I refused to perform it. A tough decision, as opinions were divided as to the rights and wrongs [. . .] All this was half-hidden from the international jury. The upshot was that the composer won second prize for his work. He is twenty-six, a terribly nice lad, with a peasant face, looking as if he stepped out of a Brueghel landscape, with a charming half-German wife, a singer.’⁵¹

Yudina took the blame – her large fee, 1,500 roubles, ‘floated past my nose’, she lamented ruefully. She entertained Danblon and his wife, presented them with flowers from her garden, and ‘even sent them home in a taxi with a black [American] violinist, since no public transport was available – masses of people were out protesting about Hiroshima, attending Carnivals or such events.’⁵² Exhausted and deflated by ‘financial disaster’ – the money spent on innumerable taxis, a new ‘modest’ dress, a few decent meals in town – Yudina nevertheless saw the festival as a joyful experience. It gave young Russians a first opportunity for spontaneous interchange with foreigners. Indeed, the authorities miscalculated how enthusiastically Soviet youth responded to ‘capitalist decadence’ – pop music, blue jeans and fashion trends. No less dangerous were the awkward questions asked about Soviet politics.

The All-Union Radio now invited Yudina to record Danblon’s concerto; a date was set for spring 1958 – all that was lacking was a conductor. Yudina simultaneously invited three – the young, ‘extremely talented’ Yuri Aranovich, Nathan Rakhlin and Gennadi Rozhdestvensky. Each gave their separate agreement! As an afterthought she also wrote to Alexander Gauk, asking him to conduct this ‘wonderful work’! As she explained, ‘it shows the influence of Prokofiev, Hindemith and Messiaen – and the Flemish polyphonist Dufay in its fugati for piano solo’.⁵³ In his warm reply, Gauk advised that as he was preparing a tour of Japan, ‘it would be expedient to record the concerto with Genya Rozhdestvensky’.⁵⁴ Thus started a musical collaboration based on a shared interest in contemporary music. On 11 April 1958 they recorded the Danblon piano concerto at the Radio House. Shortly afterwards Rozhdestvensky toured Belgium, and discovered that Belgium musicians had only the vaguest idea of who Danblon was.⁵⁵

The Youth Festival also provided new musical friendships with younger musicians: the cellist Natalia Shakhovskaya and the viola player Fyodor Druzhinin, both first prize-winners at the festival’s instrumental competitions. With the former Yudina performed recitals with cello sonatas by Brahms, Debussy and Shostakovich as well as two twentieth-century works – Hindemith’s Sonata Op. 11 no. 3 and Samuel Barber’s Sonata. In 1961 they recorded Debussy’s Cello Sonata, and in the same year Yudina recorded Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata with her one-time assistant, Lev Yevgrafov.

Druzhinin was already a teacher and assistant to his teacher Borisovsky at the Moscow Conservatoire. Now Yudina summoned him to play chamber music with her at Solomennaya Storozhka. He was astonished by her room and furnishings:

. . . if a collection of arbitrary and unimaginable objects could be defined as furniture and if an attic with open timbers could be classified as a room. Most of the objects were barely visible, submerged under music, books, papers and letters, which lay in disarray on the floor, chairs and the piano. I remember two tables, one a desk, where she ate and wrote. The room was dominated by a concert grand piano ‘comme une île flottante’, whose size, noble form, and sound waiting to be released suggested that it was the true proprietor here. Guests were offered a seat on a simple wooden park bench – I never saw one like this in any other home.⁵⁶

Yudina asked Druzhinin to play new works with her – initially sonatas by Hindemith and Honegger. Similarly, at the Gnesins’ Institute, Yudina got her students to perform novelties – William Walton’s Piano Quartet, Hindemith’s instrumental sonatas (several of which she recorded with various partners in the next years) and almost unknown Soviet works, such as Galina Ustvolskaya’s Violin Sonata.

At the end of 1957 Yudina discovered the uniquely talented young composer, Andrei Volkonsky, who was born into an ancient princely family in Geneva in 1933, and was brought up in France, where his music teachers included Nadia Boulanger and Dinu Lipatti. After the war, in a flush of patriotism, the Volkonsky family returned to Russia, where Andrei’s parents were peremptorily exiled to the area where their ancestors once owned estates. Andrei studied composition under Shaporin at the Moscow Conservatoire between 1950 and 1954, before starting a career as pianist and harpsichordist. His four-movement Piano Quintet Op. 5, dedicated to Shaporin, was written while still a student and first performed with the composer at the piano. Now Volkonsky made the quintet available to other pianists; Yudina decided that her prize-winning group with Viktor Derevyanko would perform it. On 22 November her chamber music class gave a ‘colossal’ programme, with Shostakovich’s Quintet and Second Trio, Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes, his First Violin Sonata and the Piano Quartet by Mikhail Gnesin. Volkonsky’s Piano Quintet concluded the evening, causing ‘a sensation’, as Yudina reported to Lyublinsky. ‘“Prince” Volkonsky himself was present – he’s a direct descendant from the Decembrist Prince! He was called out on stage many times; afterwards I gave a short speech as epilogue.’⁵⁷

