187A. in SAURON's EYE Three Musical Geniuses Struggle To

187a. IN SAURON’S EYE

1920 – c. 1970, Soviet Russia Three musical geniuses struggle to survive1 Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Vladimir Sofrinitsky (1901-1961) Maria Yudina (1899-1970)

Few journeys better illustrate the perils of personal and artistic integrity in a police state than the careers of Vladimir Sofronitsky, Maria Yudina and Dmitri Shostakovich. At any moment, on the whim of a Party Secretary or Committee, they were lifted to dizzy heights or plunged to depths that threatened not only their lives but all evidence they had existed.

Like Rebecca Burstein, who knew them well, the three began as students at the Petrograd Conservatory in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. They ended, deeply scarred, after the so- called Thaw.

Mitya

‘Mitya’ Shostakovich entered the Conservatory in Fall 1919 at thirteen – a tubercular undersized boy who seemed so frail that Glazunov petitioned Maxim Gorky and Narkempros Commissar Lunacharsky for special rations to “build up his strength.” He was in the same piano class as Sofronitsky and Yudina, his seniors by six years. The next spring he witnessed with a thousand others their dueling graduation performances of Liszt’s C-minor Piano Sonata, and apparently was transfixed by envious admiration that lasted 50 years. The bar they set contributed to his decision to give up performing when he received only an honorable mention in his first international piano competition (Warsaw, 1927).

But the frailty masked steel. By 1927 Shostakovich had been composing for a decade. His earliest known piece – a nonconforming ‘funeral march’ for Kadets murdered by Bolsheviks (1918) – was followed by a flurry of others during his seven years at the Conservatory. His

2 graduation ‘exercise’ – the First Symphony – was conducted to acclaim in Petersburg (1926), then by Bruno Walter in Berlin (1928) and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia (1929).

The ‘funeral march,’ however, was emblematic; it foreshadowed the attraction to forbidden works, themes and techniques that would put him in mortal danger despite efforts to paper them over with correct Soviet titles. After 1926 Shostakovich turned to modernist experimentation, driven by the Petersburg cultural ferment that produced constructivist art,2 Meyerhold’s stage works,3 and visions of the former capital as a carnival Crazy Ship sailing White Nights. His Second (“To October”) and Third (“First of May”) ‘patriotic’ Symphonies (1927-29) produced more official suspicion than applause. His satiric first opera The Nose 4 eventually staged by Meyerhold (1930), was attacked by the Russian Musicians’ Association as “un-proletarian.”

Then came what many regard as an opera masterpiece, Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk (1934). Its erotic, driving score and electric libretto were a huge success with audiences and critics -- until Stalin and his Politburo attended a January 1936 performance and walked out. Composer and audience turned white.

Two days later the ax fell. A front-page Pravda article, “Muddle Not Music” (approved, if not written, by Stalin), savaged Lady MacBeth not only as ‘coarse, primitive, perverted and vulgar” but as “formalist” – practically a death sentence as the Great Terror got underway.5 The composer was forced to withdraw his Fourth Mahler-like Symphony (1936) under threat of liquidation while it was in rehearsal. His commissions disappeared.

Then his older sister, her husband, and other relatives and patrons vanished. Whole departments of physics, astronomy, languages, literature, Oriental studies (not to mention hundreds of stamp collectors, antiquities dealers, and archaeologists) were executed. One of his friends told her diary of recurring nausea when I hear how calmly people can say it: “he was shot, someone else was shot, shot shot. . . . People said, “He was shot” as if they were saying “He went to the theatre.”6 Perhaps most depressing was the widespread belief that those murdered or deported and publicly vilified as “wreckers” must have done something terribly wrong. By mid-1937 the Crazy Ship was “The Ship of the Dead” and Shostakovich was eking a living from “safe” generic film scores. He spent nights on the landing outside his apartment so his family would not be disturbed when the NKVD came.

They did not come. Instead he was ‘rehabilitated’ by his neoclassical Fifth Symphony, which after numerous vettings for ‘socialist propriety’ premiered at the end of 1937 in Leningrad’s Philharmonia Hall. Party loyalists saw in it heroic affirmation and an artist who had learned from “just criticism.” Ordinary Leningraders heard a tribute to their sufferings under the Terror and a promise that basic humanity would prevail -- “They knew what they were hearing,” the composer remarked much later. The performance received wild applause for a full half-hour.7 The Kremlin sent investigators who sought to prove that the Leningrad audience was “scandalously” hand-picked to fabricate success.

The Symphony endured.8 Shostakovich was permitted to rejoin the Conservatory faculty as a salaried professor. After the global success of his Seventh (Leningrad Siege) Symphony (1941- 42) this new status seemed secure.

