Heinrich Neuhaus. A life beyond music 9781580469326, 1580469329

Table of contents :
IntroductionCosmopolitan WanderingsA Return to RussiaBecoming a Poet of a Belated Silver AgeHeinrich the Great: Between Russian and International MusingsNot Ordinary PedagogyConclusionDiscographySelect Glossary of NamesBibliography

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HEINRICH NEUHAUS

A Life beyond Music

Heinrich Neuhaus

Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles of Interest Bedrich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda Kelly St. Pierre Busoni as Pianist Grigory Kogan Translated and annotated by Svetlana Belsky Janáček beyond the Borders Derek Katz John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page Drew Massey Not Russian Enough?: Nationalism and Cosmopolitan in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera Rutger Helmers Opera and Ideology in Prague Brian S. Locke Reflections of an American Harpsichordist: Unpublished Memoirs, Essays, and Lectures of Ralph Kirkpatrick Edited by Meredith Kirkpatrick Schumann’s Piano Cycles and the Novels of Jean Paul Erika Reiman Samuel Barber Remembered: A Centenary Tribute Edited by Peter Dickinson Wagner and Wagnerism in Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic Provinces: Reception, Enthusiasm, Cult Hannu Salmi A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series may be found on the University of Rochester Press website, www.urpress.com

Heinrich Neuhaus A Life beyond Music

Maria Razumovskaya

Copyright © 2018 by Maria Razumovskaya All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2018 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-932-6 ISSN: 1071-9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Razumovskaya, Maria, author. Title: Heinrich Neuhaus : a life beyond music / Maria Razumovskaya. Other titles: Eastman studies in music ; v. 148. Description: Rochester : University of Rochester Press, 2018. | Series: Eastman studies in music ; v. 148 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018025834 | ISBN 9781580469326 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Neĭgauz, Genrikh Gustavovich, 1888–1964. | Pianists—Russia (Federation)—Biography. Classification: LCC ML417.N34 R39 2018 | DDC 786.2092 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025834 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Contents Acknowledgments

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Editorial Notes

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Introduction

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Cosmopolitan Wanderings

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A Return to Russia

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3

Becoming a Poet of a Belated Silver Age

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Heinrich the Great: Between Russian and International Musings

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Not Ordinary Pedagogy

147

Conclusion

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Discography

177

Select Glossary of Names

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments Without the generosity of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award (Royal College of Music) I would never have embarked upon a serious study focusing on Heinrich Neuhaus. After completing the thesis, however, I was left with many more questions than I ever anticipated. I am therefore extremely grateful to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama—especially Cormac Newark and Alessandro Timossi—who believed in the importance of finding the answers to these questions, and supported the further research that allowed me to complete this book. I would like express my sincere thanks to those who helped me along the way: Barbara Mühlenhoff, a distant relative of Neuhaus who shared her knowledge of the family and graciously gave me legal permission to access restricted archival materials; Pauline Fairclough, Marina Frolova-Walker, Amanda Glauert, Raymond Holden, Natasha Loges, Geoffrey Norris, Jan Smaczny, and Patrick Zuk, who read chapters and commented on drafts; Aoife Shanley and Shona Dale knew how to ask the right questions to get my thoughts together. Philip Ross Bullock read the entire manuscript and was unfailingly encouraging and insightful. The immense patience of Dmitri Alexeev and Tatiana Sarkisova in reading several different versions of the manuscript was matched by countless stimulating conversations. The staff of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), the Vladimir Dahl Russian State Literary Museum, and the archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) went above and beyond the call of duty to help me discover previously unknown facets of Neuhaus’s life. Therese Malhame did a sterling job with the copyediting. Lastly, I would like to thank Sonia Kane, Julia Cook, Ralph Locke, and the anonymous readers for their support and encouragement.

Editorial Notes Dates Prior to the Revolution, Russia followed the Julian or “Old Style” calendar. On January 24, 1918, a decree was issued to adopt the Gregorian or “New Style” calendar used in Western Europe. Thus, Wednesday, January 31, 1918, was to be followed by Thursday, February 14, 1918, in order to realign the calendar by thirteen days (having been twelve days behind throughout the nineteenth century). The date of the “October Revolution,” October 25, 1917, according to the “Julian Calendar” is therefore equivalent to November 7, 1917. All dates are given in “New Style” unless otherwise marked by the abbreviation OS.

Translation and Transliteration For those confident in reading Cyrillic, no transliteration system will ever be completely satisfactory. I have used a modified version of the system The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in the main text because it allows for the designation of the Cyrillic ы with the character ï, and the Cyrillic й as y. Modifications apply to proper nouns where the ending ий is replaced by y (Lunacharsky rather than Lunacharskiy, Anatoly rather than Anatoliy, Yevgeny instead of Yevgeniy); and soft (ь) and hard (ъ) signs are omitted. Familiar Anglicized form is used for the first names Sergei (not Sergey), Nikolai (not Nikolay), Dmitri (not Dmitry), Sofia (not Sofiya), Maria (not Mariya), and Alexander (not Aleksandr). Russian names of Germanic origin are not transliterated in the main text: Heinrich Felix Neuhaus (not Genrikh Feliks Neygauz), Gustav Wilhelmovich (not Gustav Vil’gel’movich), Goldenweiser (not Gol’denveizer), Fichtenholz (not Fikhtengol’ts), and Richter (not Rikhter). In cases where there is a commonly adopted transliteration, this is used in place of New Grove (for instance, Tchaikovsky). Strict transliteration according to New Grove applies for titles of works published in Russian, and throughout the bibliography and notes. German place-names on maps have been stated in the version that was widely common in the early

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twentieth century: e.g., Calcar rather than the now-standard Kalkar. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Because of the frequent use of ellipsis in Neuhaus’s writing as a deliberate stylistic feature to give emphasis, these are included in the translations. Thus, in all quoted material, editorial omissions are shown in brackets as follows: [. . .].

Introduction Every epoch writes its legends. Already within his lifetime Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888–1964) transcended the definition of pianist and pedagogue. Known as “Heinrich the Great” (Genrikh Velikiy), he became a symbol immortalized by Russia’s greatest poets including Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and, in the younger generation, Bella Akhmadulina. As he toured the Soviet Union Neuhaus was honored to find that his portraits graced the walls of conservatories and stood on the nation’s countless pianos in apartments “like icons,” and that his entrance onto the stage was greeted with long ovations and “tears of joy.”1 Despite the era’s political tensions and limited interchange of information, at the height of the Cold War students from as far afield as America sought to be admitted into his famous class in Room 29 at the Moscow Conservatory where he taught up to his death in a professorship spanning some forty-two years. It is difficult to describe the magnitude of what Neuhaus represented to those around him across the vast expanses of the USSR. Being born in Imperial Russia into a multiethnic family, he returned to Russia in 1914 having essentially spent the first twenty-six years of his life living abroad in Germany, Italy, and Austria. Like his great friend Artur Rubinstein, with whom he kept close company and even shared the same pedagogue, Neuhaus had intended to make Europe his base from which to launch himself as a musician of international renown. Both pianists were marked by a magnetic charisma, élan, and a highly erudite but dandy manner that captivated those around them. Yet the First World War set into action a sequence of events that poignantly demonstrated how differently fate would unfold for these two friends, separated by new borders. Rubinstein, free to travel across the globe, became an international superstar. Neuhaus became trapped by the hotbed of unrest that would drag his homeland into revolution and civil war. With the window of cultural exchange narrowing under the tightening grip of censorship that signaled the beginnings of the Iron Curtain’s inexorable descent, Neuhaus lost his contact with the world that he was expecting to conquer. His meteoric rise to fame within the USSR, however, proved that it was not a lost connection in the eyes of those around him. For millions across the enormous, secretive, and closed nation, Neuhaus became a living symbol of a world beyond its borders and,

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through the glimpses he offered into it, extended the hope of their becoming a part of it. Famously, in summarizing his own significance, Neuhaus proudly devised the following rather intriguing words: “An average pianist, a good musician, an excellent artist, and not an ordinary man committed to Good.”2 The description of himself as a mediocre pianist was, of course, a gesture charged with irony. In the context of the Soviet Union’s vivacious and inimitable music scene, Neuhaus was described as one of the most captivating performers of his time. Far from being an occasional performer as generally thought of in the West,3 Neuhaus played solo recitals and concertos across the width and breadth of the Soviet Union, at times giving up to seven different programs in one concert season, and he regularly appeared in the main concert halls of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Tbilisi. His concerts were followed by an adoring public, many of whom were turned away in droves since tickets sold out months in advance and virtually no “returns” became available. Neuhaus’s volatile temperament had the capacity to deliver interpretations of “phenomenal beauty” and “inimitable wonder” that left his listeners in a trancelike state, showering him with poetry written in his honor.4 On a bad day it could lead him to thump the keyboard with his fist mid-performance and upon leaving the platform exclaim: “Well, today nooothing works!”5 However, his complete absence from Western concert stages from 1914, except for a handful of occasions in the Soviet Bloc, has meant that his accomplishments as a pianist have been reduced to legends. Outside Russia, the magnetism of Neuhaus’s pedagogical approach was also fated to remain veiled in an aura of mystery. Never setting foot outside the Soviet Bloc, Neuhaus’s fame in the West was ignited by the rise to stardom of his two “redheads”: his students Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. Their playing had sent rapid shockwaves across Europe, America, and Japan, whetting the appetite of Western audiences to know more about the elusive phenomenon behind these two titans, and indeed, the seemingly endless stream of Soviet competition laureates appearing across the globe. Neuhaus’s book, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï: Zapiski pedagoga (About the Art of Piano Playing: Notes of a Pedagogue) ([1958] 1961), sold out in the USSR within days of its reaching the shelves. Abroad, during Neuhaus’s final years, it was translated into at least six languages. Struggles ensued to keep up with public demand for the work both on home soil and internationally, with American copies known to sell at the time for over a hundred dollars.6 Despite the direct effect of his work being constrained by the limitations of his time, Neuhaus’s sphere of influence was remarkably wide. Beyond Gilels and Richter, and discounting the “hundreds of musically defective students” Neuhaus joked about having passed through his hands,7 many of those who

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studied with him became influential artists and pedagogues in their own right, including Semyon Benditsky, Leonid Brumberg, Anton Ginzburg, Vera Gornostaeva, Teodor Gutman, Vladimir Krainev, Radu Lupu, Alexei Lyubimov, Yevgeny Malinin, Berta Marants, Yevgeny Mogilevsky, Alexei Nasedkin, Lev Naumov, Stanislav Neuhaus, Vera Razumovskaya, Alexander Slobodyanik, Anatoly Vedernikov, Eliso Virsaladze, and Yakov Zak. In his survey and collection of translated articles, The Russian Piano School (2007), Christopher Barnes summarized: “During the mid-twentieth century, Neuhaus, [Alexander] Goldenweiser, and [Konstantin] Igumnov were doyens and central pillars of the Moscow Conservatoire piano department, and between them, directly or indirectly, they shaped and polished all the major Russian stars of the last half-century; via pupils they have passed on their legacy to subsequent generations.”8 In the USSR the pianist and musicologist Yakov Milstein likewise wrote: “The name Heinrich Neuhaus is inseparable from the successes of the Soviet Piano School.”9 Ironically, however, the politicized lens of the Soviet competition machine, and Neuhaus’s prominence at the helm of what was perceived to be a pedagogical system that seemed to be so efficient in training pianists capable of dominating the competition rankings, has become one of the most difficult hindrances to a contemporary re-evaluation of his wider significance. Subconsciously at least, the Cold-War prejudices against the general trend of Soviet-era pianism—summarized by the American art critic Harold Schonberg as “inbred and even rather naïve [. . .] Russian teachers such as Heinrich Neuhaus produced formidable instrumentalists; [. . .] good musical sportsmen rather than great artists”10—have still not been universally dispelled. There is no denying that, as demonstrated in great detail in Kiril Tomoff’s recent study of Soviet instrumentalists, efficiency and reliability were the main criteria for selecting potential competition participants and artists permitted to accept foreign engagements at a governmental level.11 Unwittingly though, while this increasing knowledge of the mechanisms that positioned performers as strategic commodities within the USSR’s wider Communist propaganda machine is vital to our fuller appreciation of the culture of the epoch,12 much more needs to be done to direct our attention toward the artistic integrity and independent intent of individual performers caught up in one way or another in its cogs. It would be wrong to claim that Neuhaus was completely immune to the effects of Soviet cultural policy and its bureaucracy. No matter how strongly he felt that socialist cultural policy was stifling, like everyone else, throughout much of his working life he was aware of the presence of a “preferred” manner of expression (“speaking Bolshevik,” as Stephen Kotkin put it in his survey of the epoch).13 Likewise, in situations were Neuhaus sought to challenge the

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status quo, particularly in print, he could be sure that the censor’s glare was never far away—eroding away the biting sting of his critiques, or even silencing “unprintable” thoughts entirely.14 Even among the illustrious roll call of names of those who sought to be associated with him were also those from whom Neuhaus decidedly maintained a wary distance: not least Tikhon Khrennikov who stood at the helm of the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991— an infamous antagonist of countless composers including Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, and Nikolai Myaskovsky, who forcefully shaped decades of Soviet cultural policy. Indeed, the realization that such shady figures had also at one time been under Neuhaus’s tutelage provides a stark reminder of just how terrifyingly close-knit the environment was that shrouded artists in the Soviet Union. It is easy, however, to allow such aspects to overshadow the significance of what Neuhaus’s artistry meant to his public, students, and the era’s greatest musicians, writers, artists, and thinkers whose paths crossed with his. For such a vibrant persona who basked in the attention of an adoring public, those around him knew remarkably little about his private and artistic inner world, and still less is known today. It will be seen that his was a world at odds with many mainstream currents of his time, and yet one that resonated with the concerns of the intelligentsia who so respected him. Intriguingly, for an artist who was so acutely driven by a wish to define himself within history, self-reflection ultimately became a lens through which to change the perspectives of his time. Unveiling this process has been the central aim of this book. Neuhaus was not an empty vessel that simply took in ideas. Rather, his selective appropriation of influences, and the complex process of their melding and transformation, contributed to a unique and highly subjective aesthetic landscape. Within this fluid and constantly evolving inner world carefully verified fact was far less important than intent. History was not simply accepted, it was there to be molded and changed by personality (lichnost’).15 Since for Neuhaus history became a reflection of an idealized self, it allowed him to relate to other personalities across the boundaries of time and space. Forging his career in a state that required its citizens to heel to its socialist ideology and march in time with the “progress” of the forward-looking Soviet Man, Neuhaus stood fast with the bygone ideals of Romanticism and Russia’s Silver Age. These influences merged with his innate cosmopolitanism, and found themselves displaced into the twentieth century. Therefore, without trivializing the trauma that official policy thrust upon the arts, and the limitations suffered by Soviet citizens particularly in Stalinist Russia, which formed the backdrop for much of Neuhaus’s career, this study of his life and career seeks not only to finally reveal the man behind the legend but also to contribute to the understanding of a far richer and nuanced territory beyond the well-documented terror and hostility of politics that characterized the era’s musical life.

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Political Contexts For a long time now the merits of creative individuals whose careers positioned them within the borders of the Soviet Union have been measured by our own desires, or abilities, to discern their achievements as part of a sustained and premeditated narrative of dissidence against the state. Unsurprisingly the resulting tendency to focus on the crippling effects of cultural policy and its purges has often presented a dichotomy between the freedom of the West, and—save for a handful of defiant names—the artistic wasteland of the USSR. The apparent suicides of the poets Sergei Yesenin (1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1930) signaled the start of chilling repressions and purges precisely at the time that Neuhaus’s own career had just begun to gather momentum. The ensuing slaughter of millions of ordinary working people, eminent scientists, high-ranking Communist officials, and the vast majority of army officers at the hands of the state was part of the same bloodbath that would claim the lives of the country’s greatest artistic talents, and silence many others. With Stalin’s view that writers are the “engineers of human souls” the resulting campaign of paranoia has been estimated to have exterminated nearly a third of the total membership of the Union of Soviet Writers between 1936 and 1939: over six hundred people.16 Among the victims of Stalin’s purges were many of Neuhaus’s close acquaintances, friends, and colleagues: the multiple arrests and subsequent death of the poet Osip Mandelstam in a Gulag (1938), the execution of the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1940), and writer Isaac Babel (1940) were only the tip of the iceberg. Others, such as Neuhaus’s dear friend Boris Pasternak, who had initially looked optimistically on Stalin’s promises of social reform, were hounded by the state and lived in fear of the infamous midnight arrests. This reign of terror, which relented and was eclipsed only by the greater bloodshed of the Second World War, indeed makes it hard to find reasons to disagree with such a view. Early émigré commentators on Soviet musical history, including Juri Jelagin, Nicolas Nabokov, and Boris Schwarz, have undeniably contributed to the portrayal of the regime that extended these repressions into musical life through a calculated long-term campaign. By the official denunciation of Dmitri Shostakovich in 1936,17 the implementation of a “centralized totalitarian control of the arts” has been widely accepted to have affected all musical life—its proportions, according to Richard Taruskin, exerted a degree of “extreme moral duress” mirrored only by torture victims.18 Harrowing as these events were, it is nonetheless questionable to continue presenting the customary case for seeing the Soviet Union engulfed by a “system of total, all-embracing control over the actions of all cultural figures” zealously enforced by the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB.19 It is impossible to ignore the fact that for the Soviet cultural intelligentsia life was a

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lottery. There can be no logical explanation why individuals including Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Maria Yudina survived, while Meyerhold and Babel did not. Furthermore, a growing body of research in recent years, including that of Pauline Fairclough, Laurel Fay, Amy Nelson, Peter Schmelz, and Patrick Zuk, has begun to compel an evaluation of artistic achievement in the Soviet Union beyond the hypothesis of totalitarian political control by highlighting the secondary, if not tertiary, level of importance attached to music by senior party members.20 These studies have already shown that given the vagueness of official policy cases such as Shostakovich’s denunciation, although traumatic, were arbitrary and relatively few and far between. For performers and pedagogues like Neuhaus, the abstract nature of instrumental music guaranteed a greater distancing from the outside scrutiny of the regime’s representatives who found it difficult to censor or control that which they neither understood nor could assign a meaning to. For instance, the fact that Neuhaus never left the Soviet Bloc was not exceptional. The “paranoid obsession amongst the highest-ranking Soviet politicians with exerting tight control over who could travel abroad, where, and when,” described by Kiril Tomoff in relation to musicians such as Sviatoslav Richter, did not simply affect the arts.21 It was a crippling system applied to all citizens of the Soviet Union regardless of profession or context, which vetted all potential travelers on ideological grounds, and upon granting permission to travel, provided them with an allocated sustenance allowance while raking in their foreign earnings (which had to be dutifully surrendered to the Soviet state). What made Neuhaus an anachronism as far as prevailing contemporary narratives of Soviet life are concerned, however, was the incongruous situation whereby as a German by nationality and an official enemy of the state (following his detention in Lubyanka prison in 1941–42), who was known for his liberal tongue and for keeping close company with many of the regime’s blacklisted personae non gratae, he was still one of the most lauded and influential artistic personalities of his time. Therefore, as already indicated by Zuk in relation to Soviet compositional activity, it is necessary to look at such figures and their achievements more widely than the “simplistic schemata of coercion, capitulation, and artistic compromise.”22 A redirected attitude is all the more necessary given the widespread confusion within the party itself over the Communist position with regard to the merits of studying the art of performance, which had drastically slowed political infiltration into this sphere. Simply put, the performance of classical music was an area whose compatibility with Communist life was regarded with suspicion, and thus avoided: “So you finish the conservatory and join an orchestra where you will spend your whole life piping away on the flute. What will become of you? Would you really become a Communist? The republic needs workers for cooperatives, engineers, agronomists, pilots and social workers. Rather than

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do something decisively important to economic construction would you rather study a luxury, strumming an instrument for your sole listening pleasure?”23 As investigated by Lynn Sargeant, conservatories were of “little concern to the State which remained focused on the universities and technical institutions.”24 As an illustration of this, the institution with which Neuhaus was affiliated for almost half a century was able to exist largely in a sheltered microclimate of its own. While Stalin’s paranoia ratcheted up the tension that escalating into the purges of the 1930s and Great Terror of 1936–38, at the same time the Moscow Conservatory was actually undergoing a phase whereby it was returning a substantial degree of normality to the undertaking of its affairs. Traditionally the directorship of the institution had always been in the hands of a distinguished musician. In the twentieth century this included Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1906–22) and Alexander Goldenweiser (1922–24). In April 1929, however, it had been taken away from Konstantin Igumnov who had been serving from 1924. Following the orders of the current head of the arts division of Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat for Education), the Polish revolutionary Feliks Kon, it was given to his deputy Boleslav Pshibishevsky (Bolesław Przybyszewski). An outsider to the higher echelons of the music profession and the conservatory itself, Pshibishevsky had worked for the state as a school inspector. He was an ardent champion of socialist policy who immediately went about renaming the institution as the “Feliks Kon Higher School of Music” in order to cleanse it from the implied connotations of bourgeois practices and resistance to socialist change. Pshibishevsky set about sacrificing the conservatory’s musical and research activities in favor of a rigorous program of political studies, and forbade all exams and other forms of grading. So that students would not be distracted from socialist ideals by perfecting their musicianship, even the famous goldengraved marble slabs with names of alumni awarded the Great Gold Medal were removed. While core faculty members such as Neuhaus were never in danger of redundancy, the students’ proletarian background was vetted, and those found to be from allegedly bourgeois backgrounds were demonstratively expelled.25 The role of the institution was not to produce soloists or specialists in a narrow field of musicology, but to create a “musician of the masses” (muzïkant-massovik) and a “musician of the society” (muzïkant-obshchestvennik). The faculty stood aghast observing how standards began to drop. Thankfully, this dark cloud did not cast its presence for long—in 1931 Pshibishevsky was relieved of his duties.26 With the leadership between 1932 and 1934 falling to the terminally ill Stanislav Shatsky, also a member of Narkompros but a former graduate of the conservatory, not only were measures taken to immediately restore the institution’s name, but music classes and academic life were reinstated (including the introduction of even more stringent examinations), and students were protected from obligatory student brigades

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sent to work on the USSR’s collective farms. Symbolically, the recently removed portraits of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Chopin—pronounced by Pshibishevsky, alongside Skryabin, Rachmaninov, and Schumann, to be decadent, antiproletarian composers—were rehung in the conservatory’s Small Concert Hall, now once again placed alongside those of the officially approved forefathers of proletarian music: Mussorgsky and Beethoven. After Shatsky’s death in 1934, the directorship was given to Neuhaus. By now all traces of Pshibishevsky’s efforts were completely eradicated, and under Neuhaus the piano faculty in particular went on to achieve a general standard of professionalism that had previously been difficult to imagine. More importantly though, Neuhaus’s directorship returned the Moscow Conservatory once again to its unique position as the only institution of higher education in the Soviet Union not presided over by party members. Despite the resilience and relatively sheltered aspect enjoyed by the Moscow Conservatory in terms of party policy, however, it cannot be ignored that microclimates themselves buzz with internal politics. The piano faculty was presided over by the already mentioned trio of Igumnov, Goldenweiser, and their younger colleague Neuhaus for nearly half a century. All three possessed distinct, strong personalities with very different tastes and working styles. Over time these different approaches almost became legends in themselves with new fresh-faced students already stepping into the institution for the first time as self-proclaimed “Goldenweiserites,” “Igumnovites,” or “Neuhausians.” With students spending many individual hours even over the course of a single week with their professors and dedicating most of the remaining time arduously preparing for the next meeting, fierce loyalties developed. These loyalties became common sources of both friendly and less friendly altercations between students. Over time these narratives have contributed to colorful stories that rarely dwell on the value and influence of the artistic pursuits of these highly mythologized pianist-pedagogues. Adding to this mix were the gleefully exchanged snippets of gossip expected in any institution. Some of the gossip items most relished by staff and students alike were the latest quips arising from the well-known professional friction between Goldenweiser and Neuhaus. The former, a friend of Lev Tolstoy, was one of the most respected “elders” of the conservatory: a serious man with a stern expression, utterly dedicated to his students and the institution, but known as something of a pedant and “intellectual” musician. The latter, in stark contrast to Goldenweiser’s more contemplative nature, was a vivid raconteur, his appearance retaining something of the dandy with his characteristic foppish hair and colorful cravats. Neuhaus was lively and flamboyant, and little was premeditated in his spontaneous teaching and performance styles. The two mocked each other’s playing, but in addition, Goldenweiser’s sardonic remarks about Neuhaus “making passes” at, and

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giving higher marks to, coquettish female students caused as much amusement as Neuhaus’s ripostes—“no students, no telephones, no televisions, and no Goldenweisers. In a word, Paradise.”27 The eventual loss of this atmosphere with the successive deaths of this trio of professors caused Emil Gilels to lament the eerily sterile calm that replaced these rivaling clans: “Back then we had arguments and direction!”28

Personal Outlooks, Too Human Beyond surface divisions it is the highly subjective nature of Neuhaus’s outlooks, coupled with his authoritative position, that has been the most inspiring and yet problematic. At its most complex, it is this subjectivity that makes Neuhaus such a vital figure in the reappraisal of contemporary perceptions of artistic life in the Soviet era. Drawing from his many friendships with some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the age, his subjectivity allowed him to define and practice art from an anachronistic perspective that both challenged and resonated with the wider intellectual community, but stood apart in scope and purpose from Soviet policy. Unveiling these dimensions of Neuhaus’s subjectivity is the key aim of this study. Although Neuhaus’s subjectivity has been a source of admiration to his supporters, it has also proved frustrating to his critics. Indeed, the fractures from this divide run as deeply today as ever, and it is no exaggeration that even today the simple mention of Neuhaus’s name can send some musicians into a state of blind fury. Central to this has been the notorious issue of Neuhaus’s incessantly favorable presentation of his student Sviatoslav Richter as the pianist “primus inter pares,” with Emil Gilels (and indeed other students and pianists) coming across almost as a second best.29 The way in which many have tackled it through numerous writings and interviews in recent years in Russia has divided public opinion on Neuhaus—with a strong “Gilels camp” admonishing Neuhaus’s actions, and an equally vocal “Richter camp” admonishing Gilels’s.30 Richter himself, did much to fuel this fire and bring what was largely a localized Muscovite issue into the Western consciousness. In his interview with Bruno Monsaingeon, Richter announced: With Neuhaus [Gilels] behaved appallingly badly. Towards the end of Neuhaus’s life, he did something quite dreadful. He wrote to the papers and also to Neuhaus in person, saying he’d never been his pupil. He disowned him. Neuhaus for his part worshiped him, but was always very frank with him and sometimes, of course would criticize him [. . .]. When I heard what he’d done, I refused to acknowledge Gilels in the street. Neuhaus was terribly affected by it and died soon afterwards.31

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In this case, as in many others, Richter was given to elaborating the truth. Yet, whereas Gilels had not in fact written to the press, the mention of this letter haunts contemporary narratives on the Neuhaus–Gilels relationship. The pianist-pedagogue Viktor Merzhanov suggested that Gilels’s wound from his professor was deep, and stemmed from his years of being Neuhaus’s student at the Moscow Conservatory’s Meisterschule between 1935 and 1938: “For a year and a half he went to Neuhaus for lessons but so . . . gloomily. Neuhaus treated him like a first year student (I am a witness to this) [but] Gilels was a world-class virtuoso! Gilels tolerated it, but then went to Igumnov. For the last year and a half he played only for Igumnov and never went to Neuhaus’s class.”32 According to Merzhanov, Gilels had shown him a letter he had received from Neuhaus, written while in the hospital a year or so before his death, in which he spoke of the uneasy burden he felt over the cooling of their relationship. Given the fact that Gilels had had little pedagogical contact with Neuhaus, Merzhanov said that Gilels’s response, which he showed him, therefore simply asked Neuhaus not to call him his student.33 While such an emotionally tense situation on both sides is obviously going to stoke the temptation to form a judgment, it is a largely futile exercise and one that Neuhaus himself had wanted to extinguish as inferred from his request (dutifully carried out by his wife Sylvia Eichinger) that Gilels’s letter be burned when his personal correspondence was handed over to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art archives after his death. Regardless of how tempting it might be to take sides or a judgmental stance on Neuhaus’s inability to be more diplomatic when displaying his favoritism, in such a debate it is necessary to keep in mind Lev Barenboim’s words that issues such as the “Neuhaus–Gilels” saga are complicated: “We must note straight away, it needs a great deal of tactfulness.”34 However, the continuing myriad of rifts that have in some way colored contemporary receptions of Neuhaus remain, on the whole, driven by the experiences—either personal or profession—of people who knew him. The damaging consequence of the fixation on such issues of internal politics and hierarchies is that to date it has precluded serious attempts at deeper analysis regarding Neuhaus’s artistic persona. Thus, many have deciphered the elaborately subjective nature of Neuhaus’s worldview, with its inherent capacity to upset others, as a smoke screen designed merely to charm an audience, and as something that covered a multitude of sins that led many to blindly “idolize everything associated with his name.”35 It is, needless to say, a delicate balance. Today’s more objectified environment may make us feel uncomfortable about accepting apparent injustices related to Neuhaus’s outspoken, sometimes factually misplaced views—faults that Neuhaus recognized and brushed away by calling them symptoms of the Nietzschean “allzumenschlich” (too human).36 Rather than demand objectivity of Neuhaus, it is in fact more important to understand that his subjectivity

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pervaded everything he did in a way that becomes integral to understanding him both as a person and an artist. First and foremost, his subjectivity is the only key we have to understanding his unique musicianship. At the height of Neuhaus’s fame as a pianist in 1926, the musicologist Grigory Kogan noted: “All of Neuhaus’s music, down to the smallest details, comes from his person. All of his person, down to the smallest most secretive caches, is embodied in his music.”37 Despite this recognition no significant attempt has been made to date to uncover how Neuhaus’s personal circumstances may have translated into his artistic decisions and tastes. It is such issues that will form the central line of inquiry of this book. The question inevitably arises of the necessity of such an investigation. Surely, to understand Neuhaus as an artist it should be an easy enough task to filter out the inaccuracies or suspect ideas from his idiosyncratic outlooks. To illustrate the nature of the problem, let us consider the following example. Merzhanov unveiled his own frustration concerning Neuhaus’s subjectivity when he heard him teaching Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Minor from the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier to Anatoly Vedernikov: Neuhaus told him that in this music one can sense the image of cypresses. Vedernikov was completely confused as to cypresses had to do with it. He asked: “Heinrich Gustavovich, why cypresses?” [To which Neuhaus replied] “Well, go do some reading, think about this image.” Sometime later I, Volodya Tchaikovsky, Tolya [Vedernikov], and Neuhaus were leaving the room together [and Vedernikov] again asked: “Heinrich Gustavovich, well explain to me then, how and why cypresses—go on, explain it to me . . .” Neuhaus turned red and flustered, and turning to him said: “You . . . !” And he left. There were many instances like this.38

In his own slightly different account of this, Vedernikov said he was irate when Neuhaus proposed this “image of cypresses in an Italian cemetery,” and challenged him about it: “When he spoke like this about the Romantics it was one thing, but to say something like this about Bach! [. . .] We had a big argument. He said that I don’t understand anything, and that I am an idiot, so I left and slammed the door.”39 As indicated by Grigory Gordon, who also studied with Neuhaus, Vedernikov was not the only pianist to “slam to the door” when it came to this kind of subjective understanding of interpretation. It is indeed a peculiar question: Why did Neuhaus vest these specific images with so much power, and why was he so sensitively protective of them? One can search in vain for an occurrence in Bach’s biography and its connection in one way or another to cypresses. The answers to these questions therefore seem impossible to ascertain unless it can be deduced what these images might have meant to Neuhaus himself. Even on a very basic level, Neuhaus first came across this mournful piece in his youth in Italy while reassessing his attitude to

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the nobility of the human spirit through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (as will be discussed in chapter 1). Neuhaus believed that this time of studying Bach’s music alongside Nietzsche’s philosophy contributed to the apotheosis of his powers of artistic perception. On occasion he had spoken of how the austere and straight cypress trees are an integral part of the magisterial stillness of the Italian cemetery unfolding into the horizon. Seeing the cemetery’s white marble monuments glistening under a cloudless sky only to change to black once the sun shone behind them at dusk, turned his thoughts to Nietzsche’s dialectic explorations of genius and art. Perhaps then, the somber chords vertically punctuating the saraband rhythm of the work, evoked for him the effect on him of this first emotional experience of such a landscape. More poignantly though, Italy was a spiritual home for Neuhaus. Making this remark in the final years of his life, many of those around him knew that Italy was the one place he passionately, but hopelessly, longed to see once more before the end. There were many other images that, like the cypresses, symbolized for him the musical essence of a work and that have long since become inseparable elements of memories of Neuhaus. Susceptible to suspicion and, on occasion to ridicule, they were rarely whimsical offerings. These apparently random, superfluous, and unfathomable constructions carried personal ramifications that only begin to take shape when viewed in the context of Neuhaus’s life. They refer to a deeply private world that manifests itself only through a web of associations, which, taken out of a rich context and stripped of their personal significance, might mean little to the onlooker. Devising a term for this private world, Neuhaus called it an artist’s “autopsychography” (avtopsikhografiya).