Yudina asked Volkonsky how he composed the work under Shaporin’s tuition, for he was ‘light-years’ behind the times. ‘Volkonsky answered, saying, “He’s a good person, and he didn’t hinder me. True, it was Nadia [Boulanger] who taught me how to develop music!”’⁵⁸ The quintet’s first movement starts off conventionally; in its use of ‘classical sonata structure’ and tonality and use of Russian themes, it arouses expectations of a typical Socialist Realist work. However, Volkonsky developed the movement with great originality reflecting different stylistic influences. The second movement Burlesque, full of youthful vigour and wit, contrasts with the third movement’s dark, dissonant Passacaglia, its theme in the bass being a twelve-note series. The final movement starts out in the spirit of a Hindemith fugal exercise, which is developed in a masterly manner. Yudina particularly praised its ‘superb form and polyphony’. Yudina herself performed the quintet on 14 March 1959 at the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire with the Komitas Quartet.

The contemporary music Yudina performed in the 1920s for the most part no longer interested her. When performing Nikolai Medtner’s music in a recital in December 1957 Yudina exclaimed to Nina Bruni-Balmont, ‘I had exhausted his music’s possibilities some 25 years ago. It’s nothing but Russian provincialism!’⁵⁹ She could not refuse to perform it, any more than she could refuse to perform Yuri Shaporin’s Second Sonata for his seventieth birthday celebrations in January 1958, ‘an unexpected excursion back to our Youth’. She assumed that re-learning the work would be easy, but it had slipped from her fingers and memory. She bewailed to Shaporin, ‘It’s very difficult, almost anti-pianistic and “super-uncomfortable!” [. . .] Its latent melancholy is reminiscent of Blok; intellectually, it is irreproachable – far greater than Rachmaninov. In the mysterious, fragmentary Lament, I hear our Leningrad, a contemplation of Russian destinies and our individual fates.’⁶⁰ Shaporin’s sense of his own importance was in stark contrast to her ‘nauseating semi-disgrace’. Yudina did him the service of recording the sonata in May 1958; the previous year she had recorded Medtner’s Triad sonatas Op. 11.

Another composer with whom Yudina was closely connected at the time was Valentin Bogdanov-Berezovsky. She programmed his well-crafted Piano Preludes (each one dedicated to a different person) in recitals dedicated to Leningrad composers in Moscow. It proved problematic arranging a performance in Leningrad itself. Yudina’s relationship with the city’s Philharmonia swung between favour and neglect. She did not get on with the current director; furthermore, she felt that ‘Mravinsky punishes me for refusing to recognize him as a great conductor [. . .] Take away Shostakovich and nothing remains!’⁶¹ She had last appeared with the Leningrad Philharmonic in the autumn of 1956 in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy under Sanderling. More recently she performed Taneyev’s Quintet at the Philharmonia’s Small Hall with the ‘Beethovens’. It was belittling not to have been offered a solo recital. As for Taneyev, ‘he is for me long debunked,’ she wrote to Isai Braudo. ‘It’s like superimposing Gounod’s Ave Maria over the blameless Bach C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier.’⁶² Yudina had thoughts of taking up the organ seriously – and suggested she could act as Braudo’s assistant at organ recitals. In return, she would bring him organ pieces by Olivier Messiaen – a composer still unknown in Russia.

Embracing Yudina’s cause, Bogdanov-Berezovsky engaged in a frustrating battle with the Philharmonia’s administration. Yudina advised him: ‘Wash your hands of them [. . .] Better to organize my two concerts in other Halls, either the Capella or the Conservatoire.’⁶³ The Conservatoire however had no budget for outside concerts, while the Capella was dependent on the Philharmonia. To turn her popularity with Leningrad audiences to good account, Yudina suggested selling tickets for two concerts simultaneously – a popular programme of Beethoven and Schubert, tied to a contemporary programme consisting of music by Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Hindemith, Berg, Shostakovich, and ending with some Volkonsky or Serocki.

