The poet Anna Akhmatova painted a similar picture: ‘All the old Petersburg signboards were still in place, but behind them was nothing but dusk, darkness and yawning emptiness. Typhus, hunger, executions, damp firewood, people so swollen as to be unrecognizable. In Gostiny Dvor* one could pick a large bunch of wild flowers [. . .] The city had not simply changed, it had turned into its opposite. But people loved poetry (mainly the young) almost as much as they do now.’13 Such devotion to the arts in the face of desolation was a phenomenon of the times. People lived through their passionate beliefs, whether for poetry, music, building a new social order, or defending religious convictions.
The fact that the Petrograd Conservatoire remained active during the cold, hungry years of civil war was largely due to the determination and dedication of its director, Alexander Glazunov. Formerly solid and stout, Glazunov had lost so much weight that his clothes hung off his body like a scarecrow. Many professors left Petrograd to cities such as Kiev, Tiflis (Tbilisi), Koktebel in the Crimea, and Vitebsk, where food and fuel were more plentiful. By the end of 1918 Yudina’s favourite teacher, Nikolai Cherepnin, had departed to assume the position of director of the Tbilisi Conservatoire, remaining there until the arrival of the Bolsheviks in 1921, when he left Georgia to take up permanent residence in Paris.
Emil Cooper (Couper or Kuper) replaced Cherepnin as professor of conducting. Having made his name as an opera conductor, he was renowned for his ‘definitive’ interpretations of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Mariinsky Theatre, while his performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh were equally acclaimed. In 1918 Lunacharsky appointed Cooper chief conductor and director of the Ex-Imperial Theatre, as the Mariinsky was temporarily called. In 1921 it acquired a new name, the ugly acronym GATOB (State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet).
For Yudina, Cooper was a legendary figure. As a student she attended his rehearsals and performances of Wagner and of Kitezh, in which Russia’s most famous tenor, Ivan Vasilyevich Yershov, performed. ‘Dear God, what an amazing Grishka Kuterma,** what an amazing Siegmund,’ Yudina wrote of Yershov. ‘He was the very embodiment of Art [. . .] the High Priest of the Dionysian, and no less of Apollonian reasoning.’14
In 1921 Cooper was additionally appointed artistic director of the Institution of the Petrograd (later Leningrad) Philharmonic, which included duties as chief conductor of the Petrograd Philharmonic Orchestra, which had been reassembled from the Philharmonic Society’s pre-revolutionary orchestra. A father figure to his musicians, Cooper gave them generous material help during this troubled period. Nevertheless, despite his commitment to the new Soviet musical institutions, he emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1924, ending up in New York as staff conductor at the Metropolitan Opera.
For his part, Cooper was so impressed by the young Yudina that he chose her as his soloist in Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto at the opening of the Petrograd Philharmonia on 10 August 1921, just weeks after her graduation in July. The concert took place in the former Hall of the Noblemen’s Assembly, with its beautiful white columns and eight large glittering chandeliers. For Yudina it was memorable for other reasons: ‘I performed Beethoven’s Fifth at that concert, but it would have been better not to play at all – it was the day Alexander Blok died.* Emil Albertovich informed us of the news, when I was already sitting at the open grand piano, the orchestra was tuning up. We all rose to our feet, many of us in tears. Then the rehearsal started. We should have postponed the concert, but alas, we lacked understanding of the event’s historical significance and of our irreparable loss.’15
The great poet had won early recognition in the 1900s, when he was primarily associated with the Symbolist movement. While initially accepting the Bolshevik takeover of October 1917, Blok soon lost all illusions about the Revolution’s benefits. His pessimism was reinforced through his feeling that he could no longer write poetry: ‘All sounds have stopped. Can’t you hear that there are no longer any sounds?’ he demanded of the writer, Kornei Chukovsky. After the Revolution, Blok’s health deteriorated drastically, and he died a natural death ‘of exhaustion’ at the age of forty.
The reaction of all educated people on learning of Blok’s death was well captured by the twenty-year-old writer, Nina Berberova: ‘I was seized by a feeling, which I never again experienced, that I was suddenly orphaned.’16 The funeral, held on 10 August, was attended by over 500 people. The writers Andrei Bely, Vladimir Pyast, Yevgeni Zamyatin bore Blok’s coffin high over the heads of the mourners. As Berberova commented, ‘Probably there was not a man in this crowd who did not think – if only for a moment – that not only Blok had died, but this city was dying with him, its special power over people was coming to an end, a historical period was closing, a cycle of Russian destinies was being completed.’17
While Blok’s death was a terrible blow for the Russian intelligentsia, worse was to come. The thirty-five-year-old poet and co-founder of the Acmeist movement, Nikolai Gumilyov, had been arrested by the Cheka on 3 August for counter-revolutionary activity. Gumilyov – incidentally Anna Akhmatova’s first husband – was charged with participating in a monarchist conspiracy, the so-called Tagantsev plot. On 26 August 1921 he was summarily shot along with sixty others, just before Maxim Gorky had time to deliver the pardon he had allegedly elicited from Lenin. As early as 1922, it was admitted that Gumilyov and his ‘fellow plotters’ had been executed on trumped-up charges.
What followed afterwards – mass deportations, the exile of the intelligentsia and the start of planned repressions – was a logical consequence of those August events. Many of the country’s intellectual and religious figures with whom Yudina was mixing now faced a stark choice between emigration – leaving behind inherited culture, language, family and friends – and remaining in Soviet Russia, thereby risking imprisonment, execution, the labour camps, or enforced exile in the wastes of Siberia.
Yudina, too, was invited to leave Russia by the violinist and composer, Iosif Achron, a pupil of Leopold Auer. She had first heard him perform with orchestra under Cherepnin’s direction at a Bach cycle organized by the Petrograd Conservatoire in 1917. Yudina was impressed by Achron’s violin playing, and admired even more his ‘most unusual, [characteristically innovative compositions], closely linked in style to Mahler’s cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn.’18 Achron’s interpretation of Bach’s violin concertos had inspired Yudina to write him a complimentary letter. He replied asking her to emigrate with him. ‘I was incensed! I had no intention of leaving Russia, all the more so with a young man, who had “not asked for my hand in marriage”. Our morals were strict in those days.’19