Playing with Fire

Maria Yudina (1899–1970) is the stuff of legend. A piano prodigy from the western reaches of the Russian Empire, appointed full professor at Petrograd Conservatoire in 1923 (two years after graduating), she rose to the top in a career dotted with scandal, poverty, daring repertoire, and reckless acts of compassion. According to Mikhail Bakhtin—her intimate friend for over half a century, who threads his own stressed way through Wilson's story—Yudina was attracted to all things “threatened with destruction” that might be saved if only she could burn herself out in the attempt. Plagued repeatedly with swollen hands, broken bones, rheumatic fever, she astonished audiences with the strength and intricacy of her keyboard polyphony. In the 1930s, as more and more of her friends disappeared in arbitrary roundups and purges, she would play for Maxim Gorky at his dacha; when he began to cry, it was time to ask him to intervene to lessen a sentence or reunite a family in the gulag. Yudina, chronically out of funds, continually borrowed money only to give it away. Dismissed from three music institutions because of her religious views, she was not a dissident and was never arrested—nor was she ever honored with an award. But she did play with fire. For most of her adult life Yudina did not have a room of her own, and she never owned her own instrument.This unclassifiable life finds its perfect chronicler in Elizabeth Wilson, meticulous biographer and partial insider (in the 1960s, she studied cello with Rostropovich in the Moscow Conservatoire). Wilson scrutinizes the most famous legend, repeated gleefully in memoirs and film, that Yudina had been commandeered to repeat her performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 23 in A Major, so that Stalin could have a 78 rpm recording in hand the next morning. Declaring the story apocryphal, Wilson siphons it off into an appendix. A further embellishment of that legend had Yudina donating Stalin's monetary thank-you gift to her church, to pray for the forgiveness of his sins against the Russian people. Nor are these the only myths Wilson lays to rest. Yudina was not a holy fool, although she was stubborn, impractical, impulsive, and fearless. She was not a nun—although by her teens she had already assumed her trademark daily attire, a full-length black dress, and she was very unlucky in her six serious love affairs. She did not sleep in her coffin.Relying solely on published documents and personal interviews, Wilson organizes her ten chapters in a strict chronology. Yudina was born in Nevel near the Belorussian border of the Pale (there, during the Civil War, she first meets Bakhtin; Lev Pumpyansky, leading mind of his circle, proposes marriage but their love comes to naught). She moves to Petrograd to finish her musical studies and, to the distaste of her agnostic Jewish father, is baptized in 1919. She teaches, concertizes, and joins the Josephite schismatics (Orthodox believers who refuse any collaboration with the Bolshevik state). The scientist-priest Pavel Florensky (shot in 1937) becomes a revered friend. Florensky, a good amateur pianist, asked her wistfully each time they met: When will you apply the Golden Mean to music? In 1930, Yudina is dismissed from the conservatoire, charged with sympathy for the “priestly-fascist gang.” Although she proselytized only for contemporary music, not on matters of faith, Yudina never concealed her loyalties. On the obligatory conservatoire questionnaire in 1925 she wrote: “In many aspects I agree with the Russian Communist Party, but I cannot join it because of my idealistic and religious views.”Yudina's idealism was grounded in German Romanticism (both philosophy and music) but not limited to it. She was “our best pianist,” Bakhtin confirms, but she was so much more, which got her into trouble. Professional norms were not important to her. She brought into music “everything that lies on the border between music and the other arts,” especially poetry. (Poems were a provocation: in her final decade, when swollen hands prevented her from playing encores, Yudina would read instead unpublished—that is, uncensored—verse, such as Pasternak's.) Bakhtin recalled other scandalous traits of her character. She understood that strict boundaries between religions—Jewish/Christian, Orthodox/Catholic—did not matter to true belief. Mystic insight integrates and transcends all disciplines, all confessions, and Yudina, Bakhtin intimates, was a mystic. The sacrificial and heroic side of Communist ideology appealed to her temperament. Any suggestion of emigration horrified her. As Wilson writes: in Yudina's opinion “life under Western bourgeois conditions destroyed the best of talents.”In 1936, the Moscow Conservatoire hired Yudina as professor of piano. Her range and repertoire were extraordinary, both as