The tempos are all off and there's a free, shall we say, approach to the text. But perhaps I'm wrong, I haven't heard the recording in a while.
In general, I didn't like seeing Yudina-whenever I did I got embroiled in some unpleasant and confused story. Strange things kept happening to her. Once I ran into Yudina in Leningrad at the Moscow Station. "Ah, hello, hello. Where to ?" "Moscow,'' I said. "Ah, how good, how handy. I have to give a concert in Moscow but I can't possibly go there. Please, go in my place and please give the concert."
•Nikolai Andreyevich Malko (1 883-1961), conductor who led the premieres of the First and Second Symphonies, as well as other works by Shostakovich. He emigrated in 1 929 and did much to promote Shostakovich's symphonies abroad. On a bet with Malko, Shostakovich arranged Vincent Yownans's fox trot ''Tea for Two," called "Tahiti Trot" in Russia. For more information see SolomonVolkov, "Dmitri Shostakovich and 'Tea for Two,' " The Musical Quarterly, April 1 978, pp. 223-228.
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I was naturally taken aback by this unexpected proposal. I said,
"How can I go in your place? I don't know your program. And this is rather strange. Why should I play in your place? What's your program anyway?"
Yudina told me her program. "No, I can't. How could I? That would be rather strange." And I ·hurried into my compartment.
From the window of the train, I saw Yudina wandering alpng the platform, probably looking for another pianist who was going to Moscow and who would agree to her odd proposal.
Yudina, as far as I know, always drew overflow crowds. She deserved her fame as a pianist completely. But they also used to say that she was a saint.
I was never a crude antireligionist. If you believe, then believe. But Yudina apparently did believe that she was a saint, or a female prophet. Yudina always played as though she were giving a sermon. That's all right, I know that Yudina saw music in a mystical light. For instance, she saw Bach's Goldberg Variations as a series of illustrations to the Holy Bible. That's also excusable, though it can be terribly irritating at times.
Yudina saw Mussorgsky as a purely religious composer. But Mussorgsky isn't Bach, after all, and it's a rather controversial reading, I think. And then there was the business of reading poetry at her concerts. Either you play or you read poetry, not both. I realize that she read Pasternak and at a time when he was banned. But nonetheless, the whole thing reminded me of a ventriloquist's act. And naturally, the result of the famous readings-between Bach and Beethoven, I think-was another huge scandal in the series of Yudina's scandals.
There was just too much deliberate hysteria in Yudina's behavior.
Too much, really. She came to see me once and said that she was living in a miserable little room where she could neither work nor rest.
So I signed a petition. I went to see various bureaucrats, I asked a lot of people to help, I took up a lot of people's time. With great difficulty we got an apartment for Yudina. You would think that everything was fine. Life could go on. A short time later she came to me again and asked for help in obtaining an apartment for herself.
"What? But we got an apartment for you. What do you need another one for?"
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"I gave the apartment away to a poor old woman."
Well, how can anyone behave that way?
It was the same with money, she was always borrowing from everyone. And after all, she was paid rather well; first she had a professor's salary and then a professor's pension. And Yudina made quite a few recordings and radio appearances, but she gave her money away as soon as she got it and then her phone would be disconnected for nonpayment.
I was told the following story about Yudina. She went and asked for a loan of five rubles. "I broke a window in my room, it's drafty and so cold, I can't live like that." Naturally, they gave her the money. It was winter out there.
A while later they visited her and it was as cold in her room as it was outside and the broken window was stuffed with a rag. "How can this be, Maria Veniaminovna? We gave you money to fix the window." And she replied, "I gave it for the needs of the church."
What is this? The church can have various needs, but the clergy doesn't sit around in the cold, after all, with broken windows.
Self-denial should have a rational limit. This behavior smacks of the behavior of yurodivye. Was Professor Yudina a yurodivy? No, she wasn't. Then why behave like one?
I can't wholly approve of such behavior. Naturally, Yudina had many unpleasant incidents in her life, and one can sympathize, of course. Her religious positions were under constant artillery and even cavalry attack, so to speak. For instance, she was kicked out of the Leningrad Conservatory even before I was.
It happened this way. Serebriakov,* the director then, had a habit of making so-called "raids of the light brigade." He was a young mannot even thirty-and it was easy for him to get around the entire Conservatory. He checked to see that everything was in order in the institution that had been entrusted to him.
The director received many denunciations of Yudina, and he must have written some himself. He realized that Yudina was a first-class pianist, but he wasn't willing, apparently, to risk his own position.
*Pavel Alexeyevich Serebriakov (1909-1977), pianist, for many years rector of the Leningrad Conserv�tory, which he ran using police methods. Serebriakov was called "the best Chekist (Cheka agent) among the pianists and the best pianist among the Chekists." In 1 948 he dismissed Shostakovich from his professorship at the Conservatory.
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One of the charges of the light brigade was made specifically against her.
The cavalry rushed into Yudina's class and demanded of Yudina: Do you believe in God? She replied in the affirmative. Was she promoting religious propaganda among her students? She replied that the Constitution didn't forbid it.
A few days later a transcript of the conversation made by "an unknown person" appeared in a Leningrad paper, which also printed a caricature: Yudina in nun's robes surrounded by kneeling students.
And the caption was something about preachers appearing at the Conservatory. The cavalry trod heavily, even though it was the light brigade. Naturally, Yudina was dismissed after that.
For some reason, our papers like to print caricatures involving priests, monasteries, and so on. And most often it's done quite unconvincingly and not to the point. For example, when Zhdanov* was berating the poet Akhmatovat in Leningrad after the war, he described her like this for some reason: "Either a nun or a slut." And then he added, "Rather, both a slut and a nun, who mixes fornication with prayer." It's a nice turn of phrase, but meaningless. I for one could never get Zhdanov to tell me precisely what he meant by it. Did Akhmatova misbehave in some way? He did hint at something in one of his speeches in Leningrad. He said that Akhmatova had "shameful ideas on the role and calling of woman." What did that mean? I don't know either.
But there were certainly enough caricatures of Akhmatova in those days, trying to depict her simultaneously as a whore and a nun. I remember they drew me as a monk once, in the magazine Sovetskaya muzyka. Now, what kind of monk would I make? You see, I drank and smoked and was not without other sins. And even read prepared