Autopsychography: A Life beyond Music Neuhaus’s entire approach toward pianism was built around the concept that “first one looks for the image and then the tactile sensation.”40 This image was an elusive scaffold that supported the process of creating an interpretation without ever seeking to define the inner essence of the music itself: “I ask you to remember that I never ‘illustrate’ music. I say [an image] can bring about the spiritual and visual impression; symbolize it. But music is only ever that music.”41 The image itself consisted of a complex spiritual fabric made up of the pianist’s experiences, both emotional and intellectual. This emphasis on lived experience (perezhivanie), or more correctly “re-lived experience,” was a distinctly Russian aesthetic—made internationally famous in the writings of the theater and opera director Konstantin Stanislavsky—that had its beginnings in the philosophy of late imperial Russia and is deeply rooted in the peculiarities of the Russian language itself.42 Its connotations were more profound than a simple cognitive assimilation of facts and knowledge,

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instead they encompassed the beholder’s emotional reaction to these. Rather than being a matter for the mind, this specific kind of experience was the domain of the soul. Therefore, while the spirit or idea of an artwork always transcended definition in any manner other than itself, its expression came through the evocation of emotion. This in turn was a process arising from of an artist’s re-lived experiences. As summarized for instance by the music critic Leonid Sabaneyev: “One must experience [perezhit’] the idea that gives life to a creative work in order to feel and understand it.”43 Interpreting a work for Neuhaus meant finding those elements within his own autobiography that resonated most appropriately with its spirit. Applying a crude analogy, if a musical work is imagined to be an ornate vessel, its contents or spirit are poured in from the genius of its composer. It falls upon the interpreter, however, to re-create that vessel, and deducing its contents as best he can, replenish them with his own spirit. Every autobiographic occurrence that has left its distinct mark on the interpreter’s soul—the artist’s “autopsychography”—is a possible ingredient for this replenishment. Every performance is therefore a manifestation of an artist’s experiences. With such an approach it follows that the more aware a musician is of his experiences or autopsychography, the more readily he can find an appropriate image to symbolize the content of a musical work. The more profound his experiences, the greater the depth he can bring to his interpretation and the better he is as a performing artist. Driven by the belief that art only becomes great if it contains direct traces of the artist’s life experiences, Neuhaus diverted much of his energy throughout his life to the embodiment of this distinct view. As will be seen in the course of this book, sublimating the individual was an approach to the arts that stood in direct contrast to the glorification of the masses demanded by the official policies of Socialist Realism. Neuhaus designated this trace of artistic experience in art with the term “autobiographicality” (avtobiografichnost’): Nothing is ever “forgotten,” everything that has at some point been experienced lies somewhere in the secret hiding places of our brain—untouched and carefully conserved. One wonderful day the “memory” looks through these secret hiding places, and it is as if, in the innumerable crates somewhere in this attic, there is a mass of old things that in the hustle of everyday life are completely unnecessary—but suddenly something among them is urgently needed: you open a crate and there it all lies in the most ideal orderly manner. You simply take it and use it as you wish. I experienced this—oh, how I experienced this in my life, especially in anno 41 for eight and a half months living in the strictest isolation.44

With experience being such an integral part of Neuhaus’s understanding of artistry it is no surprise that he retained a voracious appetite for learning all his

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life and that he viewed a lack of erudition in a person as a serious defect. The ease with which Neuhaus commanded detailed analogies and associations from a range of topics from philosophy to astronomy was enthralling. It was a trait that quickly endeared him to the lively community of writers, aestheticians, and artists of his age whose Germanic outlooks stood outside contemporary Soviet ideals and viewed the prerevolutionary culture of Russia’s Silver Age with pious respect. Visitors to Boris Pasternak’s intellectual and artistic gatherings at Peredelkino would often find the two deeply engrossed in conversation, challenging each other’s ideas and often weeping at one another’s work. Indeed, Neuhaus was among the handful of people to whom Pasternak unveiled his literary masterpiece Doctor Zhivago in its famous private prepublication reading, and to whom were entrusted the safeguarding of the manuscripts of the poet’s youthful and sentimentally cherished musical compositions. Beyond Peredelkino, his friendship with figures including Alexander Gabrichevsky and Valentin Asmus contributed to Neuhaus’s determination that Russian art should resonate with the curious unification of cultural memory and autobiography—decades before the widely documented resurrection of the Silver Age legacy in Soviet literary history in the middle of the twentieth century.45 Being convinced that the difference between a “pianist” and “artist” was in the profundity and breadth of his experiences—not simply of the rarefied cultural and spiritual kind, but also those of day-to-day life—Neuhaus became sensitive to the notion that his performances of Chopin, for instance, should reflect some essence of Silver Age poetry. Hence, Neuhaus felt he not only needed to immerse himself in its reading, but also believed its assimilation into his pianism was enhanced through the summers he spent with Asmus in Gabrichevsky’s summer retreat in Koktebel—the same village that was home to Maximillan Voloshin’s famous Crimean meeting ground of the Symbolist literary circle frequented by Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Osip Mandelstam. For all the vibrant experiences of Neuhaus’s life, understanding how they contributed to his artistic aesthetics always demanded a great leap of faith. Neuhaus was as much an orator as a musician. In the right mood he could engage those around him with his lively and fast-paced flow of ideas sparked by a particular piece of music. Through such instances students often believed they learned far more from their conversations with their professor than seated at the piano. Yet, as with the image of cypresses, while Neuhaus offered glimpses into his autopsychography, he never offered complete admission into the workings of his inner world. That was a task he left for the future. In discussing pianism, Neuhaus considered that the mark of a good interpretation lay in the belief that it should reveal the interpreter’s vision that “knows and understands the ‘stratosphere’ into which he will one day creep. He should divine the far, guiding star to which he will unceasingly strive.”46

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Uninterested in the mundane considerations of pianism as a craft, Neuhaus’s definition of autobiographic art answered to the complicated merging of the European and Slavic aspects that he differentiated within his psyche: both deliberate and subconscious. This distinct synthesis was informed by high German Romantic philosophical undercurrents, as well as those adapted from Russia’s late nineteenth-century psychorealism, and its fin-de-siècle Silver Age, which saw the process of making and listening to music as something that could help humanity transcend commonplace reality. Speaking of this spiritual aspect of art that was so characteristic of the final three decades of imperial Russian intellectual society, the poetess and critic, and direct contemporary of Neuhaus, Marietta Shaginyan (Sergei Rachmaninov’s friend “Re,” who famously only conversed with the composer in writing) explained: “In the circle in which I was born and raised [. . .] we considered music as an essential part of all culture. [Music] was for us a cultural problem, which we discussed philosophically in its very essence, in connection with the epoch, with world views, with fundamental questions of life and death.”47 In the minds of intellectuals of this epoch, the divisions of society would be healed by the appearance of a “musician-poet” who would “unite society at war for a new and better order.”48 In a recent reinvestigation of this epoch, rocked by the two revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and scarred by the Great War, Rebecca Mitchell presented this musician-poet—Russia’s “Orpheus”—as a succession of a trinity of composers: Alexander Skryabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Sergei Rachmaninov.49 Mitchell’s survey of how the music and identity of these composers were molded into the salvific voice of a cultural Messiah, presented the hope placed by an entire intellectual society in these visions. It was, however, a hope, according to Mitchell, that faded into disillusionment with the eruption of the 1917 Revolution. With the rise of Soviet power, Mitchell found that “Orpheus” became an antiquated ideal in the landscape of “modernization, fragmentation and mechanisation [. . .] rather than spiritual regeneration.”50 By the mid-1920s the vibrant group of predominantly Muscovite intellectuals Mitchell has called “Nietzsche’s Orphans” had been scattered through death or emigration. For those few who still clung to this outdated world, the rise of Nazism in Germany would be the final shattering blow. A study of Heinrich Neuhaus’s understanding of the role of a performer, however, shows that this spiritual vision of music was far from over. Like the community of Russian intellectuals identified by Mitchell, Neuhaus also emphasized a framework of moral and philosophical understanding in order to define the role of the pianist in society, and this was spurred on by his love of Wagner and Nietzsche, and eventually of the poetry of Russia’s Silver Age. Brought up outside Russian Orthodoxy and living in a Soviet society intolerant of religious practice, as late as 1962 Neuhaus still maintained:

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I might be asked: can you say what it is you want? I can. I would like to have been . . . a saint . . . in the oldest and newest sense of the word. [. . .] If only I had the abilities of a genius in some kind of sphere of spiritual life and activity [. . .] then my secret anguish about “saintliness,” my never-to-be dream of serving good and only good [. . .] would finally “find its place.”51

Having relinquished the activity of composition in his adolescence, and thus consciously separating himself from the last giants of the composer-performer tradition in his milieu, Neuhaus was concerned with the presentation of the recital pianist “as the most noble calling” of all.52 Aware that “not only the dizzying advances of science and technology, but also their methods have had an effect on contemporary attitudes toward art,” Neuhaus spent the best part of a half century trying to bring about a spiritual attitude to art from his students and audiences.53

Structure and Methodology As a musician living and working in the twentieth century, which was flourishing in the age of recording, it would seem that audiences today would be able to witness his powerful legacy as a performer. The handful of studio recordings made by Neuhaus, however, are problematic as accurate indications of his technical and interpretative ability. By Neuhaus’s own account, the recording conditions offered to him were less than favorable, not least because of the sterile studio environment. Neuhaus had to contend with single takes because of the expense of editing, and he usually recorded late at night. Indeed, he lamented that if he had even a fraction of the technology and time that was available to Sergei Rachmaninov in America he would have been able to produce much better results: What I find very difficult [is] to come at two in the morning to the studio and play for a recording. Rachmaninov had a machine at home for recording; he could record fifteen, twenty times, and leave the good takes. I too could [go through the recording process] if it was at home or on the stage. Rachmaninov does not have bad recordings, and that is because he destroyed many of the records and re-did them many times. [. . .] In 1941 when we were under aerial bombardment, I was called to play with [Sviatoslav] Knushevitsky to record the Grieg Sonata. It didn’t work . . . I have some kind of fear of recording which I simply cannot conquer.54

In fact, Neuhaus considered not only his studio recordings but also many of his live ones unfit for posterity, and asked his son to arrange to have them destroyed.55 Of those that remain, it must be remembered that these recordings are largely those of a sixty- or seventy-year-old pianist battling physical issues that afflicted

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his right hand. Musicians who had heard Neuhaus’s live playing were also wary that his recorded legacy would be misleading. Alexander Alekseyev, for example, remarked: “For those who did not hear this wonderful musician in concert, or were not present in his lessons, these recordings will only capture a small fraction of what his audience felt when he brought them into [his] creative world.”56 Rather than talk about Neuhaus’s playing itself, this book seeks to define the thoughts and experiences at the source of this elusive and lost element of his performances, which our generation is doomed never to feel at its full effect—the autobiographic imprint that, at the best moments, empowered his performances with the expressive freshness of subjectivity. In order to do this, the book begins with a systematic investigation of the complex circumstances of his life. The first chapter discusses his familial circumstances and formative years in Europe, and the second explores his years establishing himself as a Russian artist. Although Neuhaus was such a public figure, a systematic documentation of his life has been surprisingly absent. His first and only biography by Viktor Delson, written in Russian in 1966, concisely raises valuable points, but was limited by Soviet censorship and therefore misses many important issues. Other materials, such as Neuhaus’s articles and part of his correspondence, have been scattered across various anthologies over many decades. This study supplements such sources with archival material, including those that have been uninvestigated despite being readily available to researchers, as well as those still housed in the classified archives of the Central State Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (the main successor agency of the KGB and its forerunner the NKVD), in an attempt to provide a more comprehensive view of his life and circumstances. The book then turns to the ways in which the events of his life channeled themselves into artistic experiences that laid the foundation for his unique understanding of musical performance. Finding himself separated from Europe after 1914, Neuhaus had, however, far too independent a mind to simply adopt a preformed cultural legacy. Having returned to the land of his birth with little interest in the ins and outs of the late imperial music scene at the fin de siècle, Neuhaus disavowed the emerging rhetoric of the Russian Revolution and the later aesthetics of Socialist Realism. Given such circumstances, however, the idea of an idealized Russian cultural inheritance played an increasingly important part in his self-awareness as an artist. Indeed, it is hardly accidental that Neuhaus would continually refer to himself as a “Russian pianist and teacher of music” who happened to live in Soviet times.57 Thus, many of Neuhaus’s distinct Russian cultural acquisitions were conscious and freewilled and, as seen in the third chapter, arose from his friends and extended family in the aftermath of the First World War. In particular the chapter focuses on Neuhaus’s friendship with Boris Pasternak, which introduced him to the legacies of Russian Realism and brought him into the sensual world of Silver

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Age thought that had been all but officially silenced by the Soviet regime. Enraptured by its possibilities, it was a cultural inheritance that Neuhaus was eager to modify to his own artistic and intellectual needs—its fine balance being mediated through the ways in which he created for himself the respective images of Skryabin and Beethoven. Being isolated geographically from the feverish cultural debates of the final years of the Russian Empire, as an outsider Neuhaus brought fresh and complementary ideas into the intelligentsia’s narrative of Russianness—the “tragic Russian soul”—which, as identified by Marina Frolova-Walker, had previously resonated with “a cult of suffering” glorified by writers such as Andrei Beliy in response to Fyodor Dostoevsky and the early works of Friedrich Nietzsche.58 The fourth chapter investigates how Neuhaus used his cosmopolitan upbringing to bring greater complexity to the issue of nation and spirituality based on his own love and thorough knowledge of Nietzsche and the music of Chopin. However, writing in an era that was not free from censorship, the chapter will show how the fact that Nietzsche’s writings were effectively banned in the Soviet Union gave rise to Neuhaus’s elaborate substitutions and amendments of ideas—illuminating how he believed great art achieves the status of the international, and inspiring his epithet “Heinrich the Great.” Having identified the central components of Neuhaus’s autopsychography that underpinned his work as an artist, the final chapter turns to the vexatious issue of his legacy. As the final chapter of this book shows, despite being the most famous pedagogue of his time in the USSR and beyond its borders, Neuhaus’s relationship with pedagogy was bittersweet. It is ironic that for one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most charismatic pedagogues it was a path he never originally set out to follow beyond the call of economic necessity. For many of those who could call themselves his students, the passion and selflessness with which Neuhaus devoted himself to teaching hid the darker emotions he felt toward the profession. His charming wit could quickly turn acerbic and induce fear in even the most talented of his students. Looking at his pedagogy through the lens of his two most famous students, Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter, elucidates how the intense subjectivity of his approach to music meant that, paradoxically, its essence was best revealed not through the conventional piano lesson, but through mutual conversations, reading, and visits to art galleries. Living in an age demanding objectivity, simplicity of context, and commitment to mass culture, Neuhaus believed in the individual. As will be seen in this book, he created a personal artistic world that championed expressive subjectivity and displaced him from the constraining realities around him. Being based on his lived experiences, Neuhaus’s art was a reflection of this displaced existence. For all the triumphs and faults that converge in this allzumenschliche attitude to Neuhaus’s art, more than half a century after his death, it is this enigma that this book finally seeks to illuminate.

Chapter One

Cosmopolitan Wanderings In the manuscript of his Autobiographical Notes Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus claimed: “Any artist who is not completely untalented would be able to talk about his life with far more interest than I ever could about my own mortal existence.”1 Concealed behind this characteristically coy remark, however, is a backdrop of vibrant cultural and familial connections that set Neuhaus on course to becoming one of the most influential musicians of his time. The second of two children, Heinrich Felix was born on April 12, 1888 (OS March 31), in the provincial town of Elisavetgrad in imperial Russia. Later renamed Kirovograd,2 and located in what was to become Ukraine, Elisavetgrad’s long distance from the key cultural capitals did not, however, isolate it from artistic life. Since becoming the host for what was to be Franz Liszt’s last public recital as a virtuoso pianist in 1847, Elisavetgrad was able to boast a modest yet thriving cosmopolitan musical community that proved to be the seedbed for a generation of some of the most influential Slavic musicians in history. Heinrich Neuhaus’s father, Gustav Heinrich (later known by the Russified patronymic Wilhelmovich), was born in 1847 in Kalkar, Germany, into a large family of German and Dutch parentage.3 According to Heinrich Neuhaus, his father was “very musical [. . .] and in love with pianism all his life.”4 Gustav Neuhaus’s studied piano at the Cologne Conservatory between 1867 and 1870 with Ernst Rudorff, and then with its director Ferdinand Hiller. Thus, his musical views were shaped by seminal figures who were closely connected to the circle of Clara and Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. There are conflicting opinions as to whether or not Gustav Neuhaus’s piano studies led to his graduation from the institution—the only official document relating to his time there, dated August 22, 1870, states that he attended as a “free listener [and distinguished himself as a] fine accompanist.”5 Indeed, for several months after leaving the conservatory he continued his piano studies in Berlin and maintained regular contact with Hiller to seek his advice and counsel.

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It seems, however, that despite Gustav Neuhaus’s diligence as a student he was unable to embark on a committed, professional performing career as either a soloist or accompanist. Heinrich Neuhaus later reflected, for instance, that although his father could learn Schumann’s Kreisleriana from memory in two days, or “get through” Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata from memory without practicing it for years, he had always lacked the fundamental pianistic talent necessary for a career as a performer.6 Perhaps the reason for this lack of commitment lies in the fact that Gustav Neuhaus’s energies were spread over a broader sphere of music professions, which often emphasize the mechanics and theoretical aspects rather than musicianship as performance. After all, Gustav’s formative experience of the piano had been rooted in his own father’s successful piano factory in the Lower Rhineland, W. Neuhaus Söhne Kalkar.7 Technical aspects of instrument design and innovation were never far from his mind. Thus, building on the interest and skills in piano manufacturing that he gained in the family’s factory, Gustav Neuhaus moved to Vienna for a short while to consolidate his knowledge of instrument design and piano regulation at the Bösendorfer factory. Gustav Neuhaus seems to have been thrilled by the vibrancy of musical life in Vienna where he relished making the acquaintance of figures including Theodor Leschetizky.8 He considered himself truly fortunate to have heard for himself the piano recitals of Brahms—Brahms’s performance of Kreisleriana lived in his memory as a phenomenon that could not be eclipsed even when he heard Anton Rubinstein’s interpretation of the work.9 Yet, following Hiller’s advice, Gustav Neuhaus interrupted his stay in Vienna to accept a position in Russia to teach piano and German to the family of the Countess Shikhmatova at her provincial estate, Manuilovka, some forty kilometers from Kremenchug in the Poltava Governorate of imperial Russia. From here he extended his teaching activities within the region, and around 1872 made his home in Elisavetgrad in the neighboring Kherson Governorate (see fig. 1.1). The move to the Kherson region of imperial Russia would have positioned Gustav Neuhaus within a well-established ethnic German community. This allowed him to integrate quickly and to establish himself as a respected figure in the local music scene as a pianist, pedagogue, and choral conductor. The stay, however, was never intended to be permanent, and Gustav Neuhaus wrote to Hiller that he eventually intended to return to Germany for good.10 Thus, Gustav Neuhaus was eager for his main written output, which all dated from the time of his settlement in imperial Russia, to be published in German and circulated by German publishers. The most significant of these efforts included a song cycle, Lieder aus der Jugendzeit (Songs from Youth) (1875) and a pamphlet arguing for the need to reform the notation system, Das natürliche Notensystem (The Natural System of Notation) (1906).11

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St. Petersburg

Russian Empire Austro-Hungarian Empire German Empire Russian governorate boundary 100

0

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Figure 1.1. Map showing national borders ca. 1900. Map by Chris Robinson.

Gustav Neuhaus also maintained regular contact with his family and W. Neuhaus Söhne in order to develop his ideas aimed at revolutionizing the design of the piano keyboard. This culminated in the patented invention of a new concave keyboard and concentric action frame for both grand and upright pianos. In the same manner as his written outputs, while the project came to fruition during his residence in Russia, the patent was submitted in 1881 when he was a citizen of the Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire. With the means to produce prototypes at the W. Neuhaus Söhne factory, Gustav Neuhaus was able to practically demonstrate his invention in Kalkar. As indicated by announcements in the Clevischer Volksfreund, these concerts included some of the most fiendish piano repertoire and included his performances of Liszt-Wagner arrangements, Schubert-Liszt song transcriptions, Chopin’s Barcarolle, Schumann’s Humoreske, and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12.12 The idea was followed up with his publication Das Pianoforte mit konkav-radiärer

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Klaviatur und konzentrischer Anschlagslinie (The Piano with a Concave Keyboard and Concentric Attack Line) (1882), and he even went as far as having serious conversations with the German piano makers Grotrian-Steinweg, Bechstein, and Blüthner to urge them to take up the invention.13 With the novel layout of this invention being intended to ease technical difficulties in playing virtuoso repertoire as well as to provide more power because of its larger soundboard, it serves as a particularly poignant and literal demonstration of the lengths to which Gustav Neuhaus was pushed to address his crippling insecurities as a pianist. His fear of inferior facility at the instrument accompanied him for the rest of his life, shaped his obsessive love of technical pedagogical exercises, and quickly found its way into Heinrich Neuhaus’s self-doubts relating to his own capabilities as a virtuoso pianist. On a more positive side, this heightened interest in the mechanics of the piano remained a distinctive feature of Gustav Neuhaus’s household. From an early age Heinrich Neuhaus grew up in a culture that was acutely sensitive to the differences in design among various piano manufacturers. For instance, his famously sophisticated attitude to the una corda pedal as a way of evoking the piano’s only true unpercussive sound, rather than as a means to play more softly, is a thought that was rarely discussed by pianists and colleagues in his milieu—yet it is highly characteristic of Gustav Neuhaus’s obsession with trying to defy the piano’s percussive tendencies. In his letters to his parents Heinrich Neuhaus made a point of expressing his assessment of the instruments he was faced with, as well as those he heard in concert: in the unlikely event that he found it well maintained, he enjoyed the singing quality of the St. Petersburg imperial concert grand Becker (praised by Tchaikovsky); surprisingly, he admitted that he sometimes found the resonance of a Steinway difficult to manage; and he was always particularly fond of Bechstein pianos. Gustav Neuhaus’s own preference for the Bechstein sound and feel thus found its way into the extended family’s musical ideals. Notably this reflected itself in the proud presence of two Bechstein grand pianos at the Tymoszówka estate where the Neuhaus siblings regularly spent time with their cousins, and later, in Heinrich Neuhaus’s ownership of two Bechsteins in Moscow. Despite continually searching for ways to maintain his association with Germany, it was Gustav Neuhaus’s acquaintance with the Blumenfeld family in Elisavetgrad that made his hopes of returning to Germany more and more unrealistic. As a regular participant in Elisavetgrad’s concert life, Gustav Neuhaus was introduced to Mikhail Franzevich Blumenfeld, a teacher of history and the French language in Elisavetgrad’s college, and the patron of many of the town’s musical and literary evenings. Although a Russian citizen, Mikhail Blumenfeld had been born into an Austrian family. Blumenfeld’s wife was Maria Szymanowska, whose brother, Felix, would be the grandfather of the famous Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. While described in

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Heinrich Neuhaus’s autobiography simply as the daughter of Polish landowners, she was also in fact related to the celebrated virtuoso pianist and composer of the same name.14 Gustav Neuhaus became close to the Blumenfeld family, and they rated his intelligence and character highly. He was employed to teach music to the extended family’s children including Mikhail Blumenfeld’s son, Felix—who was to become one of the most important Russian pianists of his generation, as well as an eminent pedagogue, composer, and conductor. However, it was Mikhail Blumenfeld’s daughter, Olga, who secured Gustav Neuhaus’s familial connection with the Blumenfelds. Gustav Neuhaus’s marriage to Olga in 1875 and the need for financial stability in order to raise their young children, Natalya and Heinrich, for the most part ended his hopes of a return to his homeland. Neuhaus’s connection with Blumenfelds helped him to build up a busy pedagogical practice especially within the vast Polish community in the Kherson region. Yet, it was only in 1899, with the help of Felix Blumenfeld (who now taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory) and Alexander Glazunov (the conservatory’s director), that Gustav Neuhaus formally opened his own music school.15 He ran the school with his wife, who was herself an accomplished pianist. Its distinction as being officially recognized by the Ministry of Internal Affairs quickly made it a central hub of musical life in Elisavetgrad. Heinrich Neuhaus recalled that the popularity of the school was such that his parents began to teach alongside each other from nine in the morning to eight at night with “a break for lunch that lasted exactly an hour and a quarter.”16 While this must have been a largely thankless labor, the musicologist Georgy Polyanovsky, who lived in the Kherson region at the time, later recalled that, compared with other competing music establishments, the Neuhaus School was held in particularly high esteem and “produced several good pianists and pedagogues, many of whom later studied in the conservatories.”17 This point of view must, however, be balanced with the thought that some of the most notable and talented students seem to have been from within the extended family: the young Heinrich Neuhaus, his sister, and the siblings’ cousin, Karol Szymanowski, all receiving their formative instruction and first performance opportunities there. Despite the respect that Gustav Neuhaus enjoyed as a musician and pedagogue in Elisavetgrad, he was eager for his children to look beyond the confines of provincial musical and intellectual circles for their education. Perhaps still in the hope of relocating his family to Germany at some point in the future, Gustav Neuhaus took it upon himself to encourage his children to embrace the cultural heritage of Europe. Therefore, with his father’s encouragement, Heinrich Neuhaus grew up reading the works of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche in the original language, and

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his first introduction to piano music came from his father’s love for Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. Given the maternal Blumenfeld-Szymanowski connection, these endeavors were supplemented by Heinrich Neuhaus’s early interest in Polish poetry and literature—that is, in his mother tongue. In some aspects the diverse combination of nationalities within the extended but close-knit Neuhaus–Blumenfeld–Szymanowski household would have facilitated such endeavors, even if in the linguistic sense. While life in Elisavetgrad and the surrounding areas would have required that Russian be the language of choice for communication with the outside world, at home it was a far more cosmopolitan affair. The poet Boris Pasternak, a future close friend of the family, reported with amazement to his parents: “What a strange family! The father a German, the mother (the aunt of Szymanowski) a Pole— both speak to one another in French. . . . Once I visited them and found that the conversation was taking place in four languages because Pavel Davidovich [Ettinger] was speaking to Garrik [Heinrich] in Polish.”18 A childhood spent absorbing this multilingual environment not only determined Heinrich Neuhaus’s lifelong relationship with the written word (including his early adolescent Polish-language philosophical work, Stowarzyszeni, which Neuhaus translated as “Comrades” or “Unity,” and that he later destroyed), but also left its mark on his distinctly characteristic lisped Russian speech, into which he frequently interjected foreign terms. With the particular attention in the home being lavished on Western, rather than Russian, art and culture, it is significant that in 1902 Gustav Neuhaus took his family on an extended pilgrimage (from the end of May to the end of August) to Germany and Austria. This tour was evidently designed to showcase the beauty and prospects that the German-speaking lands could offer, as well as to indulge Gustav Neuhaus’s unwavering passion for the music of Wagner. As Heinrich Neuhaus remembered in his autobiography: Our route took us through: Warsaw, Berlin, Cologne, visiting father’s relatives in Kalkar and Cleves, the Westphalian towns of Bochum and Dortmund, and then to Düsseldorf on the Rhine following which we had a wonderful voyage on a boat on the Rhine from Bonn to Rüdesheim—back then I wrote in my diary that August 11, 1902, was the happiest day of my life—I was in a trance. This trance lasted for a long time while we paid a quick visit to Frankfurt-am-Main and Nuremberg before finally arriving in Bayreuth for the Wagner Festivities. Here we heard six operas: Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tannhäuser, and Parsifal (at that time Parsifal was only staged in Bayreuth). An unforgettably happy time! [. . .] From Bayreuth we went to Munich where we heard all the other Wagner operas (except Rienzi): Lohengrin, Der fliegende Holländer, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Tristan und Isolde—all in the beautiful Prinzregenten Theater. From Munich we made our way to Vienna, but not for long. We mainly visited the museums—and of course the Prater.19

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The trip made a lasting impression on the fourteen-year-old Heinrich Neuhaus. The repeat of the pilgrimage in 1904, this time with the addition of his uncle Felix Blumenfeld and his cousin Karol Szymanowski, only served to strengthen his initial impressions: “These adventures [. . .] out of our provincial nest were not only the first time I saw ‘God’s world’ and became acquainted with Europe (or rather its Austro-Germanic side) but, much more importantly, it is where I became infected with Wagner forever—infected inevitably and incurably.”20 Heinrich Neuhaus’s early obsession with Wagner came against the backdrop of a wider prerevolutionary Russian vision, centered in Moscow, which saw the composer as “the last German in whom the spirit of music was the spirit of Christianity,” and who thus occupied the symbolic role of John the Baptist whose preaching would give way to a Russian Christ.21 The geographical isolation from Moscow, and life in an openly atheist household (despite his father’s parents being devout Protestants) that had no connection with Russian Orthodoxy would, however, have kept Neuhaus’s early experiences of Wagner separate from the spiritual ideals of religious unity that were gripping contemporaneous Muscovite intellectuals not least through the ideas of theologian-philosophers including Vladimir Solovyov and later, Pavel Florensky.22 Furthermore, rather than being influenced by the purposefully selective translations and revisions of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche that were appearing in the Russian press in the early 1900s—which, in conjunction with the reinterpretations of Wagner, sought to create a new synthesis of ideals to define a new voice for the contemporary Russian people and their “soul”—Neuhaus’s multilingual and multiethnic household did not seem particularly taken by the urgency to define themselves as “Russian” subjects. Indeed, despite being born in imperial Russia, Heinrich Neuhaus only became a Russian subject as late as 1907. It seems likely that this combination of circumstances afforded Neuhaus a fresh purpose and outlook on the ambition to unify music and philosophy in the postrevolutionary years, just as the debate about musical metaphysics and Russian cultural identity had seemed to have entered its disillusioned demise. Perhaps it is more meaningful at this point in Neuhaus’s development to see his engagement with Wagner’s opera through these pilgrimages, as well as his parents’ frequent four-handed piano performances at home, and German philosophy as treasured moments of respite from the monotony of daily musical practice within the home. Contrasting with the highly sophisticated and lively intellectual discussions that characterized the Neuhaus household, it is apparent that musical education carried the unmistakable air of drudgery. Heinrich Neuhaus talked about the “the wrenching anguish (une nausée)” in his childhood of waking up to Hanon’s exercises being played in the adjoining room by two students in unison, and the torture from the mindless hours of fortissimo scales and arpeggios that he himself was put through with his sister on two pianos, likewise in unison.23

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It was, of course, taken for granted that Heinrich Neuhaus would be destined for a career as a pianist. By the age of eight Heinrich was already able to boast having given a recital consisting of movements from J. S. Bach’s Partita no. 2 in C Minor, Schumann’s Intermezzo no. 3 in D Minor, op. 4, and Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz op. 64, no. 1, and Impromptu no. 1 in A-flat Major, op. 29.24 Despite the productivity of these early piano lessons, Gustav Neuhaus’s “old school” approach proved traumatic and counterintuitive for his son. Heinrich Neuhaus described his early lessons at the instrument with his father as primarily made up of mindless technical drills: “I played completely ‘mechanically’—completely detaching myself from my playing in terms of attention and listening, just aiming for it to be somewhat even and clean: and through my head whirled interesting thoughts, images, and dreams, which touched me, yet had absolutely no connection to the racket [I was] making.”25 Describing his father’s attitude to pianism, Neuhaus remarked: “Three years before his death (having just passed the age of ninety-one) I found a schedule of different exercises for the forthcoming week, all set out by the hour, laid out on the reading desk of the piano. Can you imagine a more absurd and touching self-sacrifice!”26 Faced with a strict and uninspiring regime of practice under his father’s tutelage, Heinrich Neuhaus began to feel early on that the only way he could envisage himself as a musician was if he could find a way to combine his musical experiences with his interest and what he called his “sixth sense” in philosophy. Symptomatic of this desire was Neuhaus’s strong adolescent urge to express himself through improvisation and composition. As will be seen these were urges that Neuhaus would purposefully extinguish within himself. Despite living in a family and age where composition and performance were still seen as activities to undertake hand-in-hand (not least Blumenfeld and Szymanowski), he would firmly tell his friends that the philosophical implications of being a performer were of such impossible magnitude that they demanded a “total sacrificing commitment” that eventually compelled him to “lock away his forays into composition into a chest and throw it into the ocean.”27 Despite proclaiming the role of the interpreter as the “most noble calling possible,” his exclusive commitment to performance would become charged with anguish: “How much ‘better’ is the position of the composer than the position of the interpreter! The spiritual facts of his biography (psychography!) are captured in specific artistic images: he speaks for himself in his own words, he speaks in the first person, but the interpreters only vary the words of others, the thoughts and experiences of others!”28 As he later revealed, had it not been for his father’s “resolve (if one wants to fall short of saying despotism)” he would most likely have become a conductor or musicologist, rather than a pianist.29 Thus, while a decade later Neuhaus would see Wagner as a figure who allowed him, in some ways, to reconcile his own national and artistic identity

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with an idealized and historically displaced Russia, he was first and foremost a symbol of music beyond Hanon: a German icon who was a significant part of his father’s heritage, but who offered a respite from the limitations of technical drills that Neuhaus had begun to associate with the traditional path of German musical training. Consequently, later in life, Neuhaus characterized his own teaching practice not through the development of a student’s technical efficiency or accuracy, but the cultivation of a philosophical self-awareness: “I wanted to drag the student into the sphere of spiritual culture, to the sphere of moral understanding—and the only means that I had to do this was through teaching how to play the piano!! What weak, miserly means for such challenges!”30 It is telling that with more talented students this process often took form through Neuhaus’s playing of four-handed arrangements of Wagner’s operas with them for hours at a time: a practice he zealously maintained even as the initial adoration of Wagner around the time of the Russian Revolution and early Soviet State transformed into a ban imposed on his operas in the wake the Second World War.

The Years of a Reluctant Student Eager for his son to be able to make a name for himself as a significant virtuoso pianist, Gustav Neuhaus was anxious to develop Heinrich’s talents under the watchful eye of a celebrated professor. Therefore, in 1903 Heinrich Neuhaus was sent, along with his sister, to Warsaw to join the piano class of Aleksander Michałowski—today most remembered as the teacher of Wanda Landowska and Vladimir Sofronitsky. There was an element of practicality in selecting Warsaw, which was then an outpost of imperial Russia. The large Blumenfeld and Szymanowski families were respected by an extended Polish community, and it would have been relatively easy to find someone among friends and extended family to act as hosts for the young Heinrich and Natalya. In addition, Karol Szymanowski, six years older than Heinrich, was already studying composition at the Warsaw Conservatory and would have been an ideal companion in an otherwise unfamiliar city. Most decisively, however, it would have undoubtedly been Michałowski’s reputation and influence that determined this decision. Although Michałowski spent his childhood in imperial Russia, he had received his formal training from the age of sixteen in Germany: first in the Leipzig Conservatory and then in Berlin. Those who traveled to study with him at the Warsaw Institute of Music were aware that they were entering the orbit of a pedagogue who had himself trained under Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Reinecke, Theodor Coccius (a pupil of Sigismond Thalberg), and Carl Tausig, and who had been a frequent and respected guest of Franz Liszt in Weimar. Michałowski

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was also a close friend of Karol Mikuli, a former student of Frédéric Chopin and therefore considered at the time to be one of the greatest authorities on the works of the Polish composer. This latter consideration would have been particularly enticing given that Chopin’s music was “worshipped” in both the Neuhaus and Blumenfeld households. Heinrich Neuhaus later recollected: “I feel as if I was born with [Chopin’s] music. [. . .] As a five-year-old child, I wanted to cry from the happiness [his music had aroused]. I carry this feeling of reverence before the beauty of Chopin’s music my whole life.”31 One of Neuhaus’s earliest surviving letters shows how eagerly the fifteenyear-old student received Michałowski’s praise at the time. It is the only surviving record of his contact with the professor: Talya [Natalya] would have probably told you about [my lesson with Michałowski], but without details. I will tell you everything without leaving out a single word from Michałowski. You should know that I was entirely unprepared, and had not practiced for nearly a whole week. I felt awful when he suddenly told me: “Perhaps, this young man will play something for us and we will listen.” I, of course, explained to him that I have played little recently and that I would play badly—yet, this did not help the situation and I was required to sit at the instrument. (I will note in brackets that my hands were icy cold.) First I played the first part of Uncle Felya’s [Felix Blumenfeld] Choral Fugue, after which Michałowski said I have a sea of temperament. Then [. . .] I mustered the courage to play [Chopin’s] Ballade in F minor. I played it, of course, awfully, and what is worse—without any tone (the piano was awful and dull). Despite this, he found that I have an “enormous talent” and that I am a “frightfully talented young man.” [. . .] Some of the things he showed me [in the Ballade] I didn’t really like. [Before] Talya was about to play Grieg’s Piano Concerto [for him] there was the following conversation: Michałowski to Talya: “You never told me, that you have such a talented brother.” Talya: “No, quite the contrary. I told you on many occasions . . .” Michałowski: “Bah! You must have said it so quietly, that I never expected . . .” [. . .] When bidding us goodbye, he gave Talya her coat, and to me he said: “Oh, this will be a great pianist.”32

Yet, despite the significance that taking lessons with Michałowski would have had for the family, it is interesting that Heinrich Neuhaus did not consider it important to mention this fact in either version of his autobiography, or in any of his articles on, for instance, Chopin. How much influence Neuhaus’s studies with Michałowski had, or even how frequent this contact would have been, is difficult to tell. In any case, after boasting of the strong impression that he apparently made on the professor, Neuhaus’s letter to his parents is much more preoccupied with relating his

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impressions of concert life in Warsaw. As was proving quite characteristic of Neuhaus’s attitude to his music studies, his overwhelming impression of Warsaw was less linked to pianistic considerations, or even Chopin for that matter, than to the fact that he was able to attend several rehearsals with his cousin, Karol Szymanowski, of Richard Strauss conducting his own works. Hearing Strauss’s Heldenleben and Tod und Verklärung, Neuhaus reported in detail the nuances that he believed had escaped his parents in their own knowledge of the piano reduction, and having memorized both reductions, he took it upon himself to study Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation.33 Later, four-handed arrangements of Strauss’s tone poems formed one of the central pastimes uniting the young Neuhaus and Szymanowski during their holidays spent at the Szymanowski’s estate, Tymoszówka.34 By 1905 Heinrich Neuhaus and his sister were already successfully giving joint piano recitals, which frequently took them to Germany. Of particular note was their performance in Dortmund at the Westfälisches Musikfest where Richard Strauss conducted his own Symphonia Domestica and Tod und Verklärung. The Neuhaus siblings garnered critical praise not least from Strauss himself for their performance of Liszt’s Concerto Pathetique for two pianos, although they had to contend with some critical comments in the press for their aesthetically “unsuitable” decision to perform Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat Major, op. 53, in unison.35 The acclaim of these performances led to growing numbers of opportunities for the siblings to appear both as a duo, and as soloists in their own right in recitals and concertos in Germany. Heinrich Neuhaus’s promise as an emerging pianist as well as his sympathy for his cousin’s works, which had flourished during their increased contact over these years, brought him into the sphere of Karol Szymanowski’s ambitions for the musical artery of the group Młoda Polska (Young Poland).36 Neuhaus’s regular contact at this time with the other core members, Grzegorz Fitelberg and Apolinary Szeluto, consequently positioned him as an obvious candidate to appear in the group’s historically significant inaugural concerts in February 1906 at the Warsaw Philharmonia. Here, Neuhaus’s performance of works by Szeluto and Szymanowski (including a premiere of the latter’s Variations on a Polish Folk Theme op. 10, and the Fantasy for Piano op. 14, dedicated to Heinrich Neuhaus) earned him particular praise, and even prompted critics to consider the artist as one of their own: “It was with enormous freedom and astounding technical mastery that these works were played by the young, seventeen-year-old Varsovian youth Pan Heinrich Neuhaus.”37 The contacts fostered through these appearances contributed not only to future engagements in the country (including under the baton of Fitelberg) but also to a network of colleagues and close friends including Artur Rubinstein. Eager to ensure that the promising early impression of the siblings’ pianism would lead to greater things, Gustav Neuhaus was anxious to find a suitable

