Almost all the performers control the instrument like first-class masters, they all have a large, multifaceted, amazingly free and light technique; they all have an unforced, very beautiful and gentle tone; an enormous sound range; exceptionally delicate pedaling; a high musical culture and a truly artistic approach. In terms of their devices, they are extremely restrained and economical, but their movements are absolutely relaxed and free; they have a subtle feeling for the keyboard.55
Among the performers in that concert was twenty-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich, who was singled out by the reviewer. Shostakovich was one of Nikolayev’s favorite students; the professor had taken on Esipova’s mantle as the most outstanding teacher of piano in the city on the Neva. Nikolayev, a well-known homosexual in Leningrad, was of medium height, taciturn but charming, with a neat part in his hair and clear gray eyes. He was a respected composer of the academic style (Horowitz and Milstein performed his Violin Sonata with great success),56 but he was sympathetic to the avant-garde. In particular, Prokofiev worked out his graduation program with Nikolayev, because Esipova was gravely ill by then. Nikolayev voted, against Glazunov’s objections, for awarding the prize to the young rebel. And Nikolayev was one of the first to proclaim far and wide that Shostakovich was a genius.
Shostakovich made great strides in Nikolayev’s class. My piano teacher in Leningrad, Iosif Shvarts, who had been Nikolayev’s student and lover of many years, told me how Shostakovich, then fifteen, played Beethoven’s demanding
Shostakovich had two strong rivals in Nikolayev’s class: Maria Yudina and Vladimir Sofronitsky. He spoke of them even a half-century later with agitation and some obvious jealousy. Sometimes Shostakovich’s enormous ambitions as a pianist are forgotten. Yet he was selected by Nikolayev to represent his class at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1927, the first international competition for pianists in interwar Europe. Shostakovich prepared for the event with great intensity, locking himself in his room and even taking a break from composing. That made it all the more painful when he received only honorable mention in Warsaw. According to many observers, the jury’s decision was unfair, but the support of the audience and the press was of little consolation to Shostakovich.58 After his defeat at the competition he gave up the idea of a concert career and concentrated on performing his own works.
Yudina and Sofronitsky had a different life. Known in the West only to connoisseurs, they were enormously popular in Russia, becoming cult figures. Their significance went far beyond that of musical performance. In a closed, hierarchical society, in which every member had to know his or her place as determined by the authorities and perform all duties in accordance with prescriptions handed down from above, Sofronitsky and Yudina became—in different ways—symbols of inner freedom and cultural protest.
Tall, thin, pale, and mysterious, Sofronitsky was considered one of the most handsome men in Leningrad. Women were said to have left their families and attempted suicide over this romantic musician. Sofronitsky was compared to Byron, and it was often said that he was “the ideal Hamlet.”59 He played Chopin and Scriabin incomparably and was married to the latter’s daughter for a while. The general opinion was that after Scriabin’s death, Sofronitsky was the best interpreter of his works. Before the revolution Scriabin’s oeuvre was considered in Russia as the highest expression of creative genius; under the Bolsheviks, his music fell into disgrace. First he was called a mystic, then a decadent, and finally a formalist. Sofronitsky stubbornly continued to play Scriabin, even giving concerts consisting only of his works, which instantly made him more than just a pianist, even a great one.
In 1942 Sofronitsky was brought out of Leningrad, which at the time was besieged by the Germans, and taken to Moscow. In 1943 he received the Stalin Prize, and in 1945 Stalin took Sofronitsky with him to the Potsdam Conference to show him off to President Truman, an amateur pianist. (Besides a trip in 1928-1929 to Warsaw and Paris, this was Sofronitsky’s second and last appearance in the West.) Despite this official attention, the pianist’s alienation from the Soviet cultural apparatus continued to grow. Sofronitsky’s son recalled how in 1948, when Shostakovich and other composers were being denounced by the authorities, Sofronitsky was playing at home and suddenly slammed down the lid of his piano, exclaiming, “I can’t play! I keep thinking that a policeman will come and say, ‘You’re not playing the right way!’”60
