Her godmother Yevgeniya Tilicheyeva was much impressed by Yudina’s pedagogical development in the 1920s: ‘Her students literally grew under our eyes. It seemed to me that her demands exceeded their possibilities, for she exacted the same requirements from them as she did from herself.’15 This was precisely what attracted the students, who felt privileged to be judged by such high standards and stretched to their limits. Naturally many students emulated their teacher, imitating her musical interpretations in every particular. As the young Shostakovich admitted, such an approach was doomed to failure. ‘In the years I studied with Nikolayev, Yudina was one of my idols. Sometimes I attempted to copy her in every detail of a performance: if she did a ritenuto somewhere, then I too would do it in that place. Much later I understood that I was treading the wrong path. What one could learn from her related not so much to particular mannerisms or colours, but to the overall shape and grandeur of her concepts. Yet such youthful errors had their use, in that I was imitating a mature artist, as Yudina was in her Conservatoire years.’16
When it came to technique, Yudina adhered to Nikolayev’s maxim that ‘a pianist’s hand must be trained in the same way as singers’ voices’.17 Adhering to universal physiological laws, Yudina would closely observe a student’s movements and hand position, checking that there was no sign of muscular tension. She used the analogy of a hosepipe carrying water through the arm’s whole length, explaining that weight and energy should be free to flow without impediment, so as to connect the fingertips to the shoulder and back. She likened the position of the fingers to the supporting pillars of an arched bridge, rounded, strong, yet sensitive, and able to carry the burden of weight. The tips of the fingers were of utmost importance, for their touch on the keyboard was the focal point on which the arm’s weight was concentrated.18
Yudina instructed her students to ‘develop a mind’ in the fingers, a metaphor also used by the great Jewish actor and theatre director, Solomon Mikhoels. In 1945 Yudina wrote to him, ‘Your theory is so apparent – and so close to mine – of seeing life in the very fingertips, one can observe this focused, creative heartbeat in the hands of your actors, bearing all life’s diversity, refinement, virtuosity and content.’19
The piano is, in effect, an instrument of illusions, where the creation of singing legato defies its basic percussive character. Sensitivity of touch was of fundamental importance in achieving a free sound, which Yudina believed had to have depth, with no trace of hardness, and be capable of great strength, while remaining precisely focused. Until a student could produce a beautiful and noble sound on the piano, he or she was not allowed to play up to speed. In developing virtuosity, a light but strong finger articulation was needed, allowing clarity of passagework. The natural weight of the arm was essential in producing a freely projecting sound – what she termed ‘maximum cantabile’.20
Yudina selected her students’ study repertoire according to progressive difficulty, using examples of different musical forms, first and foremost polyphony. Some believed that she did not possess the lightness and flexibility suitable for Chopin, although she could avail herself of these qualities when needed. Certainly she recommended that her students study certain passages ‘with maximum lightness, airiness, transparency’. Other favourite maxims were ‘to combine flexibility and breathing with sharpness and tenacity’. More than anything Yudina detested ‘mechanical’ repetition, and insisted that students ‘play with the head and not the hands’. After all, artistic aims dictated performance methods. Only an exacting listening process guaranteed results; what the hands played should coincide with what the head heard. Yudina herself was known to repeat a passage for hours and hours to achieve perfection. All in all, the mobility of the pianist’s hand and arm apparatus had to become second nature, ‘like the function of breathing in musical speech’.21
Yudina liked to paraphrase the artist Vladimir Favorsky in saying there were no rules in music, only laws, by which she actually meant the embodiment of philosophical values. As her one-time student Marina Drozdova (and niece of Yudina’s teacher Vladimir Drozdov) put it, ‘laws as a philosophical category express the very essence of all phenomena and their inner connections’.22 In this Yudina shared Favorsky’s understanding of creativity: ‘Why is it that an artistic creation, based on ideas translated into matter, should not adhere to the laws by which it was born and by which it lives?’ Yudina responded: ‘Once you have an aim and the conditions to realize it, then laws exist implicitly. But you cannot turn these laws into rules. Laws are alive, whereas rules are static.’23
Naturally students were expected to start with a minute study of the text and the composer’s indications. Yudina exhorted, ‘Look with attention, as if through a magnifying glass, so you don’t miss anything.’ One had to have a clear understanding of the form and structure of a piece of music, its style, harmonic language and rhythmic design. Here lay the key to interpretation, which could be aided by pictorial imagery or intuitions of inherent spiritual expression.
In music, the projection of sound is in itself an art. Sustaining sound and shaping the phrasing is achieved through minute control, whereby the decay of each single note is precisely calculated. Yudina also demanded that in passagework the melodic element must be highlighted even in the fastest figurations. Occasionally students found themselves in conflict with Yudina’s views when they felt unable to identify with her interpretation or were pressurized to refute their own ideas. Endowed with the essential quality of empathy, Yudina knew when it was useless to force a pupil to go against their firm convictions.
In the early stages of her teaching career, many of Yudina’s students were her contemporaries in age – a few were actually older. Several, like Alla Maslakovets and Anna Artobolevskaya, became lifelong friends. Maslakovets enjoyed a distinguished career as a performer, whereas Artobolevskaya was to become a famous teacher in her own right at Moscow’s Central Music School and Conservatoire.* Initially Yudina recognized the gifts of one particular student, Yuli Kremlyov, and stimulated his interest in contemporary music, setting him works by Hindemith, Poulenc, Berg and Stravinsky. When he stopped performing because of illness, he became a music critic. Yudina believed that his attitudes to life and people hardened, and worse still, he became overly eager to oblige the Soviet authorities.
In 1928 Yudina met the art historian Alexei Bykov, a good amateur pianist who had sought an audition with her. She greeted him with the words: ‘Consider it a happiness not to become a professional pianist!’ Before Bykov had even played a note, Yudina put him through his paces in a small colloquium on philosophy. A panic-stricken Bykov had forgotten all he knew about Kant and Hegel, and couldn’t answer Yudina’s questions on the Critique of Pure Reason. She nevertheless agreed to teach him privately, setting him a programme worthy of any professional – Chopin’s First Ballade, and Bach’s F sharp minor Prelude and Fugue from volume one of The Well-Tempered Clavier. At their first lesson she worked on just one line of the Chopin Ballade! When Bykov asked Yudina to name her fee she exclaimed angrily, ‘It has absolutely no importance. Of course, everybody needs money from time to time, myself included. Bring however much you want, what you can afford.’ Money was never to be mentioned again, she added.24