In the meantime, Yudina undertook a money-earning tour of Siberia during the 1958 winter scholastic holidays. In Novosibirsk she performed a recital, and two concertos with orchestra – Mozart’s D minor concerto and Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’, directed by her cousin, Gavriil Yudin, whose musicianship she incidentally disparaged. From Novosibirsk she flew to Tomsk, where her plane crash-landed, fortunately without injury or loss of life. She described to Lyublinsky the hazards of provincial touring:

There’s no point in your asking me for my impressions of Siberia; alas, this is no expedition to see the taiga, the majestic rivers, where all is genuine and all-powerful. This tour in the sticks is merely a means of earning money. Not a single authority on music is to be found in these parts, the small orchestras are mediocre, the public is backward, although thirsty for knowledge. Audiences are despondent, but submissive – they don’t leave the hall in the face of the monumental scale of my programmes. For I make no concessions and earn my money honestly. Novosibirsk is an ‘exemplary’ city of our times, with great contrasts between its genuinely prosperous and terrifying ghetto-like quarters, full of life at a pulse rate of 140, while outside temperatures reach minus 39 [. . .] Tomsk, the former ‘Siberian Athens’, is a filthy hole, worthy of Gogol’s pen. It has lost all its former charms and acquired no new ones, and now is just a stopover on the Moscow–Peking railway route. No need to dot the ‘i’-s and underline that I am not playing in Vienna or Prague – not even in Leningrad!⁶⁴

Reading was a way of keeping her sanity during these tours: ‘How is it possible that over fifteen years of friendship you never told me that Alexander Dumas’ trilogy [the D’Artagnan Romances] was the most interesting of all secular books?’ Yudina demanded Lyublinsky. ‘From Tomsk, I hurried home where I was awaited by Athos’ immeasurable nobility, Raoul’s charm, the terrors of Milady, scenes of gluttony so dear to me, Porthos, Aramis’ refinement and the eternal righteousness of D’Artagnan. I soaked it all in, wept and chuckled all night long!’ She asked Lyublinsky as an expert in French literature about the text’s fidelity: ‘Richelieu, the strange disdain of Cromwell, the deplorable opulence of the French court? [. . .] The dethroning of the Catholic hierarchy, followed by the much-needed Reformation – from there it’s not so far to “my” Couperin and Bach!’⁶⁵

Before Dumas, Yudina had immersed herself in British literature – Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Wilkie Collins and Shakespeare’s chronicle plays. ‘I must read while I can – maybe I’ll lose my sight when I am old – what terrible retribution that would be from Yelena Nikolayevna!’⁶⁶ She had tried out Joyce – ‘not my cup of tea!’ – and in 1959 was reading with disdain Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus. ‘Mann was worse than that grumbler, Hemingway! He should be taken to court for his treatment of the medical theme at the centre of Faustus, and the associations with Arnold Schoenberg at the end!’⁶⁷

Yudina also kept abreast of novelties at home, and defended Vladimir Dudintsev’s controversial novel Not by Bread Alone when it was mercilessly criticized at the Writers’ Union. Privately she termed it ‘not so bad in the literary sense, but Dudintsev misses the point on various issues’. Later she got to know him through attending the same church. In an inscription Dudintsev made in a new edition of his novel he spoke of their shared devotion to the Church ‘where there are pits in the floor made also by my knees’.⁶⁸

All domestic literary events paled in comparison with the colossal scandal which erupted over Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago. The novel’s descriptions of the brutal and contradictory events of Revolution and Civil War were seen as a deliberate desecration of the 1917 Revolution. Despairing of publication at home, Pasternak allowed Dr Zhivago to be taken to Italy, where it was published by Feltrinelli in an Italian translation in November 1957. Soon editions followed in English, French and German. Pasternak’s independent action was already intolerable to the Soviet authorities, but their fury knew no bounds when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1958. Mercilessly hounded in the Soviet press, expelled from the Writers’ Union, and threatened with having his citizenship revoked, Pasternak was left with little choice but to renounce the Prize.

Even while Yudina couldn’t name Pasternak in letters, she visited ‘the Poet’ in these difficult months. She was present at his birthday celebration on 10 February, where most invited guests were too intimidated to appear. Heinrich Neuhaus came with Vera Prokhorova, who recalled how many invited actors had rung Neuhaus, asking him to pass on their excuses to Pasternak. ‘At least Prokofiev’s first wife was honest,’ Prokhorova remarked – ‘she didn’t want to risk her sons’ lives!’⁶⁹

Notwithstanding the censure of the Western press over the Dr Zhivago scandal, cultural exchange with the United States got off to a big swing in the summer of 1959. An ‘American National Exhibition’ opened at Sokolniki Park, with Vice-President Richard Nixon in attendance. This was followed in late August by the visit of the New York Philharmonic sustained by President Eisenhower’s Special Program for Cultural Presentations. Yudina visited the exhibition and wrote enthusiastically to Tatiana Kamendrovskaya, daughter of Yudina’s dear friend Nikolai Antsiferov, now living in New York: ‘Everyday life, cars and fashion hold little interest for me. As far as Art is concerned, what I found closest to me was Jackson Pollock’s painting The Cathedral.’⁷⁰ She had been profoundly moved by Pollock’s canvases when they were first displayed during Moscow’s 1957 Youth Festival.

The Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy had been the first American orchestra to perform in the Soviet Union in 1956. The visit of the New York Philharmonic under its flamboyant director Leonard Bernstein marked the musical highlight of the decade. Bernstein dazzled in his triple role of composer, conductor and pianist; he revelled in giving short impromptu talks to audiences about music and the need for ‘mutual political understanding’. In Moscow alone the orchestra performed eight concerts between 22 August and 12 September in programmes ranging from Ives and Gershwin, Barber and Bernstein, to the European classics. Tribute was also paid to the two greatest living Russian composers – Stravinsky and Shostakovich – the first moreover a US citizen!

Yudina attended the American orchestra’s rehearsals and concerts, and befriended Seymour Lipkin, their soloist in Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds. She got to know Bernstein and defined their relationship ‘as short-lived, but deep and heartfelt, elevated and abstract.’⁷¹ She told him, ‘Not since Klemperer’s concerts in the 1930s did I go crazy over a conductor – now it’s happened again!’ The great musician Bernstein was ‘a very kind, open person, one feels it in everything’.⁷² In contrast, the other immensely popular American, the pianist Van Cliburn, winner of the first Tchaikovsky Competition, left her indifferent because of ‘his dated repertoire’.

On 11 September Pasternak attended the Philharmonic’s concert at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire – his first public appearance since the brouhaha over the Nobel Prize. Bernstein and his wife took credit – they had lunched with Pasternak in Peredelkino and persuaded him to come. Images of Pasternak greeting Bernstein in the Green Room, published worldwide, were seen as ‘positive rehabilitation’ of the disgraced writer.

Yudina noted with pride, ‘I was the last Soviet-Russian citizen to see Bernstein at the airport, fifteen minutes before his flight took off. Those who said they’d come either overslept, or their cars didn’t start, or last night’s celebration had been their farewell! When Bernstein saw me, he said “Vous êtes trop gentil” [sic], and his exquisite, doting Lady lisped pleasantries in English and we all embraced.’⁷³

In the same letter Yudina reminded Lyublinsky that her 60th birthday had just passed on 10 September. As she had wished, there had been no celebration. Her gifts lay in a new ‘friendship’ with Bernstein, and through Pasternak a direct contact with Pierre (Pyotr) Suvchinsky, musician, philosopher and friend of avant-garde composers living in Paris. Pasternak had been corresponding with Suvchinsky since 1927. Their epistolary exchange came to a halt during the years of Stalinist Terror, and only in 1957 did they resume contact. Recently Pasternak had passed on via Suvchinsky greetings to Yudina from Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Pyotr Petrovich Suvchinsky^* was the ideal person to reveal to Yudina the world of Western contemporary music – he had known Prokofiev and Stravinsky since his youth. In 1954 he co-founded the ‘Domaine Musicale’ concert series with Pierre Boulez, Jean-Louis Barrault and Hermann Scherchen, and was a supporter of the musical avant-garde. Born in 1892 in St Petersburg and trained as a pianist, Suvchinsky was characterized by his friend Boris Asafiev as ‘a passionate lover of music, a serious specialist in Russian poetry and literature, and a man of the widest interests’. After leaving Russia in 1917, Suvchinsky lived in Sofia and Berlin, before settling in Paris in 1925, where he became a leader of the Eurasian movement with Dmitri Mirsky, his London counterpart. By the late 1920s Parisian Eurasians veered strongly towards communism; Suvchinsky was amongst those who applied to repatriate in the Soviet Union – but his application was rejected. When he did visit the Soviet Union in 1937, the experience destroyed any desire ever to return. On the other hand, those like Mirsky who did return perished in the Gulag.

In 1936 Suvchinsky created the libretto for Prokofiev’s Cantata on Lenin (soon renamed Cantata for the XX anniversary of the Revolution) from texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, one of the first works Prokofiev wrote after relocating to Moscow. Predictably, his original and modernist setting of these texts ensured that the Cantata was never performed during his lifetime. In 1934 Suvchinsky had married Marianna, second daughter of the philosopher and fellow Eurasian, Lev Karsavin, whom he regarded not so much as a father-in-law but as a cherished friend and spiritual adviser. The same year Suvchinsky’s ex-wife, Vera Guchkova, by now a committed communist, moved to Moscow where she married an English journalist, Robert Traill, who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 the now widowed and heavily pregnant Guchkova demanded an interview with Nikolai Yezhov, the sinister head of the NKVD, to petition for Mirsky’s release. Yezhov promptly sent Guchkova back to Paris, with instructions to inform on the Russian community there.

