Undoubtedly, the aesthetics of both Auer and Esipova developed to a great degree in parallel to the artistic strivings of the Belyaev Circle. No wonder Glazunov dedicated his Violin Concerto to Auer. The similarities in their musical principles are noteworthy: a striving for grandeur and dignity. Both the composer and the teacher valued clarity of thought, neatness of detail, and technical perfection. With the years both Auer and Esipova demanded from their students an ever more serious, restrained, and “objective” approach to their playing.52
This Petersburg style of playing might be called academic were it not for the overpowering temperament and acuity manifested in the playing of its most talented representatives. It was rather too full of color and life to be academic. Rather, the style—like the best works of some members of the Belyaev Circle—retained traits of Petersburg pseudoclassicism, which at that very period had become the leading architectural style in the capital of the Russian Empire.
A great distance separates pseudoclassicism from neoclassicism. The former is incomparably more conservative. This is particularly visible in composition; it is enough to compare Liadov’s pseudoclassical “Musical Snuff Box” with any piece in Stravinsky’s neoclassical
Both violinists came to Petersburg as outsiders. For Russian Jews from the Pale of Settlement, one of the few ways to a great career, fame, and wealth was mastery of the piano or, especially, the violin. Entering the Petersburg Conservatory made it possible. Glazunov gave his patronage in every possible way to talented Jews. A Russian, he was even called “King of the Jews.” Shostakovich told me about Glazunov’s famous response to the inquiry from the Russian prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, about the number of Jewish students at the Petersburg Conservatory: “We don’t keep count.”
But Glazunov inspired the respect of young musicians not only because he was a caring director. For Heifetz and Milstein he was the “Russian Brahms,” a renowned composer and for many years the symbol of musical Petersburg. In falling in love with Glazunov, Heifetz and Milstein, like hundreds of other young musicians from the provinces, fell in love with Petersburg. Milstein recalled the time spent in the Russian capital as the happiest period of his life.53 Petersburg was the inspiration for the majestic, restrained playing of the young violinists, a style that corresponded well to the city’s architectural style. The role of the Petersburg school of composition in this development is clear.
Their move to the West rapidly accelerated the changes in their playing. As the neoclassical tendencies of Heifetz and Milstein matured, their playing became even more refined, but also more expressive and modern. They can be considered a rightful part of the Russian neoclassical group in the West. The aesthetic closeness of Heifetz and Milstein to Stravinsky and Balanchine is obvious. In the United States, Milstein became one of Balanchine’s closest friends. With a nudge from Milstein, Balanchine created some of his best neoclassical ballets, for instance,
If Heifetz, Elman, and Milstein had not emigrated to the West but remained in the USSR, the development of the Soviet school of violin playing probably would have proceeded in a very different direction. But the cosmopolitan nature of their talent “pushed” them beyond the borders of Russia, as it had Stravinsky, Nabokov, and Balanchine. Once they moved to the United States, these violinists, together with Arturo Toscanini and Sergei Rachmaninoff, exerted an enormous influence on the American style of music making. Through recordings this style spread to the rest of the world, becoming in the end one of the most distinctive performing styles in the twentieth century. Professor Auer and the Petersburg Conservatory had every reason to be proud of their graduates.
In 1927 the magazine
