When Stalin received the record, he sent Yudina a large sum of money. She thanked him in a letter, explaining that she was donating the funds to her local church and would pray for God to forgive Stalin his grievous sins before the people. This seemed like a suicidal act, but contrary to expectations, nothing happened to her. It is rumored that Yudina’s Mozart recording was on the record player near Stalin’s bed when he was found dead.
Like Sofronitsky, Yudina was a passionate partisan of Petersburg. In her old age, she was flattered by comparisons to Peter the Great. In fact, her aquiline profile, especially when she was playing, did resemble that of the emperor. On stage, she sometimes placed a picture of the Bronze Horseman on the piano. After a concert in which her playing had been particularly compelling, she explained, “I was in the thrall of the Bronze Horseman today, and I wanted to convey the hoof beats, the chase, the fear.”
Yudina could be called the emissary of the American branch of Petersburg modernism in the Soviet Union. When the New York City Ballet brought Balanchine’s works there for the first time, she compared them with the Pergamon Altar, Bach’s Passions, and Wagner’s
Yudina was a personality given to exaltations. Many people, including Shostakovich, who had the greatest respect for her musical talents, found her behavior affected and pretentious. But I always believed Yudina’s extravagant gestures manifested the same fierce temperament that surged in her performances. She violated one convention after another. She never married, wore sneakers even in winter, and could spend weeks sleeping in the bathtub. When we met, she tried to convert me to Russian Orthodoxy with her first words, refusing to discuss musical topics. But since our conversation lasted over five hours, I managed to turn it to questions of culture. The result was the only published conversation with Yudina that I know of, covering aesthetic themes and her musical credo. Alas, it first appeared in Leningrad only in 1972, almost a year and a half after her death at age seventy-one.
Yudina could have used Akhmatova’s poem of 1961 to speak for herself:
Heifetz and Milstein, who belonged to the same school as Yudina but left for the West for “the protection of alien wings,” conquered the world with their art and significantly expanded the cultural horizons of multitudes of music lovers. They began interpreting music in a new way, creating a revolution of sorts in their sphere. Remaining in Russia, Yudina and Sofronitsky also achieved unique musical heights. In fact, their musical evolution paralleled in many ways the development of Heifetz and Milstein in the direction of severe neoclassicism. In addition, Yudina and Sofronitsky also became models of behavior and examples of inner independence for artists in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet state. Their ethical role was enormous, even though it has been little described until now. Thus, the influence of Yudina and Sofronitsky was both narrowed (since they could be heard only in the USSR) and expanded (moving beyond the purely musical into the ethical and political spheres).
An analogous situation developed with the great alumni of the Petersburg school of composition. Stravinsky chose life “beneath foreign skies” and became arguably the leading composer of the twentieth century. Modern music is impossible to imagine without his achievements. Shostakovich remained “with his people,” and his music, which has sometimes been accused of aesthetic provincialism, became a diary of the Soviet era. Prokofiev emigrated but then returned to the Soviet Union. Interestingly, the fate of his music reflects his ambivalence: it did not acquire universal traits, as did Stravinsky’s work, but it is not tied so closely to recent Russian history as is Shostakovich’s music. Diaghilev realized this, saying in 1929 about Prokofiev, “He needs to strengthen the ethical base of his creativity. That is why I insisted on his doing