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mentor for them who would have the authority to help establish the pair more permanently in the German music scene. Upon consulting Felix Blumenfeld in St. Petersburg it was decided to try to arrange a consultation with the celebrated pianist Leopold Godowsky in Berlin. Having briefly been a student of Ernst Rudorff, as had Gustav Neuhaus, Godowsky was known for honest and uncompromising evaluation of aspiring young pianists. Used to working with child prodigies and established artists he always claimed it was important not to give false hope. Godowsky’s unforgiving attitude to professionalism was reflected in Neuhaus’s own experience of his master classes: “[Godowsky] would immediately lose all interest in a student who had a defective ear, learned wrong notes, or showed a lack of taste. Due to this a concertizing pianist once ‘failed’ in her very first lesson and just because she had added an extra note (the third of the chord) into the left-hand triad in the penultimate measure of Chopin’s seventh etude (in C major) op. 10.”38 Thus, it is not without some trepidation that Neuhaus auditioned for the great pianist on May 23, 1905. Impressed with the young pianist’s talent, Godowsky recommended that Heinrich Neuhaus study privately with him in Berlin the following season (from the end of September to April). These studies, two years after Neuhaus’s initial contact with Michałowski, were marked by his increased attentiveness to pianistic considerations. Whether this was simply linked to a more mature and focused approach to his own development or it was a direct result of Godowsky’s influence is difficult to tell. From Neuhaus’s correspondence it is clear that Godowsky already approached the seventeen-year-old as an accomplished pianist who, by now, was starting to perform more regularly. In terms of artistic direction Godowsky saw his contribution more as a mentor who would help Neuhaus’s more efficient transition into a fully concertizing pianist. Thus, his primary concern was to focus the aspiring artist’s mind on acquiring a large repertoire: “If you continue studying at home you will lose much more time than you should in order to become a finished artist. [. . .] You need to learn half a dozen piano concertos over the winter, and three solo programs for Klavierabende.”39 Despite their different temperaments, Godowsky nonetheless respected his new student’s outlook on the works studied: “You have your own, different individuality and so I shall not violate it.”40 From the outset it was a difference that Neuhaus had been acutely aware of, particularly in relation to their respective interpretations of Chopin. Himself a volatile and passionate performer, Neuhaus initially met Godowsky’s more restrained pianism with admiration, assuring his parents that this was indeed a “great artist.” However, already used to his independence when it came to artistic considerations, this restrained manner was not a quality that Neuhaus was seeking to emulate in his playing: “Yesterday I had a wonderfully pleasant and interesting lesson with Godowsky (two hours): I played well and he was very happy, making few comments. He

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told me to play the Polonaise [probably Chopin: F-sharp minor, op. 44] somewhat faster and without the slightest rubato [. . .]. He plays it too metronomically—with which I don’t agree—and, of course, which I will not do.”41 Many years later Neuhaus summarized: “Godowsky was not an artist with a tempestuous temperament like Anton Rubinstein. His interpretation was not as captivating: there was no boiling, volcanic passion. But, the precision of the finish, the crystal-clear phrasing and perfect technical mastery always amazed his listeners.”42 Interestingly, it is important to note that this acceptance contrasts sharply with Neuhaus’s general dismissal of musicianship that shied away from strong emotional effect and had given rise to his criticism, for example, of Strauss’s conducting just a few years earlier: “Can you imagine—Strauss as a conductor did not impress me at all. [. . .] It was so even and restrained, generally quite fast and slow without any Steigerung [intensification]: almost expressionless. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was equally boring and completely lacking temperament.”43 Drawn into the sphere of a famous pianist who was then at the height of his performing career, Neuhaus relished the opportunity to discuss both music and the music business with his mentor. Supplementing his private lessons with Godowsky were invitations to his social gatherings, soirees, and the occasional cup of tea or some lunch during which the professor shared the latest gossip and his verdict related to the various debut performances that week. Similarly, Godowsky evidently shared collegial advice and warnings when it came to Neuhaus’s concert engagements. For instance, planning Neuhaus’s 1906 orchestra appearances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in which the young pianist was to perform Strauss’s Burlesque they shared thoughts about trying to persuade the composer to conduct the work instead of August Scharrer. The failure of the plan was a painful demonstration to Neuhaus of the financial aspects of launching a career in music: “[Godowsky said] it would be great publicity and would guarantee success. But Strauss, the rascal, is such a businessman—without a few hundred marks (perhaps 200) the [proposition] is hopeless. At the start of a career advertising is everything (just imagine, Paderewski spent 40,000 francs advertising his first London appearance).”44 Although Neuhaus evidently benefited greatly from the ways in which Godowsky’s influence expanded his musical horizons, the sporadic nature of the lessons began to take its toll. To compensate for Godowsky’s busy teaching practice and touring schedule, Neuhaus was forced to take increasing numbers of supplementary lessons with assistants—his personal lessons with Godowsky being reduced to a mere handful over the year. Making matters more complicated was Neuhaus’s growing disillusionment with Godowsky’s own artistic decisions. While he continued to be enchanted by Godowsky’s technical skill and the performances of his transcriptions, he found his professor’s understanding

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of Chopin “vulgar,” and his interpretation of Liszt’s B-minor Sonata “like that of a student: lacking meaning, feeling of the whole, temperament and artistry.”45 Consequently, as early as 1906, Neuhaus was already dreaming about enrolling as a student in the master classes of Ferruccio Busoni, whose recent concerts in Berlin had left him mesmerized. Realizing more and more that he was essentially being left to his own devices both taking responsibility for preparing for his own concerts as well as for his general pianistic development, Neuhaus began to think about his future prospects. Writing to his parents in 1908 Neuhaus admitted that he was hardly able to touch the piano because of his growing sense of hopelessness, and noted that his further stay in Berlin was unnecessary: “Godowsky will never be able to help or harm [my development]. If I were to take a weekly lesson with him so that he would be able to supervise me regularly, perhaps it would have some kind of use—although I doubt it. But to pay so much is madness (just laughable) especially as he is disinclined to reduce his rate or give free lessons.”46 The intensified concentration on pianistic matters that marked the start of his studies with the great master had started to waver again. Whereas previously Neuhaus’s attention had been distracted by the prospect of becoming a conductor, from October 1907 he commenced private studies in composition with the Russian-born composer of Swiss parentage, Pavel Juon. Juon had studied under Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev at the Moscow Conservatory, and after further studies at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin was invited by Joseph Joachim to remain as a composition professor. Composing was an activity that occupied a prominent position in Neuhaus’s extended family ranging from his father’s interest in theory and occasional compositions to his uncle who was already established in the field in Russia. It is likely that Neuhaus’s frequent contact with Karol Szymanowski in these years, and the regular inclusion of his cousin’s piano works in his own concert programs, was a significant influence that further fueled this impulse. Neuhaus’s interest in studying composition seems to have started during a monthlong “Generalpause” in his piano studies with Godowsky.47 Using the time to primarily work independently on developing his technique through Czerny and Clementi etudes it is easy to understand why Neuhaus was so taken by Juon’s encouragement as the professor tried to persuade his student to devote his undivided attention to composition. Just a few months later Neuhaus would write to his father to inquire whether his passport would allow him to travel to St. Petersburg to study counterpoint with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.48 This request must have troubled his parents somewhat, especially given Gustav Neuhaus’s preference that his son establish himself as a virtuoso pianist in Europe. Instead, a surprising and irresistible alternative was offered.

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An Italian Paradise In an attempt to dispel Heinrich Neuhaus’s melancholic thoughts and the lethargy that the loss of direction in his piano studies had caused, his parents unexpectedly offered that he join Karol Szymanowski in a trip to Italy in January 1908. Little would they have suspected that this excursion would imprint itself so deeply on their son’s life and become what he continually referred to as his “second spiritual homeland.” Initially intended as a short two-month break to lift his spirits, this trip took him to the northwest seaside town of Nervi (where they stayed with Szymanowski’s aunt). Having traveled there from Berlin through Switzerland, Neuhaus arrived already awestruck by the change of scenery, recounting in his autobiography how being a native of the “Kherson steppes” it was impossible for him not to feel intoxicated by the impression of seeing mountains for the first time.49 Already within the first few days of his arrival he reported that he was unusually inspired to practice, and that pieces that seemed impossibly difficult for him in Berlin now appeared “simply toys.”50 The “fairy-tale” Italian landscape that Neuhaus encountered in Nervi was supplemented by his further cultural discoveries touring Genoa, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan before setting off, through Munich, back to join his parents in Manuilovka (Countess Shikhmatova’s estate, which marked Gustav Neuhaus’s first arrival in Russia and where the family spent their summer holidays until the outbreak of the First World War). Neuhaus’s initial impressions shortly grew into the conviction that “in a cultural sense it is a strange thing, but, the smallest Italian town does not give me that sense of provincial isolation, while Berlin, despite all its goings on, always remains [for me] a big province, albeit of gigantic proportions.”51 By the end of the summer Neuhaus had convinced his parents to let him return to Italy to continue his independent development as a pianist for an additional year. With the help of Countess Shikhmatova, arrangements were made for Neuhaus to be taken under the wing of one of her influential aristocratic Russian acquaintances in Florence. In contrast to the informal gatherings of touring musicians to which he was occasionally invited by Godowsky in Berlin, Florence brought Neuhaus into contact with a wealthy high society eager to display their enthusiastic appreciation of the arts. It is quite possible that the famous coquettish “dandy” manner that Neuhaus’s future colleagues later found so remarkable in him stemmed from his exposure to such company. His charming erudite decorum made an indelible impression on the Florentine elite, making him a regular performer in the most fashionable salons of the city for both private and charitable causes (such as his several recitals at the Automobil-Klub in aid of the victims of the catastrophic 1908 Messina

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earthquake in Sicily).52 Likewise Neuhaus’s playing garnered lavish critical praise from the press for his charismatic interpretations, “brilliant virtuosity and extraordinary beautiful touch,” prompting reviewers at his Lyceum Club recitals to foresee his promise of a great future as one of the most important pianists of his time.53 The comfortable day-to-day living arrangements, including the unrestricted use of a “wonderful” Blüthner, and courage gained from the positive impressions that his playing was making on both himself and the wider public led Neuhaus to reflect on this period as the “apogee” of his achievements as a performer.54 It is a startling remark considering that in it Neuhaus is referring to his twenty-year-old self: hardly a renowned pianist of international significance, despite his successes to date, and at least a decade away from the years that would set him on the trajectory that would make him a household name. Yet it was perhaps one of the only times in Neuhaus’s adult life when he had the opportunity to become completely immersed in his self-development unperturbed by the constraints of finance and making a living, and crucially, when he had the mood and will to spend long hours at the piano every day. This latter consideration, given Neuhaus’s history of debilitating onsets of depression, was not a factor to be brushed aside lightly: Boris Pasternak recalled how even at the height of Neuhaus’s career he could cease all contact with the instrument for extended periods, leading the elderly Gustav to desperately beseech the writer to exert his influence over his son.55 Far from just offering a pleasant climate and lifestyle, however, Italy— much as it had for Karol Szymanowski—became a catalyst that spurred on Neuhaus’s interest in the philosophical and wider cultural ideas. Thus, despite spending more time at the piano, compared to his Berlin correspondence in which he reported in detail his musical accomplishments, his letters from Italy scarcely mention composers let alone matters concerning technique or interpretation. Instead, they give a sense of the spiritual fabric that would underpin the elaborate web of associated thought informing his interpretation of music. Hence, it is significant that much of the repertoire with which Neuhaus built a profound engagement reflected some link in his imagination to Italy. Using his time in Florence to learn the complete Well-Tempered Clavier and all of Beethoven’s sonatas, and to consolidate much of his existing repertoire of Chopin, many of these works were especially marked by this connection: Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Minor (from book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier) became linked to the white marble and austere cypresses of the Italian cemetery; Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata to the “velvet night” of southern Italy, and opus 109 to the glistening sunset over the Alps; and Chopin to painters of the Italian Renaissance. The fact that Italy proved to be such a fruitful source of inspiration for Neuhaus is not unusual in itself. By this time Neuhaus was officially

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confirmed as a Russian subject, and thus one might have expected him to be aware of the strong connection of Russian artists with Italy whether in a strictly symbolic sense like that of Alexander Pushkin, or in longer residencies of writers including Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, musicians including Mikhail Glinka, Piotr Tchaikovsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, or the wave of interest in Italy by the contemporaneous poets of Russia’s Silver Age such as Alexander Blok. Yet there is a striking lack of Neuhaus’s apparent awareness of, or interest in such parallels at the time. Furthermore, despite the influence that Karol Szymanowski’s actions and beliefs exerted over Neuhaus, he did not share his cousin’s artistic yearning for Sicily’s Syracuse, nor was he particularly taken by the exotic promise of its mythical world defined by the meeting of Arabic, Byzantine, and Ancient Greek influences. Instead, broken away geographically from Germany, it is finally in Italy that Neuhaus felt able to really engage meaningfully with his most vibrant philosophical and cultural acquisitions from the German-speaking lands. He delighted himself in Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey) and became actively interested in the thoughts of the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. Neuhaus felt “a great contentment” that he was following in the footsteps of Nietzsche who “also lived in Genoa a long time and wrote his Morgenröthe [The Dawn of Day] there,” and made a conscious effort to surround himself with several volumes of the philosopher’s work.56 Of all the diverse and seemingly unending list of figures inspiring Neuhaus’s artistic thoughts, Nietzsche was surely among the most significant. Neuhaus’s engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophy while in Italy left deep marks on his aesthetic views and became the prism through which he filtered much of his understanding. For instance, never having shown any particular interest in discussing religion he suddenly elaborated extensively on his conviction that he felt averse to Christianity: There are however some things [among all the wonders here] that impress such a sadness—especially the Forum romanum around which those damned towers of churches poke out everywhere with that brusque and sardonic sign of the Catholic cross that mocks and shames man [. . .] only here in Rome can one completely feel and see with one’s own eyes the difference between the Christian world and Classical Antiquity—soit disant [sic], the pagan world. [. . .] the Cathedral of Saint Peter did not impress me in the least, but the Palatine Hill, and the Baths of Caracalla [. . .] showed me what it is that I really love and find wonderful. [. . .] What can I do if I find the very shape of the dome to be un-aesthetic, paintings depicting exhausted saints—repulsive, and generally all aesthetic manifestations of Christianity to be vulgar in the highest order (à propos, Michelangelo and others who only appeared to be painting saints [but] were in fact, pagans par excellence).57

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The similarities between these thoughts and Nietzsche’s views of Christianity can be traced to abundant sources including Der Antichrist (The Anti-Christ), as well as many earlier works such as the following extract from Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human), which Neuhaus knew intimately:58 The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods above them as master and themselves below them as servants, as did the Jews. They saw, as it were, only the reflection of the most successful specimens of their own caste, that is, an ideal, not a contrast to their own nature [. . .]. Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely, and submerged him as if in deep mire. . . . Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: moderation, and for this reason, it is in its deepest meaning barbaric, Asiatic, ignoble, un-Greek.59

Indeed, these impressions became so deeply rooted that it was not until the final decade of Neuhaus’s life, with the encounter of the work of Albert Schweitzer, that he began to reassess his attitude to religion. Neuhaus’s knowledge of Nietzsche’s works was so thorough that he fluidly incorporated Nietzsche’s philosophical aphorisms and poetry into his writing throughout his life. This permeation far overtook the number of citations from any other figure. Nietzsche’s citations, however, are hardly ever identified or referenced as such by Neuhaus. Nevertheless, although some citations require the knowledge of a specialist to locate and appreciate them, cornerstone words and ideas like allzumenschliches (too human), vornehm (noble), or the “camel” became unmistakable and frequent staples of Neuhaus’s expression. While Nietzsche’s views on composers came into contact with the myriad of Neuhaus’s other cultural acquisitions and outlooks to eventually subtly develop into a complex synthesis, certain elements remained overtly indebted to the philosopher. Particularly obvious in this respect was Neuhaus’s association of Chopin’s artistry, which he began comparing specifically to the achievements of the Italian nineteenth-century philosopher and poet Giacomo Leopardi and the High Renaissance artists Raphael and Michelangelo.60 It is hardly a coincidence that these names figure prominently in Nietzsche’s Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (The Wanderer and His Shadow): “Chopin, the last of the modern musicians, who gazed at and worshipped beauty, like Leopardi [. . .] Chopin had the same princely punctilio in convention that Raphael shows in the use of the simplest traditional colors.”61 In some ways emulating Nietzsche’s wanderings around Italy—seeking out a romanticized solitude among some of the most breathtaking landscapes and cultural documents in order to give space for higher thought—Neuhaus called his lifestyle a “poet’s dream.”62 This evocative label is particularly apt, since his perception of Italy was never really molded on contemporary Italian life. Outside the wealthy world of the Florence elite and their largely émigré

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aristocratic circles, Neuhaus was effectively divorced from any interaction with institutions or authority, not to mention the stressful reality of making a living. Left free to dream, Neuhaus’s Italy evolved into a personal symbol of a life that was fulfilled with profound philosophical and spiritual meaning. His desire to become at one with the spirit of Italy, as he saw it, was marked by his dedication in learning the language—not for mundane conversation, but because of his belief that it would bring him closer to the meaning held in the writings of Dante and Petrarch. Italy was thus a place to heal the soul. So great was the spiritual symbolism of Italy, that it would be the one place Neuhaus dreamed of returning to once more at the end of his life. Sadly, Sviatoslav Richter’s plan to take his former professor with him on his Italian tour in the summer of 1965 came too late: Neuhaus died on October 10, 1964.63 As May 1909 approached, signaling the end of his agreed sojourn in Florence, Neuhaus’s desperation to stay was evident. Writing to his parents he implored them to understand how difficult this break would be for him: “All the feelings that had always been so completely alien to me, like the attachment to a country, etc., here become essential, alive, real, and so strong that they almost become part of one’s daily psychological reactions.”64 His attempts to convince his parents, however, that he could have a realistic chance to make a “decent” living as a musician in Florence, and eventually become comfortable enough financially to potentially support their move to Italy, came to no avail. Neuhaus’s parents were troubled by the lack of promise that Florence, very much a provincial town in their eyes, might hold for their son’s career as a virtuoso. Furthermore, it was not without trepidation that they learned of Neuhaus’s news that he had fallen “madly” in love with an Italian “widow”— quite possibly something of a euphemism given his parents’ reaction—who was thirteen years his senior and the mother of two children.65 With great reluctance and obedience, Neuhaus returned to Manuilovka, and then Elisavetgrad. He described the following months as a hellish existence plagued by “black melancholy” and suicidal thoughts. Despite the future hardships of famine, wars, detention, and exile thrust onto his path by a politically unstable epoch, Neuhaus nonetheless looked back at these particular months as some of the bleakest “sorrows of [his] soul,” incomparable even to his “imprisonment for eight months in Moscow in 1941–42.”66

Back to Berlin To cure his son’s melancholy and to refocus his mind, Gustav Neuhaus sent Heinrich to audition for a formal course of study at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Berlin. Neuhaus passed the necessary auditions with ease and became a student of Karl Barth. While mostly known for

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being a long-standing accompanist for Joseph Joachim, Barth’s pianistic polish had come from his own studies with Hans von Bülow, Hans von Bronsart, and Carl Tausig. His contact with some of the epoch’s finest virtuoso pianists in the Lisztian legacy therefore made him a sought-after pedagogue (Artur Rubinstein being one of his most famous students). Supplementing Neuhaus’s timetable of piano studies was the formal recommencement of his composition studies with Pavel Juon. Neuhaus’s studentship in Berlin certainly brought on an intense period of reevaluating his attitude to the instrument and repertoire. Not easily given to praise, Barth was impressed by his student’s musicality and intellectual vitality. To say, however, that the relationship between teacher and student evolved with a mutual understanding is difficult. Nearing his twenty-second birthday, Neuhaus came to Barth with headstrong views, shaped in turn by his father, Godowsky, and his own independent preparation. In part a consequence of Godowsky’s former guidance, as well as a prominent feature of his Italian period, Neuhaus’s development was driven by an almost encyclopedic study of repertoire: a method that he believed could bring him closer to the essence of the composer’s philosophical and cultural world. Thus, by nature, Neuhaus was inclined to see technique as a necessity, but not as the ultimate reason for returning to his daily practice at the instrument. Neuhaus’s obsessive interaction with the music of Wagner and Strauss, which he yearned to play for hours at a time in four-handed arrangements, or interest in Szymanowski’s compositions, were not met with sympathy. Likewise, bringing Liszt’s B-minor Sonata to Barth revealed his professor’s deep skepticism about Liszt’s stature as both composer and pianist. Barth’s teaching, like that of Gustav Neuhaus, relied on hours of dry technical drills that Neuhaus had found so traumatic in his childhood. However, whereas Gustav Neuhaus was particularly sensitive to the development of a lyrical sound quality from the outset, chiding his son for “banging” at the keyboard, Barth believed in the value of strengthening the fingers and developing accuracy by playing loudly for extended periods of time. Being presented with Barth’s “method” Neuhaus immediately had reservations: “With his method neither technique nor tone will be as beautiful as it might potentially be with mine if only I commit myself [to my ideas] with hellish fervor.”67 Neuhaus quickly realized that his hallmark tone at the piano, which he had sought to painstakingly cultivate over the years, was of little interest to his professor. It is clear that Barth did not share in Neuhaus’s inclinations to discuss music beyond technique, nor did he believe that the responsibility for the cultural expansion of a student’s horizons lay with the teacher. Eager to earn this professor’s praise, Neuhaus’s achievements under Barth’s guidance suddenly took an uncharacteristic turn toward sportsmanship: “What a pity he didn’t hear me when I was playing Katot’s [Szymanowski’s] Fantasy (when during the one week I broke eleven strings).”68

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Despite his aversion to Barth’s ideas, Neuhaus committed himself to the teacher’s instructions to change his technique—“raising the poignée [wrists], turning out my hands—things which I hate, but will patiently carry out to see whether it may help me to achieve anything.”69 Unable to contextualize his progress in terms of deepening spiritual or cultural insights into the repertoire he was studying, Neuhaus remained dubious about the potential benefits of his studies: “If only you heard how I practice now—it is completely different from how I practice in Elisavetgrad—I pound the piano with all my strength, play fast, don’t pay as much attention to accuracy or the nobility of sound so that I may again gain courage and virtuosic impudence [. . .] but I don’t like it.”70 Seemingly Barth was satisfied with the results of Neuhaus’s work as he allowed him to supplement his Clementi and Moscheles etudes with virtuosic repertoire for upcoming recitals. These included Liszt’s La Campanella, Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Schumann’s Kreisleriana, and Chopin’s Fourth Scherzo in E Major. In addition, Barth selected him for important performances with orchestra, including as the soloist for Saint-Saëns’s brilliant Second Piano Concerto. However, by December 1910 Neuhaus was already experiencing the adverse consequences of Barth’s recommendations. Playing through obvious signs of performance-related injuries for several months, diagnosed as rheumatism by his physician, he was eventually forced to think about canceling future engagements so as to let his hands heal: “I feel so terrible. Things are bad with my hand—I really can’t play strongly: I can just about manage a tentative piano, but poignée, octaves, forte, etc. are almost impossible.”71 As a result, he was forced to cancel lucrative concerto engagements in Berlin, including Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and the Saint-Saëns. The latter, it seems, particularly contributed to Neuhaus’s injuries and, unsurprisingly, he developed a pronounced lifelong hatred for the composer’s works. Needless to say, Neuhaus quickly grew disillusioned with Barth’s teaching. He became resigned to the fact that his unevenness as a pianist rested on two largely irredeemable factors: his hands, which he believed were small, “hard” and not supple enough for the demands of modern pianism; and whether or not his volatile moods left him feeling able to face the audience. The latter consideration was already making itself known in the critical reviews of his performances, which ranged from elated descriptions of the charismatic and tempestuous power coupled with a flawless technique, to comments about his “Germanic” complete lack of expression.72 The crippling self-doubt that arose from these issues was seemingly never addressed openly or sympathetically between teacher and student. In a time still strongly marked by notions of national temperament, Barth quickly put Neuhaus’s deficiencies down to his foreign origin. Similar to Theodor Leschetizky’s famous adage that Russians pianists have “turbulent natures, difficult to keep within bounds, but making

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wonderful players when they have the patience to endure to the end,”73 Barth quipped: “I see perfectly well that you are stuck in a Russian skin: You know very well how it should go, but you have no patience to work to achieve it.”74 Much to the dismay of his parents, without a mentor to turn to for guidance, and desired progress grinding to a standstill, Neuhaus began to mock Berlin for its hellish inflexibility, insincerity, and environment of “police Bekanntmachungen” (notices) in part as a response to the sociopolitical climate in the last years of Prussian rule, but also seeing it as a metaphor for his own piano studies there.75 Writing to his parents Neuhaus even claimed he would much rather be back in dreary, provincial Elisavetgrad than remain in this bustling city: “It’s horrible that I have to wait for July [to return home]. In Berlin there is something stupid and painfully weary—in a Großstadt it is always this way. [. . .] Nowhere else does one feel that nichts ist wahr, alles ist erlaubt [there is no truth, everything is permitted].”76 Even his closest friends could not provide the necessary solace. Neuhaus’s attendance at a concert of Szymanowski’s compositions in Berlin in January 1912, where Artur Rubinstein gave a performance of the composer’s Second Piano Sonata in A Major, op. 21 (which was also central to Neuhaus’s own repertoire at the time), provided the tipping point. Now convinced of his failure as both a pianist and composer he slipped away from the post-concert reception, leaving a note for his cousin about his return to Florence, where he traveled with the intention of committing suicide. Rubinstein remembers that he and the Szymanowski ran for the first available train from Berlin to Italy. In inquiring with the police they were told: “A young Russian by the name of Nicolsky had cut his wrist in the bathroom of a hotel, but, panic-stricken, he had called for help and was now safe and recovering in a hospital. [Driving] to the hospital [our] apprehensions were confirmed. There we found poor Harry [Neuhaus] in bed, his face white, his eyes half-closed and his bandaged arm in a sling.”77 Although in time Neuhaus’s wrist and overplayed hands healed, his lack of a congenial relationship with Barth left him with a void that he desperately wanted to fill: “I am endowed with that unhappy German trait—I find it necessary to find a subject that I may passionately love in an intellectual sense.”78 In an attempt to fill this intellectual emptiness, Neuhaus turned once again to Godowsky.

Final Years in Vienna Neuhaus found it difficult to explain to his parents why he had suddenly had such a change of heart about his assessment of Godowsky. Before his Italian sojourn Neuhaus’s previous dozen or so private lessons in Berlin had ended abruptly. However, no longer being able to face the fact of further study with Barth, Neuhaus’s relations with Godowsky started to become restored in the

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Figure 1.2. Neuhaus (right) with Artur Rubinstein ca. 1912. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

spring of 1911 when Neuhaus sought out his former mentor backstage after a recital. Among other things, Godowsky urged Neuhaus to gain the necessary permission to take his final exams in Berlin early in order to leave Germany and enroll as his student in the prestigious Meisterschule course at the Vienna Academy of Music. The promise of a scholarship and living stipend that would be available for Neuhaus upon audition as a talented foreigner was a lucrative offer that he was eager to accept. In making the decision to go to Vienna in 1912, Neuhaus could hardly have realized its significance in marking the final period of his European life. The countdown had begun on his last two years ever living outside the borders of imperial Russia and the future Soviet Union. It was also a period that proved to be a certain coming of age for Neuhaus, bringing an end to his cosmopolitan childhood and wanderings and focusing his mind on his future. The diploma of the Vienna Meisterschule would have given Neuhaus a document that would have been recognized with respect in professional institutions in both Europe and the big Russian cities. In any case, it would have comforted a fear he had already voiced in 1909 that he was currently “factually unable” to make a life in Russia beyond the provinces on his return.79 According to imperial Russian law, residency was strictly only permitted in one’s administrative locality (in this case Kherson), and violation of this was an offense that carried large fines. The diploma would have extended him the chance of an institutional affiliation in Kiev, or with his uncle in St. Petersburg. This, in turn, would have allowed him

Figure 1.3. Karol Szymanowski (left), Felix Szymanowski (seated), and Heinrich Neuhaus (right) ca. 1912. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

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to change the location of his Russian residence from Kherson, and apply for a registration—a propiska—in that city and its locality. Away from Barth’s method, Vienna allowed Neuhaus to once more take control of his learning with enthusiasm. Although delighted by his studies in composition with the newly appointed Franz Schreker, these did not form an escapist distraction away from his piano practice. Working diligently toward his master classes, as well as regular concerts, Neuhaus was able to significantly expand his repertoire to reflect his own professional aspirations: preparing, for instance, for his Kleve recital and upcoming master class Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 7 and Mephisto Waltz, a selection of Chopin etudes, three Bach-Busoni Chorale Preludes, Bach-Liszt’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata op. 106, Brahms’s opus 116 and opus 117, Chopin’s Third Piano Sonata in B Minor, op. 58, a piano sonata by Szymanowski (most likely the same fiendish no. 2 in A major, op. 21, which was also performed by Artur Rubinstein), Chopin’s First Piano Concerto in E Minor, op. 11, and Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto in B-flat Major, op. 83.80 More important, however, it was a time during which he developed a better understanding of himself as a pianist. Now, at the age of twenty-five, he had reached a certain realization of what constituted his artistic identity and he was able to articulate it with confidence: Pupka [father], just because in Elisavetgrad I often played Brahms and Bach’s Chorale Preludes in the evenings, doesn’t mean that I intend to do so my whole life. [. . .] I always work on technical pieces, for example Chopin etudes [. . .] and you are mistaken if you think it is the first time I have played Brahms in the Meisterschule, and that it happened to simply [fill out time]. First, Brahms is certainly not easy in technical terms, and second, he is sympathetic to my soul on an artistic level—and therefore I will always cultivate him [within me]. To train myself to be a performer of Liszt’s Rhapsodies would be idiotic: that can be achieved by every pedigree stallion, and someone will do so better than I can, but he will never be able to play a little Brahms Intermezzo, such as the second one from opus 117—but I can, and do so better than most of the famous pianists I know.81

Finally having the courage to identify the strength of his lyric qualities, Neuhaus felt pride in the way that these qualities were being recognized as an enviable asset by those around him—with his colleagues in the class already addressing him not as a student, but as Godowsky’s assistant. Godowsky’s help in securing Neuhaus a number of well-paying private students in Vienna had been the first such professional experience for the young pianist. Never having had to teach to support himself while living abroad, and having only seen the relatively dire standards of his parents’ music school in Elisavetgrad, Neuhaus relished the chance to be “already sincerely useful to advanced pianists.”82

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Seeing in practice for the first time the effect he could have on a student’s development, Neuhaus was beginning to explore those qualities within him that would lay the foundation for his own illustrious teaching career, prophesying: “It will be an absolute shame and scandal if I would have to become a teacher in Elisavetgrad. [. . .] My place is as a musical authority in a big city—it will be so, but probably not immediately.”83 Neuhaus’s increasing confidence in his abilities and maturing outlook was met with respect by Godowsky, who extended a supportive but not prescriptive watch over the young pianist. Sure that his student had the necessary talent and character to progress as one of the leading figures in the music profession, Godowsky recommended that Neuhaus define the completion of his formal studies by participating in the coveted Großer Staatspreis für Musik in addition to his upcoming final recital (Diplom-Prüfung). This state prize was open to all musicians on the cusp of beginning successful, independent performing careers, and it carried a generous financial award (apparently 800 kronen in 1913).84 Having seen the standard in 1913 and set his mind to win this honor, Neuhaus saw the prize as a way to avoid what would otherwise be his inevitable return to Elisavetgrad—a prospect that frankly terrified him: To remain for a long time (i.e., to the end of my life) in Elisavetgrad is downright madness, because there I will have absolutely no ways of progressing forward. I am completely certain that once I start somewhere it will only be a matter of time before I gain recognition—and not so much because of my energy and experience of life, but because of my talent, my skills, and who I am.85

To increase his chances of offering realistic reasons for staying in Vienna, Neuhaus actively planned ambitious recitals and appearances as a concerto soloist. Far from seeing the imminent completion of his formal studies as a way of defining the end of his journey of self-development and learning, Neuhaus’s optimism drove him to dare to look at this as the start of greater things to come: “I play for many hours to discipline my horrid, hard hand [. . .] I read a lot too—academic literature and philosophy—with great pleasure. Reassure Pupka that this is not the end of my education, my ‘higher aims,’ in any way— but the contrary, the exact opposite!”86 Neuhaus’s meticulous preparation and planning paid off. For the first time in his European years his life had the focus and promise that enabled him to spread his wings as a professional performer of upcoming international repute. In the spring of 1914 Neuhaus earned the distinction of being officially recognized as an independent artist through his graduation from the Vienna Academy, and his spirits were lifted by a string of forthcoming engagements as a result of his being awarded the Staatspreis. With the assumption that he

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would be able to collect the generous financial award in the autumn when he returned to Europe for his first recitals of the season—“something around 1,000 or 2,000 gulden” according to his autobiography, but quite possibly an exaggeration, given the value of the previous year’s prize he reported to his parents—he left for the summer holidays to Zakopane to celebrate his success with his friend, the Polish pianist and former student of Ferruccio Busoni, Eduard Steuermann.87 From here, Neuhaus made his way to Manuilovka to join his parents for the remainder of the summer holidays. Little did he know that in a matter of just a few weeks his hopes and plans were to be dealt a crushing blow by the dark political events unfolding on the horizon.

Chapter Two

A Return to Russia On the evening of August 1, 1914, Germany declared war on Russia, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire following suit six days later. The cultural shock to the Russian Empire, whose identity hinged so much on German influence, was profound. As the border closed, Russia gave in to a wave of anti-German sentiment. The Russian capital was renamed from the Germanic sounding St. Petersburg to its literal Russian equivalent, Petrograd. Musical life too felt the consequences. Cases were reported of German and Austrian musicians in the large Russian cities being arrested and expelled.1 Boycotts, violence, and destruction started to affect German businesses across the board, including those of high repute such as the eminent Moscow-based music publisher Anton Gutheil, a German émigré, who decided his best option was to sell the business to Serge Koussevitsky’s Editions Russes de Musique (Rossiyskoye muzïkal’noye izdatel’stvo), and leave the country. Throughout the course of his life, Neuhaus was reluctant to express how his family was affected by these unfolding political events. The only issue he ventured to raise in passing was that of his personal and unanticipated “war complications.” He was released from a brief period of conscription with a “white ticket” on health grounds. It was, however, not the end of his problems: I only had a document of graduation from a “prestigious” but in this case absolutely useless institution—the Meisterschule of the Vienna Academy of Music—an Academy of a state that was now at war with Russia. Therefore, I effectively had no papers that would confirm the fact of my higher education. [. . .] The connection of my name with a diploma from the Vienna Academy would not have boded well.2

Thus, having just celebrated the end of his student years, Neuhaus was forced to prove himself one more time. In the spring of 1915 he made his way to Petrograd where his uncle, Felix Blumenfeld, was a professor of piano and had arranged for Neuhaus to take the final exams without the need to attend

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lectures or classes to earn the required distinction of becoming a “free artist” (svobodnïy khudozhnik) which would see him officially recognized as a professional, rather than a gifted amateur musician. Despite the general atmosphere of German resentment initiated by the Great War, the music scene in the imperial capital was particularly resilient and Neuhaus’s performances in Petrograd were accompanied by excitement. As witnessed at firsthand by the musicologist David Rabinovich, Neuhaus’s debut was accompanied by an extraordinary sense of anticipation: Among the many words that can express in one way or another the emotional vibrancy of the moment when H. Neuhaus first, and from that instant forever, entered into the history of Russian pianism is the Romantic epithet “tempestuous” [. . .]. It was in the early days of summer in 1915. Whispers spread across the Petrograd Conservatory that an unknown but wonderful, extraordinary pianist (and nephew of F. M. Blumenfeld) was giving his [final] diploma recital in the Small Hall. [. . .] We truly did not know anything about him except that he had studied at the Meisterschule in Vienna, and returned to Russia a few weeks before the outbreak of the war [. . .]. For my whole life I will carry the memory of the tempestuous intensity of his playing, and equally of the tempestuous reaction that it provoked from the audience—an elemental force of nature storming its way through the hall.3

Creating such an impression on the Petrograd audience was not an easy feat in a city that was witnessing one of its most vibrant musical periods. Even in the young Rabinovich’s memory, for example, competing for his attention were the recent recitals of Sergei Prokofiev and Jascha Heifetz. Neuhaus’s charisma as a performer quickly established him as one of the bright new names. Not just limited to playing his trademark pieces from his European studies (chiefly Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms), Neuhaus was involved in concerts of contemporary German music. Of particular significance was his participation in the memorial concert for Max Reger in 1916 held in the hall of the capital’s leading arts journal Apollon. The event was a magnet for Petrograd’s emerging musical names with Alexander Borovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Esfir Chernetskaya-Geshelina, Nadezhda Golubovskaya, and the Swiss pianist-composer Emil Frey being present in the audience. Neuhaus performed a selection of Reger’s solo works, the Violin Sonata no. 5 in F-sharp Minor (with his regular chamber music partner, the Polish violinist Paweł Kochański—who collaboratively contributed to Szymanowski’s violin concerto), and the Piano Trio no. 2 in E Minor, op. 102 (with the cellist Alexander Shtrimer). While he lamented not being allowed to perform Reger’s Variations on a Theme of J. S. Bach, a piece that remained dear to him his whole life, he reported: “The success was unprecedented. All the musical elite listened to us—that is especially good. Now for sure I won’t be forgotten in Petrograd.”4

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Word of Neuhaus’s talent spread and by the autumn of 1916 he had received an invitation from the director of the conservatory in Tiflis (Tbilisi after 1936), then still called the Tiflis Specialized Music School of the Imperial Russian Music Society (Muzïkal’noye uchilishche Tiflisskogo otdeleniya Imperatorskogo Russkogo muzïkal’nogo obshchestva), to become a professor of piano. Accepting the offer, Neuhaus intended to save as much of his salary as possible to enable him to move back to Petrograd or Moscow: “It is a shame if I were to lose my ties with Petrograd. I have come to love it very much and can see myself settling down there. I am scared of the provinces.”5 It was Neuhaus’s first formal professional position in an institution, and it marked the beginning a forty-eight-year career during which he battled to combine his energies as a concertizing artist and pedagogue. Although the standard in Tiflis at the time left much to be desired, Neuhaus enjoyed a dynamic performance schedule the likes of which he had never experienced before. He was regularly being greeted by packed halls as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician, and was accumulating a devoted following of fans: The success was enormous: I received six huge baskets of flowers and some bouquets [. . .] and was called back on stage endlessly. Some here call me a “Bachist” [Bach-specialist], others a “Chopinist,” and the rest a “Brahmsist”— all Tiflis argues about this in the most heated manner.6 According to Bebutov [. . .] wherever one goes, one hears [the name] Neuhaus, Neuhaus . . . and that I am already liked much more than [Alexander] Borovsky. I am so unbelievably happy to perform so often [at least five times that month with different programs].7

In this encouraging atmosphere and bright southern sunshine Neuhaus embarked on a time of musical consolidation and exploration. Trying to limit the number of students he took on, Neuhaus viewed this position as a temporary stepping-stone to greater things: “I must play well to keep up with my reputation. [. . .] In the future I will be earning more through concerts than through teaching, so therefore I need to first and foremost take care of my pianism.”8 At the back of his mind, Neuhaus always knew he was aiming to find a way to relocate to the big musical centers: Petrograd or Moscow. A reason to leave Tiflis presented itself soon enough, but for the wrong reasons: the German, Ottoman, and later British military presence flooded into Georgia as it claimed independence in the summer of 1918. It spurred on the departure of many of the musicians who had come to teach in Tiflis. Neuhaus, who had managed, along with Felix Blumenfeld, to secure a position as a professor at the Kiev Conservatory for himself in the autumn decided to weather these interim weeks in Elisavetgrad.