But by 1946 Stalin no longer needed the popular support of a Great Patriotic War to withstand near-fatal invasion. As “normal” Soviet life resumed, oxygen was withdrawn again. Millions of Russians who fought for the Motherland were deemed contaminated by foreign contact and packed off to camps. Religion, individualism and ‘Western decadence’ were once more proscribed. In 1948, while purges of Jews and other “rootless cosmopolitans” geared up, Shostakovich, like Prokofiev, Khachaturian and hundreds of other composers, was denounced by Supreme Soviet decree and required to apologize for his work. He was dismissed once more from the Conservatory; his compositions mostly were banned..9

The “thaw” brought another crisis. In 1960, as Khrushchev sought support from artists against hard-liners, Shostakovich was ‘asked’ to head the Composers’ Union. To some degree the post would allow him to promote expression and protect dissent. But it also required him to join the Party and meant more patriotic music, plus Party-line articles under his name. The dilemma reduced him to tears. In declining health, he finally agreed.

By 1970 he was “a mass of twitches and nervous tics,” suffering from polio that disabled his right hand plus other ailments. He died of lung cancer in 1975 in his native Leningrad, leaving 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, and a mass of additional music – much of it anti-authoritarian, mostly composed at speed under unimaginable conditions.10

Vovochka

Vladimir (“Vovochka”) Sofronistky was little known in the West. He was allowed to appear outside Russia only twice – a concert trip to Warsaw and Paris in the late Twenties before Stalin’s control consolidated, plus one day at the 1945Yalta Conference to perform at Stalin’s command for amateur pianist Harry Truman. But for decades he embodied to Russian music lovers the romantic mystique of the former Imperial capital -- and their secret hopes.

This aura was not merely a matter of the heroic starving artist whom Rebecca Burstein fed in the desperate Petrograd winter of 1919-1920. Or the magnetic figure who repeatedly performed in gloves during the Siege. Or his fairytale Hamlet-Ophelia romance with Scriabin’s daughter. Or the astounding range of his repertoire, or the hypnotic power of his playing. It seems he appealed straight to the eccentricities and longings of the indefinable Russian soul. 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. [He] was compared to Byron, and it was often said that he was ‘the ideal Hamlet.’ He played Chopin and Scriabin incomparably. . . The general opinion was that. . . [he] was the best interpreter of [Scriabin’s] 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. [This] instantly made him more than just a pianist, even a great one.11 Sofronitsky apparently could not abide even ordinary convention, let alone rules imposed from above. He despised recording sessions, calling records “my corpses.”

In 1948, as the post-War clampdown accelerated, he slammed closed his piano, exclaiming “I can’t play! I keep thinking that a policeman will come and say, ‘You’re not playing the right way!’” Then, despite official entreaties, he declined to tour Russia. Soon he refused even to play in public, limiting his appearances to invitation-only concerts at Moscow’s Scriabin Museum. Secret audience tapes of these sessions were replicated and passed around.12

By the mid-1950’s Sofronitsky’s compatriots thought him the best male pianist in Russia, though he was collapsing inside from stress and cocaine. He endured what has been called “a horrible death” from cancer in 1961. But even his refusal of morphine became part of the myth: “Do not spare me, do not lie to me, I should suffer it all.”

On hearing the news Emil Gilels reportedly exclaimed: “The greatest pianist in the world has died.” 13

Yudina

Unlike her colleagues, Maria Veniaminovna Yudina seems to have had no endearing nicknames; she was too fierce and wild for that. She also was less scarred: indifferent to poverty, homelessness, persecution, the threat of internal exile or execution, she resided within the forbidden Russian Orthodoxy that she had adopted and radiated like a shield. “For her, the ocean [of terror] was only knee-deep,” Shostakovich remarked.

Like a force of nature, she repeatedly was thrown off conservatory faculties for espousing “religious mysticism” among many other offenses -- and repeatedly returned. Boris Pasternak gave his first readings of Doctor Zhivago at her Moscow apartment (1947). She recited his works and delivered so-called ‘suicide sermons’ on conscience and piety during standing-room recitals of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartok and other banned composers – with tennis shoes peeking from the hem of her long black dress. Yet – “playing forcefully, with long sturdy fingers . . . held in a unique way that resembled an eagle’s claws”14 -- she survived. Yudina looked just as striking as Sofronitsky: with large gray eyes in a maidenly face, she was sometimes compared to the Mona Lisa. She always wore a black pyramid- shaped dress with long, flowing sleeves and a large pectoral cross . . . [though] Jewish by birth, [she] . . . became a fanatical Orthodox Christian, [giving her possessions to the poor and] devoting considerable effort to Church affairs. Her behavior naturally put her on a collision course with the atheistic Soviet state. [She] was expelled from Leningrad Conservatory, where she was a teacher [since graduating in 1920] . . . she never received any awards and was never allowed to perform outside the Soviet Union. On and off the stage, Yudina was a proselytizer. . . . [She] destroyed forever the stereotype of ‘female’ piano playing as something gentle and tender. Her performances were majestic, with sharp contrasts. . . . She was a powerhouse of ideas . . . about the avant-garde. Her influence was revolutionary and liberating in that area, but it was not confined to 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 . . . she was capable of suddenly interrupting her concert to [recite] . . . the futurist Khlebnikov . . . .Although [she] was often banned from performing [or recording], she was never arrested.15

In one famous incident, an aging Stalin phoned the state Radio Committee to request a copy of the Mozart No. 23 Piano Concerto “played by Yudina” which he had heard the previous night. There was no such record; her broadcast was live. Too terrified to admit this – “no one ever knew what the consequences might be” – the Committee summoned Yudina and an orchestra after dark to produce a disc. Two conductors froze with fright; a third was drafted to finish the recording. A single copy was pressed and sent to Stalin that morning.

