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By Olga Fyodorova
Summer of 1959. There are two aspiring students chatting in the foyer of
Moscow Gnessins Institute of Music.
“Where are you from?”
“The Urals. And you?”
“Moscow…”
“Then you must know all those people sitting on the examination commission.
Tell me who’s that scary-looking old stick in a black blouse and tussled
hair? We had a crazy woman in my town who looked exactly the same way…”
“Maria Yudina. A great pianist. And a real beauty when she was young.
I saw her photo… She had amazing hair, a little on the wavy side, a perfect
face and shiny eyes… And she was always wearing black… Well, I’m not surprised,
she’s a devout Christian, you know… Even in Josef Stalin’s day during all
those crackdowns on religion, she kept going to church and even corresponded
with the great theologian Pavel Florensky. You’ve got to be a very brave
person to mix with someone Stalin did not like. And she is an amazing pianist
too, living in her own world, so colorful and fascinating…”
“I never heard her play…”
“She’s playing tomorrow. Let’s go, I will find a way to get you inside…”
A daughter of Petersburg-based intellectuals, Maria Yudina started taking
the interest in music at an early age. Appreciating Maria’s musical talent,
her parents hired really good teachers for her to study from.
Well, Maria always had luck with good teachers. At the St. Petersburg Conservatory
she studied with their leading lights but even these seasoned professors
sometimes found it hard to cope with this charming but so independently-minded
young lady who never held back her mind and never hesitated to put up a
fight for what she thought was right.
Told to play something at a traditional tempo and with tried and true nuances,
she never bowed to tradition always doing what her intuition dictated her
even though it was not necessarily in line with the composer’s idea.
Graduating from the Conservatory with honors at the age of 22, Maria was
presented with a grand piano they traditionally gave their best students.
For decades the instrument was her only and most prized possession.
The Twenties… The Civil War was raging on… Russia lay in ruins with millions
of starving people roaming its endless expanses. Amid all that havoc, an
enthusiastic young pianist was playing concerts at orphanages, hospitals,
giving lessons at schools trying hard to give the lost generation the feel
of the fascinating world of arts.
Breaking with the time-tested traditions, she was experimenting with new
music and propagating modern art forms. The Bolshevik authorities
appreciated her effort advertising the concerts of someone they hailed
as the leading revolutionary in music... only to find out that Yudina believed
in God and had no intention of becoming an atheist. Happily she was
not arrested like many other believers were... She survived the purges
and even became a Conservatory Professor, first in her native Leningrad,
now St. Petersburg, and then in Moscow.
When the Nazi Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941, Maria was in Leningrad
where she spent the most terrible months of the siege. Emaciated and freezing,
she kept playing for her fellow Leningraders because she knew that
the city sentenced by the invaders to starvation and death, desperately
needed the very special energy only the arts could give them. And so, braving
the terrible odds, this woman kept working on, playing concerts and recording
for the radio. It was her mission she so courageously performed throughout
the horrible months of the 900-day siege…
In 1944 when victory was still a year away, they opened a music institute
in Moscow whose founding mother, Yelena Gnessina, was out to bring together
a very special team of teachers. These, she thought, were to be talented
people with unorthodox views on music. Maria Yudina suited that demand
just perfectly and was immediately hired.
And she kept up a busy concert schedule focusing on new music and often
being the first performer for many Russian and foreign composers.
Even playing the tried and classical evergreens by Schubert, Schumann and
Beethoven, however, she managed to find in them some very special undertones
no one else seemed to have noticed before her…
Maria’s unorthodox manner was hugely appealing to some and absolutely alien
to others. During her concerts, some people applauded like mad while others
stormed out fuming midway through a piece. The critics were similarly
divided…
“Maria Yudina just can’t play romantic music,” one of them wrote. “Her
interpretations look like a piece of unfinished wood. Her phasing is straightforward
and blunt, her melodic line bereaved of genuine feeling and warmth…”
“Yudina plays as if she were speaking,” said another. “Only a very intelligent
and emotionally and spiritually endowed person can outline his thought
the way she does… It’s the performance of a philosopher, strait-laced,
dignified full of genuine love for life…”
Maria Yudina knew how to separate eternal values from the vanity of everyday
life, in her selfless service to music. Everything else looked unimportant.
The rough and tumble of everyday life certainly had its toll on her but
never touched her soul. She just couldn’t care less about what she
was wearing and how her hair looked. She lived a life that was bubbling
inside her and it was there that she was looking for harmony and purity…
Just like most other 20th century Russian performers, Maria Yudina is absolutely
unknown in the West. Stalin’s Iron Curtain confined her larger than life
talent inside this country. Only now, with the advent of the Compact Disc
many music lovers are finally able to appreciate the legacy of a pianist
who died 30 years ago…
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