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The Long Journey to Kiev Leaving the political unrest of Tiflis, Neuhaus had returned home just kilometers from the Eastern Front of the Great War. The Central Powers (Germany, Austro-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) were laying claim to territory deep into the Russian Empire. In some ways this was the least of his troubles. While Neuhaus was teaching and concertizing in and around Tiflis, some 3,000 kilometers away Petrograd had become the “cradle of the Revolution.” Seething anxiety was hurling Russia from the October Revolution of 1917 into the throes of the Civil War. The revolution instigated violent and far-reaching mass strikes of workers, peasants, and soldiers, which coincided with simultaneous action by ethnic groups across the former Russian Empire’s borderlands to demand greater autonomy and self-determination. The Kiev Uprising in 1917 had led to the defeat of imperial Russian forces and created two separate self-proclaimed “Ukrainian People’s Republics” by the warring Central Rada (a “council” of political, cultural, and professional organizations seeking independence for Ukraine) based in Kiev, and the Bolsheviks in Kharkov. The area was plunged into turmoil. Loyalties to sides and causes proved fickle and unpredictable. The Central Rada, facing imminent defeat by the Bolsheviks, sought a truce and alliance with the hostile Central Powers. Following the resulting Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918, the Central Powers drove away the Bolsheviks and, despite frequent insurgence, left Ukraine under German influence. However, by November 1918 the defeat of the Central Powers on the Western Front initiated their complete withdrawal from territories previously occupied under the treaty. The resulting vacuum once more opened up the territory to further deadly hostilities at the hands of Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, “Reds,” “Whites,” and various anarchist groups (see fig. 2.1). Power continued to change hands frequently between 1919 and 1921. Borders were volatile, and at times redrawn weekly, as various political factions within the region engaged in a fast-moving and murderous military conflict to claim land and governance that would eventually form the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly defined borders for Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.9 The former imperial governorates of Poltava and Kherson, where the Neuhauses and Blumenfelds had made their home, were at the heart of these conflicts. The territory had seen occupation and atrocities carried out by the Bolsheviks and the Central Powers following the 1918 Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Even more terrifying though was the deadly turnaround of occupations by the White Army, the Ukrainian Nationalist Army of Symon Petlura, the Anarchist Black Army of Nestor Makhno, the Green Peasant Army, and, later in May 1919, the heinous Elisavetgrad pogroms of Ataman Nikifor Grigoriev. As Neuhaus fled

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Figure 2.1. Map showing key territorial strongholds between 1917 and 1920. Map by Chris Robinson.

from Tiflis to Elisavetgrad to join his parents and the entire Szymanowski family (who sought refuge in Elisavetgrad after their beloved Tymoszówka estate was looted and razed to the ground by the Bolshevik Army in 1917), normal life was hardly recognizable amid the famine and ruins of the town, which eventually succumbed to Bolshevik control.10 Opening up about the harrowing details of life in Elisavetgrad at the time, Szymanowski explained: Such villainy en gros no one ever saw in their whole life. [. . .] What we went through in the winter (although it does not compare with e.g. Kiev or

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Moscow), you have no idea! Imagine a petit–maître such as I patrolling outside the house all night armed with a rifle and revolver, and becoming accustomed to everything which would have previously caused me at the very least to faint: blood, wounds, the terror and violence of armed bands of robbers, looters etc. etc. [. . .] And imagine—it turns out that I was not at all the coward I had suspected myself of being!11

While Neuhaus was far less inclined to discuss the daily round of life, it is certain that he too took his turn to form part of the armed nightly guard around the house with his cousin. Bearing witness to many unspeakable things, it is impossible to believe that his pistol could have remained unfired. Amid this battle for survival, contrary to his initial plans, Neuhaus would not get to Kiev until the autumn of 1919. Having seen such atrocities at firsthand it is evident why, in contrast to a wave of artistic figures embracing the fervor of the revolution, the Neuhauses’ reaction was to detach themselves from its hysteria as much as possible. In an early manuscript of his autobiography Neuhaus simply stated: “We had nothing to do with the Revolution.”12 Knowing that his writing would be censored in the event of publication even in the 1960s, Neuhaus evidently maintained the illusion of his personal neutrality. Thus, he curtly summarized that many of those whom he met in Elisavetgrad who were devoted to the ideas of the revolution were angry with Gustav Neuhaus’s apathy to the cause. Yet the surviving letters of Szymanowski speak of the terror shared by the Neuhauses, Blumenfelds, Kochańskis, and Szymanowskis with regard to the traumatic “sacrifices” of the revolution, Bolshevik ideals and the ensuing anarchy that sought to destroy everything in its path in the name of the new social cause.13 Writing for the Russian newspaper Voyna i mir (War and peace) under the cryptonym “Sz” in October 1919, Szymanowski gave an indication of the extended family’s thoughts when he denounced the revolution, seeing it not as the painful cure of the “Tsarist disease,” but as its agonizing consequence.14 Already planning to flee the country once a suitable lull presented itself, he expressed himself more overtly, writing: “The Russian Revolution is a fit of premortem convulsions, a rebellion of the cellular substance against the organizing principle of life, a hypertrophy of collective tissue to the disadvantage of the more noble tissues such as the nerves and the brain.”15 Despite the extended family’s distrust of Bolshevik rule, it did bring a stabilizing influence and certain obvious advantages. With extensive plans to put education at the heart of their campaign, the Bolsheviks came with the intention of securing the cooperation of the local artistic and intellectual circles at a governmental level. Part of their ambitious, far-reaching plans included the establishment of a network of schools from nursery age to higher education, and a conservatory that would provide free tuition for all instrument studies, research, and academic subjects, and a pedagogical training center. The

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Neuhauses, Szymanowskis, and Blumenfelds were quickly given official engagements as leaders of the regional Elisavetgrad Music Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education. Heinrich Neuhaus and Karol Szymanowski were given positions at the helm of this initiative. Writing to the Kochańskis, Szymanowski reported: We exist purely as a result of our role now in the [Regional People’s] Commissariat for Education—the pay is not bad, and it saves us from various complications. Harik [Neuhaus] and myself, along with a few others, give concerts and are even thinking about setting up a school. Although I have been asked to Odessa to fulfill a similar role, I dare not—living from hand to mouth among loved ones is more bearable.16

Certainly the regular salary and substantially more generous ration allocations provided by such roles were welcome privileges during a time of famine. Similarly to Szymanowski, however, Neuhaus too saw the opportunity as a temporary comfort. Updating Reinhold Glière, the director of the Kiev Conservatory, on his situation Neuhaus stressed that although he was involved in lecture-recitals, performance, and pedagogical work, he was “thinking all the time how to leave this wretched town as quickly as possible.”17 While the young cousins maintained that their engagement by Narkompros was “not for themselves, but for the money,” they obviously undertook this work seriously.18 Neuhaus boasted that the intensity of his work with Szymanowski led to a “flourishing” of Elisavetgrad’s musical life far beyond the scale it had ever witnessed.19 For their concert activities, at their disposal were the town’s best halls and two well-maintained Steinway grand pianos. During this time both Heinrich and Natalya Neuhaus gave regular solo recitals. Further, Neuhaus was able to make the most of his long-standing passion for performing symphonic repertoire in four-handed arrangements through the many performances he gave with Szymanowski on the two pianos. Compared to their previous indulgence in the music of Richard Strauss, especially at Tymoszówka, these programs now placed a heavy emphasis on Russian music. For Neuhaus this formed his first pronounced immersion in this repertoire and included Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, Francesca da Rimini, and staging Eugene Onegin; Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Tamara; and concert performances of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov. Supplementing this, Neuhaus and Szymanowski successfully included performances of symphonies by Beethoven and Schumann as well as excerpts from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Tristan und Isolde to packed halls.20 Their tenure in Elisavetgrad proved short-lived. Along with other regions, by the summer of 1919 the Bolsheviks temporarily lost control to General Anton Denikin’s White Volunteer Army. When Elisavetgrad was seized there was no option but to flee. Routes of escape were treacherous, necessitating elaborate

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roundabout paths. As the family decided to split in order to embark on a bid to reach some kind of safety, planning ahead proved almost impossible. Desperation severed loyalties even between old acquaintances, for example, as was graphically demonstrated by Neuhaus’s warning to Szymanowski about the corruption of their mutual friend Alexander Dubyansky—a prodigious pupil of Blumenfeld, and one of the dedicatees of Szymanowski’s Masques op. 34 (the others being Neuhaus and Artur Rubinstein), who would commit suicide a year later at the age of just twenty: “One terrible thing: Sasha has been completely Bolshevized [. . .] a typical specimen of the functional communist—you know the background.”21 News of atrocities throughout Ukraine brought little hope. A close friend, Natalya Davidova, wrote from Kiev about endless killing both day and night: “All the houses on the Sadovaya, Ivansky, and Elisavetsky Streets are stained with blood, and the parks are filled with the corpses of those murdered. Each day someone is killed and our remaining circle of friends also decreases day by day.”22 Despite this Neuhaus decided his best chance was to try to make it to Kiev. There was no time for farewells, even though he knew full well the finality of his parting from his cousin: I just found out about your final decision to leave for Warsaw. I completely support this, but it made me feel so sad—the devil knows when we will meet again. I must stay in Kiev [where] I have become a professor [at the Conservatory] and have a class of twelve students. Soon I will start giving concerts. I feel sad, there is no life [. . .] and no money. My dream in many ways would be to come to Warsaw with you, but the knowledge that I will not see my parents, possibly for many years, [. . .] forces me to stay in Kiev, which by the way, I hate especially in its current state. [. . .] Katotku [Szymanowski], it is terrible that I will not be able to write to you when you will be in Warsaw. However, regardless of everything, I wish you as soon as possible to break free from this sh . . . I embrace you, Katot, my dearest and love you very much. Yours, Hari N.23

Szymanowski made it to Warsaw, traveling for the sake of safety not overland, but through Odessa, across the Black Sea, and finally through Romania. With such fast-moving events, it is easy to forget the significance of this journey. Unlike a few years earlier, Szymanowski’s return to Warsaw did not bring him to that outpost of the Russian Empire where he and Neuhaus collaborated so often, but to an independent Poland: a country now engaged in a bitter war with both Russia and the new Ukraine (see fig. 2.2). In a final touching exchange, Neuhaus’s sweetheart, Militsa Borodkina, urged the composer never to forget his “burning homeland”—the “poor Russia” shortly to be sealed by a “huge stone wall which even the entire magic of imagination cannot break.”24

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Figure 2.2. Map showing furthest lines of advance in the Russo-Polish War. Map by Chris Robinson.

In Kiev Neuhaus joined his uncle on the piano faculty of the conservatory, where they both remained until 1922. Here he resumed a busy concert schedule—averaging nearly ten different concert programs in the season. Some of this concert activity remained strikingly similar to the revolutionary duties expected of him in Elisavetgrad: “I continued to play [Chopin] in the [Workers’] Clubs and in the Red Army barracks. I was even given an honorary title by the Twelfth Division of the Red Army.”25 Similarly, he continued to perform concerts of symphonic arrangements for four hands—famously with Vladimir Horowitz whom he mentored at this time.26 It was during these years that Neuhaus started to develop a particular interest in giving what he would later call “monographic” concerts: recitals dedicated to the works of a single composer. This was a relatively unusual initiative at the time, given the fact that it was still common to present mixed programs with the participation of different musicians (combining chamber and vocal music with solo works) or

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sharing a piano recital among two or three different soloists—both formats that Neuhaus had himself experienced frequently to this point. Already performing all-Chopin recitals in Kiev and Elisavetgrad, Neuhaus’s inclination toward monographic concerts at the time was driven by the music of Bach, Skryabin, and Szymanowski. In 1919 in Kiev, for instance, his projects included an entire evening dedicated to Skryabin’s complete piano sonatas, followed by an evening of Szymanowski (Variations on a Polish Folk Theme op. 10, the second and third piano sonatas, and Masques op. 34), and two recitals of Bach (most likely complete performances of the two volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier).27 Throwing himself ever more deeply into his work, out of both personal ambition and a certain need to forget the horror around him, these seemingly innocuous initiatives were in fact forming the foundations for his most important concepts of musical interpretation: playing the complete oeuvres of a composer Neuhaus believed that he “lived himself into” that composer’s life. In learning to speak the “words, thoughts, and experiences” of the composer in a similar way, Neuhaus was convinced he was learning to embody the “spiritual facts” or “autopsychography” of the composer’s life—the tracing of which he believed formed the core of truly great art, and that he would eventually call its “autobiographicality.”28

Rise to Fame as a Muscovite Pianist Neuhaus’s short years of professorship in Kiev (1919–22) brought about many of the important friendships that would prove to have a deep influence on his future life. Perhaps the most striking of these was his first wife, Zinaida Yeremeyeva-Giotti. Born in 1897 in St. Petersburg, she began her musical studies in 1914, and in the summer of 1917 found herself in Gustav Neuhaus’s music school in Elisavetgrad where she studied with Natalya Neuhaus. She was proving to be an accomplished pianist when she first met Neuhaus during his sporadic visits to Elisavetgrad before he had set off for Tiflis. Upon Neuhaus’s return from Tiflis, she became his student, following him to Kiev to study in his class at the conservatory. Half Italian on her mother’s side, Zinaida struck those around her as extraordinarily beautiful. Her slender frame, delicate manners, and attention to the way she dressed were features remarked upon by many (see fig. 2.3) and, as described by Taisiya Suvorova (one of Blumenfeld’s students), gave her the “look of an Italian boy. Her thin face and big eyes . . . made her glance resemble that of the Madonna.”29 In 1919 Zinaida and Neuhaus were married. Although Neuhaus largely respected Zinaida’s musical judgment, and the two regularly played piano duets in private, she never became a professional musician. She was, however, a doting wife, committed to supporting her

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Figure 2.3. Left to right: Two unidentified relatives, Gustav Neuhaus (standing), Olga Blumenfeld-Neuhaus (seated), Heinrich Neuhaus (seated), and Zinaida Neuhaus (standing) ca. 1920. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

husband’s career. In her own memories of these early years of marriage she singled out her surprise at his helplessness. Life with Neuhaus gave her the “impression that a great artist should not be competent in household duties and chores. Heinrich Gustavovich always said that the limits of his abilities were in being able to do up an English [safety] pin. During the Civil War Heinrich Gustavovich was once forced to put on the samovar: he put the coal where he should have put the water, and water into its chimney.”30 Outside the household Zinaida took charge of many of her husband’s concert arrangements— from hauling wood to help heat the concert hall in Kiev, where Neuhaus regularly played his recitals in fingerless gloves and coat during these years, to finding and moving a better instrument into the venue by horse and cart. Later, with the birth of their two sons—Adrian (“Adik”) in 1925 and, the future eminent pianist and pedagogue in his own right Stanislav (“Stasik”) in 1927— Zinaida quickly got used to being left for long periods of time to take charge of the household as her husband divided much of his time between long days teaching or being away on concert tours. The young couple’s stay in Kiev was not long. In 1922 Heinrich Neuhaus and Felix Blumenfeld both received a summons from Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet People’s Commissar of Education, to teach at the Moscow Conservatory. Neuhaus’s professorship in Moscow, at the age of thirty-four, was in many

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ways the fulfillment of his long-standing dream of being a respected “musical authority in a big city.” While Neuhaus’s early years of establishing himself in Russia focused his energies on the former imperial capital, Petrograd, the fear of foreign invasion had recently forced Vladimir Lenin to move the capital back to Moscow in March 1918. Lunacharsky’s transfer of Neuhaus to the Soviet capital, where Neuhaus as yet had no connections, therefore thrust him into a bustling center of artistic and intellectual achievement where he taught, with the exception of the years at the height of the Second World War, for the rest of his life—some forty-two years. Neuhaus’s indelible first impression on his students and colleagues at the conservatory quickly made him a core member of the piano faculty, and would soon catapult him to fame: a household name instantly recognized by amateurs and professionals alike across the expanses of the Soviet Union. Just as in Kiev, however, Neuhaus’s pedagogical commitments did not dampen his desire to perform. In fact, being based in Moscow in such an eminent position broadened the scope of his concerts to include regular Soviet tours. Indeed, in the first decade of his professorship, it is difficult to comprehend how he found the time for his many students. Neuhaus’s concerts usually combined several different programs within the space of a few days and would often involve extensive travel, the toll of which is easy to take for granted. For instance, in January 1926, after four days of continuous travel by train from Moscow to Tiflis he was to perform a solo recital of Skryabin, and a few days later, two piano concertos (Beethoven’s fourth and Liszt’s second) in one evening.31 Despite his strenuous teaching schedule at the Moscow Conservatory, in January 1929 Neuhaus reported to his parents that, during a fortnight on tour in Kiev, his programs made up seven separate recitals. A conservative repertoire list included:32 Beethoven: Piano Sonatas in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2 (“Tempest”); A Major, op. 101; B Major, op. 106 (“Hammerklavier”) Bach-Liszt: Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, S. 462; a selection of organ chorale preludes Schumann: Fantasie op. 17, Vogel als Prophet from Waldszenen op. 82 Chopin: Ballades, no. 3 in A-flat Major, op. 47, and no. 4 in F Minor, op. 52; a selection of preludes; a selection of mazurkas; two nocturnes; Barcarolle op. 60; two waltzes Liszt: Mephisto Waltz S. 514; Valse oubliée S. 215; Ave Maria; two Petrarch Sonnets from Années de Pèlerinage Medtner: Sonata in G Minor, op. 22; Funeral March op. 31, no. 2 Prokofiev: complete Visions Fugitives op. 22; March, Dance, Minuet, Gavotte; Contes de la vieille grand-mère op. 31 Myaskovsky: Sonata no. 2 in F-sharp Minor, op. 13

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Skryabin: a selection of preludes; a selection of etudes; a selection of poems Ravel: Sonatine; Alborada del gracioso Brahms: two rhapsodies and three intermezzi Neuhaus’s impresario counted an overall audience attendance for these solo Kiev recitals as being in excess of three thousand people. The ability to perform different and challenging programs in recitals taking place within a narrow space of time was undoubtedly a legacy of Romantic pianism at the end of the nineteenth century. The musicianship of Neuhaus and his contemporaries evolved in the shadow of Anton Rubinstein’s mammoth concert programs given across Europe. Josef Hofmann’s programs between 1897 and 1923, as well as those of the young Artur Rubinstein, were particularly notable for their variety and duration within the same week, let alone season.33 What is remarkable in Neuhaus’s case, however, is the rarity of combining such intense programming with full-time pedagogical commitments. Even for a famous pianist of the musical intelligence and stature of Leopold Godowsky, for instance, his pedagogical work seems to have dramatically affected the number of different programs he would perform within a season, with the same works being performed even in venues of close geographical proximity.34 With such exposure Neuhaus’s reputation as a pianist flourished and he quickly became one of the USSR’s most famous concertizing artists. His success in the nation’s main concert halls garnered him a dedicated following in the main cultural centers of Moscow, Kiev, Tiflis, and eventually Leningrad. Neuhaus’s charismatic stage presence earned him a near fanatical following, which guaranteed him packed concert halls wherever he played. His name was further spread through his supplementary concerts aimed at wider audiences such as the open-air concerto evenings (Liszt’s Second, Chopin’s First, and Skryabin) in Kiev and across more provincial areas.35 A fragment from an anonymous diary for 1931 among Militsa Genrikhovna Neuhaus’s archive materials is representative of the kind of furor his performances were able to conjure at the height of his pianistic powers to a public already spoiled by a staggering customary standard of musicianship and variety: “Today I heard Heinrich Neuhaus—an exceptionally popular pianist in Moscow. Impressions: a huge musical culture, astounding technique; stronger in the lyrical than the dramatic and bravura. All in all—an astounding musician. An enormous success. He played a lot for encores including works by the “reactionary” Prokofiev [. . .]. The audience filled the Grand Hall of the Conservatory to the brim, and listened with the greatest attention.”36 Not long after, an overwhelmed Boris Pasternak would gasp: Garrik played exceptionally well: the evening was a real triumph. But there were some pieces ([. . .] a sonata by Scarlatti, Beethoven’s Sonata opus 109,

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parts of Schumann’s Fantasie, and Chopin’s Ballade in A-flat Major), which he played with a superhuman strength, divine, with boundless authority, so tenderly to the point they floated away and became immaterial. After the Ballade a tumultuous roar broke out—the floors shook, for ten minutes they would not let him start the Liszt [. . .]. Coming out for the tenth time to cries to give an encore, as silence set into the hall, he said he felt unwell and would play a composition of his own. He played his Prelude—the one which I love and often sing, with the broad cantilena and bell-like second theme. He knew the success of the evening—if he did not feel the triumphant accomplishment of his achievement he would not have played himself. Through his sorrow [Neuhaus had recently traumatically separated from his wife] he glowed and laughed; they did more than listen to him: they listened and loved.37

The press too commented on Neuhaus’s “flawless” technique, and even the deeply critical Gustav Neuhaus began to admit to being astounded by the brilliance of his son’s interpretations. Even after hearing Heinrich Neuhaus’s performances in Elisavetgrad and Crimea in 1927 alongside Blumenfeld’s star pupil Simon Barere, who was garnering a reputation for his effortless virtuoso technique, Gustav Neuhaus maintained that his son had “no reason to fear competition.”38 After the grueling hardships of the Civil War things started to look bright. The prestige and stability of a coveted professorship in the capital, the respect of colleagues and popularity with students, the joy of beginning a young family with his beautiful wife, copious sold-out performances across the Soviet Union, and critical acclaim all contributed to a newfound confidence. As the wounds of his severed ties with his youthful friends and cousin started to slowly heal, his pianism was reaching new heights, and new friendships prompted an inquisitive freshness to radiate through his playing.

Difficult Friendships Neuhaus had always mockingly maintained that his “proper place” was “in the meetings of the [philosophical] group ‘Free Aesthetics,’ and not in Room 29 at the Moscow Conservatory.”39 Neuhaus’s habit of immersing himself in the philosophical as much as the musical literature gave him a refuge that kept alive the spiritual aspects of musical performance: diverting his mind away from the arduous work he needed to keep his technique in good form and from the anxieties that could contribute to uneven performance that were apt to plague him as a result of his volatile personality. Neuhaus confessed: “Since my childhood I was infected not only by the musical bacillus, but to an even greater degree by morals, ‘moralin’ [play on words hinting at a medical connotation]: aesthetic questions, questions of dignity, human values, of the beauty

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of man’s soul, of spiritual greatness concerned me not less, if not more, than the most beautiful sonata of Beethoven.”40 It is therefore symbolic in many ways that his closest friendships, which he formed in Russia during the first decade of his rise to fame as a pianist, were not with musicians, but with writers, aestheticians, and philosophers. Shortly before his transfer to Moscow from Kiev, Neuhaus had become good friends with the philosophical and literary historian Valentin Asmus. Having just graduated from Kiev University in 1919, Asmus was already making a name for himself as a brilliant intellectual, becoming most famous for his studies of Immanuel Kant and Baruch Spinoza. Like Neuhaus, Asmus’s partGermanic origin contributed to his interest in forming a continuity of the classical European philosophical tradition into the early Soviet years. With these interests being particularly sympathetic to Neuhaus’s own, the two families exchanged news and ideas through regular visits.41 Their contact became all the more permanent when the Asmuses too settled in Moscow in 1927, and the families spent many evenings in each other’s company. Not long after the Asmuses’ arrival in Moscow, Valentin Asmus’s wife, Irina, brought Neuhaus a 1917 edition of Boris Pasternak’s Poverkh bar’yerov (Over the Barriers). Both families were completely enthralled by the writing, and when by some coincidence Irina recognized Pasternak at the tram stop in Moscow in the winter of 1928–29 she immediately invited him to their home. It was an almost trivial turn of events that would soon bring about profound changes in the pianist’s and poet’s personal and artistic lives. Pasternak obviously enjoyed the company of the Asmuses and Neuhauses, as a week later the invitation was reciprocated. Already having heard Neuhaus’s playing a short while before, Pasternak offered the opinion that this was “one of our best pianists.”42 Neuhaus’s private performances at Pasternak’s home at Volkhonka significantly deepened this impression and left the poet prepared to consider his new friend a genius—a word he did not use lightly, especially having grown up in an environment where music of the highest caliber filled the home, which frequently welcomed Skryabin and Rachmaninov. Moreover, Pasternak’s mother, Rosa Kaufman, was herself a successful concert pianist who had studied with Theodor Leschetizky and possibly attended the master classes of Anton Rubinstein. The evening was further animated into the small hours with discussions about art and aesthetics, and included Pasternak’s recitations of his recent poetry. Such late night gatherings quickly developed into a ritual shared between the families. As documented by Pasternak in a letter to his mother: The only joys in my existence are the diverse performances of my latest friend (i.e., my friend of this last year)—Heinrich Neuhaus. Along with some of his friends we have this tradition now that after his concert we spend the

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rest of the night in each other’s company. [. . .] Last time he played a twopiano recital with [Fyodor] Keneman, and it was so odd to witness how their different attacks can change the piano of the same maker into instruments of such incompatible timbres. Without ever diverging in rhythm, they always diverged in music [and] even with closed eyes we could tell when Neuhaus came in with [. . .] his wave of profound sound, with a devilish sense of rhythm and temperament. Then (without Keneman, of course), until six in the morning we drank, ate, played, read, and danced the foxtrot.43

The rapport that joined together the couples in these years—Valentin and Irina Asmus, Zinaida and Heinrich Neuhaus, and Boris and Yevgeniya Pasternak—was immortalized by Pasternak’s poetry as a “six-hearted union” (soyuz shestiserdnïy).44 Outside the routines and duties of Moscow life, the couples’ interactions intensified during their summers spent together in Irpen on the outskirts of Kiev where Zinaida arranged for them to rent dachas in close proximity. As Zinaida recalled: “In the evenings we got together to listen to music. Boris Leonidovich simply adored the playing of Heinrich Gustavovich, and Neuhaus was in love with his poetry and often recited these to me by heart to try and make me like them too.”45 This adoration quickly spread beyond the confines of those private gatherings and poured out into the artistic arena. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, Pasternak’s views on art made a profound imprint in Neuhaus’s thinking and playing. Likewise, Neuhaus’s playing was idolized in several of Pasternak’s poems. The pianist’s distinct affinity for the music of Chopin resonated with Pasternak’s own privileged view of this composer above all others. For the poet, these two musical personas often evolved in a manner that made his interpretation of them quite interchangeable. Most openly this is traced to Pasternak’s poem written that first summer in Irpen, “Ballada” (Ballade) (1930). Here, Neuhaus’s emotionally charged performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in E Minor, op. 11, in Kiev on an outdoor stage on the banks of the Dnieper, accompanied by thunder and lightning, caused the poet to meld Neuhaus, Chopin, and the drama of the occasion into what is widely considered his most musically structured work, “harmonized” by the recurring phrase “Nedvizhnïy Dnepr, nochnoy Podol” (The motionless Dnieper, nocturnal Podol).46 However, it was not only Neuhaus who would find his reflection in Pasternak’s work—the poem “Leto” (Summer) (1930) alluded to Zinaida as the kindred spirit to relight Pasternak’s creativity. Soon the Neuhaus–Pasternak friendship put into action a sequence of events that shattered both their marriages. The summer of 1930 in Irpen had exposed the hidden fractures already straining the relationships of both Heinrich and Zinaida, and Boris and Yevgeniya. In the Neuhaus household, Zinaida had to come to terms with the news that her husband had met with his former fiancée from Elisavetgrad, Militsa Borodkina, and fathered a daughter. Although Zinaida claimed in her

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memoirs that she received this devastating news in 1926 while carrying their second son, Stanislav who was born in 1927, it must have actually occurred sometime later as Neuhaus’s illegitimate daughter, Militsa (Milka) was in fact born in 1929. Pleading for forgiveness for his actions and the stress this caused in their relationship, Neuhaus sincerely remained very much in love with Zinaida. The Pasternaks too had found it increasingly difficult to live in a harmonious union. Yevgeniya (née Lurye) was a professional artist in her own right and as both husband and wife competed to assert themselves artistically and refused to make concessions, tempers were very often frayed. Pasternak became ever more enchanted by Zinaida who, several years later, supposedly would find both her personality and her prerevolutionary past as the inspiration for Lara in Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.47 In particular, in contrast to Yevgeniya, Zinaida enthralled him with her “dedicated love of the round of daily life,” which he felt marked her “true poetic nature” in everything she did: “from music to the scrubbing of pans, cleaning of floors, and being a perfect hostess to friends from Tiflis.”48 Although a seemingly odd trait to compliment it was not simply a whimsical fetish to Pasternak. Boris Pasternak’s father, the painter Leonid, had been a close friend of Lev Tolstoy and had spent much time at Yasnaya Polyana, becoming a famous illustrator for the great writer’s books. Tolstoy’s idea that true artistry would evade privileged aristocrats and intellectuals unless they humbly worked the land impressed itself on the Pasternak family who revered his status as both a writer and philosopher. The eagerness with which Tolstoy himself donned traditional peasant dress, plowing the earth and reaping the harvest, was in itself, as for Ilya Repin, the subject of many of Leonid Pasternak’s paintings. Zinaida could not have failed to recognize the meaning of Pasternak’s attention, and was also struck by his curious nature. In contrast to Neuhaus’s lofty artistic detachment from daily life, she was surprised to find Pasternak actively seeking out opportunities to engage with the realities of everyday life such as chopping wood for the fire, and speaking about it as a necessary attribute for poetic thought: “I never knew that such a great poet could be so adept at household chores. [After all, Neuhaus’s] participation in such activities only led to insurrection.”49 On their return to Moscow in mid-September 1930, Pasternak approached Neuhaus with a long and difficult conversation. Leaving the apartment, Pasternak left on the piano a copy of his “Ballade” dedicated to Neuhaus, and a second, different poem of the same name for Zinaida. Convincing herself that things would return to the way they should be, Zinaida decided to stay put for the time being. Notwithstanding all the best will to avoid any hint of scandal, the situation quickly started to develop with increasing difficulty. As Neuhaus left for an extended concert tour of Siberia on January 1, 1931, Pasternak

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admitted to his parents that: “What happened in his absence would have happened anyway, but given the circumstances became overcast with the shadow of dishonesty.”50 Zinaida’s letter to Neuhaus confessing her love for Pasternak prompted him to break off his recital in tears and cancel the remainder of the Siberian tour to return to Moscow on March 22. The confusion of feelings contributed to a turbulent atmosphere. There was no hiding from the scandalous affair. Leaving for Kiev, Zinaida felt torn: “Pasternak conquered me with the power of his love and his depth of intellect. When Pasternak came to Kiev I was completely taken with him and his passion. In a week he had to leave—Heinrich Gustavovich arrived in Kiev with concerts. . . . And, like after all his successful concerts, I once more believed that I desperately love him.”51 Pasternak, for his part, was sure his fate rested with Zinaida, yet that he could continue loving and supporting Yevgeniya and their son, Eugene, “but in a different way.”52 Neuhaus never ceased loving Zinaida: You will always live in the most sacred part of my heart—[. . .] no matter how our journeys part [. . .] our roots and hearts are one, and no force will part us. [. . .] Since that moment in Siberia I have never suffered so [. . .] but despite my heart’s pain, know that yours has gained the love and artistry of a great, extraordinary man.53

According to Pasternak, Neuhaus’s explosive temperament and frayed nerves were strained with the “impossible task of being a friend” with which he could no longer cope.54 Such a devastating turn of events left Neuhaus utterly beside himself. It was only recently that these same friendships had spurred him on to give extraordinarily inspired performances. Now he struggled not to stop mid-performance and storm off the stage. Witnessing such a recital the poet Osip Mandelstam astutely defended through his poetry the pianist’s decision to leave the stage, rather than continue with an uninspired interpretation, as an honorable one: “Do not rub into the keys the root / of the sweetly pear of the earth” (Ne vtirayte v klavishi koren’ / Sladkovatoy grushi zemnoy)—the “pear of the earth” or artichoke, so hated by Mandelstam, being a poetic symbol for artistically destructive influences.55 It was only early in 1932 with Pasternak’s demonstrative suicide attempt that the situation found a final resolution. Attempting to keep the event a secret, Pasternak nevertheless wrote about it at length to his sister: Neuhaus opened the door. “Der spät kommende Gast?” [A late guest?], he said [. . .] and left to give a recital. I saw a vial of iodine on the medicine shelf and swallowed its entire contents in one gulp. It burned my throat and straight away I made involuntary chewing motions. “What are you chewing? Why does it smell of iodine?” Zina asked. “Where is the iodine?”—she

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shouted and cried. [. . .] I was saved by the virtue that she was a nurse during the war. [Being nursed by Zinaida] was such bliss. Knowing [that our separation after this was inevitable] I longed for death like for a cake: if there were a revolver near me, I would have reached out for it like for something sweet. [. . .] At 2:00 a.m. Neuhaus returned. When Zina told him about what had happened he ran to me. “No, really, you did that? Boris, you? I would never have believed it. Have I really overestimated you?” And so on. Before that, he curtly said to Zina (as if she were guilty in some way), “Well, are you satisfied? Has he proven his love for you?”56

Zinaida, along with Adrian and Stanislav, started a new chapter of their lives with Pasternak, officially confirming their commitment in marriage later that year. Neuhaus would marry Militsa Borodkina, but they too eventually parted ways. When exactly this happened is unclear, but eventually Borodkina’s companionship was replaced by that of the Zurich-born violist Sylvia Fedorovna Eichinger, who had studied at the Vienna Academy, and whom Neuhaus met in Crimea in the summer of 1937. In a somewhat convoluted arrangement Neuhaus continued to live with and maintain warm ties with Militsa Borodkina and their daughter Militsa, with Eichinger also later joining the household. The union between Neuhaus and Eichinger was only officially marked in 1962, after Militsa Borodkina’s death. Despite everything, the new Pasternak family maintained regular contact with Heinrich Neuhaus and, seemingly against all odds, their friendship continued to flourish: “[Neuhaus] comes to see us nearly every other day, not just because he cannot forget [Zinaida], but also because he cannot part with me.”57 Of particular importance to Neuhaus were his visits to Pasternak at the writers’ village outside Moscow, Peredelkino (see fig. 2.4), which took over the aura of Irpen as a place of cultural dialogue, music making, and the exchange of ideas. Neuhaus not only spent extended periods at Peredelkino but also introduced his most talented students to Pasternak’s circle, including both Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. When Neuhaus was finally able to bring his elderly parents from Elisavetgrad to Moscow in 1931 to escape the infamous famine (the “Holodomor”), they developed a strong bond with Pasternak. Until his death in 1938, Gustav Neuhaus frequently confided in the poet, speaking in German, sharing his concerns over his son’s occurrences of apathy toward practicing the piano, and depending on Pasternak to “exert an influence” over Neuhaus.58 With time the trauma of this separation proved an easier burden to carry. Neuhaus’s adoring public had forgiven him the spate of disrupted recitals and he swiftly resumed his successful tours. Continuing to win the hearts and minds of more audiences across the USSR, and becoming one of the most respected artists of the Muscovite intelligentsia, his unevenness as a performer—which had made itself known in his European years—never quite ceased to haunt him.