On 16 September, six days after her 60th birthday, Yudina finally sat down to write to Suvchinsky, introducing herself as a friend of Pasternak, pianist, professor of chamber music and devotee of new music. Her letter concluded with a request for scores of Stravinsky, Webern’s Piano Quintet and ‘everything of Boulez’s with piano in its formation’.⁷⁴ She promised repayment – in roubles – to any friends or relatives in the Soviet Union. ‘Listen to this, Miaua!’ Yudina enthused happily to Lyublinsky, ‘I have entered into correspondence with one of the Poet’s friends – he is not only at the Centre of the New Music Avant-garde, but – but – but – he is the son-in-law of the late Lev Karsavin! Two days ago, I received from Paris his really amazing letter. People (he and I) – who have never even dreamed of each other’s existence – immediately spoke in the same language, as if we had parted only yesterday on some street corner in Paris or Leningrad of the 1920s!’⁷⁵

Suvchinsky proved a generous friend, providing Yudina with the addresses of Boulez, Messiaen and Stockhausen and their scores. Additionally, he immediately informed Stravinsky about her. Replying to Yudina, Suvchinsky enthused about Stravinsky’s ability – at the age of seventy-five – to absorb Schoenberg’s system in his own idiosyncratic manner, while he dismissed his former friend Asafiev for succumbing to careerism. As for ‘poor Prokofiev, through his thoughtlessness, his inborn apathy towards culture has caused much harm to himself and others.’⁷⁶ Suvchinsky judged Soviet music as ‘provincial, incompetent and without taste’. Yet he was painfully aware of Soviet musicians’ ignorance of contemporary developments. Now Yudina was to become the chosen recipient of avant-garde scores delivered punctually by the Soviet post – which afterwards would be subjected to censorship by Soviet repertoire committees!

In early October 1959 Yudina received from Stockhausen his iconic Klavierstück XI, a graphic score of short fragments played in random order. Shortly afterwards, Suvchinsky’s gifts arrived – for which Yudina was infinitely grateful: ‘Now the creations which I read and dreamt about are lying on my piano and desk! I can study them, and adhere to this innovative, luminous world!’⁷⁷ On 25 October she was going to visit Pasternak to show off her treasures: signed copies of Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître and Improvisation sur Mallarmé! Heinrich and Stasik Neuhaus would be there, and she brought with her Druzhinin and Volkonsky to perform the latter’s Viola Sonata for the company.

On 22 November Yudina was scheduled to appear as soloist with the Radio Orchestra (the BSO), playing three concertos under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky: Mozart’s C minor K.491, Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Winds of 1923–4. But neither conductor nor soloist had access to Stravinsky’s orchestral score or parts. Although these were available on hire from Western publishers, Soviet citizens could not pay hire charges in hard currency. The Soviet Union did not adhere to international copyright conventions; usually the conductor ordered copyists to write out orchestral parts by hand from an available score. At Rozhdestvensky’s suggestion they substituted the Concerto for Piano and Winds with his Concerto for Two Pianos of 1935 – a bravura piece that Stravinsky had written to perform with his son Soulima, and a personal favourite amongst his instrumental pieces. He described the second movement Nocturne ‘not so much night-music, as after-dinner music – a digestive to the larger movements’.⁷⁸ The third movement’s Four Variations reflected Stravinsky’s current immersion in Beethoven’s and Brahms’ Variations. The impressive final Fugue was based on the Variation theme.

Rozhdestvensky, an excellent pianist, rehearsed the piece with Yudina in a crowded-out Gnesins’ Institute classroom: ‘Maria Veniaminovna accompanied the rehearsal with interesting commentary – the lesson continues! Under her fingers, the Institute’s clapped-out old instrument is transformed, and one stops noticing the passage of time; soon it’s long past midnight, and we have to disperse.’ Rozhdestvensky had to adapt to Maria Veniaminovna’s manner of producing sound. ‘It wasn’t so simple. Try playing simultaneously martellato and legato!’⁷⁹

Yudina wrote to Suvchinsky about their performance: ‘It was declared that I played very well [. . .] I learnt this magnificent work in eight days. We were so pressed for time that I gave up my beloved Brahms concerto, with its marvellous “Benedictus” second movement. Instead, we performed Beethoven’s “Emperor ” .’ She had the feeling that ‘Stravinsky’s works were written for me, if it wasn’t I that was made for them. [. . .] The Concerto’s every detail provokes delight – the energy and dynamism of the first movement, the fairy-tale Nocturne, the incredible Variations [. . .] The astounding polyphonic perfection of the fugue. We played the Nocturne and the Variations as encores.’⁸⁰ She also acknowledged receipt of Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata and Septet, both of which she would learn immediately.