The next week Yudina received “at Stalin’s order” a thank-you envelope from the Kremlin containing 20,000 rubles. She wrote back: I thank you Iosif Vissarionovich, for your aid. I will pray for you day and night and ask the Lord to forgive your great sins before the people and the country. The Lord is merciful and He’ll forgive you. I gave the money to the church that I attend. As Shostakovich noted, this was “a suicide note.” A warrant for her arrest was laid before the dictator. He set it aside.

The record apparently was spinning on Stalin’s turntable when his stroke-paralyzed body was discovered -- the last music he apparently heard before he died.16

Like that of Sofronitsky and Shostakovich, Yudina’s blazing talent became a beacon, fueled at an exorbitant price.

Yudina, c. 1930. Yudina, c. 1965.

Sofronitsky, c. 1925. Sofronitsky, c. 1955.

Shostakovich, 1925. 1950. 1974.

1 Primary sources include: Solomon Volkov, St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (tr. Antonina Bouis, Free Press, Simon & Schuster; NY, 1997); Moynahan, Siege and Symphony, op cit; Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (Faber & Faber, London, 2006).

2 See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(art) (accessed 8-31-16).

3 See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Meyerhold; http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/cinema- and-theater/vsevolod-meyerhold/ (both accessed 8-31-16).

4 Based on Gogol’s 1836 anti-bureaucratic story about a barber who finds in his breakfast a nose that turns into a haughty, unapproachable State Councillor. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nose_(opera); http://www.shmoop.com/nose-gogol/summary.html (both accessed 8-30-16).

5 “The cultural convulsions of 1936 were the culmination of a process [by] which Stalin, the supreme manipulator of public opinion, shaped Soviet art and literature according to his . . . propaganda goals. . . . The terms ‘proletarian culture’ and ‘fellow travelers of the revolution’ . . . were replaced by . . . ‘Soviet culture’ and ‘Soviet writers.’ . . . it was officially announced that the road to development of Soviet culture was to be realism, and not ordinary but ‘socialist’ realism . . . .for Soviet cultural forces to glorify socialism in traditionally realistic terms. An atmosphere was created in which any . . . experimentation in art was declared ‘formalism,’ and ‘formalism’ became the worst label one could hang on a writer, artist, or composer. "Volkov, op cit. at pp. 411-412.

6 Moynahan, op cit. pp. 41-42 (Lyubov Shaporina, director of the Leningrad Puppet Theatre and wife of composer Yuri Shaporov).

7 “The first audience of the Fifth Symphony entered the hall dressed to the nines . . . wondering what the ‘disgraced’ Shostakovich would offer up for their judgment. But from the very first sounds, reflexive, jagged, filled with nervous tension, the music captured them . . . .when the music ended, many were weeping. . . . The orchestra had long left the stage, but the audience would not leave the hall. They understood that this music was about them, about their lives. . . The Fifth Symphony from the beginning was interpreted by Leningraders as a work about the Great Terror. Of course, it was impossible to say that.” Volkov, op cit. pp. 423-424 passim.

8 See, e.g., Moynahan, pp. 45-49; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._5_(Shostakovich) (accessed 8-30- 16).

9 Shostakovich’s “desk drawer” for compositions that only could be performed “later” included Rayok: The Antiformalist Paradise, a cantata mocking the 1948 decree. Rayok includes quotes from speeches by Party bigwigs and from Stalin’s favorite song. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Formalist_Rayok (accessed 8-31-16).

10 See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Shostakovich (accessed 8-2016).

11 Volkov, op cit. p. 365 passim.

13 Yudina, op cit. and Wikipedia ‘Sofrinitsky’ above, respectively.

14 Shostakovich, Testimony, op cit. p. __; quoted in (e.g.) Jenny Wade, “Maria Yudina” (n.d.), http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/maria-yudina/ (accessed 5-2016).

15 Volkov, op.cit., pp. 366-367 (authors’ bracketed interpolations from other passages).

16 Testimony, op cit. pp. ___; Volkov, p. 367. Authors’ note: This tale, long thought to be apocryphal, has been corroborated by multiple sources, including an apparent release of the actual 1948 recording. See, e.g., comments to “Maria Yudina Plays Mozart Concerto No. 23 in A Major,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riRK7P_ynfc (accessed 9-1-16); David Fanning, ‘Maria Yudina, Volume 1,’ International Piano Quarterly (Spring 1999), pp. 85–

86, on line at ______(reviewing Dante HPC 121, including Mozart’s Concerto No. 23 performed by Yudina and the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra under Aleksandr Gauk (matrix number 014983/9, recorded in 1948)). The recording is available at http://www.mariayudina.com/index.cfm.