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Figure 2.4. Gathering at Peredelkino. Left to right: Boris Pasternak, Heinrich Neuhaus, Sviatoslav Richter, and Galina Neuhaus (wife of Neuhaus’s younger son, Stanislav), 1948. Reproduced with permission from the Vladimir Dahl Russian State Literary Museum.

Authority and Authorities Neuhaus’s successes did not quell his ongoing nervous episodes and crippling insecurities relating to his alleged lack of bravura technique and “unsuitable” hands. These issues caused evident distress not only to him, but also, as is evident from Gustav Neuhaus’s despair, to those closest to him: “Almost expressed in Garry’s [Heinrich’s] letters is his dissatisfaction with himself and life in general. He wants to work all summer on his technique [but says] if [he] needs to spend his ‘whole life working only on technique he would rather put a bullet to his head.’ Is it acceptable that a married man, the father of two children, should write such things to his elderly parents?”59 His charisma both on and off the stage, however, seemed indomitable. Although the technical polish of his performances sometimes left more to be desired, this was readily forgiven. His strenuous pedagogical commitments (by the mid-1930s his class at the Moscow Conservatory numbered some twenty-five students) left him teaching diligently on many days from early morning to dusk, leaving precious little time for his own practice. Indeed, at times it was only a matter of a few half hours that separated his busy teaching or examination duties from the curtain call of his

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evening performance. It is unsurprising then to find that in 1933 a well-known Russian critic, writing under the name of K. Grimikh, expressed concerns: “It is unfortunate when [Neuhaus’s] pianism is marked here and there by stains and splashes—it is especially unfortunate that Neuhaus plays not only worse than he wants, but worse than he can.”60 In many ways the years between 1922 and Grimikh’s remark saw Neuhaus at the zenith of his pianistic powers. Neuhaus continued performing until 1958, giving his last performance in the Grand Hall of the Conservatory on April 23 as part of the celebrations of his seventieth birthday. Selected for the program were the works that, as noted by reviewer, carried the “incomparable hallmarks” of Neuhaus’s “poetic world with its dynamic emotional perspective, wisdom and profundity of thought”: the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17, Skryabin’s Fantasie op. 28, and Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 49 (with Skryabin’s Album Leaf and a Chopin mazurka as encores).61 The poignancy of the occasion must have been combined with particularly inspired interpretations, as it was remarked that the recital was played in the inimitable “Neuhausian manner—imbued so deeply with meaning that there were no ‘empty passages.’ [. . .] The audience once again confirmed how extraordinarily the world of musical imagery is interpreted by this artist, and that age did not detract from the sharpness or the freshness of his [emotional] experiences.”62 These were followed by a few recitals in May in Kiev and Saratov (including performances of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier).63 Those twenty-five years leading up to these final recitals, however, were marked by a continuous battle to conceal and overcome a problem that threatened his entire career—a partial paralysis that developed in Neuhaus’s right hand as a result of serious complications after he was struck down with diphtheria in 1933. The illness was initially misdiagnosed by the doctors, which caused him to develop the polyneuritis that had nearly killed him. As related by Pasternak: The complications worsened into polyneuritis: as a result of the ulceration of the larynx he started to lose his voice, then it affected all his limbs, which became quite paralyzed. Yesterday he was taken away by ambulance to the Institute of Physiotherapy for lengthy treatment [nearly nine months]. These cases are always protracted and difficult to cure. It is especially frightening for a pianist, and we are all very worried.64

The public at large did not know the enormous sacrifices and tricks that Neuhaus had to resort to over the subsequent years to perform. His letters, however, reveal his constant anguish as he tried to keep himself in shape for recitals (see fig. 2.5), and discuss his largely unsuccessful and increasingly elaborate attempts—including various injections, intense physiotherapy sessions, surgical procedures, and electrotherapy—to find a cure, or at least some respite.

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Figure 2.5. Neuhaus went to great lengths to hide the extent of the difficulties afflicting his hands, often concealing bandages under fingerless gloves. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

The onset of Neuhaus’s partial paralysis of the hand at such a crucial stage was a decisive factor that precluded his aspirations to free himself from the burdens of a teaching career in order to dedicate himself entirely to performance. Despite Neuhaus’s denial that he was endowed with a gift for teaching, Valentin Asmus believed it to be his calling. Although he was truly enraptured by Neuhaus as a performer, Asmus felt that it was impossible to ignore the fact that Neuhaus was endowed with a rare talent and “wonderful, inimitable manner” to talk and write about music.65 Neuhaus’s fame as a pianist, coupled with his devoting of more time to teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, contributed to the meteoric rise of his pedagogical career: the waiting list to be considered for study with the pianist became ever longer. Added to this was his pedagogical role in teaching at the Central Music School (TsMSha)—a newly formed affiliated school for younger musicians created through the initiative of Alexander Goldenweiser and Stanislav Shatsky in 1932. In these years Neuhaus’s reputation as a great pedagogue was sealed with the triumphs of his students in international piano competitions and particularly

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through two rising stars: Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. In an age where international competition laureates and their professors were greeted as national heroes upon their return to the country, Neuhaus had become a cultural icon to the wider public. Just as Asmus had foretold, Neuhaus’s authority was further supplemented and confirmed by his regular articles from 1933 written for the nation’s most eminent journals including Sovetskoye iskusstvo, Sovetskaya muzïka, Sovetskiy muzïkant, Muzïka; the newspapers Izvestiya, Pravda, and Kul’tura i zhizn’; and the wider interest cultural magazines Ogonyok and Yunost’. Similarly Neuhaus became one of the chief advisers to other piano faculties in conservatories across the USSR, and served as a jury member in hotly followed competitions such as the All-Union Competition for Performers in 1933 and in the Soviet Bloc, notably the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1937 (returning to that esteemed jury panel again in 1960). Neuhaus’s appointment as rector of the Moscow Conservatory between 1935 and 1937 (following the death of Stanislav Shatsky) was one that, despite bringing about some positive educational reforms in the Soviet Union, he carried out with a heavy heart, asking on numerous occasions to be freed from this obligation. Although a reluctant director, his tenure in the position had essentially confirmed the return of the Moscow Conservatory’s affairs to a state of normality following the disastrous Narkompros interference through Boleslav Pshibishevsky’s directorship (1929–31), and reinstated the establishment to its unique position as the only higher education institution not under the governance of a party member. However, for all the stabilizing initiatives during these years that returned the Moscow Conservatory to its existence as a microcosm that was sheltered from excessive political intervention, things were far from untroubled beyond its doors. Without a doubt the most disturbing event that coincided with Neuhaus’s directorship were the fateful meetings summoned by the Union of Soviet Composers on February 10, 13, and 15, 1936, in response to the denunciation of Dmitri Shostakovich in the notorious Pravda newspaper articles: “Sumbur vmesto muziki!” (Muddle instead of Music!) (January 28, 1936), and “Baletnaya fal’sh’” (Balletic Falsehood) (February 6, 1936). The purpose of these infamous meetings was to bring together “composers, music critics and performers” to discuss the “bright and happy event” of the vitriolic criticisms of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet The Limpid Stream. Both had enjoyed opulent success until Josef Stalin had come to hear Lady Macbeth for himself, leaving in disgust before the final scene. Overnight they were pulled from the repertoire and denounced as “formalist” creations that were poisonous to the Soviet people. The warning relayed in “Muddle instead of Music,” most likely at the dictator’s behest, was chillingly clear: “This game with abstruse things can end very badly.”66 In a matter of weeks the witch hunt across the wider artistic community for

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formalist scapegoats was rampant, and one whose malignant effects was witnessed by Neuhaus within his own close circle of friends as he remained one of the few people to dare to continue being seen alongside his now denounced friend, Pasternak.67 Neuhaus’s obligatory participation in the Moscow meetings of the Union of Soviet Composers has often been presented in modern evaluations of the event as an opportunistic and biting criticism against the young composer.68 True enough, the transcript of Neuhaus’s short speech in Sovetskaya muzïka shows that he did not hide his dislike of this particular opera: saying that it had “bored” him enough to leave immediately after the second act. While this hurtful remark to the twenty-nine-year-old composer (already put in such a vulnerable situation by the Pravda criticisms) undoubtedly does Neuhaus no favors, it is an attitude indicative of the limitations of his personal taste rather than any political agendas. Whatever flaws of judgment this incident suggests, they are flaws of a personal kind and need to be understood as such, and not as political actions intended as a direct denunciation of Shostakovich. Using his speech to proclaim the composer as a “highly talented, gifted, and intelligent person” with a bright future Neuhaus repelled the previously heard comments voiced during the meeting that this was, in effect, the end of the road for Shostakovich.69 Beyond this politicized meeting, and this particular work, Neuhaus’s admiration for Shostakovich’s symphonic and piano output is undeniable. Although in his speech he maintained that “neither Shostakovich nor Myaskovsky are comparable with Bach or Tchaikovsky” it must be remembered that he held the same conviction when it came to the music of his beloved Skryabin.70 Shostakovich’s photograph stood on his bookshelf overlooking the piano as Neuhaus regularly introduced his students to the “genius” of his Fourth Symphony and the “brokenheartedness” of the Fifth Symphony by playing four-handed arrangements with them, keenly showcasing his knowledge of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies from memory, and himself learning works from handwritten copies he transcribed after borrowing Shostakovich’s manuscripts prior to their publication—hardly actions of apathy.71 As indicated in Neuhaus’s papers, it was a respect that seems to have been warmly reciprocated by the composer (see fig. 2.6). In 1941, in Neuhaus’s highly enthusiastic article, “Dmitri Shostakovich,” he hailed the now more mature composer as the “continuation of all the greatest classical Russian art: the traditions of Pushkin, Glinka, and Tchaikovsky.”72 The word “Russian” here in place of “Soviet” is hardly accidental. Its implication as a nobler cultural manifestation is incongruous when seen against the state’s prewar intensification of insular nationalist mass rhetoric and the elaborate propaganda mechanisms that recanonized these artistic figures as “Soviet.” Audaciously, it reveals Neuhaus’s deliberate separation of artistic and

Figure 2.6. A handwritten note from Dmitri Shostakovich dated April 14, 1963, found amongst Neuhaus’s papers. It reads: “Dear Heinrich Gustavovich! Accept my late but most warm congratulations. I wish for you to always be in good health, happy, and that for many, many years you bring us joy with your remarkable artistry. With a hearty handshake, yours D. Shostakovich.” Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

Figure 2.7. Birthday portrait of Neuhaus with the score of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, 1958. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

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intellectual identity from the Stalinist “self-fashioning” that citizens routinely undertook, whereby Soviet was adopted as the new superior national identity (that subordinated Russian and other nationalities to a label of ethnicity) through “naked self-interest, omnipresent coercion,” and eventually sincere belief.73 Russia (and, as will be seen in the following two chapters, its understanding in a cosmopolitan, international sense) triumphing over the primitive crudeness of the Soviet became an increasingly important symbolic distinction for Neuhaus—as powerfully implied in his choreographed anniversary photograph (see fig. 2.7) holding not piano music, but a copy of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony.74 Perhaps most importantly, Neuhaus’s speech of 1936 is striking in the way in which it provides a rare but public glimpse of his critical view of Soviet cultural policy. Whereas Neuhaus’s mockery of the Communist regime was wellknown to his closest group of friends, it obviously remained a closely guarded topic. The sardonic tone of his speech is unmistakable. Rather than discuss Shostakovich, he instead opened his speech with a somewhat long-winded and obviously contrived account about the joy of being sent as part of a delegation of musicians that summer to meet the French writer Romain Rolland—who was seen as a sympathetic revolutionary spirit by the Soviet Union—at the dacha of Maxim Gorky. Neuhaus began to explain how they talked together about a recent sports parade and how it should be reflected in music. To those colleagues whom Neuhaus respected, his dislike of Rolland (in contrast to figures including Alexander Goldenweiser) would not have been a secret.75 Voicing this on numerous public occasions, perhaps the most famous of Neuhaus’s remarks on Rolland declared: “With all my respect for Romain Rolland, to his noble humanistic striving, I must say that despite his immense knowledge [. . .] I find his work is in some way distorted, even unpleasant.”76 The idea that serious art music should in any way be degraded to a simplistic spectacle of the likes of a sports parade is ironic enough in itself without knowing of Neuhaus’s ardent love of Romantic philosophy, or of his complete ineptness at any kind of physical exertion or sportsmanship. Even more daring in Neuhaus’s speech, especially given the menacing warnings in the Pravda article being discussed, was his direct criticism of Soviet cultural achievements. The Stalinist cultural revolution of the 1930s had been priding itself on eradicating formalist and bourgeois art, and various political agencies, including Stalin himself, keenly pointed out Soviet masterworks that surpassed all other Russian and Western art, and thus deserving of emulation.77 The Soviet cultural system was heralded as having given rise to the New (Soviet) Man who had risen from a perfect type of humanity. As described by Igal Halfin, the “new self” was part of a perfect society standing on the “threshold of the Communist paradise.” Since it was healthy and mature, “only the individual could be blamed for negative actions [and] those who thought

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otherwise were quite simply criminals.”78 With the crime of counterrevolution being seen as a state of mind more so than a course of action, expressing any doubt in the superiority and perfection of Soviet society was a dangerous move. And yet, amid a climate of escalating purges, Neuhaus took the opportunity to publicly attack the “boastful nature” of Soviet art and proclaim: “Our arguments and quibbles here are petty and inconsequential. Art which is great, true art, is like the peaks of the Himalayas [and] we have not yet created such an art. Everything which our Soviet art brings—is not it.”79 Thus, Neuhaus’s speech was far more significant than his relating his personal dislike of the opera, which formed only the most meager part of his comments. He used it as a platform to condemn the issue of erroneous “simplicity” expected of Soviet art by officials and policymakers. As a criticism of state cultural policy it garnered support from colleagues including those in the parallel meeting held in Leningrad, notably Shostakovich’s former teacher Maximilian Steinberg, and the issue of “greatness” in art was one to which he would return again and again with his students and in print.80 How successfully his message was transmitted beyond a select group of colleagues and intelligentsia, however, remains quite another matter. Neuhaus’s speech has become better known through the summary in Pravda that appeared on February 17, 1936. In the transcript, skewed beyond recognition by the enforced censorship of the state, the readers were to be made aware that in a speech “imbued with deep and genuine feeling Professor Neuhaus said: ‘We are going to the Himalayas of art. How petty and inconsequential seem those feelings and passions which are depicted in music like Lady Macbeth.’”81 Much to his perpetual annoyance it was by no means the last time that words were put in his mouth and his intended meaning hushed.82 Maybe only in hindsight did he realize how easily his outspoken stance at this meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers, at the start of the Great Purges, could easily have turned into grave problems. Handing over the conservatory’s directorship to Valentina Shatskaya in 1937, Neuhaus felt he was finally able to once more redirect his full attention to those things he did best—performing and teaching. His own successes, as well as the high-ranking results of his students in the 1937 International Chopin Competition, garnered him recognition from the state with the award of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (Orden Trudovogo Krasnogo Znameni).83 It was not long though before this return normality was disturbed by new hardships ushered in by the outbreak of the Second World War. Although the Soviet Union became involved in the War on September 17, 1939, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, Soviet citizens had believed themselves to be protected under the Molotov–Ribbentrop nonaggression pact signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939. In a drastically unforeseen turn of events on June 22, 1941, however, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. For the second time in Neuhaus’s life, Germany was once again

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a bitter enemy of Russia. Hitler’s well-resourced armies quickly moved deep into Russian territory. The eventual victory over Fascism came at a harrowing sacrifice of around twenty million Soviet lives. In the autumn of 1941 two deadly events crushed Soviet morale. On September 8 the Nazis besieged Leningrad, severing all roads in and out of the city except, in the winter, the treacherous journey across the ice of Lake Ladoga. It was a siege that lasted 872 days and killed around one in three of Leningrad’s inhabitants through starvation, bombardment, and exposure. Closely in its tracks came the Battle of Moscow between October 1941 and January 1942. Marching to the capital the Nazis vastly outnumbered the Red Army in men and technical might. By October 10 the Nazis were 45 miles (70 kilometers) from Moscow’s center, prompting Stalin to order the evacuation of the government to Kuibyshev (now Samara), leaving only a handful of officials behind. As the front line was reduced to a mere 18 miles (28 kilometers) from Moscow’s center by November, Stalin stayed put to calm pandemonium and rumors of the Soviet Union’s imminent defeat. With the unfolding of such events every attempt possible was made to maintain normality in the city’s cultural life. Throughout 1941 Neuhaus played relatively frequently for radio broadcasts, and gave lecture-recitals (including one on Szymanowski) as well as solo and concerto recitals in Moscow. By midOctober, however, it was impossible to hide that the capital was paralyzed with physical hardships and crippling fear. The prioritized evacuation of Moscow’s factories and engineering organizations pushed back the state’s decree to evacuate the major cultural institutions farther and farther. It was only on October 13, 1941—just two days before the official decree to initiate the mass evacuation of the USSR’s capital—that the faculty, students, and family members of the Moscow Conservatory (along with the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow Art Theatre, Vakhtangov Theatre, and the Maly Theatre) were offered this chance. As the Muscovite civilian population fled in large numbers, large sections of the conservatory began their journey by designated routes to Saratov, Kazan, Sverdlovsk, and neighboring cities. Cultural life, however, did not completely cease as several respected musical figures voluntarily refused to evacuate, including the Beethoven Quartet, the Bolshoi Symphony Radio Orchestra and their conductor Nikolai Golovanov, David Oistrakh, Maria Yudina, Yakov Flier, Yakov Zak, Sviatoslav Richter, Grigory Ginzburg, and Heinrich Neuhaus. Thus, although officially the section of the Moscow Conservatory that stayed put was closed between October 16, 1941, and March 10, 1942, sporadic classes continued to be held. Refusing to evacuate was not a decision to be taken lightly for anyone under the circumstances, but particularly so for Neuhaus. In the fragile wartime atmosphere it was not uncommon for those of even remote German ancestry to be accused of alleged espionage, rounded up, and executed without trial.

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Neuhaus’s German descent was obvious by name as well as his identity papers, which officially labeled him as a Soviet citizen of German nationality. His nonparty status but high professional rank could easily have put into question his loyalty to the USSR. Evacuation, however, would have meant unavoidable separation from his eldest and favorite son, Adrian, who was in a sanatorium just outside Moscow gravely ill with tuberculosis that had spread to his bones (despite all efforts, he died in 1945, at age twenty). On November 4, 1941, a wave of arrests targeting intellectuals and artists still living in Moscow swept through the city. That day a knock on the door of Neuhaus’s apartment presented him with a warrant for his arrest for the offense of resisting evacuation and for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, and an order to detain him in the infamous Lubyanka, the headquarters of the NKVD. His imprisonment there included six months of strictly observed solitary confinement, lasting until July 19, 1942. He was investigated and charged under Article 58.10.2 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR dealing with “counterrevolutionary actions”—a crime that was punishable by lengthy internment in a labor camp in peacetime, but during war or civil unrest, by confiscation of property and execution by firing squad. This period of Neuhaus’s life has always been shrouded in secrecy. Being eradicated from all Soviet accounts of his life and activities, it was a fact that only began to emerge into wider circles in the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For instance the posthumously published Autobiographic Notes, described the incident only as a “necessitated pause” in his “Moscow career,” with further text expunged with the editorial “.”84 Neuhaus’s reluctance to discuss this beyond his most trusted circle of friends and colleagues led Berta Kremenstein to say that in the years after his ordeal, Neuhaus’s outward energetic expression of optimism and wit made it impossible for onlookers to suspect what he had been through. In a conversation with his student Vera Gornostaeva, Neuhaus admitted that “‘it was a difficult epoch which only marginally touched me, without causing significant ill.’ He knew full well the relativity of his troubles.”85 Even today the NKVD file no. 3463 contains pages of classified information pertaining to his imprisonment, leaving many of the miraculous circumstances of Neuhaus’s release a mystery. The pages that were kindly made available by the Federal State Security Service of the Russian Federation for this study are a distressing read.86 On the day of his arrest a search of the apartment initiated the expected confiscation of identity documents (including the medal, documentation, and benefits associated with his Order of the Red Banner of Labor), valuable items such as separate items of jewelry and government bonds, and a 5-ruble gold coin from the time of Nicholas II, as well an older tsarist coin and “foreign coin from yellow metal”—possession of which in themselves were heavily punishable offenses. A more targeted search, evidently following leads from informants, focused on

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securing his address and telephone books, photographs, notebooks, 137 letters in foreign languages belonging to Gustav Neuhaus between 1905 and 1913 and Heinrich Neuhaus from 1928 to 1936, and moved decisively (among so many possible texts on every inch of the shelves) specifically to the four volumes of Friedrich Nietzsche’s works published in Russia in 1911–12.87 Despite gathering this evidence, the interrogations that began on November 6 were obviously driven by informant reports that carried the insinuation that reason Neuhaus had refused to evacuate was because of his Germanic sympathies: We have evidence that your refusal to leave Moscow [to Nalchik (in the foothills of the Caucasus near Georgia) which you declined] due to your familial circumstances, or [to Penza with the Central Music School and lastly Saratov] because you had received information that the chance of finding work and living conditions were poor, was because you were planning to stay in Moscow in case it was captured by the Nazis to work for them.

It was a claim Neuhaus categorically denied insisting that he was an “enemy of Hitler’s regime.”88 Aware that the slightest detail could be contrived to uphold the charge and lead to further arrests, his replies to questions such as to name his closest ties in the USSR (“the writers Boris Pasternak, Konstantin Fedin, Vsevolod Ivanov, Nikolai Pogodin; composers Sergei Prokofiev, Anatoly Alexandrov; pianists Konstantin Igumnov and Samuil Feinberg; and my students Emil Gilels, Rosa Tamarkina, Yakov Zak, and others”) purposefully avoided those who had remained in Moscow: Sviatoslav Richter, Valentin Asmus and Alexander Gabrichevsky.89 With the exception of his students, Pasternak, and Prokofiev, none of the others mentioned were among those regularly seen at his home. Being told that reliable evidence existed of his recent anti-Soviet sentiments, and asked where he might have given cause for someone to hear it, the identity of the informant must have dawned on Neuhaus. As he collected his thoughts, his first response was crossed out (as indicated by his signature next to a request in the margin asking it not to be read), and the remaining answer offered: “Certain colleagues from the arts and literature, and, in October, the birthday party of Elena Prokofieva [Lina, the Spanish wife of Sergei Prokofiev] where many mutual acquaintances were present.”90 Cornered by the interrogating officer in the second interview on December 3 between 1:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Neuhaus was “presented with a range of facts demonstrating [his] counterrevolutionary statements over the past three years,” and in light of the examples that had evidently been read out to him, he began to “partially” admit that the allegations were grounded: “I previously denied the charges because I was speaking in self-defense and did not realize that my anti-Soviet statements were such—but rather the result of

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a frivolous [legkomïslennogo], superficial approach to the serious questions of Soviet reality.”91 The transcription of the interrogation on December 3 did not need a scrupulous eye to discern “anti-Soviet” sentiments. Among the passages where Neuhaus admitted to ridiculing several decrees from 1940—including the proposal to introduce a compulsory seven-day eight-hour workweek, the introduction of fees for students in higher education—and the genuine fear about the difficulties being faced by an outnumbered Red Army at the front, there were far more shockingly outspoken comments that were singled out in crayon as the document was passed to higher-ranking officials pending further action: I was critical of issues of the USSR’s internal and international politics. For example, I spoke of my discontent over the 1939 Soviet-German [Molotov– Ribbentrop] Pact, saying it brought [the USSR] closer to Fascism, and saw many parallels between the USSR and Germany—in particular the analogous nature of their dictatorships, their one-party systems, the [totalitarian] methods by which things are accomplished. [. . .] I was convinced that the German invasion of Poland and the Red Army’s advancement onto Polish territory was pre-orchestrated between [them]. I also did not agree with the Soviet annexation of the Baltics, believing it designed to deprive them of their rightful independence and [a mechanism to] force these countries to become Soviet. Yet, I believe that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are cultured and civilized enough countries to be able to have the right to decide their own fate. In connection with this [I also] spoke my thoughts that the [Soviet Union’s] actions are analogous to the invasion of smaller, unprotected nations by Nazi Germany. In this vein I disagreed with the military conflict that the USSR instigated against Finland at the start of the War. [. . .] Likewise, my anti-Soviet remarks and mood were directed toward my assessment of Soviet democracy: I did not share such a system of freedom of speech and in writing, selection of officials, committee meeting speeches made by those representing the State, where it is obvious that everything is predetermined and one-sided [and everything is] forbidden that isn’t dictated by strict Soviet censorship. I admit myself guilty of making slanderous remarks about the leaders of the Soviet State. In particular, I remember I talked about the way in which the Stalin Prizes were not given to more deserving people, and I let myself say that the Leaders love legs more than they do fingers—but all I meant was that there was an unjust proportion of prizes given to ballerinas compared to musicians. I would like to add that this remark was not aimed at anyone in particular in our leadership and that it was really just meant to be a joke.92

Rereading the transcript to confirm its content, Neuhaus asked for words such as “defeat” to be removed from his sentences about the “setbacks faced by the Red Army” (signed with the margin note “cross out and do not believe” [zacherknut’ i ne verit’]), and added the plea to understand that his remarks were

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not “rooted in deep anti-Soviet beliefs,” but were “for the most part frivolous remarks because of his lack of understanding of the serious questions and because of putting trust in certain rumors.”93 Yet, on December 28, Neuhaus signed off on a transcript with further criticism of the regime that mirrored his speech of 1936 (at the meeting of the Union of Soviet Composers) as the interrogator pressed him on matters including his remark that true art has not been achieved through Soviet cultural policy: I cannot say exactly when I started to go down the path of making anti-Soviet remarks, because it may well be that, because of my nature as a rotten intellectual [gnilogo intelligenta],94 I might have sporadically voiced anti-Soviet, or rather un-Soviet, outlooks during the entire existence of Soviet power. [Yes,] I did say that [Socialist] Realism limits the creative potential of the self [. . .] and that truly great culture has not and could not have been achieved in the years of the Soviet State’s existence. Beginning in 1937–38 . . . I believed that a period of cultural destruction and great suffering for people had been initiated by the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Soviet State. Keep in mind, that before this period, in my career as a musician there had been a period of significant personal creative achievement. I thought all this would come to nothing. [As you logically put it], I talked about Socialist Realism and the policies of the Soviet State in relation to culture and the arts in a slanderous manner, among other things believing them to limit the creative potential of the talented personality [lichnost’]. [But] along with my anti-Soviet outlook on art, I also believe that Fascism is an enemy of culture and that Fascism is lethal to culture. This is why I never had the desire to wait for the enemy.95

From these transcripts the investigation moved to make the official statement on January 22, 1942, that there was enough evidence to “expose the leading of anti-Soviet agitation” and formally charged Neuhaus under Article 58.10.2.96 It was an ominous state of affairs and reading the statement Neuhaus must have prepared for the worst, if he had not done so already. The arrival of a secret eleven-page file from Saratov on January 19, which according to a handwritten note by one of the NKVD officials involved in the investigation was never circulated with Neuhaus’s arrest documentation, had begun to slow things down. The considerable file signaled herculean efforts being exerted to save Neuhaus from certain death, but the details of which will probably only be revealed many years from now. With the still classified file originating from the city where the Moscow Conservatory now had its temporary headquarters, one can only speculate as to who might have instigated it and what it said. The web of potential figures who might have pleaded on Neuhaus’s behalf “behind the scenes” is further widened by the fact that, at the time, with the incapacitation of Moscow and Leningrad, Saratov had taken on a premier role as the USSR’s main cultural center that was visited by numerous artists and intellectuals on

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tour and for meetings. Likewise, it remains unknown for now whether Sylvia Eichinger, with her links to the Communist Party, played any part in disseminating information about his predicament. Although the investigation moved on to scrutinize the question of espionage, containing further classified papers alongside Neuhaus’s responses about his relatives, and was granted an extension for Neuhaus’s imprisonment, on April 23 a handwritten statement from an official declared it to be the fourth and final extension. With a change to more senior officers, on May 22, 1942, Neuhaus signed attesting that he had read all fifty-nine pages of the file, confirmed his testimony of having made anti-Soviet remarks, and refuted “any anti-Soviet links whatsoever and especially any allegations of espionage.”97 With the document signed, but before any sentence had been passed, a handwritten statement and then official decree commanded that all the letters, address books, and notebooks taken as evidence against Neuhaus were to be “burned immediately,” and his collection of Nietzsche given to the First Special Department of the NKVD.98 Thus, on May 25 the investigation was forwarded for sentencing, stating that Neuhaus had “partially confessed” to making remarks with an anti-Soviet sentiment, and specifying that the charge was made based on the “agency’s materials” from informants since, as added by hand, no material evidence exists.99 The file was forwarded to the committee of the Special Meeting (Osobogo Soveshchaniya) of the NKVD with the recommendation to set the punishment at five years expulsion with the prohibition to reside in one of the 340 “restricted” areas (rezhimnïkh mestnostyakh) of the USSR.100 The sentence was confirmed on July 4. Neuhaus chose to spend this period in the Sverdlovsk region, to which Adrian’s tuberculosis sanatorium had been evacuated, some 15,000 kilometers from Moscow on the other side of the Ural Mountains. Here too, however, there must have been special requests as, following a hearing at the Special Department of the NKVD relating to a file dated August 5, 1942,101 the preprinted documents requiring Neuhaus to reside in the small town of Kamensk were altered by the same hand that asked that material evidence relating to the file be burned, to the region’s administrative center, the city of Sverdlovsk. Evidence of the possible involvement in this whole matter of Gilels, who was often requested to play for the state and for Stalin, is documented in Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak’s memoirs. She writes that in making her way back from visiting Adrian’s sanatorium to Chistopol (near Kazan) where she and Pasternak were living: “I saw a poster advertising a recital by Gilels, who had been a student of Heinrich Gustavovich. [. . .] Inquiring at the only inhabited hotel in Sverdlovsk in 1942, I found out [Gilels’s] number. It is hard to believe, but calling Gilels’s number I suddenly heard the voice of Heinrich Gustavovich.”102 Through the further pleas of the Kiev-born pianist Abraham Lufer, then the rector of the Ural Conservatory, and Neuhaus’s former students (including

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Berta Marants and Semyon Benditsky), he was instated as a professor at the conservatory in Sverdlovsk.103 Here he resumed his pedagogical activities alongside his famous and frequent concert appearances in the unheated Conservatory Hall. Before long he became one of the most sought-after concertizing artists in the region with lengthy concert tours taking him to Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Magnitogorsk, Kirov, Sarapul, Izhevsk, Votkinsk, and Perm.104 As the Moscow Conservatory began to relocate itself gradually back to Moscow in 1943, Neuhaus began making plans to establish himself in Tbilisi. Pleas were directed from several high-ranking and respected artists and intellectuals to Mikhail Kalinin, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet Committee of the USSR—the highest-ranking legislative body—to allow Neuhaus to return to Moscow. Although the details of this remain classified, on October 7, 1944, the sentence of the Special Committee of the NKVD was amended to state that the sentenced had been served and to free Neuhaus from exile, granting permission for him to live in Moscow.105 Marking the occasion with a solo recital in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, which was overfilled with wellwishers, Neuhaus’s entrance onto the stage famously brought on a tumultuous applause that refused to die down for over ten minutes. Neuhaus only discussed these difficult years with those closest to him. Writing to Berta Marants he said that even with day-to-day issues such as food rationing and finding a place to stay in Sverdlovsk, he had survived only because of the help of friends.106 While he jokingly told Gornostaeva that at the “Hotel Lubyanka” he had the “luxury” of committing to memory the entire oeuvre of Alexander Pushkin—the only volumes he was allowed to receive from friends to ease the burden of his imprisonment—the experience did not leave him unscathed.107 Aside from his ordeal at the Lubyanka having left him visibly emaciated, with his teeth lost to scurvy, it was the emotional scars that took the longest time to heal. Those that knew him intimately noticed certain subtle changes in his behavior: he became more reclusive than usual, and his unfailing charm was apt to be clouded by moments of agitation and emptiness. In January 1958 he wrote to Alexander Goldenweiser: “Forgive my behavior. Sixteen or seventeen years ago something went awry inside me—my personal illness [the partial paralysis of Neuhaus’s right hand], personal misfortune, and the death of my son. I love life, but not myself in it. . . . Your old and unhappy colleague, Heinrich Neuhaus.”108 Despite the positive outcome of what could easily have ended in tragedy, Neuhaus’s “file” was now blemished and he was an “enemy of the State.” Although the Khrushchev Thaw brought about a wave of rehabilitations exonerating victims of Stalinist persecution, Neuhaus was not formally rehabilitated until 1989.109 His prewar distinctions of the Order of the Red Banner of Labor were revoked. In a system where state awards not only played an important role in prestige but also could carry welcome financial considerations, it is

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obvious that Neuhaus’s detention brought issues. When the committee of the Stalin Prize for Music finally discussed the need to provide a category within the award for performers in 1941 at the insistence of Goldenweiser (a committee member), an ad hoc list of potential nominees was initially compiled.110 The twelve pianists included Goldenweiser, Neuhaus, Konstantin Igumnov, Samuil Feinberg, Leonid Nikolayev, Grigory Ginzburg, Lev Oborin, Vladimir Sofronitsky, Emil Gilels, Yakov Zak, Rosa Tamarkina, and Yakov Flier. Following the official establishment of the special category for performers essentially for “lifetime achievement” in 1943, however, Neuhaus was the only pianist from that initial list never to receive even so much as a nomination for it within Stalin’s lifetime. The others not only had multiple nominations to their names, but all with the exception of Zak, Flier, and Tamarkina (the younger generation of nominees) went on to claim the prize. With Stalin’s death, the Prize Committee began to tussle over the question of whether or not to put forward Neuhaus for the award in 1954, who, as noted in the meeting by Alexander Goldenweiser, “was previously dropped from consideration because of certain issues which no longer exist.”111 While most of the committee, including the chairman for most of the session, Tikhon Khrennikov, “wholeheartedly” agreed that Neuhaus should be nominated for the first prize (100,000 rubles) with his student Yakov Zak considered for second or first the following year, others such as the art historian Vladimir Kemenov believed it was wrong to nominate a pianist who was now playing less than the up-and-coming generation of new competition laureates (such as Yevgeny Malinin) simply because of his reputation and the “sentiment that he should have been awarded it before.”112 In his view, the matter of Neuhaus’s nomination was all the more impossible since the principle of the award was to celebrate achievements of the previous year. With the committee divided, questions began to arise as to whether perhaps Neuhaus should formally audition for the prize alongside the younger musicians (most of whom were his students). Though this idea was brushed aside as ridiculous by Goldenweiser on the basis that “Neuhaus would never agree” and because it was wrong to question the abilities of someone so renowned (“none of us [musicians on the committee] would have agreed to it”), individual participants present at the table of discussion nevertheless tried the tack that perhaps Neuhaus’s playing was no longer of the required standard for the prize.113 While many offered Neuhaus’s age (sixty-six) and illness as defense, Goldenweiser did in principle agree that “Neuhaus is not in good form”—to which Shostakovich immediately retorted: “He plays excellently.”114 Despite the deliberations surrounding Neuhaus’s candidature it was eventually conceded that he should indeed be the only musician that year to be awarded the first prize—gaining forty-two of the possible fifty-four votes.115 With the documents signed by the Ministry of Culture, it seemed at last that the injustice of

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Neuhaus’s politically motivated absence from the prestigious distinction would be reversed. For whatever circumstances, however, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (TsK KPSS) decided against awarding the prizes for the arts that year. In this way, the Stalin Prize was destined to remain out of his reach. Neuhaus did however receive the Order of Lenin in 1954,116 and his official award of merit became the relatively modest People’s Artist of the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) in 1956 at the age of sixty-eight. Given that by the end of his life Neuhaus’s fame had few rivals, many of his students and colleagues were bemused about why this distinction had come so late, and why he had never been awarded the greater honor of People’s Artist of the USSR.117 Vera Gornostaeva considered: “There is reason to believe that he was tacitly disfavored by the authorities. In any case, he wasn’t among those professors who were promoted ‘from above.’ By the standards of those times, much cast a shadow on his ‘reputation’: he studied abroad, was known for his liberal tongue, his mocking temperament, and eccentric behavior.”118