Just before the New Year holiday, Yudina fell ill with ‘a strong attack of angina pectoris – they thought it was a heart attack – it was a near thing!’⁸¹ She avoided hospitalization, rested at home, and postponed her concerts. Being so ill made Yudina realize that she could no longer cope with conditions at Solomennaya Storozhka. She resolved to move to the city centre. Over a year before she had put her name down for a flat in a House of Scientists’ housing cooperative. This necessitated a large deposit, and Yudina had begged and borrowed the money: Bogdanov-Berezovsky lent her 3,000 roubles, Bakhtin 1,000, Neuhaus another 1,000. Pleas to the Union of Composers for financial assistance went unheeded – a bitter pill to swallow, after her lifelong promotion of Soviet contemporary music.

In March 1959 Yudina had a touching reunion with the conductor Nikolai Malko, when she attended his Moscow concert. Yudina suggested that as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra he might invite her nach Australien. ‘I won’t shame you or the Art of my country. I play everything except Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Kabalevsky and Khachaturian!’⁸² Malko replied after about a year’s delay: ‘Why, don’t you know how to perform Tchaikovsky?’ She was wrong in thinking he could choose his own soloists in Sydney. Malko had recently attended Otto Klemperer’s rehearsals in Sydney: ‘It was his first appearance after his resurrection – he nearly burnt to death in his bed. We spent lots of time together, it was wonderful, we talked about you.’⁸³ Malko, however, proposed Yudina to the Danish Radio, while recommending the composer Niels Viggo Bentzon, an ultra-modern meshugener!^* If Bentzon was a meshugener, Yudina retorted, that made two of them! The Danish contact came to nothing, and the following year Malko died.

Early in 1960 Yudina informed Rozhdestvensky that she had received from Paris the score of Messiaen’s piano concerto Le Réveil des Oiseaux: ‘I would really like to perform it with you. May I suggest it to the Philharmonia, do I have your agreement?’⁸⁴ Earlier the conductor had suggested performing André Jolivet’s Piano Concerto, which he dubbed ‘Concerto Slap-on-the-Face!’ – because of its aggressive textures. Helpfully, Suvchinsky supplied Jolivet’s address – Yudina should ask the composer to send the score. He passed on his friends’ opinions of Jolivet: ‘Naturally Stravinsky and Boulez can’t stand him – Messiaen probably as well, but he doesn’t show it.’⁸⁵ On the other hand, Jolivet opened up the possibility for an invitation to Paris!

By chance, just as Stravinsky heard about Yudina from Suvchinsky, he received a missive from an unknown twenty-two-year-old Ukrainian conductor, Igor Blazhkov, assistant conductor of the Ukrainian State Symphony Orchestra and passionate devotee of contemporary music. Blazhkov asked Stravinsky for scores, which were unobtainable in the Soviet Union, and told him of the desolate musical scene at home. In conclusion he hoped that ‘in some ten or fifteen years all this will be a distant memory. And we will achieve this – we, the young! Oh! We have marvellous young people!’⁸⁶

Suvchinsky alerted Yudina to Blazhkov’s existence. Soon they were in correspondence; it was obvious, she wrote, that they should unite their efforts – she would send him scores to be photographed. Yudina suggested performing together Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra in Kiev. Blazhkov expressed astonishment at Yudina’s go-ahead repertoire: ‘Normally elderly musicians are terribly conservative and mortally afraid of everything! I am immeasurably glad to find in you a like-minded person!’⁸⁷ Yudina approved Blazhkov’s ambitious plans of performing Webern, Boulez and Stockhausen. ‘But you are right, not straight away, or they’ll confiscate your conductor’s baton!’ She instructed him to forget the second-rate – Roussel, Barber and Gershwin – ‘Gershwin was the one black spot on the marvellous, radiant Leonard Bernstein!’⁸⁸ Yudina also befriended Blazhkov’s fiancée, the talented musicologist Galina (Galya) Mokreyeva; like Blazhkov, she was often in trouble with the authorities.

