Trying to defend his inner freedom, Sofronitsky became an alcoholic and dope addict. His audiences knew it. People held their breath when Sofronitsky brought his famous white handkerchief to his nose, right on stage. This meant that the pianist felt the need for an additional snort of cocaine.61 This behavior was a challenge to the strict norms of Soviet life. For the pianist and his admirers, it was a desperate declaration of the right to spontaneity and rebellion.
The next step was Sofronitsky’s refusal to tour Russia and then to give practically any public performances at all. He could be heard only at the small auditorium of the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, playing before specially invited guests. He was also reluctant to make recordings, reiterating, “Recordings are my corpses.” Nevertheless, his fame continued to grow. Legends spread about his rare semiprivate performances, each of which was turned into a mystical rite. Amateur tapes made without the pianist’s permission were passed around, precursors of the Soviet
Sofronitsky’s favorite authors were Dostoyevsky and Blok. Bogdanov-Berezovsky, who had known the pianist well, once told me that Sofronitsky was a character out of Dostoyevsky who resembled Blok. Sofronitsky liked to say, “Think how many people went mad or committed suicide over Blok’s poems. What power they have!” He was perfectly aware of the magic impact of his playing, too.
When Sofronitsky died at the age of sixty in 1961, his health ruined by alcohol and drugs, Russian intellectuals perceived him as the lonely, persecuted Hamlet described by Pasternak in the poetry of his novel,
Maria Yudina graduated from the conservatory in Nikolayev’s class the same year as Sofronitsky. They performed together at the graduation concert, which Shostakovich considered one of the strongest musical impressions of his youth. Yudina looked just as striking as Sofronitsky: with large gray eyes on a maidenly face, she was sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa.62 She always wore a black pyramid-shaped dress with long, flowing sleeves and a large pectoral cross on a chain. Yudina, who was Jewish by birth, converted and became a fanatical Orthodox Christian, devoting considerable effort to church affairs. Her behavior naturally put her on a collision course with the atheistic Soviet state. Yudina was expelled from Leningrad Conservatory, where she was a teacher, and unlike Sofronitsky she never received any awards and was never allowed to perform outside the Soviet Union.
On and off the stage, Yudina was a proselytizer. Her interpretations, which drew overflow crowds, were always passionate sermons, delivered with imperiousness and conviction. Yudina destroyed forever the stereotype of “female” piano playing as something gentle and tender. Her performances were majestic, with sharp contrasts. Her programs were full of contrasts, too. She would play Bach and Beethoven and then, skipping Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff—that is, the most popular part of the repertoire—turn to contemporary works.
Before the war Yudina promoted the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, and then of Bartok and Webern, and in the final years of her life, she was taken with the works of Boulez, Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono. She was a powerhouse of ideas and information about the avant-garde. Her influence was revolutionary and liberating in that area, but it was not confined to just that. With equal passion, Yudina studied the lives of the saints, church architecture, and the poetry of Leningrad dadaists, many of whom had been friends of her youth. An admirer and connoisseur of Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov, she was capable of suddenly interrupting her concert to start reciting the poetry of the futurist Khlebnikov or the banned Pasternak. Every such performance was regarded by the regime as a political act, of course. Although Yudina was often banned from performing, she was never arrested.
A possible explanation for the authorities’ toleration is a story I first heard from Shostakovich that was later corroborated by others. Stalin, allegedly hearing Yudina playing a Mozart piano concerto on the radio, demanded a recording of the performance. No one dared tell him that it had been a live broadcast. Yudina was hastily called to the studio to produce a special record overnight—one copy for Stalin.