The Final Decade Now in his sixties, the 1950s was a decade that was in many ways categorized by Neuhaus’s desire to set down a legacy that would continue to have meaning long after his physical departure from life. Confiding to Lucy Pogosova, Neuhaus wrote: I work like an ox and receive from art a great sense of satisfaction as always, but the soul is sad—it is hurting and cries. It is not possible to dream of socalled “happiness.” I can only imagine peace and freedom. Maybe it is stupid, but before Death [comes] I want to do so much. I have lived through a lot and thought a lot over anew, and I want to leave a little something after myself.119

These were the years in which Neuhaus began to think more readily about allowing for the issue of a small number of live recordings—often becoming obsessive in asking that recordings he considered to be unsatisfactory be destroyed altogether. This practice accounts for the notably missing movements from cycles that had evidently been performed complete in concert. Thus, works that had acquired a legendary place in Neuhaus’s concert repertoire during his life exist in fragmented form on record: notably this includes Brahms’s Klavierstücke op. 76, and Schumann’s Fantasie op. 17. It was also the decade that marked Neuhaus’s return to the concert stage in his beloved genre of the piano duo. Neuhaus had previously never shown

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much hope for the musical future of his younger son, Stanislav: “a serious child, but so impossibly quiet [. . .]. Musically, he is gifted, but I do not think he will become a virtuoso.”120 Yet, as time went on he began to change his judgment and in 1948, on the third year of his son’s conservatory studies, Neuhaus decided (against the wishes of Zinaida Pasternak) to transfer Stanislav into Neuhaus’s own class at the Moscow Conservatory.121 Neuhaus’s sudden and genuine respect for his son—the recognition of an independent but like-minded artist—led to their first joint concert in October 1950. This father–son debut took place in the Column Hall of the House of Unions under the baton of Alexander Gauk. The two Neuhauses opened the evening with Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos K. 365, followed by Heinrich Neuhaus playing Chopin’s First Piano Concerto in E Minor, op. 11, and Stanislav playing Liszt’s Second Concerto in A Major, S. 125. The “colossal success” of the evening, in which the Mozart Concerto was encored to a standing ovation, was the start of a fruitful and famous partnership.122 Throughout the 1950s, this father and son duo was among the most eagerly awaited concert highlights of the season.123 Touring across the USSR their piano duo repertoire was vast including: Mozart’s Sonata in D Major, K. 448; the Mozart-Grieg Piano Sonatas; Chopin’s Rondo in C Major, op. 73; Liszt’s Concerto Pathétique S. 258; Debussy’s En blanc et noir; Schumann’s Andante und Variationen op. 46; Reger’s Introduktion, Passacaglia und Fuge op. 96; and works for piano duo by Arensky, Rachmaninov, and Taneyev. Neuhaus had finally found a kindred spirit with whom he could rehearse and perform, and was evidently delighted that he recognized something of his own artistic ideals in his son. Stanislav cherished the opportunity to be such a close part of his father’s music making, and the rehearsals were one of the times in which he was observed to open up his shy nature and engage in heated artistic debates.124 The idea of a legacy associated with this concert activity was also supplemented by Neuhaus’s quickly making Stanislav one of his key teaching assistants at the Moscow Conservatory—one of his “three bogatyrs” (or also, alluding to Pushkin’s poetry, the “three brothers Budrïs”) along with Lev Naumov and Yevgeny Malinin, to whom Neuhaus entrusted the main preparation of his students.125 As a consequence, for many, Stanislav was seen as his father’s truest artistic successor. Neuhaus’s concert activity with his son must have brought him solace. The piano duo had been a genre that was for him one of the most special musical interactions between two musicians. It was with touching fondness he remembered his parents performing arrangements of Wagner; his own playing with his mother, with Karol Szymanowski, Felix Blumenfeld, Vladimir Horowitz, and Zinaida, and with his closest students. It was also, however, a genre that became increasingly practical even if Neuhaus himself was afraid to admit it. The partial paralysis of his hands was now taking a heavy toll. His imprisonment and

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then years of exile in Sverdlovsk, without adequate heating in its bitter Russian winters, only exacerbated the problem. Performing as a duo allowed Neuhaus at least a chance to redistribute the excessive burden of bravura passages. Although solo performances had become almost impossible, Neuhaus stubbornly insisted on bringing himself back “to shape.” Taking increasingly regular treatment in the summers at the sanatorium in Tsikhisjvari, Georgia, Neuhaus would religiously prepare repertoire for the new season, making sure to have a good instrument available for the purpose. In 1957, for instance, although considering the reality that he would soon be forced to cease performing, Neuhaus spent the summer in Tsikhisjvari practicing for no less than six hours a day in order to learn new repertoire (including Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata no. 8 in B-flat Major, op. 84, Shostakovich’s Twenty-Four Preludes and Piano Sonata no. 2 in B Minor, op. 61, and Szymanowski’s Etudes op. 33), and gave a total of thirteen different solo piano recitals there (two performances a week), inviting numerous friends and acquaintances.126 Contrary to popular belief, his final public concert in Moscow in April 1958 was never intended to be his last, and Neuhaus was still desperately making plans to give several solo concerts in the autumn season of that year in the capital.127 Only on December 5, 1958, did he finally make the heart-wrenching decision to admit defeat: “I will never play again. My right hand is finished [. . .]. If I were twenty years younger, I would practice for six hours a day; continue to give it massages, electrotherapy, and injections. Now there is no use, it is hopeless—I have no energy or will for it. Let the young play. It’s alright—I started at seven and finished at seventy.”128 The trauma of ending his career as a pianist prompted Neuhaus to turn his energies to his other great love: the written word. Thus, the year that Neuhaus’s received the state honor as a People’s Artist, 1956, was also the year in which he decided to dedicate himself to completing a manuscript for a book that he had for many years dreamed of writing to secure the significance of his name for posterity. Published two years later, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï: Zapiski pedagoga (About the Art of Piano Playing: Notes of a Pedagogue), sold out its initial print run of 10,000 copies within days of appearing in bookstores across the USSR.129 Its popularity was so unprecedented that in January 1959, the very same month that it had first appeared in print, the publishing house was already making plans for the second edition.130 Reeling from their miscalculation in demand, this second edition would appear two years later with a contracted print run of 50,000 copies.131 Neuhaus’s work on the manuscript of his book had been encouraged by Valentin Asmus, and the art historian and philosopher Alexander Gabrichevsky (a close mutual friend at whose summer residence Neuhaus often stayed in Koktebel in southeastern Crimea). The two writers claimed that the disarming charm of Neuhaus’s literary language would ensure that

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it would be a work that captured the imagination not only of musicians but “everyone else.”132 Their support for the project led Neuhaus to lament the fact that he had not forced himself to focus on such an endeavor earlier, and that he had for the past years all but given up with his book, thinking it best to leave the documentation of his pedagogical legacy in the capable hands of his assistant Tatyana Khludova (whose transcripts of her professor’s lessons formed the basis of her doctoral dissertation defended in 1954).133 Neuhaus feverishly perfected the manuscript using the summer months free from pedagogy to commit as much as four hours a day to its writing alongside the preparation of repertoire for upcoming recitals. He claimed: “The problem is that as soon as I see a white sheet of paper, then all of a sudden all these new thoughts crawl into my head.”134 Whereas Asmus and Gabrichevsky were inclined to see the success of Neuhaus’s book precisely in the way it captured the pianist’s personality and spontaneous manner of thought, it was this very feature that drew criticism from some in the musical community. The musicologist Lev Barenboim considered that for all the important ideas that Neuhaus had tried to cover in About the Art of Piano Playing they were obscured by his “deeply suspicious maxims” and coquettish manner, which often turned to the use of foreign terms (German, French, and Latin) in citations of aphorisms from poetry, philosophical literature, and some general sayings.135 In reviewing the book, Barenboim was concerned by the lack of scholarly rigor in a work evidently written with a pedagogical mission and coming from such an influential figure.136 Along with several of Neuhaus’s colleagues, Barenboim was startled by the “incessant” mentioning of Sviatoslav Richter as the pinnacle of all artistic considerations. Vladimir Sofronitsky, one of Neuhaus’s close friends, was so offended about his name having hardly appeared in comparison to the copious glowing accolades of Richter’s achievements that he completely refused to talk about the book. Furthermore, Barenboim was disturbed that in stating his opinion Neuhaus made controversial, and at times erroneous, judgments that he did not feel obliged to qualify—instead “sending ‘to the devil’ any critic who disagrees [with him], and promising to shout ‘he’s just dumb’ after him.”137 Neuhaus followed criticism, as well as praise, of his first publication with particular zeal. He used the preface of his expanded and revised 1961 (second) edition of About the Art of Piano Playing to address his critics. He refused to remove the foreign language citations that, given his multilingual household, were such a characteristic part of his distinct everyday manner of expression, and that Barenboim found had diluted the serious nature of the pianist’s undertaking. Relating to the accusation about his coquettish literary style, it was not without a sense of humor that Neuhaus retorted, “Ridendo dicere severum” (say what is somber through laughter)—a citation, although left unidentified by Neuhaus, came from Nietzsche’s Nietzsche contra Wagner.138

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Likewise, Neuhaus retorted that suggestions that his book had spent too much time “philosophizing” and talking about the arts in general, rather than addressing issues of pianism, had misunderstood his concept entirely.139 He explained that he had specifically selected the word “art” (iskusstvo) in the title because while he needed at times to refer to specific technical matters, in his view, it was meaningless to consider pianism as an isolated undertaking that did not respond to the fine arts, dramatic arts, literature, poetry, and philosophy. The main argument that Neuhaus was seeking to defend, however, was that his book was informed by a subjective outlook. Rather than seeing this as a compromising feature of his efforts, Neuhaus saw it as a strength. Defending his stance Neuhaus suggested that anything that comes from one’s own experience is “unavoidably autobiographic” and that it was precisely his autobiography that “gives rise to [his] Volapük [a type of constructed international language].”140 In so doing Neuhaus identified an important aspect without which his artistic vision and character are inconceivable—the idea that he defined himself as existing beyond the narrow confines of pianism as a complex amalgamation of the sum of his unique experiences in life and culture. His Volapük was not a superfluous layer that could be stripped away to reveal an orderly series of thoughts. Instead, it was a labyrinth of ideas, feelings, facts, misunderstandings, sympathies, and tastes appropriated from his surroundings at some point in his life as a means to make sense of his role and actions. In July 1958 Neuhaus had started thinking about a second book.141 This new endeavor was meant to eclipse the former in length and profundity. Although he called this his Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Autobiographical Notes), it had only a dozen or so modest paragraphs that offered details about his life. They are surprisingly sketchy for a project that he recognized to be his last attempt at a legacy. Scant in biographical details, it also made absolutely no attempt to set the record straight about any aspects of his vibrant, and at times certainly scandalous, life. Instead, he decided that it was far more important to portray what he now called his avtopsikhografiya (autopsychography). Delighted with his newly invented term, Neuhaus’s analysis of his autopsychography was a documentation of the “innermost workings of the soul”— the process through which his countless experiences interacted and evolved. It was under this banner that Neuhaus navigated a multitude of impressions and ideas: some linked to pedagogy, some to certain works (namely, Beethoven’s piano sonatas opus 106, “Hammerklavier,” and opus 110), and some that shed light on his philosophical and moral outlook on the “responsibilities and beauty” of mankind. It was in many ways an unruly effort that not only “scratched the surface” of his internalized knowledge and spiritual inner world but also made little attempt to contextualize and contain its sheer breadth of ideas. Expressed in a fast and volatile narrative, the literary style of the Autobiographical Notes reflected the impression Neuhaus had made on

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David Rabinovich as he ascended to fame when he first arrived in the imperial capital: “Thoughts and feelings are not so much ‘born’ in him, but ‘erupt’ in a process which resembles a chain reaction—each flash instantaneously causes the next.”142 Neuhaus’s Autobiographical Notes were fated to remain unfinished. Even if he had lived longer it is difficult to say with any certainty that Neuhaus’s envisaged magnum opus was an undertaking of the kind that could have in fact permitted any conclusion. How an experience such as a friendship with Boris Pasternak, the reading of Nietzsche, or a painting by Mikhail Vrubel can find its expression in one’s performance of a Skryabin poem or a Chopin mazurka is an elusive concept. How exactly the sum of such experiences converges and affects these performances note by note, and indeed day by day, is impossible to tell. Indeed, none of these names—so strongly associated with Neuhaus’s legendary persona, and so inherent to his private writing such as his letters— are given anything more than a passing reference in the manuscripts. It is most likely that even Neuhaus, in all honesty, would not have been able to identify, let alone explain how his indebtedness to these figures evolved or manifested itself. Yet, for a man who considered that every minute of his life was lived in the name of art, an attempt to investigate how these experiences converge— divorcing themselves from the confines of their original contexts and forming new bodies of influence—and how they affect the psyche of the pianist, is an idea whose exploration becomes the most appropriate and enduring biographic portrait.

Chapter Three

Becoming a Poet of a Belated Silver Age The petition pleading that Heinrich Neuhaus be allowed to return to Moscow following his arrest in 1941 and expulsion in 1942 for anti-Soviet activities and propaganda was headed by the signatures of eminent Russian musicians Dmitri Shostakovich, Vissarion Shebalin, Konstantin Igumnov, and other cultural figures including the writer Alexei Tolstoy, philologist Militsa Nechkina, and actors Ivan Moskvin and Vasily Kachalov. The document stated: “Despite his surname not being Russian, H. G. Neuhaus is undoubtedly a Russian, Soviet artist with a Soviet style in his creative methods; he is an eminent standard bearer of precisely Russian-Soviet culture which he champions; he is one of the best interpreters of Russian and Soviet composers.”1 Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1933 the music critic K. Grimikh wrote: “[Neuhaus] remains a son of his time, one of the brightest representatives of the Soviet artistic intelligentsia. He lives our life, with our interests at heart: with us he thinks, feels, searches, falters, experiences joy and suffering—and all these thoughts and feelings are those of a Soviet man, worker, and citizen which are filtered through the prism of his brightly talented individuality.”2 Yet, having essentially lived beyond Russia’s borders until the age of twentysix—the son of an émigré family who had grown up speaking and writing predominantly in Polish and German, and had shown hardly any interest in Russian music, literature, history, or other arts before 1914—it would be naive to suggest that Neuhaus really had any claim to being born into an instinctive awareness of Russianness. Upon his first arrival in Petrograd in 1915, his debut recital had aroused the curiosity of Russian musicians wanting to hear the musicianship of this foreign, Austro-German–educated pianist. A significant number of his first professional engagements in the country were linked to the performance of German music, including that of Max Reger. Many of his European acquaintances

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whom he left behind, such as Artur Rubinstein, continued to remember him as a German pianist. Establishing himself within Russian society, Neuhaus surrounded himself with a network of friends who looked toward German culture: not least Asmus, Gabrichevsky, and Pasternak. Realizing that political events had made it his fate to establish himself as a Russian musician, Neuhaus set about defining an aesthetic and philosophic territory that would draw from a Russian cultural heritage and thus bring about his adoption back into the country of his birth. Unwilling to engage with the mainstream national identities being written for Russia both before the revolution and in its wake, Neuhaus had to find an alternative image of Slavic consciousness that he was able to embrace to justify artistic existence: “Sometimes I so want the reassurance, the full reassurance, that what I am doing, my work, is done in the best possible manner, and that I have found the key to all the riddles of the mysterious work [which I undertake].”3 Taking inspiration from across the arts, he synthesized a complex historically displaced and highly individual image of spiritual Russianness—imbuing his role as a Russian pianist with a personal philosophical meaning. To audiences, however, the most outward sign of a pianist’s Slavic consciousness was through his choice of repertoire. As already seen, in Neuhaus’s youth his main contact with Slavic music was in many ways indebted to Szymanowski. Their common participation in the activities of the group Młoda Polska saw Neuhaus take an active role in premiering, and being the dedicatee of, his cousin’s piano works. His acquaintance with Russian repertoire, however, was largely restricted to be symphonic works and operas of the “Mighty Handful” and Tchaikovsky,4 which he explored with Szymanowski in four-handed arrangements alongside the music of Wagner. After his return to Russia at the end of 1914, Neuhaus’s concert programs made a considerable shift to spotlight Russian composers. Defining oeuvres among his programs included numerous works by Felix Blumenfeld and Alexei Stanchinsky—a direct contemporary of Neuhaus who died tragically young. Although Neuhaus did not become as associated for his interpretations of Tchaikovsky’s solo piano music as his colleagues Alexander Goldenweiser and Konstantin Igumnov, he ardently held the composer’s symphonic music to be comparable in importance and achievement to that of Wagner: “Without Wagner and Tchaikovsky a musician cannot live. Any man who has not digested Tchaikovsky is an inferior musician.”5 Arising from this, he broke with the expectations of performing the Tchaikovsky concertos, and instead created a reputation for performing transcriptions of Tchaikovsky’s orchestral works in concerts for piano duo. While his cool attitude to Sergei Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto in D Minor, op. 30, has been widely documented with much dismay,6 it is less known that Neuhaus regularly performed the composer’s Preludes, Études-Tableaux, and Second and Fourth Piano Concertos (opp. 18 and

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40)—particularly while living in exile in Sverdlovsk. Important for his students, however, was Neuhaus’s encouragement of this music in a climate checkered by witch hunts and bans instigated by various politically affiliated organizations that looked disapprovingly at Rachmaninov’s émigré status and melancholia. Similarly, it is widely considered that Emil Gilels was the first artist to daringly bring back to the Soviet concert stage in 1954, after Stalin’s death, the music of Nikolai Medtner, which had been banned in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, despite the ban, Neuhaus’s programs already frequently included the music of Medtner throughout these two turbulent decades.7 Furthermore, during the meeting of Soviet cultural workers with Romain Rolland and Maxim Gorky in the summer of 1935, Neuhaus had specifically chosen to perform Shostakovich’s Preludes op. 34 (composed in 1933), and Medtner’s Trois Morceaux dedicated to Alexei Stanchinsky op. 31, including the set’s expansive Funeral March, on the occasion.8 Neuhaus’s commitment to contemporary Soviet compositions was impressive. He zealously followed the new compositions of Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. Even works that seem completely alien to Neuhaus’s artistic persona, such as Prokofiev’s ferocious Seventh Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 83 (made famous by Sviatoslav Richter), were all part of his working repertory kept in hopeful readiness for recitals.9 Neuhaus was a frequent guest at Prokofiev’s apartment and even counseled the composer in some aspects of his piano writing. Similarly, having had the privilege of hearing Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues op. 87 in the winter of 1951,10 and later again in the spring of 1952 as part of the official previews taking place at the Moscow Conservatory (more than half a year in advance of their premiere by Tatyana Nikolayeva in Leningrad), Neuhaus said that he was completely in awe of them, and that many of them moved him to tears. Touchingly, he had even written out the scores of six of these from the manuscript for himself by hand.11 Although he felt there were no Soviet composers who could match the genius of Shostakovich or Prokofiev, he promoted the works of his less widely established contemporaries including Julian Krein, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Arno Babadzhanyan, Anatoly Alexandrov, and his colleague, Samuil Feinberg. It was not uncommon for Neuhaus to perform recitals consisting only of contemporary Soviet works on the country’s most important concert platforms. For instance, on December 30, 1939, his solo recital in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory consisted of Myaskovsky’s Pozheltevshchiye stranitsï (Yellowed Pages) op. 31, Alexandrov’s Sonata no. 4 in C Major, op. 19, Krein’s Eight Preludes (premiere), Shostakovich’s Preludes op. 34, and Prokofiev’s Danse op. 32, no. 4 and Gavotte op. 77, no 4.12 More often though, it was the mixed programs of Russian and Soviet music that became his particular staples. In this respect his concerts in Saratov in 1949 are typical: with Skryabin’s Piano Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, being performed

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alongside a solo recital including: Medtner Two Skaski op. 20; Rachmaninov three Preludes; 3 Études-Tableaux; Skryabin Sonata no. 3, op. 23; Shostakovich Preludes op. 34; and Prokofiev’s Sonata no. 4, op. 29.13 Notwithstanding this varied commitment to Russian and Soviet repertoire, the one most iconic Slavic composer in Neuhaus’s repertory has always been Alexander Skryabin. It was, however, a far more complex relationship than one might initially expect. The elaborate contexts, that were layered onto Skryabin’s music by individuals and their causes on either side of the revolution—by the Russian Orthodox–suffused Silver Age of imperial Russia’s last decades, and socialist rhetoric at the dawn of Soviet Russia—were never fully embraced by Neuhaus. It is the resulting friction between these narratives within the framework of Neuhaus’s own sympathies, however, that divulge precious insights into his unique outlook, and demonstrate the melding of ideas from facets of psychological Realism and the sensuousness of the Silver Age that he painstakingly undertook to position himself artistically within a personal and idealized cultural Russian heritage beyond Soviet State policy.

Alexander Skryabin Having being introduced to Skryabin’s music by Karol Szymanowski when they were still studying in Europe, the composer at that time had only occupied a marginal place in Neuhaus’s programs. It was only following Neuhaus’s arrival in Petrograd in the spring of 1915 that his interest in performing the music of Skryabin had started to grow, leading him to admit: “It is impossible not to be touched by Skryabin’s art” and not to love the “glittering diamonds” he “unearthed and scattered through his works.”14 Soon audiences would speak the names of Neuhaus and Skryabin almost as synonyms. Both pianists’ dandyish manners, pale countenance, and short stature, which struck audiences as much offstage as in concert, was supplemented by their inspired aristocratic appearance at the piano: caressing rather than striking the keys, and often tilting slightly backward with the eyes closed at the end of a piece. Their fame for exploiting the instrument’s many pianissimo sonorities, sweeping climaxes into fortissimo, hypnotic rubato, and intricate pedaling are common features in descriptions of their pianism. Later, those who knew about Neuhaus’s problems with his right hand would have recognized his complaints in Skryabin’s own difficulties in giving concerts as a result of the performance-related injury he had himself sustained as a student.15 With Skryabin himself having returned to Russia in 1909, his persona and music had been the focal point of Moscow intellectual life, contributing to what Pasternak described as the “Skryabin phenomenon.” His Poem of Ecstasy op. 54 and Prometheus op. 60 were being widely discussed and reviewed as

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pivotal cultural events that marked the composer as an “Orpheus” of the age: music’s “Messiah” and “Prophet.”16 With audiences still under the impression of Skryabin’s final opuses in 1914 (including Vers la Flamme op. 72 and the last Five Preludes op. 74), his sudden death in April 1915 had prompted thousands to attend his funeral in Moscow—including many who made the pilgrimage from other cities such as Petrograd—forcing tickets to be issued the night before the service to prevent overcrowding, and leaving many to witness the event from the side streets surrounding the church. In these years directly preceding Neuhaus’s return to Russia, Skryabin’s stature had evolved into something beyond simply musical significance. Inequality had left a deeply fractured society in desperate need of unification. For many thinkers the necessary spiritual healing would be brought about by a new kind of music. This music would encompass a profound philosophical dimension that would position it as the ultimate expression of a theurgic art steeped in Russian Orthodoxy. Society would be healed and unified through the recognition of art’s Christian mission through the Russian Orthodox notion of sobornost’. Deriving from the word sobor meaning cathedral, and related to the verb sobirat’ meaning to gather together, it originates from the Nicene Creed to refer to the feeling of unity experienced during the liturgy by faithful Christians within a single community. Under such a vision Orthodox and Old Believers, rich and poor, educated and ignorant, those who looked to the West and Slavophiles, tsarists and revolutionaries, were all united under one new church and would all selflessly share their individual talents for the common good. Initially applied by nineteenth-century Slavophile thinkers to reflect the virtues of Russian peasant life, and hence to define the very essence of the Russian soul, sobornost’ became a theme tackled by writers and philosophers, including Lev Tolstoy, who emphasized the need for art to be imbued with a Christian morality. The theologian Pavel Florensky, for instance, maintained that sobornost’ was best understood through Russian peasant choirs where there was “a full freedom of all voices, uniting with each other. Each individual improvises, more or less according [to individual means and talent], but does not destroy the whole [of everyone participating] in the general act.”17 Beyond the Slavophiles, however, Fyodor Dostoevsky and later the religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov were eager to expand these ideas to encompass the unity of physical and spiritual realms of existence. Solovyov therefore spoke about art’s power to bring people together into a state of supreme unity, vseyedinstvo, and thus its potential to bring about the deification of humanity.18 With this religious theme being tackled with great urgency by many writers and poets at the time, which would later be called the Silver Age, a tide of thinkers sought to represent Skryabin as the contemporary Russian voice who finally embodied the ideas of vseyedinstvo through music. Heralded by his “disciples,” Leonid Sabaneyev and Boris Schloezer, as Russia’s first musician-philosopher,

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they seized the opportunity to promote Skryabin’s advanced harmonic language, such as that demonstrated in his “Prometheus chord” (which combines all four “consonant” triads—major, minor, diminished, and augmented— into a single unity), as scientific proof of the composer’s penetration into the music of the spheres, and so his embodiment of all existence. Furthermore, Skryabin’s evolving idea of the Mysterium (begun as early as 1903 but remaining unfinished), which sought to unify all arts and senses as well as the performer and audience, and promised to culminate in an apocalypse that would replace current humanity with nobler beings, raised the hopes of Moscow intellectuals in their “Messiah.” As the Revolutions of 1917 approached, Skryabin’s Mysterium appropriated new significance. As claimed by the Symbolist poet, Vyacheslav Ivanov, in his speech “Skryabin and the Spirit of the Revolution” given on the eve of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power in Petrograd on October 25, 1917 (OS): “If the revolution we are living through is truly the great Revolution [. . .] the painful birth of the Russian Idea [. . .] further historians will recognize Skryabin as one of its spiritual perpetrators and [. . .] the Revolution as the first bars of his unfinished Mysterium.”19 Indeed, many in the intelligentsia who adopted the promise of an art suffused with Russian Orthodoxy, met the Revolution with enthusiasm. The bloodshed and maelstrom of terror were meant to be Russia’s ultimate sacrifice before redemption and spiritual transfiguration into a resplendent New Holy Russia. With the atheist Bolsheviks seizing power, however, they had little time or sympathy for religion—that notorious “opiate of the masses.” The vision of the intelligentsia’s promised spiritual transfiguration was stifled. As portrayed in the final lines of Alexander Blok’s Dvenadtsat’ (Twelve) (1918) the messianic appearance of Christ before the twelve Bolshevik Red Guards was made invisible by the raging blizzard (I za v’yugoy nevidim); and his head adorned with white roses (V belom venchike iz poz). Eerily these traditional Russian funeral flowers form not a wreath, venets, but the Orthodox cloth laid upon the head of a deceased, venchik.20 In light of the Bolsheviks’ atheism Skryabin’s music was given new meaning. His music was received with popularity in the early years of the Soviet state. Skryabin’s Prometheus became a symbol of the revolution’s cause, of “people rising up for light and liberty,” and was performed on the first anniversary of the revolution at the Bolshevik Festivities at the Bolshoi in Moscow.21 Striping away possible religious contexts, the first People’s Commissar of Education and Minister of Culture Anatoly Lunacharsky lectured on Skryabin’s significance to the Soviet state as a hero who had turned away from Nietzschean individuality to give the prophesy of a collective vision as manifested by the revolution.22 The composer’s music became the central focus of political rallies and mass festivals dedicated to the promotion of communal art to enlighten and educate the masses in socialist ideals.

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By the time Neuhaus began to make Skryabin a focal element of his repertoire in the years after the revolution, he would have been aware of the profound significance the composer’s music had to debates on Russian cultural identity. In fact, he had witnessed firsthand the power of Skryabin’s music when he performed a four-handed arrangement of Prometheus with his uncle shortly after arriving in Kiev in 1919: there was no end to the audience’s ovations until the pianists returned to encore the work. As Neuhaus started to mark definitive moments of his career with Skryabin recitals, the momentous nature of these occasions contributed to the fact that audiences began to perceive him as an unrivaled authority. Critics and musicologists added their voice to the emerging narrative of Neuhaus’s innate affinity for Skryabin’s musical spirit—so much so, that in 1946 the musicologist and critic Daniel Zhitomirsky considered: “[Neuhaus] feels and communicates that rebellious element of Skryabin’s world that was already at that time described by [Georgi] Plekhanov as the expression of the [revolutionary] storm to come.”23 The association of Neuhaus’s affinity for Skryabin was so strong that even the rise to fame of Vladimir Sofronitsky, a close friend who was married to Skryabin’s daughter (although he had never met the composer), did little to eclipse Neuhaus’s reputation and stature as a foremost Skryabin interpreter. The eminent musicologist Igor Belza claimed that Neuhaus’s decision to give two Skryabin programs in September 1922 as a farewell to Kiev before leaving for Moscow was one of the most vivid experiences of his life—in his view incomparable to anything else he had ever heard, including the playing of Ignacy Paderewski.24 These two recitals encompassed the complete piano sonatas along with other works, and it is likely that Neuhaus was among the first pianists to attempt such programs. As Belza recalled: Skryabin’s complex, graphically sophisticated musical text became enlightened with a truly unbelievable clarity and indestructible “tenacity in its texture” (a term coined by Taneyev which Neuhaus particularly liked). Many pianists [. . .] interpret Skryabin’s late works with a nervous improvisatory quality. In Neuhaus’s interpretations, Skryabin’s works maintained their emotional incandescence—reaching ecstatic tension in the climaxes—but with the brilliance of classical refinement, combined with a captivating, alluring poeticism.

The audience was transfixed not only by the music but also by Neuhaus’s “noble” stage manner through which “one felt the profundity of everything that came to life under his hands.”25 A testament to the power of Neuhaus’s effect on the audience (many of whom had come to hear these works for the first time) was the fact that of all the sonatas, it was the ninth (the so-called Black Mass), rather than the virtuosic fifth, Neuhaus’s staple encore piece, or more “accessible” earlier sonatas, that had evoked the greatest reaction from those present:26

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I do not know if Neuhaus knew then what Skryabin had told Nadezhda Nikolayevna Rimsky-Korsakov [. . .] about the sinister theme of the Ninth Sonata: “The theme is that of death creeping up.” But this is exactly the impression that Neuhaus conjured up [. . .]. It is difficult to put into words what happened: there was no end to the ovations and cries from the audience, and when Neuhaus returned onto the stage to conclude the concert with Skryabin’s last [Tenth] Sonata everyone jumped up, and following persistent demands [he] played the Ninth Sonata again.27

Neuhaus’s choice to mark his Moscow concert debuts in the 1922 winter season with the same all-Skryabin program evoked similar scenes. Zhitomirsky recalled: “It was impossible to separate [Skryabin] from Neuhaus: all of Skryabin’s world, with his flight, determined ascent, and yearning—all this seemed to arise from the personal temperament and will of the interpreter. It seemed that Neuhaus did not perform Skryabin, but that right there on the stage he was composing his music.”28 It was an effect that Neuhaus was able to replicate not only among the discerning audiences of Kiev, Moscow, and Leningrad, where concentrated pockets of artists and thinkers had eagerly placed their trust in the composer as a Messiah of Russian culture, but also further afield. In 1927 Neuhaus’s concert tour to Tiflis included an all-Skryabin evening, which, among smaller works, included the Second, Third, and Fifth Sonatas. As reported by Semyon Benditsky, the knowledge of Skryabin held by Tiflis’s core audiences at the time did not extend beyond the famous Etude op. 8, no. 12. Yet, despite Neuhaus’s concerts coming in the wake of those by Vladimir Horowitz, Egon Petri, and Simon Barere, who had focused on accessible showpieces including Liszt’s La Campanella, Don Juan Fantasy, and the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the “hall was filled with the audience’s exultation.”29 Similarly, Neuhaus reported how it amazed him that Skryabin’s late works (“not sonatas at all: as they lack the necessary content, developmental stature, and enigma of imagery”) could be received so enthusiastically by audiences: “In Leningrad, Tbilisi, Saratov, and many other towns I played the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Sonatas, and the five last Preludes [op. 74]—the public listened with such attention and interest [despite] these being such contentious and so-called difficult works.”30 The success of these recitals highlights just how receptive audiences, across very different demographics from the layperson to the specialist, were to the recognition of Skryabin as an embodiment of something they perceived to stand at the core of their national and cultural identities. However his listeners defined this notion of identity for themselves, Neuhaus came to be accepted as a malleable but definitive part of that vision’s expression. His intellectual vitality for aesthetic and philosophical discussions concerning the arts made Neuhaus vulnerable to being appropriated by both the intellectual elite, who sought to align Neuhaus’s admiration of Nietzsche with their late imperial

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Russian Orthodox vision of vseyedinstvo, and by those, especially in Kiev, who saw him as embracing and promoting the spirit of the revolution. Yet, unlike his attitude to some other composers (including Chopin and Beethoven), Neuhaus was not brought to Skryabin because he perceived a certain personal affinity to the wider philosophical concepts he felt embodied by the composer’s persona. Having a short temper with those who claimed to be Skryabin’s disciples, Neuhaus distanced himself from the Muscovite hype surrounding the composer’s legacy, writing in 1955:31 Mystics and obscurantists like L. Sabaneyev and B. Schloezer were extremely harmful to Skryabin: they created around him an unhealthy atmosphere of unrestrained worship that became a cult. They exalted all the most contrived, sickly, and heirless of Skryabin’s creations. They proclaimed the diseased, fantastical ideas of the Mysterium and Prefatory Action to be the prophetic revelations of a genius. Among those closest to Skryabin there was no one who would offer the sobering word of truth.32

His pronounced atheist position precluded Neuhaus from considering religion as an integral part of Skryabin’s output in the way that it was fundamental for his friend Vladimir Sofronitsky, who openly suggested that “Skryabin should be played through Christ’s prayer.”33 And, unlike many artists in Russia at the time, Neuhaus’s detachment from the ideological promises of the revolution likewise were reflected in his opinion that Skryabin’s music answered to the time of late imperial Russia and had “no place in our [contemporary] epoch.”34 Neuhaus’s engagement with Skryabin’s music instead answered to a very personal set of circumstances, and his understanding of the composer was shaped by various extended familial relationships. On a prosaic level, the influence of Skryabin’s music could be traced to the early compositions of Szymanowski. The piano writing of both composers is characterized by a shared interest in post-Wagnerian harmonic gestures, complex polyphonic inner lines, miniature forms, the exotic melodic intonation of Rimsky-Korsakov, and a Romantic volatility in character that soars from the dreamlike to the tempestuous. Similarly, the lyric aspect to the works of both composers finds strong roots in Chopin: compare, for instance, Szymanowski’s Preludes for Piano op. 1 with the opus 11 set of Skryabin.35 Notwithstanding such parallels, as Szymanowski’s work evolved away from Skryabin’s influence to incorporate an inclination to a Germanic and “intellectual” counterpoint, Neuhaus frequently admitted that he found his cousin’s works more satisfying.36 With the Civil War eventually causing the cousins to part ways, Szymanowski had crossed the border into Polish Warsaw. By virtue of the Russo-Polish War he was now residing in what was seen up to 1939 as a politically hostile country. The impracticality of programming Szymanowski’s music at this time,37 and in acquiring his latest works

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in the USSR until the middle of the century, not to mention the difficulty for Neuhaus to sustain a correspondence with his cousin, was evidently soothed in part by Skryabin’s music offering a sympathetic kinship. In more cynical terms therefore, at least initially, Skryabin was a second-best option. In the years after his first all-Skryabin recitals, Neuhaus’s growing appreciation of the composer was fueled with fresh avidity by his friendship with Boris Pasternak. Through the poet Neuhaus was finally able to form a bond with Skryabin’s music on terms very different from the wider narratives of religion and revolution he had encountered so far. Pasternak had provided the missing personal connection to the composer that stoked Neuhaus’s imagination to form an alternative contextualization of what Skryabin stood for in his own mind. The composer was a welcome guest in the Pasternak household and a famous subject for many of Leonid Pasternak’s sketches and canvases. As a young man growing up amid the late imperial Muscovite intelligentsia and their debates, Pasternak had idolized Skryabin. The inspiration was so great that it compelled the fourteen-year-old Pasternak’s decision to devote himself to composition and eventually to enroll at the Moscow Conservatory. Throughout Pasternak’s adulthood Skryabin continued to be both a symbolic and direct presence in the poet’s work. Although Neuhaus did not always agree with Pasternak in their heated artistic debates, the fact that he allowed himself to be guided by his friend’s sympathies is undeniable. Talking about Pasternak at the end of his life, Neuhaus revealed: “Under the invisible influence of feelings and thoughts of this extraordinarily multifaceted and talented persona, it was as if, for several decades, I lived basking under his light.”38 It was, however, an influence that worked both ways; and their readiness to reciprocate ideas was undoubtedly enhanced by sharing common musical heroes. While their time in Irpen confirmed a mutual love of Chopin, as well as Beethoven and Brahms, their future discussions in Moscow and Peredelkino revealed that they shared a youthful veneration of Tchaikovsky and Wagner. For Pasternak, the composer who in his opinion mediated and evolved the legacy of these two figures was Skryabin. Pasternak’s ideas must have intrigued his new friend, as strikingly this same idea was adopted by Neuhaus’s article on Skryabin written in 1955, as well as his lecture-recital on Szymanowski in 1954, where he refers to Skryabin as the one who melded together the influence of Wagner and Tchaikovsky.39 Furthermore, the fact that the two artists must have discussed the link between these composers is evident in Pasternak’s poem “Muzïka” (Music), published soon after Neuhaus’s article in 1956. Intriguingly this link is represented not only in the words themselves but also in the techniques that the poet used to weave meaning between the words. “Music” portrays a professional pianist, most likely Neuhaus, moving into a city apartment. His grand piano is brought up to the sixth floor; his