In the meantime, the scores that Stravinsky had sent to Yudina from London never arrived. Suvchinsky suggested he send them a second time, via himself in Paris. When at last they arrived, Yudina wrote to Stravinsky thanking him for ‘such magnificent works: In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, Concerto in D, the Mass, Symphony for Winds and Orpheus. I don’t know what I should be most grateful for – perhaps Orpheus, perhaps the Mass. In your presence I feel like a timid schoolgirl.’⁸⁹ Yudina informed the composer she was programming his Piano Sonata in May, the Septet and Concerto for Two Pianos in the autumn. Suvchinsky reported that her letter ‘had intrigued and touched Igor Fyodorovich deeply’.⁹⁰ Enclosed in this letter was Stravinsky’s first reply, which neatly fitted on the back of his visiting card: ‘My sincere and heartfelt greetings and gratitude for your most kind and interesting letter. Please write again!’⁹¹

Suvchinsky now conveyed some good news: the ‘Concerts Pasdeloup’ in Paris were inviting Yudina to perform Jolivet’s Piano Concerto under the composer’s direction on 29 January 1961. ‘Jolivet, while hardly an interesting composer, is an officially recognized person, and acts as a kind of “vice-minister on musical matters” to André Malraux (the Minister for Culture and the Arts). Only he can organize an official invitation, arrange for your visa and so on.’⁹² Soon afterwards, Jolivet confirmed the invitation in writing, and asked Yudina to repeat his concerto in Moscow.⁹³ Yudina was planning to perform the ‘Hopi-Snake Dance’ from his Danses Rituelles. Now for health reasons, she had to postpone her concerts of new music from spring until autumn. By April she was well enough to record at Moscow’s Melodiya Studios two works by Hindemith, the Third Piano Sonata and the Viola Sonata with Fyodor Druzhinin.

Just as things seemed on the upturn, two disasters struck simultaneously. The first, Pasternak’s death on 30 May 1960, came as a shock to Yudina. Having been unwell herself, she hadn’t kept in touch these last two months and was unaware that Pasternak’s cancer was advancing at fulminating speed. The second event – not totally unexpected – was Yudina’s dismissal from the teaching staff of the Gnesins’ Institute. The brilliant successes achieved by her chamber music class aroused hostility in certain quarters. Yelena Gnesina was a mere figurehead, ‘living out her days, sitting by the telephone at her desk [. . .] on half pay with half a class. Real life, administrative and creative, has bypassed her. She did an incredible amount for education, but has always had dreadful taste in people.’⁹⁴ The Institute’s administrators who surrounded Gnesina were incompetent flatterers, who abandoned her when she lost power. Yudina did not fight to maintain her teaching position.

In a letter to Suvchinsky, Yudina left a detailed description of Pasternak’s funeral: ‘We buried him in the village cemetery [in Peredelkino], at the foot of the parish church on the hill on 2 June at 5.30 p.m. The illness, which erupted on the surface on 24 April, lasted for five weeks. The last days were the most excruciating [. . .] Boris Leonidovich understood he was leaving this earthly life.’⁹⁵ The time and place of the funeral were not advertised, nevertheless people thronged to Pasternak’s house. ‘Boris Leonidovich was laid out in the large downstairs dining room, covered with flowers – after all spring is here in all its exuberance. His body remained there until the end, so people could make their farewells, while we – Stasik Neuhaus, Andrei Volkonsky and myself and two sympathetic young instrumentalists [Lev Yevgrafov and Grisha Feigin] – played music in the ground-floor bedroom with the grand piano. Poor Stasik’s hair turned white overnight.’⁹⁶

Pasternak’s widow Zinaida had requested the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio, a work the poet cherished because of childhood memories of his mother performing it. Finding musicians proved problematic: ‘To their shame certain players refused to be involved [. . .] I got up at dawn to practise, having at last found partners, so we could fulfil Zinaida Nikolayevna’s request. At the end she burst out sobbing, and embraced us all, saying “You don’t know what you have played!” We then played the exquisite andante from Schubert’s first trio, which calmed her down.’ Stasik played appropriate movements from Chopin, while Volkonsky played Sarabandes from Bach’s Suites:

At Lyonichka’s request I played the Largo from Beethoven’s Seventh Sonata (Op. 10 no. 3). We waited for Richter. Zinaida Nikolayevna had asked him for the Funeral Music from Götterdämmerung, but he had forgotten the music. He had left Leningrad early that morning and arrived after two, with Harry (Neuhaus). He immediately sat down to play – several Adagios from Beethoven sonatas and then other things – none of us got a chance to play again. This made a really dismal impression on me – such self-centredness, and complete disdain of us ‘common mortals’.⁹⁷