soloist and as collaborative chamber musician. Known for her Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert lieder (she worked closely with Pasternak and other poets, creating isometric Russian translations of German song texts), she also pioneered the Second Viennese School—Schoenberg, Webern, Berg—in Soviet Russia, as well as Stockhausen, Hindemith, Krenek. At a time when other performers and conductors stuck to Socialist Realist classics, she championed rising contemporary Russian composers. During the war, Yudina was indefatigable. Refusing to be evacuated from Moscow, she recorded hundreds of pieces with the All-Union Radio Orchestra, often under blackout conditions, for broadcasting throughout the country. She traveled to the front to play for soldiers and relished being flown into Leningrad under siege to perform in zero temperatures in 1943. “Only my hands,” she would say, “made of steel, withstand the pace.”After the war, although she was accused of musical “formalism,” Yudina was finally allotted her own room. She had no furniture (a pilfered park bench served as a couch) and cared nothing for belongings, but having her own space meant she could host others. Her first guest in 1946 was Bakhtin, who stayed for a month, relying on her academic contacts to find suitable examiners for his dissertation defense (on Rabelais) later that year. In February 1947, Yudina invited to her room a very select group to hear Pasternak read the opening chapters of his emerging novel Doctor Zhivago. She thrilled to Prokofiev's War and Peace, playing piano reductions of its dance scenes before the opera had passed the censor for stage production.Then came Stalin's death, and the Thaw. In 1956, Leonard Bernstein brought the New York Philharmonic to Moscow: both the man and the music dazzled Yudina. The expat Eurasianist Pierre Suvchinsky began supplying her with modernist scores from Paris. But her fearlessness and eccentricity—what Bakhtin identified as her indifference to official praise or blame—ensured that she was never permitted to travel beyond the Soviet bloc. “So, just like Pushkin,” Yudina wrote in the 1950s to a close friend, “without leaving the country, I am more European than those who travel and are interested in nothing besides stupid pleasures and cuts of meat.”Yudina's final decade was fraught. Involuntarily retired as a teacher from the Gnessin Institute, she agreed in 1963 to perform and lecture in Khabarovsk, eastern Siberia. Her enthusiasm for foreign composers triggered a denunciation from music school personnel, and in consequence Yudina was banned for three years from all official concert venues. One triumph, however, was welcoming Stravinsky to Moscow in 1962, to mark his eightieth birthday. Yudina had always admired Stravinsky's work. She performed his Concerto for Piano and Winds, his Duo Concertante, and his Concerto for Two Pianos, and recently she had located his niece Kseniya, who helped her organize a major exhibit on the composer. At the airport—so Kseniya reports—Yudina “fell heavily on her knees in front of him and started to kiss his hands. Uncle was frightfully embarrassed.” The reception of this famous prodigal son was a sensation in the USSR, but the officials of the Composers’ Union kept the unpredictable Yudina at arm's length. It was Stravinsky's biographer Robert Craft, on-site in Moscow, who summed up how the matter looked to a Western observer: “Such passionate Christianity pouring out of a Jewish intellectual at the most unseemly moments, together with outspoken criticisms of the regime, was awkward and incongruous beyond description.”Incongruous, perhaps, to outsiders. To insiders it was as Bakhtin insisted: Yudina took her piano skills as a given, as a gift that imposed further duties. She “was always striving to break out into something broader, first through religion, then through public service.” This expansion was necessary, Bakhtin said, because “music, by its very nature, is both philosophical and mythical.” Wilson, I believe, would agree. Walking coolly and with great literacy through this red-hot Soviet world, she relegates fake legends to their proper place but inclines us to believe in both the philosophy and the myth of music's high calling as her subject embraced it. Although with overtones of tragedy, Yudina's life was also freer than the careers of her more obedient colleagues and comrades. She did what she wanted—and for this reason, the system did not swallow her up. Nor could its party bosses trust her to serve any power not of her own choosing. In 1967, age sixty-eight, semi-disgraced, and in failing health, Yudina recorded Bach's Goldberg Variations for the Melodiya label; a year later, Musorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. These interpretations still stun us

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