* The New Economic Policy, introduced by Lenin in 1921, allowing free-market enterprise so as to give temporary respite to the population from hunger and the hardships of War Communism.
* Acronym for the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage.
* The enormous department store on Nevsky Prospekt.
** The treacherous drunkard in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh.
* The poet Alexander Blok died on 7 August. His funeral was held on 10 August, the day of Yudina’s concert. Evidently she was referring to a rehearsal three days before.
* Volfila: Acronym of the Free Philosophical Association. The Philosophical Circle Voskreseniye (meaning both ‘Sunday’ and ‘Resurrection’) was created in 1917 and closed in 1928.
* Kozlinaya Pesnya, sometimes translated as The Goat’s Song.
** Acronym for Ob’edinenie real’nogo isskustva (The Union or Association for Real Art). Founded in 1927 by the Leningrad writers Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotsky.
* St Petersburg or Leningrad.
3
1921–1927
GRADUATION AND START OF A MUSICAL CAREER
While there are no rules [in composition], there are of course laws. How else can a creation, based on thoughts expressed through material, be conceived without the laws by which it finds life?
Vladimir Favorsky1
Bach climbs majestically to the heights like a pious aspirant, whereas Mozart is always at home there.
Father Pavel Florensky2
Maria Yudina returned to her official piano studies in the autumn of 1920 with the intention of graduating from the Petrograd Conservatoire the next summer. By now many of her former professors had left Petrograd. Vladimir Drozdov emigrated from Russia, eventually to settle in the USA, while Felix Blumenfeld had taken up a position at the Kiev Conservatoire in 1918. Yudina now enrolled in Leonid Nikolayev’s piano class. As the acknowledged doyen of the Petrograd Conservatoire’s piano teachers, Nikolayev boasted a strong class, including such eminent pianists as Vladimir Sofronitsky, Alexander Kamensky and Natan Perelman. The thirteen-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich had enrolled in his class in 1919, and was yet to decide whether to become a pianist or a composer. Additionally, there were Yudina’s closest friends Hermann Biek and his wife Vera Vinogradova, fellow students of Yudina and Shostakovich in Steinberg’s composition class.
Lessons with Nikolayev would be a mere formality in Yudina’s mind, for she was confident of having already learnt all she needed to know about piano playing. She had used her three years away from the Conservatoire studying new repertoire, consolidating the old, and extending her cultural horizons. Thus, Yudina and Nikolayev entered into discussion as near equals. While he recognized her outstanding gifts, she held him in enormous esteem as a serious composer and performer of immaculate taste. As Yudina’s friend the composer Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky observed, ‘Nikolayev educated his students not so much as pianists, but primarily as thinking musicians. He never created a specific school of playing.’3
When, at the age of seventeen, a dissatisfied Shostakovich thought of transferring from the Petrograd to the Moscow Conservatoire, it was his devotion to Nikolayev that held him back. He might have preferred Moscow’s Nikolai Myaskovsky to Petrograd’s Maximilian Steinberg as a composition teacher, but in his opinion Moscow’s most illustrious piano professor, Konstantin Igumnov, ‘had a long way to go to reach Nikolayev’s level’.4 In addition, Dmitri attended Nikolayev’s classes on analysis and form, claiming he was by far the best teacher of this subject in the Conservatoire. He also respected Nikolayev the composer, and performed his ‘Variations for Four-hand Piano’, from which he would quote themes in his own Second Piano Sonata of 1943.
Nikolayev encouraged his students to develop their own musical personality, so that no two pianists in his class were alike. He demanded of all his pupils attentive listening and complete control of the musical phrase through use of finely nuanced dynamics and rubato. He taught that piano sound must be ‘constructed’ as a large mass, while preserving transparency and an infinite spectrum of nuanced colour.
Later in life Shostakovich recalled his years in Nikolayev’s class. Yudina and Sofronitsky were set as examples for him:
‘Just listen to how Marusya plays this piece’ – he called Yudina ‘Marusya’ and Sofronitsky ‘Vova’ or ‘Vovochka’. Or ‘listen to how she plays four-part fugues, each voice has its own timbre’. And I would listen and indeed each voice has its own timbre, although it seemed theoretically impossible. Yudina played Bach quite wonderfully.5
Nikolayev was often very late for his morning classes; if other students loped off impatiently, Yudina and Shostakovich stubbornly stayed on. ‘We would go to the library and take out some four-hand music to sight-read while waiting,’ Shostakovich wrote. ‘I remember on one occasion sight-reading Taneyev’s Prelude and Fugue in G sharp minor,* a very complex work which posed no problems for Yudina. I would show her my own works, and she was very encouraging. And she in turn acquainted me with works by Hindemith, Bartók and Krenek. I much enjoyed her performance of Krenek’s F sharp minor concerto, and on a couple of occasions played second piano for her.’6
It was during this last Conservatoire year that Yudina developed an interest in contemporary music. She often performed new pieces by composition students. The boldness and conviction of her interpretations often raised a new work beyond its level of achievement, helping young composers to understand their own potential. The musicologist Yuri Tyulin was entranced by the young Yudina: ‘In all her being, her facial expression, her eyes shining in exaltation, one sensed the imminent arrival of a special and great event; all the more so as she was offering a student’s new sonata for judgement to our most illustrious examiners. The sonata may have been mediocre, but how she played it!’7
Throughout her pianistic career Yudina’s choice of repertoire was defined by her serious tastes; her idols were Bach and Beethoven, while she definitely preferred Brahms and Mussorgsky to Chopin and Rachmaninov. As a student, she was greatly enamoured of Liszt, in particular Années de Pèlerinage en Italie and ‘Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata’ in the second volume. Shostakovich found that:
Yudina’s interpretations of Liszt were quite marvellous – most particularly of those works where the composer was most sparing with the notes, as in ‘Les Cloches de Genève’ – one of his best piano works in my opinion. Yudina also had a deep understanding of Beethoven, and her interpretation of Op. 111 was especially remarkable. She held your attention completely in the second movement, which is so hard to grasp; the music’s inner tension never wavered for a second. It was Yudina who advised me to learn the famous ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. ‘Why do you keep playing the ‘Moonlight’ and the ‘Appassionata’?’ she reproached me. ‘Why don’t you tackle the ‘Hammerklavier’?’ Nikolayev gave his approval, and I played for Yudina a few times before taking it to my lesson with him.8