Crowds waited outside the garden fence to say farewell. Many had travelled down on the local train: ‘simple people, Pasternak’s readers, the young, the old – respectable white-haired members of the intelligentsia, pensioners, ignoring their heart attacks and strokes. Also unknown, miserably dressed people, who had spent their last kopek on a bunch of lilies of the valley, as well as many celebrities, writers, actors, translators, philosophers, mathematicians. And the local people were all present – those Russian people that [Pasternak] loved and venerated.’ The philosopher Valentin Asmus gave the graveside elegy. ‘After the family had dispersed, some three hundred people remained by the grave and spontaneously started reciting Pasternak’s verse, each according to his abilities, desires and memories.’ Yudina was particularly affected by the recitation of ‘August’, a poem in which Pasternak recounts a dream of his own funeral in this very cemetery. ‘It was the People who laid the great Poet to rest – and not just the People – all of Nature, the larks and birds were singing in the most incredible way!’⁹⁸

The death of Pasternak left Yudina grief-stricken and forlorn, while she reacted philosophically to the loss of her chamber music class at the Gnesins’ Institute. To be pensioned off at sixty was ridiculous, given that the acting artistic director, Yelena Gnesina, was in her eighty-sixth year, and other professors taught well into their seventies! In reality, an ideological battle was ongoing in all educational establishments, as recorded by the archival stenographic report of the Institute’s Artistic Council. Speaking out against Yudina were Colonel Nemyrya, head of the Military Training Faculty, Anna Melnikova, head of the Faculty of Marxism and Leninism, and the music-theory teacher Pavel Kozlov. The latter claimed that Yudina’s crushing authority ‘disrupted the correct line of work with young people’. Worse still, ‘her propaganda of composers of an evidently anti-Soviet nature, such as Jolivet and Stravinsky, is completely out of place in a musical-pedagogical Institute’.

Amongst Yudina’s defenders was Adolf Gottlieb, professor of chamber music, who emphasized the consistently excellent level of Yudina’s class. He asked, ‘Why does Comrade Kozlov consider Stravinsky belongs to the anti-Soviet group?’ Kozlov’s reply that Stravinsky was ‘a famous reactionary’ was ludicrous even for those times. Gottlieb insisted, ‘But you say anti-Soviet?’ Kozlov retorted, ‘Surely you agree that Stravinsky is our sworn enemy!’ Gottlieb stuck to his guns: ‘I don’t agree. Why shouldn’t one get acquainted with Stravinsky’s works [. . .] I see no ideological harm to our students.’ The issue of Yudina’s religious beliefs also aroused debate. Why was she allowed to teach music with sacred texts? The Marxist Melnikova thought one could be simultaneously religious and Soviet. Colonel Nemyrya thought differently: ‘It is incompatible with Soviet morals!’ When her students were summoned to give evidence against Yudina, they assured the officials that religious themes were never discussed. Kozlov nevertheless won the day in declaring Yudina ‘completely unsuited to the education of Soviet Youth’.⁹⁹

Yudina’s dismissal was formalized on 1 July 1960. The director of the Gnesins’ Institute, Yuri Murmantsev, was powerless to stop it. It had been orchestrated by the Ministry of Culture, which was defending Soviet Youth ‘from corrupting influences’. It was one thing for foreign artists like Gould and Bernstein to perform Stravinsky and Webern to Soviet audiences, quite another when performed by their own artists.

Only recently Yudina’s friend, the Estonian conductor Roman Matsov, was forbidden at the last minute to perform Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms in Tallinn. He fumed: ‘150 members of the Choir turned up in concert dress on the day and were cynically informed the concert was off’.¹⁰⁰ Two more programmes were now cancelled – Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis because of its religious aspect – and his concert with Yudina scheduled on 21 May, performing the Soviet premiere of Messiaen’s Le Réveil des Oiseaux – the work of ‘a modernist decadent’. Paradoxically within twelve months official negotiations were taking place for Stravinsky’s visit to Russia. There was no consistent logic in such swings in cultural policy, any more than the ban on Dr Zhivago occurring four years earlier than the sanctioned publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Yudina wrote to Lyublinsky, ‘I do not despair, I have other work – presuming it won’t be cancelled. The students and everybody round me are immeasurably indignant; I asked everybody to calm down, my heavy teaching load was suicidal, so it’s all for the best.’¹⁰¹ To Grigori Kogan she exclaimed, ‘It’s all gain for me – more time, no more dismal impressions, no more spending on taxis, and best of all the preservation of my intellectual and spiritual strength.’¹⁰²

* She played Sonatas 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 and 32.

** First violin of the Philharmonic Quartet, the future Borodin Quartet.

* Konstantin Krayevich (1833–92), physicist known for his educational work.

* A reference to Yudina’s concerts during the Siege of Leningrad.

* Known in France as Pierre Souvtchinsky.

* ‘crazy’ in Yiddish.