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music making soars above the bustling streets, and later, resounds in the concert hall of the conservatory. The names of Chopin and Tchaikovsky are referred to openly providing key structural elements of the poem. The reference to Wagner is likewise obvious: “Po krïsham gorodskikh kvartir / Grozoy gremel polyot val’kiriy” (Over the rooftops of the city apartments thunders the flight of the Valkyries). According to Boris Katz, Skryabin, the final composer evoked in the poem, is heard as an “an overtone of other words.”40 Thus, in the final line—“To tears Tchaikovsky moved [us] with the fate of Paolo and Francesca”—Skryabin’s name appears not in the text, but through it: Do slyoz Chaykovskiy potryasal Sud’boy Paolo i Francheski

While the observation of such practices can, of course, be viewed with skepticism, it needs to be noted that both Pasternak and Neuhaus did indeed enjoy intricate word games. Neuhaus in particular always took immense pleasure in his letters of inventing new words, ironically substituting similar-sounding words, coded references, and was especially proud of inventing phrases that can be read forward and backward such as the famous one about his colleague Lev Oborin: velik Oborin on i robok i Lev (great is Oborin, he is shy and a lion [lev]).41 This practice of working with words as “overtones” became a striking feature of Pasternak’s writing that he himself proudly acknowledged. Pasternak had always been enamored by the piano, but never having fully mastered it, his close contact with Neuhaus had in many ways enhanced his appreciation of its capabilities. Neuhaus’s distinct attitude to pedaling that focused on the piano’s ability to produce sound that was not directly related to the hammer stroke—ideas that Neuhaus had inherited from his father’s thinking about the instrument and advanced technical knowledge of it—had inspired Pasternak to embrace new techniques in his poetry. For instance, rather than understanding the left una corda pedal as simply a device to play quietly, Neuhaus believed it was one of the most underrated features of the instrument for its ability to awaken an inner essence and bring to life “hidden” sound. In About the Art of Piano Playing he advised: Few of those studying the piano know that the greatest charm of the left pedal is not just that the hammer hits two strings, instead of three, but that the first (of the three) that is not struck (as the mechanism moves from left to right) sounds together with the two that have been struck—it doesn’t answer to the hammer, but because the damper above it lifts, it sounds exclusively in sympathy with the tuned unison of the neighboring strings. This is the most “un-percussive” sound possible on the piano and for this reason it is impossible not to love it for this feature.42

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Applying a similar understanding to the right damper pedal, Neuhaus earned a formidable reputation for his “pedal sorcery” through which he elevated its use beyond the ordinary role of sustaining notes.43 In what is an unusual and rare application of the damper pedal, Neuhaus would use the notion of sympathetic resonance to make notes “appear” out of silently depressed keys (i.e., without letting the hammer touch the strings). He exploited this to spectacular effect in producing his famous “ethereal” sonorities in Skryabin but, to the frustration of his students, like a true magician, he never documented his use of this technique.44 Passing it down to his son Stanislav, however, the latter did share a glimpse of this technique with his own students: Once when I played Chopin’s First Ballade [in G Minor, op. 23] to [Stanislav Neuhaus] he suddenly asked: “Do you know how [Heinrich Neuhaus] used to play this passage?” We were discussing the two last scale passages and the following chords in the coda. Sitting himself down at the piano, father pressed the right pedal and played the first scale. Then, without changing the pedal, he [depressed] the first chord silently and afterward quickly changed the pedal [see ex. 3.1]. This created the impression that the chord grew from nothingness. He did the same with the second scale. Then smiling, he said: “But now, of course, it is not allowed to play in this way.”45

While Neuhaus’s live recordings of Skryabin present difficulties both because of their technical sound quality and because of the unevenness of his playing, especially after 1933, it is nonetheless possible to suggest that both his interpretation of Vers la Flamme op. 72 and the Ninth Sonata from a recital in Moscow’s Grand Hall in 1953 do indeed make use of this effect as their rising tumultuous climaxes melt away into the hushed but resonant depths of the instrument. Pasternak’s relationship with Skryabin, however, was a complex affair that left its trace on elements of Neuhaus’s lack of enthusiasm for what he described as the composer’s “fatal mistakes” and “perversity of philosophical and aesthetic concepts.”46 At the age of nineteen, in 1909, Pasternak played one of his own compositions for Skryabin, including his one movement Piano Sonata—the manuscript of which he later gifted to Neuhaus. Despite Skryabin’s praise for Pasternak’s skill, the latter (not the most accomplished musician and believing that the composer did not have perfect pitch) decided to rest his fate as to whether or not to dedicate himself to a life of composition on Skryabin’s reaction to his revelation of his own lack of this aural gift: “If [Skryabin] responded to my confession with the words ‘Borya, but even I don’t have it,’ then [. . .] I am fated to music. If in response he talks about Wagner and Tchaikovsky [who did not have perfect pitch], about piano tuners and so forth, then that was the end of it.”47 Skryabin’s reply was the latter, prompting Pasternak to abandon his studies at the Moscow Conservatory and leave for Germany to study philosophy.

Example 3.1. Frédéric Chopin. Ballade no. 1 in G Minor, op. 23, with Neuhaus’s pedaling.

  













 





    
 









 

 

 










  



  






   











    

 




 






















 

 

 






 























 

 

 

 












 



















 













 











 

   



 

     








 

 

 









  

 



























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Although numerous elements of Skryabin’s influence are identifiable throughout Pasternak’s life, this episode shattered a certain part of Pasternak’s sympathy for the composer.48 He saw Skryabin’s refusal to acknowledge his own lack of perfect pitch as an expression of superiority beyond all others— a distancing of himself above and beyond the reach of any other artist. This notion, that a great artist could somehow believe that his artistry was detached from the concerns of the world in which he lived and created, was foreign to Pasternak’s understanding of the role of an artist, and clashed with what he came to define as “Artistic Realism.” Pasternak’s critical attitude can be assumed to be given voice through an unmistakable allusion to Skryabin’s Prefatory Action being criticized by the philosopher and uncle of the protagonist, Nikolai Vedenyapin, in Doctor Zhivago: “For two solid hours she tormented me by reading out utter nonsense—a text in verse by the symbolist A. to the cosmogonic symphony by the composer B., with the spirits of the planets, voices of the four elements, etc., etc. [. . .] I suddenly realized that [this is all] irrelevant to contemporary man.”49 Likewise, Neuhaus’s dismissal of Skryabin’s “diseased” philosophy came in similar concerns. While he acknowledged that Skryabin’s innovation enriched many aspects of musical art—“broadening its horizons, and creating new expressive means”—and continued to show a genuine interest in performing the late works, Neuhaus wrote that it would be fatal to “completely give in to the ‘sorcery’ of Skryabin’s music [which is] unthinkable in our epoch.”50 Neuhaus was apprehensive that the composer’s “‘soaring flight’ above the world often meant a detachment from the world” and went against the composer’s own earlier statement “in the 1890s, that Realism is the greatest force in contemporary art.”51

Realism and Russia’s Silver Age Spirit Neuhaus’s comment about Realism could easily be construed as one of those phrases added under the gaze of a censor to grudgingly sing the praises of socialist policy. Indeed, for nearly all of Neuhaus’s life in Russia Realism had become one of those politically charged buzzwords resulting from the state’s demand that all arts to conform to the infamous ideological trio of narodnost’, ideynost’, and konkretnost’—requiring art to appear truth-like and be immediately comprehensible to all ordinary people; relate directly and optimistically to their lives or demonstrate personal heroic actions made for the enrichment of wider socialist society; and contribute to the education of socialist society in the spirit of the Revolution. Thus, Socialist Realism was an effective propaganda tool that was enforced with an ironclad grip in the wake of the revolution, eventually becoming the official sanctioned theory of art from 1932 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It was, however, a mere offshoot of

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far more complex cultural debates about Realism, raging within the sphere of Russian culture at the fin de siècle. For many of Russia’s intelligentsia in the USSR it was the earlier debates about Realism, or its appearance in various nomenclatures relating to truth, stemming from the latter part of the nineteenth century that had contributed to their ongoing understanding of the arts. Poignantly documented in Alexander Goldenweiser’s diary entry in February 1926: In our dark days of crudeness, cruelty, and mockery of all that is spiritual it is [wonderful when you hear music that causes you to witness that] art is the greatest truth. When there are lies there is no art! There is nothing you can do to help, and this is why “Marxist” art is such a failure and will never succeed [. . .] and why it is afraid of true art like the devil is afraid of the crucifix.52

To Neuhaus the belief that nineteenth-century Russian art embodied a striving for truth became a symbol of an idealized Russia uncompromised by the falsehood of socialist policy. This symbol was a product of Neuhaus’s imagination, since unlike his older colleague Goldenweiser, it related to a Russia that he had never lived in: “There is a direction—and it was born in the deepest strata of the Russian soul and the Russian people—a direction that sought truth in interpretative art: truth with which all great Russian art is marked (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Yermolova, Stanislavsky. . .).”53 Strikingly, just as this list avoids the mention of Soviet Russian artists, Skryabin’s name too is conspicuously missing. For Neuhaus, Russia had lost its innocence and artistic integrity with the cataclysmic rise of the revolution. Unable to share the enthusiasm of those who heralded Skryabin as the torchbearer of a “new” Russia, Neuhaus felt that the composer’s stylistic development had closed the door on the most Russian elements of art evident in his early works: “lyricism, a purely Russian warmth and emotionality in their expression of the soul—a Slavic sincerity.”54 Although the late nineteenth-century debates on Realism that selectively formed the basis of Neuhaus’s idealized Russia were underpinned by the notions of truth and reality, the theories they proposed across various times, disciplines, and gatherings were remarkably different. Setting aside the cruder theories of Realism, such as those of the materialist philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which had led his followers to claim that “Shakespeare is worth less than a good pair of boots,” the main divide between these different aesthetic positions was in their respective approaches to questioning or affirming art’s usefulness, and interrogating the validity of beauty.55 For instance, one of the most famous Realists, Lev Tolstoy, admonished the idea of beauty in seminal article “Chto takoye iskusstvo?” (What Is Art?) (1897), claiming it detracted from the obligation of art to contribute to the development of society’s moral

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core. Echoing similar concerns, the Peredvizhniki artists (Wanderers), who separated themselves from the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts in 1870, chose subjects that resonated with many of Tolstoy’s concerns: the corruption of the state and church, the drunken poverty of the lower classes, and the darker aspects of social and familial relations. As related later by the painter Ilya Repin, artists were obliged to take a stand on moral and political issues: “The proclamation of ‘art for art’s sake’ was a banal, shameful phrase that smelled of lechery. Artists were forced to teach and moralize society so they would not feel like spongers and nobodies.”56 On the opposite side of the spectrum, Fyodor Dostoevsky argued for art’s independence from externally applied moral or social agendas: Art is its own purpose and must be justified by its very existence. There should be no question of “usefulness in art.” [. . .] Writers, poets, painters, and actors must not be concerned by anything quotidian or current—be it politics, the internal life of the society to which they belong, or even some burning national issue—but only with high art. To be concerned with anything but art is to humiliate it, drag it down from its heights, and mock it.57

Central to this was Dostoevsky’s distancing of himself from the naturalism that could be found at the extreme end of the Realism debates, and the embracing of the psychological and philosophical (or fantastical) world of the subject. As summarized by the late Peredvizhniki painter Mikhail Nesterov, one of Tolstoy’s most famous portraitists, the aim of Realist art is the capturing of “the spirit of the subject which is often concealed from our cursory glance.”58 It was this idyllic stance that proved so inspirational to a younger generation of thinkers who would suffuse art with Russian Orthodoxy to form the sensual Silver Age at the start of the twentieth century. With additional influence from French poets and aestheticians such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, at the turn of the century beauty was presented as the opposite of usefulness: “Nothing truly beautiful can serve any useful purpose whatsoever; everything useful is ugly. [. . .] The most useful part of the house is the toilet.”59 Baudelaire urged artists to capture what he called modernité, the ephemeral experience of life’s reality, which would lead to beauty. In 1903 the Russian Symbolist poet Valery Bryusov argued that in art the real world is “merely a prop used by the artist to give shape to his dreams” and that “no art can repeat reality. Art is related to reality like wine to grapes.”60 Like many Russian artists of these years looking up to a cult of beauty, Bryusov believed that the glorification of beauty itself—the striving for something beyond the limitations of imitating nature’s reality, and existing only in the imagination—became the ultimate goal of art. As summarized by the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev: “Beauty is an ideal goal of life, elevating and ennobling man.”61 By the close of the first decade

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of the twentieth century, this avant-garde movement soon counted among its followers the composers Alexander Skryabin and Nikolai Medtner, the poets Alexander Blok and Andrei Beliy, painter Mikhail Vrubel, and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. This diverse cohort of Silver Age dreamers was assumed to assertively slam the door on Russia’s nineteenth-century Realism and bring it into the realm of the mystic. In the Russia that Neuhaus encountered at the end of 1914 these various aesthetic positions were still part of the living fabric that formed the country’s recent cultural history. His belated personal definition of Realism, however, remained latent throughout his initial decade in Russia. It was not until the 1930s when he came into the orbit of Pasternak that Neuhaus suddenly found the stimulus to define himself within the parameters of Russian art: writing out poems by Silver Age poets that were not in publication and collecting postcards of paintings.62 That Pasternak prompted Neuhaus to articulate himself within this legacy is hardly surprising. After all, Pasternak’s household had welcomed gatherings of Realists. Alongside the family’s friendship with Tolstoy, the young Pasternak had regularly interacted with the great Peredvizhniki painters including Valentin Serov, Nikolai Ge, Ilya Repin, and its later members Mikhail Nesterov, Konstantin Korovin, and Isaac Levitan. The tide of the Silver Age likewise extended into the family home: the artist Mikhail Vrubel was rated most highly, and, of course, not a single concert or rehearsal of Alexander Skryabin was missed. During his adolescence, Boris Pasternak’s intimate knowledge of the latest literary works of Blok, Beliy, and Bryusov was fed by his frequent trips to the stronghold of Symbolist drama— the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre in St. Petersburg (courtesy of free travel organized by his uncle, Alexander Margulius, the manager of the Petersburg– Moscow railway line).63 Pasternak’s own work extended the legacy of Silver Age poetry into the Soviet era along with his friends the poetesses Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. As a pianist, Neuhaus’s requirements arising from an aesthetic of truth were defined by the very fact that unlike painting, literature, or drama, the actual process of performance demanded by most piano literature brought little that might be construed as bearing any relation to naturalism. In much the same way, performance eschewed judgment by the triad of criteria of Socialist Realism. Instead, Neuhaus’s engagement with Realism was limited to two spheres: the role of art and the artist in society; and reconciling for himself how such an aesthetic manifested itself in the otherwise abstract phenomenon of performing someone else’s music. For the first, Neuhaus adopted the Tolstoyan moral commitment, which held that “spiritual activity and its expression, genuinely needed by others, is the greatest calling of man—[his] cross as conveyed in the Gospel,”64 and which revealed itself like a doppelgänger in Pasternak’s view that “for a Realist-artist, his work is his cross and destiny.”65

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Setting aside Neuhaus’s atheist outlooks, the existentialist Christian suffering that Tolstoy and Pasternak considered crucial to the Realist artist, were likewise adopted by him. As set out by Tolstoy: A thinker and artist will never sit still upon the heights of Olympus [but] suffers in an attempt to find salvation or consolation. [. . .] He suffers because he is always anxious: he may have decided and said that which would have given good to mankind, liberated them from their suffering, and given them consolation—but he did not say it in the way he [wanted], actually he had not decided and had not said, and tomorrow may be too late—he will die.66

The relationship of this passage with the artistic anxieties expressed by Neuhaus is unmistakable: “I work like an ox [. . .] but the soul is sad—it is hurting and cries. It is not possible to dream of so-called ‘happiness,’ I can only imagine peace and freedom. Maybe it is stupid, but before Death [comes] I want to do so much. I have lived through a lot and thought a lot over and I want to leave a little something after myself.”67 Neuhaus’s desire to faithfully express this elusive realm of the soul in order to become a historical persona who might perhaps be of benefit to others thus resonated with the sentiments of the Russian intelligentsia of Nicolaevan Russia where the action of self-reflection and the pursuit of the ideal personality (lichnost’) became inexorably linked with the hope for historical progress.68 The second criteria of Neuhaus’s Realism derived from the distinctive sublimation of lived experience and feelings that prompted the metamorphosis of nineteenth-century Realism into the modernity of Silver Age individualism. He defined this territory as the “very spirit of Romanticism”—the “directness of feeling that was still quite recently so trusted and believed in by Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and many, many others. . .”69 As noted by Neuhaus’s respected colleague, the musicologist Grigory Kogan, his understanding of Romanticism could only be understood if related to the ideal embraced by the Peredvizhniki painters: “Art is not a depiction of life (reality) as we know it, nor of what it ought to be (in the ideal). It is the depiction (detection) of that which is in real life but that we don’t see, notice, or know.’”70 Romanticism for Neuhaus had meant one key hypothesis: the notion that art could strive beyond nature’s limitations because truth did not reside with the object itself, but with the artist’s own subjective response to it. Aligning Realism to Romanticism meant the former answered only to the lived experiences held in the artist’s imagination. Similar to the foundations of Silver Age thought that Pasternak extolled, Neuhaus’s hypothesis dictated that truth was only found in the sense that the work of art was a reflection of the artist’s transient experiences of the world as they had appeared to him. With the sublimation of individual experience Pasternak summarized his view that it was “the depth of the biographical imprint which becomes the main driving force

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of the artist, pushes him onto the path of innovation and originality.” Thus, Pasternak’s “Artistic Realism” (khudozhestvennïy realizm) (evidently devised as a nomenclature by which to separate it from Socialist Realism) was rooted in the belief that the profundity with which the artist “looks into his own life” was the means “to understand all life,” and was hence “biographical without being egocentric.”71 Seeking a term for this same artistic approach, Neuhaus chose to call this “autobiographicality” (avtobiografichnost’). It is wrong to assume, however, that Russian cultural influences suddenly stoked Neuhaus to prioritize the emotional experience as a superior artistic aim. An intensely emotive aspect of his pianism had always marked Neuhaus’s performances. From his youth he was highly critical of musicians, including his idol Richard Strauss, who had chosen to give interpretations that more restrained than those he expected. Neuhaus’s attitude even frustrated his father who had tried to stem what he believed to be his son’s overindulgent emotional engagement, which disrupted his studies: “I was playing something and repeating several times very slowly a passage that was not very difficult, but listening to it intently, obviously feeling something when my father came in [. . .] and shouted: ‘Du spielst nur immer, du studierst nicht’ [You are forever playing and never studying].”72 Reflecting how this attitude to music reflected itself in Neuhaus’s performances in the capital, Alexander Nikolayev suggested that the “searching aspect” to Neuhaus’s pianism was its most captivating factor: “The pianistic mastery of H. G. Neuhaus attracted not through effects of bravura virtuosity, but through the bright and colorful ability to use the rich sonic palette of the piano—his ability to use the instrument to give the most nuanced shades of feelings, images and to realistically develop the artistic idea of every piece.”73 Similar opinions are abundant in the descriptions of his colleagues and the reminiscences of his students. With the flourishing piano tradition penetrating deeply into Russian culture through its increasing number of very distinctive and varied exponents by the late 1930s, it became inevitable that audiences and critics would cluster together certain exponents into stylistic “bands” according to a set of assumed overriding characteristics. The three pianists consistently singled out as “emotional,” “poetic,” and “Romantic” were Neuhaus, Konstantin Igumnov, and Vladimir Sofronitsky, whereas “brilliance” was often attributed to pianists like Grigory Ginzburg and the young Emil Gilels, and “intelligence” to Alexander Goldenweiser and his student Samuil Feinberg. That said, Neuhaus increasingly felt that his natural inclinations to sublimate the emotional expressivity of performing fell on fertile ground within Russia. Elevating the role of emotion in music, he went as far as to consider the most vital work of the interpreter to lie not in attention to musical aspects but attention to “the direction of feelings, in other words—that through which art lives.”74 The actions he witnessed of Russian artists who glorified an open show

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of emotion, such as his uncle Felix Blumenfeld “lying on the divan and crying over a score of [Glinka’s] Ruslan and Lyudmila” seemed to confirm this.75 Neuhaus himself not only cried over music and poetry but also recognized the intensity of emotional commitment in performance: “There are pieces which I can play only at home . . . those that I can’t play on the stage because they make me overwrought [such as] Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger, Chopin’s Second Ballade [F Major, op. 38] . . .”76 He found it a painful experience when he could not give the same level of “sincerity” as “at home [as] something stands in the way.” In those cases, Neuhaus complained, “one puts on a ‘mask’—but that is terrible.”77 Such instances drove him to despair as he associated them with all the faults he perceived in the attitude to pianism he encountered during his studies in Europe, including Godowsky’s who believed that “one somewhat prostitutes oneself on stage. On stage you [should only] give 25 percent of that which you have inside you because on stage you put on a mask.”78 The scrutiny of lived experience within a more complex aesthetic territory of culture revealed to him by Pasternak, however, finally allowed Neuhaus to reconcile the Dionysian expressivity glorified by Russian arts from the fin de siècle with the adoration of beauty that came so instinctively to him. Already mocked in his youth for his strikingly foppish manners, he had written to his parents from Italy that he could not but help being “drawn to beautiful things, the elegant and artistic” that he found while rambling through the country’s the museums.79 Speaking about music Neuhaus’s students at the Moscow Conservatory often heard their professor define beauty as the epitome of genius: There are hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands “especially beautiful” passages such as the Fugato in [Chopin’s] Fourth Ballade [F Minor, op. 52]: like beautiful views of landscapes which captivate the wayfarer and make him return to them again and again. I am sometimes surprised at myself—and those present in the class too are evidently surprised—that when working on Chopin’s Barcarolle [op. 61] (which we have already studied a hundred times before) we delve into its untold beauty (especially the transition to the recapitulation [. . .] after the second subject in A major, there begin the trills in the right hand to the dominant F-sharp major—C-sharp minor) [that] make me fall into infantile awe—I hardly keep back tears of joy that there is such a miracle on earth!80

Filtering the intense emphasis on truth, arising from nineteenth-century Realism, through the lens provided by the Silver Age’s adopted cult of beauty provided the two aesthetic sides of Neuhaus’s autobiographicality. As Neuhaus’s student Berta Kremenstein reported, “Autobiographicality was a distinctly Neuhausian idea undoubtedly meaning the soulfulness, genuineness, and depth of feeling expressed, and all this with restraint and simplicity.”81

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By modifying Realism’s slogan “art is life,” Neuhaus offered an alternative: “Art is life, but in its highest crystallized form.”82 Although life was “frightening and terrifying” it was, according to Neuhaus, in essence “beautiful.”83 Like Dostoevsky who considered that beauty should be “idolized unconditionally” as the most necessary part of “everything that is healthy and most alive,” Neuhaus believed that striving for the highest spiritual plane of life, or beauty, ennobled man—complementing the existentialist Tolstoyan moral commitment whereby the act of autobiographic self-reflection brought the artist out of step with his immediate oppressive historical reality, and positioned him on the cusp of a more liberal and enlightened society.84

Autobiographicality and the Embodiment of Blok’s “Demon” Neuhaus acutely recognized the moment when his performance went beyond the norm, and answered to his understanding of autobiographicality. Describing an ideal performance to Zinaida, where his sincerest experiences found their rightfully refined and sophisticated expression, Neuhaus wrote in 1931: Today I played—I played so wonderfully that if only you heard you would have fallen in love with me again, and Boris would have cried (with joy) like everyone present: although father, who is more stoic sat quietly; concentrated and glowing. I would never say about this playing, as I talk about my other concerts in Moscow and Kiev, that it was “not right”: No, it was precisely that unique, sacred [playing] in which everything was felt-through to the end, and which flowed so easily—all that which is sometimes so torn, polluted, maimed, and tortured in me, all that which I love and for which I live, and which makes me a brother of Chopin, Bach, Pushkin, Blok, and Boris. . . .85

Neuhaus’s documentation of this elevated performance takes on the attributes of an unfettered and forthcoming confession in which he felt he had openly reflected, through the music of another, the personal influences around him. Revealing the influence that finally made it so natural for him to express his own autobiographicality in performance, Neuhaus confided to Zinaida: “I have just now, nearly without a break, reread almost all of Blok: poems, articles, diaries, and notebooks. He is extremely close to me.”86 In turning to Blok as a figure to underpin his personal definition of Realism, Neuhaus would have had to concede Blok’s openly difficult attitude to Realist prose of the early twentieth century, including Dostoevsky’s. Blok’s suggestion that all human experience without exception was emotional, however, was central to the ideals of Russian Realism across the arts, and proved to be the necessary hook with which Neuhaus could incorporate his ideas into his vision. Blok’s philosophical vision, which considered that “the poetic perception of

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the world has no divide between the personal and universal,” and that it was therefore an artist’s obligation to put “all experiences, from every aspect of life, together” into the lyric poetry of one “musical chord,” pointed out to Neuhaus the validity of his concept of autobiographicality.87 This vision was furthermore affirmed by Pasternak, who claimed that the ability to erase the distinction between real life and its artistic manifestation made Blok a great Realist: Blok’s St. Petersburg is the most realistic St. Petersburg ever depicted by a contemporary artist. It exists equally in real life and in [Blok’s] imagination. It is full of everyday routine, which fuels the poetry with tension and anxiety, and in its streets the language of the common people is heard, which refreshes the language of poetry. At the same time, the image of this city consists of features that are depicted by the nervous hand of the poet who spiritualized the city to such an extent that it was transformed into a breathtaking phenomenon of the rarest inner world.88

Blok’s vision that the poet’s soul is tempered by the experiences and anxieties of his epoch likewise found its way into Neuhaus’s Realist understanding of art as life: “The emotional attribute (let’s call it the subconscious state of the spirit) is found in even the most rational, the most apparently unemotional movements, actions and thoughts. . . . Everything that lives in the human soul, everything that is ‘subconscious’ (often it is ‘super-conscious’) is the kingdom of music.”89 The confessional, “autobiographic” performances by Neuhaus therefore reflect themselves within Blok’s belief that “only that creation which is a confession, and in which the artist has burned himself to ashes can become great.”90 Thus, rather than Blok being linked in Neuhaus’s mind to the philosophy of Skryabin that claimed to extend beyond the realm of the human world into the mystic, he offered a very real model of how he could contextualize his own interpretative endeavors as a pianist. The belief that it is not “how” to play but rather “what” to play from his own autobiography as the question of primary importance, is indicative of Neuhaus’s idea that an interpreter does not exist in passive submission to the composer’s will.91 Neuhaus took it for granted that an interpreter had to have his own artistic will—a burning and insatiable desire to communicate. To Neuhaus’s understanding, this artistic will was a far-reaching concept and not one that just manifested itself as a final ingredient in a public performance. The whole process of preparation for a public performance was seen as tempering the evolving interpretation to become ever closer to the “artistic image”—the synthesis of the apparent “intentions” of the composer with the performer’s own experiences—in carving out a path or trajectory by an increasingly focused artistic will. In the course of the interpreter’s daily practice, Neuhaus was adamant that “successful work [only] occurs when a person is ruled by real passion, i.e. desire, multiplied by will.”92

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Neuhaus defined artistic will as that elusive quality that made the pianist not just a musician or artist, but a “poet”—a word he reserved for describing those interpreters who had, in his opinion, reached the highest possible of level of emotional and intellectual engagement with their art.93 Tirelessly requesting his students to find the poetry within the music Neuhaus argued: “The heart of all art, its most profound essence and most sacred thought, is poetry.”94 For Neuhaus, it was the strength of this will that defined the strength of the elusive poet within the interpreter. His fixation on the interpreter as a poet who should seek out and deliver the poetry of a musical work is all the more pertinent since its essence cannot be notated by metric means, and is thus the element that most relies on the expression of one’s unique autobiographicality. Neuhaus’s son, Stanislav, later summarized his father’s understanding of what it meant to listen to a pianist who “spoke” as a poet: “The greater the presence of poetry [. . .] in an interpretation, the greater its hold on the listener— it wakes the sleeping, calms the restless, and leaves a deep impression in our souls, sometimes forever.”95 This emphasis on poetry as a mark of individualization was bound in Neuhaus’s mind with Blok. He not only impressed those around him by reciting swathes of Blok’s poetry by heart, but lines from his poetry found themselves scattered among Neuhaus’s most important literary works. It is certain that Blok’s evocative description of the expression of poetic individuality as the supreme and only viable model for contemporary art found fertile ground in the pianist’s mind. Writings such as “O Lirike” (“About the Lyric”) (1907) would undoubtedly have given Neuhaus a certain reassurance, for instance, when he came to refute Skryabin’s eventual claim that “creativity cannot be individual.” In a broader arena, these writings evidently contributed to the backbone of his critique of Soviet policy during an open question-and-answer conference in 1944 where Neuhaus explained that a pianist-poet’s interpretation should not be expected to be “accessible” to listeners uninitiated to the concerns of high art: “A lot of stupidity was committed in the name of achieving the vsenarodnost’ [literally: all-peopleness] of art.”96 More important, however, it was perhaps the widespread interdisciplinary resonance for Russian artists and thinkers from the long nineteenth century that made the image of the lyric so alluring to Neuhaus as he sought to find the ways in which to connect himself aesthetically with the illustrious cultural legacy of the country of his birth. Indeed, Blok’s distinct portrayal of lyric is one carried through an overt allusion to the painting of the Symbolist Mikhail Vrubel Demon (seated) (1890) (see fig. 3.1): Among the mountain ranges where the “solemn sunset” mixed the blue hues of the shadows, the scarlet of the evening sun, and the gold of the dying day—mixed and poured out into one viscid, and glinting violet mass—was

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Figure 3.1. Mikhail Vrubel. Demon (seated), oil on canvas, 1890. Reproduced with permission from the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. a Man: suffering and sorrowing [he was] the owner of all the world’s riches [. . .] yet did not know where to lay his head. This Man—the fallen AngelDemon—was the first Lyric.97

This in turn, was a response to the legend created by the poet Mikhail Lermontov who spent much of his life setting it down in his posthumously published masterpiece Demon (1842).98 While Neuhaus never directly quoted Blok’s definition of the Lyric, it is impossible to ignore that his longstanding fascination with Vrubel’s Demon was always elucidated through the very same language of Blok’s own critiques of the artist. Thus, Neuhaus would frequently paraphrase Blok’s forewarning that the talented are fated to work not less, but harder: “[Vrubel] painted the head of the Demon forty times because he was a genius, and not because he was ungifted.”99 Yet, perhaps the most unmistakable and personal admission that the image of the Lyric Angel-Demon had indeed deeply impressed itself on Neuhaus’s imagination, were his mysterious remarks in his letters to his closer students: “Most of all, I wish I could give you the gift of The Demon.”100 What exactly Neuhaus meant in such cryptic sentences, as with so many of his expressions, will never be revealed to us with a complete degree of certainty. It is possible to suggest, however, that like all the ideas Neuhaus adopted in his drive to identify a spiritual and artistic “Russianness,” which might contest Soviet reality, it was one that would be subjected to some kind of transformation as it came into contact with his own autobiographical intellectual world. Appearing in various guises throughout Neuhaus’s thoughts on music,

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the image of the Lyric Angel-Demon can be seen as an allegory for his own committed vision to the philosophical state that he unfailingly expected of an artist. For so many who were part of Russia’s Silver Age, including Blok, Vrubel, and Pasternak, the potency of the Demon’s philosophical implications pointed to the messianic figure of Skryabin. Unable to engage with the composer’s “diseased” philosophy, though, Neuhaus turned to Beethoven—for him, the epitome of the greatest achievements of European philosophical endeavors. Neuhaus’s placement of Beethoven into the realm of the Silver Age was unusual, not least because it moved to defamiliarize one of the most coveted composers of socialist cultural policy. While many across the world have measured themselves against Beethoven’s genius, it is no exaggeration to say that he was one of the composers most stably venerated in Russia and throughout the Soviet epoch. After his transformation from a symbol of artistic perfection in the nineteenth century to the “founding father” of proletarian music, by the 1927 celebrations commemorating the centenary of his death he had become a universal figure of revolutionary freedom and heroism for the USSR. Such was his stature that key events of the socialist experiment and its policies (such as the debut of the conductorless orchestra, Persimfans) were marked with all-Beethoven programs.101 With “accessibility” being all-important for policy, attention tended to focus on Beethoven’s middle period—with the notable exception of the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis, which were in vogue. Although the virtues of his late works (such as the “Hammerklavier” op. 106) were acknowledged, they were rarely discussed. It was these late works, however, that constituted the very territory where Neuhaus felt Beethoven finally reconciled philosophy with music and found his true genius. Here, deriving from his own ardent and vocal interest in Hegel’s dialectic philosophy (banned by the state),102 Neuhaus was determined to present the composer’s last creative period as the transition into a self-consciousness of the spirit that recognizes itself pantheistically as all reality (proposed in The Phenomenology of the Spirit), and thus elevated Beethoven above the human. In reaching out to bring Beethoven into this new territory, the similarity between the Lyric Angel-Demon and Neuhaus’s vision of Beethoven is remarkable. Indeed it is surprising that to date it has not been discussed that in defining the atmosphere of Beethoven’s last Piano Sonatas, Neuhaus always returned to the very specific colors associated with the Lyric Angel-Demon as described by Blok, and also through Vrubel’s canvas (sadly with oxidation, the glistening gold of the bronze incorporated into the paint is but a pale reminder of its former glory): the Variations from opus 109 (Piano Sonata no. 30 in E Major) being a “majestic, solemn sunset” in which the “glinting mountain peaks,” are seen through gold, scarlet, and violet before mixing with the shadows of the coming “blue-blue night” (sinyaya-sinyaya noch’); and the slow movement of his Fifth Piano Concerto op. 73 as an “azure-golden glow” (lazurno-zolotistogo

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siyaniya).103 In speaking about Beethoven’s late period, Neuhaus presented the composer as a solitary genius who, in the very same symbolic imagery as expressed in Blok’s Lyric and reflected by Vrubel’s placement of his Demon in Earth’s most bejeweled garden, was never at ease: despite owning all the spiritual riches of the Earth and having the “clearest” possible view of the world, he was always desperately reaching for the stars.104 In bringing a desire to see Beethoven’s soul as a solitary self-conscious one, as evoked in Hegel’s pantheistic vision, together with the Russian legend of the Demon, Neuhaus unusually chooses to forgo his atheist convictions with Beethoven being the only composer to whom he routinely applied the words “godly,” “prayerful,” and “divine.”105 Furthermore, this elevation of Beethoven beyond humanity rested on the idea, peculiar to the Lyric Demon, that this spirituality is flawed and hence binds him to forever exist on Earth. Just as the legend of the Demon begins with his being cast down from the heavens, Neuhaus called Beethoven’s soul an embodiment of a “salto mortale: a fall from the sky to Earth.”106 Mirroring Blok’s language that the Demon was “Man,” Neuhaus claimed that he felt there was something that prevented Beethoven from being “divinus”: “The human [. . .] this is the strength of Beethoven, but also it is his downside (if it is even possible to talk of downsides here). There is something higher than him.”107 Blok warned that the Lyric, having the whole world, “will not give you, people, anything other than momentary splashes, other than faraway songs, other than a stupefying drink. [. . .] A Lyric cannot give anything to people. But people come and take. A Lyric is ‘poor and bright’; from his ‘bright generosity’ people create countless riches.”108 This same sentiment is shadowed by Neuhaus’s view that confessional, autobiographic art—whether created from the “blessed: heightened state of self-awareness that Beethoven’s deafness “happily” bestowed upon him, or those rare performances that Neuhaus felt “flowed out of him” without constraint—should enrich the audience’s spiritual perception of art, yet crucially, that it was not for the artist to lead the audience into his world.109 As Neuhaus’s student, Vera Gornostaeva, explained: “He touched the keys and you felt that your sound was poor in comparison to that which arose from underneath his fingers. The sound which he commanded was like a tuning fork—you understood that you were listening to a different piano, to a different type of thought.”110 Like Yakov Zak’s complaint that “how to achieve this was left up to the student to discover,”111 she warned that while Neuhaus “infected us with his keenness,” there was no way to “rationalize” and adopt his mastery.112 More significant than the outward manifestation of the Lyric, however, was the way in which Blok’s definition allowed Neuhaus to negotiate the apparent paradox between what he called being a “servant” of the score, but also its “master.”113 As offered by Blok:

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That is how I want it. If a Lyric loses this motto and replaces it with another— he will no longer be a Lyric. This motto is his curse—immaculate and bright. All freedom and servitude are in this motto: in it his free will, and in it his imprisonment in the walls of [his] world—“the blue prison.” Lyricism is “I”: a microcosm. And the whole world of the lyric poet lies in his process of perception.114

Neuhaus believed that the strength of the artistic will, and by extension the poetry, in an interpretation, was dependent on the interpreter’s completely excluding all possibilities except that one specific path to which his interpretation subscribed. To Neuhaus, the success of interpretation was therefore constantly underpinned by the understanding that despite the many truths latent within a score, an interpretation can only contain one. In his critique of Neuhaus, Nikolayev considered that the overpowering impression left by Neuhaus’s live performances was indeed representative of this view: “It seems as if only this way and exactly this way the given music must be understood— that this sounded-out [version] is the only possible interpretation [. . .] of the given artistic image.”115 This one truth was that sincere, self-sacrificing “autobiographic” confession where the interpreter laid bare his lived experience as an answer to the composer’s template, but it remained the expression of the exclusive will of that interpreter. Following this path brought forth the “secret anguish” of the sorrowful and tormented Lyric Angel-Demon for Neuhaus as a pianist.116 From the prison of his world, defined by his experiences, the Lyric could only strike the “green earth and blue skies of its walls.”117 Despite aiming to access the world beyond his own, that elusive autopsychographic world of a great composer, Neuhaus likewise was bound to reveal and magnify the accumulated riches of his own. Thus, aspiring to the genius status of Blok’s Lyric allowed Neuhaus to contextualize his youthful attraction to philosophy, which had so often diverted his attention away from musical studies. If the Lyric was encased in the prison of his experiences, the only way he could expand the walls of his confinement was through enriching his “I” by constantly renewing and amassing new experiences. Thus, Neuhaus believed: In my opinion, the concept of man’s worth (his beauty, strength, superiority, charm, “effectiveness” etc., etc., many more epithets can be added . . .) cannot be determined by any prepared moral, religious, philosophical, aesthetic, and sociopolitical principles. They must be directed, or created anew, and only then will they grow and bloom in the way that all that lives blooms and becomes higher and higher. An old proverb says: the higher the treetops rise to the sky, the deeper into the earth their roots must go.118

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The genius and talent of a Lyric interpreter hence gave rise to one of Neuhaus’s most famous aphorisms that listening to a pianist “one can feel the books he has read and the paintings he has seen.”119 This kind of interpretative aesthetic, which empowered the pianist to perform a work “as if [spiritually] his own,” was not universal by any means.120 The highly personal nature of the experiences underpinning Neuhaus’s interpretation of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata no. 21, op. 53, seemed inappropriate, for example, to his student Emil Gilels: “For Neuhaus, the second movement (Adagio molto) is [inextricably linked to] a ‘velvet night’; a southern-Italian velvet night that is followed by dawn. It is beautiful, but it is excessively brought about by feelings—the desire to express the personally gained pleasure from this ‘velvet night’: a Romantic modification. There is no distance.”121 The musicologist Lev Barenboim similarly attacked Neuhaus’s lack of objectivity and reliance on personal opinion as one of his greatest failings as an artist because it led him away form “truth” instead of bringing him closer to it.122 Neuhaus’s adherence to his modified vision of Russian Realism, which he defined as autobiographicality, was not a response to the cultural world of contemporary Russia around him, which he considered placed more value on “intellect and constructive logic” than conviction or “strength of feeling.”123 Its subjectivity and inherent Romanticism allowed him to conceive of himself, like the displaced Demon, as a practicing “Russian,” rather than Soviet, pianist. In “Ustarel li romantizm?” (“Has Romanticism Become Outmoded?”) Stanislav Neuhaus lamented after his father’s death that there were few pianists able to embody and sustain this same vision: “We hear more and more often the use of the term ‘minus 19’ in reference to pianists, which is supposed to mean that the pianist does not engage [with] Romanticism. [. . .] The Soviet pianistic school has given the world many excellent pianists, and it would be sad if this tradition ceased to exist.”124 Situating himself in this crosscurrent of various influences Neuhaus had forged an aesthetic territory whereby he could finally visualize a life of servitude to the arts through Realism beyond the rhetoric of revolution, Russian Orthodoxy, or socialist policy. The image of Blok provided for him the marriage of confessional art whose striving for nobler things was directed by the search for beauty. In serving art unconditionally for its beauty while accepting its existentialist moral commitment, Neuhaus was well aware that the sensuality and individualism of the fin-de-siècle Silver Age ideals were treated as nonexistent during both Stalinist Russia and the Thaw. The works of these artists were simply expunged from the consciousness of the masses. Neuhaus taunted the state with his alternate vision of art through the symbolism for his own complex writings by making references to these ideals throughout his working

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Soviet life. His last, My Highest Aims as a Musician and Pedagogue, envisioned to be published as part of the official tributes for the Moscow Conservatory’s Centennial Celebrations in 1966, ended with a citation of the final Latin words of Alexander Blok’s “Blagoveshcheniye” (“Annunciation”) (1909). In the final stanza of this Silver Age poem, symbolizing the sensual conception of truly sacred art, hidden behind a curtain and guarding the scene stands an artist. He trembles as he holds out a cross and entreats the onlookers: “Profani, procul ite, Hic amoris locus sacer est” (Go far away, you uninitiated—here is the sacred place of love).125

The Pianist as Stanislavsky’s Actor It was often remarked that Neuhaus came to life when he shared his thoughts on music with an audience: the bigger the audience, the more he came into his own. These discussions were characterized by wit and charm, and there is no lack of people who considered Neuhaus’s lectures and conversations in class to be performances in their own right. Yet, despite Neuhaus’s view of Blok as a spiritual “brother,” his public writings and speeches referred not to the poet’s Lyric as a model for the interpreter, but to that of the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky: “Again and again: Everything is one . . . Read the books of Stanislavsky where this is revealed in a lot of detail most beautifully.”126 His adaptation of punchy aphorisms from Stanislavsky’s work—“Love not yourself in music, but music in yourself”—quickly became popular and distinct facets of his discussions on musical interpretation. How much Neuhaus was genuinely interested in the work of Stanislavsky is subject to debate, particularly since the Stalinist climate usurped Stanislavsky’s vision in the 1930s in the name of Socialist Realism. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that his public definition of “Russianness” mentioned both Stanislavsky and Maria Yermolova—the latter being Stanislavsky’s colleague who, according to the theater director, was the greatest tragic actress of all time. Stanislavsky’s ideas of Russian Realism presented with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre—later christened in Honor of Chekhov—were well known throughout Russia by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it is in the terms of Stanislavsky’s unique terminology applied to the theater that Neuhaus was presented by the mainstream musicologists of his time: “Neuhaus is first and foremost an ‘actor of lived experience’ [aktyor perezhivaniya].”127 Stanislavsky drew the inspiration for his understanding of theater and the arts in general from many of the same ideas in which Russia’s Silver Age was rooted. Theater was elevated beyond entertainment to the status of a unified, collective undertaking, not unlike the Gesamtkunstwerk, to reflect the

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psycho-emotional essence of the play. Actors expected to immerse themselves in the wider cultural and social issues of the epoch of their character in preparation for their roles. Audiences were expected to undertake their position in the auditorium with a similar sense of concentrated responsibility. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko were the first Russian directors to insist on darkening the seating areas of the auditorium, request complete silence from audiences during the performance, and to prevent latecomers from being admitted.128 The fact that this attitude to art was driven by Stanislavsky’s friendship with figures including Anton Chekhov, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Fyodor Chaliapin, and an idolization of Lev Tolstoy’s aesthetics of art, would have furthermore attracted Neuhaus’s attention as he searched for the territory that defined his adopted, historically displaced Russia. While in 1932 the theater was renamed as the Moscow Art Academic Theatre in Honor of Gorky when state intervention changed its agenda—causing Mikhail Bulgakov to parody it in his 1936 satirical novel, Teatral’nïy roman (Zapiski pokoynika) (Theatrical Novel [Notes of a Deceased])—there is no doubt that in essence Stanislavsky’s original teachings would have resonated with Neuhaus who confessed: “It gives me great pleasure when my friends [say in the green room]: ‘What an amazing actor you are! You can with such assuredness move between one composer and the next.’”129 Furthermore, when Neuhaus’s book About the Art of Piano Playing (1958–61) became a sought-after publication, likened in importance to the writing of Stanislavsky, Neuhaus excitedly reported: “My modest book is an unprecedented success. [. . .] Recently there was a meeting at the Moscow Art Academic Theatre where they really praised me and concluded that About the Art of Piano Playing stands alongside Stanislavsky’s book My Life in Art. Well, I’m very pleased.”130 To understand the significance of Stanislavsky’s contribution to artistic culture in the broadest sense is to realize that his philosophy was unswervingly guided by one definition: “Art is the creation of life of the human soul.”131 Neuhaus’s ideal, to create an interpretation through which his lived experiences would give voice to his spiritual autobiography, was drawn to Stanislavsky’s demanding criteria that an artist should convince the audience that they were witnessing the creation of reality. Such an attitude broke the pianistic models of Neuhaus’s youth including Barth, Godowsky, and Ferruccio Busoni—the latter of whom had claimed: “The onlooker, if the artistic enjoyment is not to be debased to human participation, must never consider it as reality.”132 Thus, in explaining why he could sit for hours in the practice room over a small, technically easy fragment of a phrase, working on its specific rubato and dynamic inflection (“intonation”) Neuhaus revealed: “Stanislavsky had a wonderful expression: ‘I don’t believe it.’ Sometimes an artist would come out twenty times with some word or phrase but Stanislavsky would say: ‘I don’t believe it.’ This is the most important thing in art: truth, truth, and truth.”133

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When Stanislavsky decided to formulate his “method” for revolutionizing, or rather creating the staple raison d’être of the Russian acting school, he condensed all artistic endeavors into one of two possible paths. Stanislavsky famously differentiated these two kingdoms of art and called them “representational” (iskusstvo predstavleniya) and “emotive” (iskusstvo perezhivaniya). These two different processes of performing a work provided a vocabulary that was easily applicable even to abstract arts such as music. The kind of artistic interpretation that Stanislavsky found unacceptable (“representational art”) was one that “not creating the actual living life of the spirit [. . .] instead speaks vividly of it.”134 Stanislavsky believed that representative art was a craft that mimicked the ideal or rather the truth within the artwork: “The truth of [representative art] is not in true passion, but truth-like feeling [. . .] that becomes believable.”135 He discussed the great skill, particularly of French actors, who had been trained to observe and then meticulously study, copy, and refine the externalized actions—reminiscent of Neuhaus’s concerns over Godowsky’s performance mentality that called for adopting a “mask.” Stanislavsky acknowledged the great craft of such actors, yet for him that is all it remained—craft.136 Infinitely greater in Stanislavsky’s opinion was the second type of artistic undertaking the “emotive,” or art of “lived experience,” that which proclaimed that “Art is life”—words that Neuhaus happily appropriated throughout his writings.137 Stanislavsky’s actors were encouraged not only to undertake fundamental research into the kind of life they were portraying (such as famously walking through shady underworld streets by twilight), but also to learn writers’ entire oeuvres to gain a better sense of their literary style. In a similar way, Neuhaus frequently used the same language to explain the motivation for his lifelong interest in “monographic” recitals devoted to only one composer (Bach, Skryabin, Debussy, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven, and, in his later career, Schumann): “I like to study not one or two works by a composer, but many. If it’s Bach—then all 48 Preludes and Fugues. One must learn to live inside [vzhivat’sya] the music of that composer, and this is only achieved by learning as many of his works as possible. [. . .] When I played my first Skryabin sonatas, I learned all of Skryabin’s works.”138 The application of Stanislavsky’s techniques and ideas to the creation of a musical interpretation began to undergo serious musicological investigation in Soviet Russia in the 1930s: the first substantial musicological investigations of Stanislavsky’s system and piano pedagogy was by the Soviet musicologist Lev Barenboim in 1939.139 It was followed by key texts including Grigory Kogan’s U vrat masterstva (At the Gates of Mastery) (1958)—to which Neuhaus contributed the foreword—and Samarii Savshinsky’s Rabota pianist nad muzïkal’nom proizvedeniem (The Work of the Pianist on a Musical Composition) (1964). Neuhaus’s ideas about the pianist-interpreter became strongly linked to emerging ideas

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of these literary works, which heralded his musicianship as one of the most successful examples of this system to pianism. Most likely Neuhaus did not need to engage with Stanislavsky to form his own identity as a Russian artist. Stanislavsky was, however, a celebrity whose name was recognized across the USSR, and who exerted no discomfort on state policy. In pedagogy, where Neuhaus was often reluctant to disclose his innermost thoughts, he could point his students through Stanislavsky to a clear and recognized model that sought to understand the paradox of being a Realist who was both “master and servant” of another artist’s creation: a performing artist who created onstage the “life of a human soul through [the artist’s] truthful, sincere feeling, and sincere passion.”140 Such a pianist-actor, like Blok’s Lyric, would understand the world beyond him through his own experiences. Tempering his experiences to the vision, but not direct knowledge of that other world, the resulting performance was a “new creation” that “inherited characteristics of the artist, who conceived and gave birth to it, and the [work] that fertilized it.”141 By happy coincidence, the result of Neuhaus’s profound inner searching for how he could draw his artistic conscious closer to a Russian cultural heritage as both Lyric and actor through his pianism resonated on sympathetic ground. Neuhaus, by speaking of “truth” as the underlying principle of Russianness, was accepted as one of Russia’s own: an open, sincere soul who would pour his inner world into his art. The paradox, however, was that as the ultimate Realist who could enrapture the masses with narratives of truth, Neuhaus was also clothed in the decadent robes of the displaced Silver Age Demon. Even mythically owning all the rich experiences of the world through art, he remained the ultimate individual: fated to be forever blinded by his own “I.”

Chapter Four

Heinrich the Great Between Russian and International Musings In 1933 Karol Szymanowski’s concert tours took him to Moscow. Despite the obvious personal significance of this occasion, it was not one that Neuhaus documented either in his Autobiographical Notes or in his many articles. Scores of Russian musicians who met the Polish composer in the green room of the Moscow Conservatory’s Grand Hall and the Polish embassy, however, left not only with impressions of the visiting Pole but also with a new epithet that Szymanowski had devised for his cousin. Neuhaus, who was now one of the most famous Russian pianists of his time, was hailed as “Heinrich the Great” (Genrikh Velikiy).1 Szymanowski’s reference carried with it the unmistakable overtones to Russia’s tsar—Peter I, or from 1721, “Peter the Great”—who was famously acknowledged by his contemporaries as bringing the country from nothingness into being. Although this was a precarious implication to make in the postrevolutionary years where history was bent to a Stalinist ideology, Peter the Great was nonetheless widely recognized as the figure who had transformed Russia into a formidable power.2 It was widely accepted that a significant part of this transformation had been instigated by the tsar’s keen desire to look outward to the West: notably Germany, but also beyond. The introduction of these Western outlooks to Russia had informed the core of his policies, ideas, and methods. More specifically though, for those thinkers who, like Szymanowski, were well-acquainted with the ideas of the emerging Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century, Peter the Great carried great symbolic significance for the self-reflective autobiographical practices that sought to define an artist’s worth through the imprint of his personality, or lichnost’, in his work. As the first “fully fledged” personality on Russian soil, Peter the Great had marked

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for this intelligentsia the beginning of a new modern Russia.3 Surely it was this escapist symbol—which once guided the intelligentsia of the sociopolitically backward Nicolaevan Russia to hope that their art would be the force to create a better world—that became so poignant to Szymanowski as he looked aghast upon Stalinist Russia. It was not only his German name that accentuated the foreignness of Neuhaus’s formative years of immersion in European life and culture. Neuhaus’s closest and liveliest friendships in Russia evolved with Germanoriented intellectuals whose ideas developed not from engagement with contemporary Soviet cultural practice, but as reverberations of the Silver Age. At various times Neuhaus lived as a neighbor, or in the country dachas outside Moscow, Kiev, and Koktebel (on the Crimean coast) alongside the family of the art historian and philosopher Alexander Gabrichevsky—who did much to keep Neuhaus informed of new developments in German music, and who, sharing in Neuhaus’s passion for Thomas Mann, authored the critical commentaries for the first Russian translation of Mann’s work in 1959—the family of philosopher Valentin Asmus, and the Pasternak family.4 Already in 1931 Pasternak poetized the summers in Irpen that the Neuhauses, Pasternaks, and Asmuses spent together, with their discussions of poetry, philosophy, and music making, as a “six-hearted union” (soyuz shestiserdnïy) that became forever symbolized in the music of Brahms—the opening melody of whose Intermezzo op. 117 (see ex. 4.1) was to be printed together with the poem: Godami kogda-nibud’ v zale kontsernoy Mne Bramsa sïgrayut,—toskoi izoydu. Ya vzdrognu, i vspomnyu soyuz shestiserdnïy [. . .] I stanut kruzhkom na lyzhkhe intermetstso, Rukami, kak derevo, pesn’ okhvativ, Kak teni, vertet’sya chetïre semeystva Pod chistïy, kak detstvo, nemetskiy motiv. In years to come, in a concert hall They’ll play Brahms for me—melancholy will overwhelm me. I will shudder and remember the six-hearted union [. . .] And standing in a circle on a meadow, in an intermezzo, Their hands like trees, having encompassed the song. Like shadows, four families together will swirl To the German motif, pure as childhood.5

Even thirteen years after Neuhaus’s death, Bella Akhmadulina’s poem “Pamyati Genrikha Neygauza” (“In Memory of Heinrich Neuhaus”) composed

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Example 4.1. Johannes Brahms, Intermezzo, op. 117.
  

 
 

                    




in 1977, continued to see his music making as her symbolic path, as his student, to a world of Germanic art: [. . .] mne ta zemlya mila, gde Gyote, Reyn, i on, i muzïka—prekrasnï, Germaniya moya, garmoniya moya. Vid muzïki tak prost: on skhozh s ego ulïbkoy. Yeshchyo tam bïli: shum, bokalï, torzhestvo, Tot uchenik ego prel’stitel’no velikiy, i ya—kakoy ni yest’, no uchenki ego. [. . .] For me that land is dear where Goethe, the Rhine, and [Neuhaus], and music—are wonderful, My Germany, my harmony. Music’s semblance is so simple: it is like his smile. Also there: noise, glasses, celebration, that great charismatic student of his, and me—no matter, his student too.

Of all the poems composed in honor of Neuhaus, perhaps the one that most closely mirrors the cosmopolitan fusion of ideas as distilled in Szymanowski’s epithet “Heinrich the Great” was that by Osip Mandelstam. “Royal’ (pod vpechatleniem igrï G.G. Neygauza)” (“The Grand Piano [inspired by the playing of H. G. Neuhaus]”), dated April 16, 1931, depicts a recital that was unfolding to Neuhaus’s dissatisfaction, and which prompted him to storm offstage. Mandelstam immediately evokes the sense of immense moral height exuded by Neuhaus’s pianism: Ne prelyudï on i ne val’sï I ne Lista listal listï— V nem lilis’ i perelivalis’ Volï vnutrenney pravotï. Not preludes, not waltzes nor Liszt were on the pages he turned— In him flowed and shimmered [the] Waves of inner righteousness.

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Subsequently, Mandelstam converges this idea with the notion that it was Neuhaus’s right, even obligation as an artist, to stop a performance if it was not worthy of reflecting him as a great orator of the French Revolution: “[Honoré] Mirabeau of the piano’s rights” (Mirabo fortep’yannïkh prav). Mandelstam’s initial references to the French Revolution give way to the Germanic and explicitly Wagnerian: summoning up the “resinous sonata of the genie” from the piano’s hammers (its “vertebrae”) through his playing (Chtob smoloyu sonata dzhina / Prostupila iz pozbonkov), the coiled bass string becomes a “Nuremberg spring” that “straightens out the dead” (Nyurenbergskaya yest’ pruzhina, / Vïpryamlyayushchaya mertvetsov). Against a wider context in which Germanic concepts were challenged by some of the more extreme Slavophile thinkers, and maybe more pressingly, had led to certain socialist and Stalinist cultural policies to alienate these as corrupting “bourgeois” ideologies, Neuhaus does not partake in their destruction—his hands after all, he exclaims dismayed, are not sledgehammers (Razve ruki moyi—kuvaldï?). The central image of Mandelstam’s poem is, however, not simply that of Neuhaus’s European ideals that he sought to defend through his performances. Vitally, he gives Neuhaus’s German spirit (emphasized later in the poem by the word “Meister”) a nomadic freedom unrestricted by borders: “My ten fingers—my herd [of stallions]!” (Desyat’ pal’tsev—moy tabunok!). In the most famous part of the poem, Mandelstam’s extended metaphor brings Neuhaus into the world of legend: “And jumping up, straightening out his coattails, / Meister Heinrich—the little humpbacked-horse” (I vskochil, otrikhaya faldï, / Master Genrikh—konyok-gorbunok). “The Little Humpbacked Horse” (Konyok-Gorbunok) was the fairy-tale poem of Piotr Yershov, a contemporary of Alexander Pushkin, published in 1834 about a small, unattractive pony with large ears (hence Mandelstam’s association with Neuhaus’s coattails) who is bestowed with magical powers (see fig. 4.1). Privileged with the knowledge of faraway kingdoms, the Little Humpbacked Horse tirelessly helps the hapless and lazy Ivan, the son of a peasant, to unearth the most elusive and sought-after treasures of his land, including the Firebird, and beyond—asking nothing in return. On their numerous and arduous quests the Little Humpbacked Horse not only brings Ivan to these riches, but given their weight and significance, which overwhelm Ivan, finds ways to bring them home. As a mediator between Ivan’s homeland and the magical riches beyond it, the Little Humpbacked Horse enriches Ivan’s spirituality, transforms him into a better person and, in defeating the malicious Tsar (who perished in the boiling cauldron of milk that had metamorphosed Ivan, with the Little Humpbacked Horse’s help, into a handsome youth), raises him above his peasant status to become the bridegroom of the Tsaritsa. Mandelstam’s evocative metaphor for Neuhaus as the Little Humpbacked Horse is a particularly apt recognition of the way in which the pianist was seen

Figure 4.1. Vladimir Milashevsky. The Little Humpbacked-Horse in flight with Ivan. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

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by many as a conduit into worlds beyond the closed borders of Stalinist Russia. As will be seen in this chapter, Neuhaus’s erudition afforded him an enviable ease in substituting contexts to nonetheless express himself where the climate of censorship and state policy proved a hindrance. In light of Mandelstam’s later satirical poem “Kremlyovskiy gorets” (“Kremlin Highlander”) from November 1933—or “The Stalin Epigram” as it is now widely known, whose depiction of the dictator as a murderer consequently caused the poet’s arrest and interrogation in Lubyanka in 1934 (from which he was miraculously released, sentenced to exile away from Moscow and Leningrad)—the symbolic imagery of the fairy tale is all the more compelling.6 Not only was the Little Humpbacked Horse gifted with the ability to make distant kingdoms and their riches accessible to Ivan, but he was also able to procure for him forbidden treasures (including the magical feather of the Firebird), and negotiate a way to make it possible for Ivan to keep them, as far as possible, beyond the dictatorial tsar’s ruthless, greedy gaze. In devising this metaphor it is both uncanny and visionary that, as Mandelstam witnessed Neuhaus jump away from the piano in the guise of the Little Humpbacked Horse, the music that was broken off in that recital was none other than that of Frédéric Chopin.

The Kingdom Most Desired yet Farthest Away: Frédéric Chopin Throughout the twentieth century, Russian pianism was marked by an endless fascination with unveiling the elusive spirit of Chopin’s music. In fact, Poland itself had historically presented itself as a long-standing object of strong attraction for its Slavic neighbor: a nation and culture at once both ethnically close and yet exotic. Western European interpretations of history are quick to highlight the persecution suffered by Poles at the hands of Russian conquest and the forced uprooting of their national identity. Historically, in fact, Polish culture had enjoyed high regard and closeness in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in imperial Russia. Manifestations of this were concentrated in Russia’s much-loved ditties of the time, the most famous (even throughout the twentieth century) being Ogiński’s Polonaise.7 It is not accidental that Polish dances such as the polonaises and mazurkas became such an important part of the output of Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Lyadov (representatives of the Russian Nationalist School), and Chopin’s pianistic style and harmonies found themselves melded with the writing for piano of Balakirev, Blumenfeld, early Skryabin, and many others.8 Out of the multitude of Russian interpreters who became acknowledged as Chopin specialists or “Chopinists,” it was Neuhaus who occupied an esteemed place of honor. In Alexander Alekseyev’s textbook on Russian pianism, Istoriya

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fortepiannogo iskusstva (A History of the Art of the Piano) (1967/88) readers were advised: “Among the significant recordings of interpretations of Chopin made by Soviet pianists of the older generation, the artistry of H. Neuhaus is most fully represented.”9 Neuhaus’s colleague Konstantin Igumnov had even publicly stated: “For me, Neuhaus’s interpretations of Chopin are the closest to my [heart]. I really do find all other interpretations of Chopin very distant from myself.”10 Vladimir Sofronitsky too, wrote: “The best interpreters of Chopin are Heinrich Neuhaus and Lev Oborin.”11 Lev Naumov, Neuhaus’s student and assistant, considered Chopin not simply to have been the pinnacle of his professor’s pianism, but claimed that Chopin’s music was inconceivable without it being touched by some element of Neuhaus’s distinct persona: “Chopin must, without fail, be played in a Neuhausian way.”12 The momentary blemishes on Chopin brought on by various political organizations and causes had little influence on Russia’s desire to claim the composer as its own. Notwithstanding the Russo-Polish War, which had pitted the Second Polish Republic as an enemy of both Soviet Russia and the warring factions that struggled for power within Ukraine, Neuhaus turned to the music of Chopin when asked by officials to organize performances that promoted a Bolshevik identity in the first years of the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Entire programs were dedicated to Chopin’s works, and on the platforms of outdoor concerts aimed at the masses works such as the “Heroic” Polonaise in A-flat Major, op. 53, which, according to Neuhaus particularly “reached out to the spirit of the people,” took on symbolic overtones of Soviet triumph.13 Even the infamous attempts of the short-lived but toxic Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) from 1923 up to its disbanding in 1932,14 to brand Chopin as a “nihilist, bourgeois composer” who “relaxes the will and [contributes to] the upbringing of a hysterical person” had a negligible effect on the performance of this music with both Neuhaus and his colleagues continuing to actively program and teach this repertoire.15 Furthermore, the first International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927, chronologically coinciding with the middle of RAPM’s existence, was seen as a great Soviet success with the first prize taken by Lev Oborin (Igumnov’s student), and fourth prize by Grigory Ginzburg (Goldenweiser’s student).16 Szymanowski conveyed the overwhelming superiority of the Russian competitors taking part: “The Russian pianists who recently played here in Warsaw, Łóym, Kraków, Lvov, Poznań, and Vilno [. . .] simply captivated our musical world. They came, played and won. . . . This was not a success, not even a furor. It was a victorious march, a triumph!”17 Politically, the triumph of the Russian pianists at the competition had indicated that rather than Chopin being “foreign” to the Russian or Soviet hearts and minds as argued by the

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RAPM, the reverse held true: “Diplomacy was forced to take a back seat, and Poles to admit that Chopin was played best of all by moskal’.”18 Oborin summarized the role of the successes at the Chopin Competition in the subsequent intensified desire that Russia be recognized as a nation of natural Chopin interpreters: [Before the competition] we had no idea of the consequences this event, for which we prepared in only a matter of weeks and had no hopes of winning, would have. From today’s point of view such a competition is yet another passing occurrence. But then? Back then, all the world’s newspapers were writing about it, the artist Boris Efimov included an illustration in the [newspaper] Izvestiya where I was shown with the competition diploma in my hand, and [Winston] Churchill clutching his head, dispirited by Moscow’s success.19

In such a politically charged climate the competitors and their professors ultimately found themselves being mere pawns in the Soviet state’s calculated designs aimed at a global showcasing of the superiority of its system.20 Yet political exercises and the meddling of party members in the compulsory precompetition selection hearings that chose USSR participants and strategies, coexisted with the genuine artistic need for these pianists to express themselves in Chopin’s music in a way that transcended the narrow confines of propaganda. The aim to identify with Chopin became a vital part of the pianistic psyche. Oborin remembered: “[Immediately] I was announced to be a ‘Chopinist.’ First I was surprised. I won’t lie—I was happy. Then I began to ‘rebel,’ to protest against what I felt to be a limitation. [But] then his music became vital for me—I felt a need to play it, to converse with Chopin, and eventually there was no composer closer to me.”21 Even though Neuhaus’s students did not take part in the 1927 Chopin Competition, his emerging influence as an interpreter and pedagogue was seen as a vital contribution to the overall dynamic and attitude toward the issue of interpreting Chopin. The musicologist Sofia Khentova believed that Neuhaus was one of the leading pianists who helped to install “authentic” values into the Russian Chopin tradition: [In the years leading up to first International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw (1927)] Heinrich Neuhaus often performed his interpretations of Chopin’s works. His handling of the large-scale forms especially stood out: the concertos, Fantasie [op. 49], Ballades. [. . .] If Igumnov, sometimes unintentionally, gave Chopin’s intonations shadings that remind one of the lyricism of Tchaikovsky, and the warmth of his interpretations was understood as intimacy—that is, devoid of sharp, dramatic collisions—then Neuhaus put forward many other psychological traits: the depth of a wounded pride of an ill but courageous man, the feeling of hope, the call for justice.22

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In the subsequent Chopin Competition of 1932, where preparation was marred by Pshibishevsky’s drastic cuts of time allocated for instrumental tuition at the Moscow Conservatory, Neuhaus’s students Teodor Gutman and Emanuel Grossman were laureates who took the eighth and tenth prizes.23 By the third Chopin Competition in 1937, Neuhaus’s stature as a leading Russian Chopin interpreter and pedagogue had burgeoned. Not only was Neuhaus the only Soviet jury member in the 1937 competition, but his student Yakov Zak was unanimously awarded both the first prize and the Mazurka Prize. In 1949, Neuhaus’s student Yevgeny Malinin took the seventh prize.24 By the 1960 Chopin competition, although he had still not been officially rehabilitated for his 1942 charge of having engaged in anti-Soviet propaganda, Neuhaus was once again a jury member—this time alongside Zak, Pavel Serebryakov, and the vice chairman Dmitri Kabalevsky. Other competition triumphs by Neuhaus’s students, outside of the Chopin Competition, were marked by the quality of their interpretations of the composer. For example, Emil Gilels’s victory at the Ysaÿe Competition in 1938 had been attributed in no small part to the first impression made by his firstround performance of Chopin’s Sonata no. 2 in B-flat Minor, op. 35, which he had studied with Neuhaus. Chopin’s Ballade no. 1 in G Minor, op. 23, which became a staple of Gilels’s repertoire in the late 1930s and part of his program for the 1936 Vienna Competition where he took the second prize, was a work that he had himself associated with his studies with Neuhaus.25 Furthermore, many of Neuhaus’s students who were not selected or allowed to travel abroad to take part in foreign competitions, such as his son Stanislav Neuhaus who was denied participation in the Chopin Competition at the eleventh hour, nevertheless became significant Chopin interpreters within the borders of the USSR. Despite Russia’s seemingly having proved its spiritual right to the music of Chopin in such a politicized arena, Neuhaus was always concerned about the amount of work—behind the scenes—that was needed in order to enable students to triumph as Chopin interpreters: “For the modern young pianist it is so much easier to play a Prelude and Fugue of Shostakovich or a Prokofiev Sonata than, for example, Chopin’s Barcarolle.”26 Contributing to the myth that without Neuhaus’s guidance Russia had begun to lose its claim to the spiritual riches of Chopin, in the 1970s his son wrote: In the past few years discussions have intensified about the fact that [Russian] pianists of the younger generation are playing the works of Romantic composers more and more rarely, especially Chopin—and if they do, then the quality of their interpretation trails behind the quality of their interpretation of Classical, Post-Romantic, and contemporary music. This is confirmed by the results of the last Chopin Competitions [in Warsaw]. Chopin is a “difficult” composer to interpret [but nevertheless through the guidance of Neuhaus and others] the Soviet Piano School has given the

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world many extraordinary pianists, and it would be such a shame if that tradition should cease.27

It was not a lack of technique, however, that was holding back Russian pianists. During their tenures in the Soviet Union’s conservatories, Neuhaus and his colleagues had overhauled the institutionalized music education system and raised the level of technical proficiency and general music professionalism to heights that were far beyond any expectations at the start of the twentieth century. Nor was it a lack of exposure to the composer’s unique sound world or the analysis of his musical language since Neuhaus was known to spend hours with his students “journeying” through Chopin’s “landscapes [. . .] like a captivated wayfarer.”28 The issue, according to Neuhaus, was that Chopin was the ultimate Realist (as identified by Pasternak and Asmus),29 and Lyric poet: “Chopin is unusual primarily because of the untold autobiographicality of his art, which exceeds by far that of any other great artist be it Goethe, Pushkin, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, or anyone else you wish. . .”30 Chopin thus required of the interpreter a quality that was so elusive that its possession could be counted among the greatest spiritual riches of humanity: “It seems to me that Chopin demands from the interpreter an unusually large [kind of] love, a love which we come across in life as rarely as we come across an enormous talent. This is why Chopin is so hard for the pianist.”31

Attaining Chopin Neuhaus’s Chopin symbolized the highest morals defining humanity. For him Chopin embodied the highest spiritual ideals of mankind including selfless self-sacrifice for the greater good of humanity. Thus, his student Vera Razumovskaya summarized Neuhaus’s view of Chopin as: A soul that is virtuous, proud, and at the same time passionate. A soul that is young, heroic, sacrificing, passionately loving its people, and patriotic. [. . .] He could comprehend everything—he accumulated everything into himself and felt everything. He understood life, felt like no one else the high tragedy of death, the death of any person because he loved people, and was the most humane of the humane [chelovechneyshim iz chelovechneishikh].32

To Neuhaus this meant that for the interpreter to be able to relive Chopin’s spiritual experiences he would likewise need to offer himself unconditionally and freely to his music: “In other words, to fully understand and transmit him, it is necessary to wholly submit your own soul into his unique soul. This immersion into another ‘I’ is only given to people in the state of love.”33 This action, however, could equally magnify and betray the interpreter’s “human

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limitations” since, as Razumovskaya warned: “An interpreter does not only interpret music, but whether he wants to or not, he involuntarily reveals himself in the music: he offers his portrait.”34 Chopin’s music therefore required the interpreter to work incessantly “on the self” (rabota nad soboy)—an action “not given lightly. It needs efforts, concentrated will, loyalty, and reverence.”35 Often conceived as a distinctly Russian idée fixe—and one that was also traceable in its trivialized form in Soviet rhetoric—the notion of “working on the self” permeated the aesthetics of Neuhaus’s appropriated world of Russian Realism that stemmed from the nineteenth-century intelligentsia. Stanislavsky’s Rabota aktyora nad soboy v tvorchestom protsesse perezhivaniya (The Work of an Actor on Himself in the Creative Process of Experiencing) (1938),36 and its heavily indebted pianistic equivalent Kogan’s U vrat masterstva (At the Gates of Mastery) (1958), would have been widely recognized texts that continued to promote these ideals in twentieth-century pedagogy. On a more personal level, Neuhaus’s idea of “working on the self” was inherently bound up with the responsibilities of Blok’s Lyric toward his servitude of art, and was one of the prerequisites of Pasternak’s Artistic Realism, with its Tolstoyan facets, which he found most concentrated in Chopin.37 Vitally important for Neuhaus, the spiritual elevation designated by this self-critical and self-analytical “working on the self” as explored by such Realist figures, not only cleansed the interpreter of “limitations” that might otherwise reveal themselves through his autobiographic performance, but also opened up a more profound understanding of life and art: “Complete giving of the self [in the process of] self-understanding and self-analysis are methods and criteria of studying reality.”38 Impossible to ignore, however, is the Germanic root of such notions: the literature of Neuhaus’s youth. Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, to which Neuhaus frequently referred, considered it man’s “duty” to cultivate his mind and spirit as a fundamental question of moral dignity and self-actualization. The philosopher who was Neuhaus’s unfailing spiritual companion, and his childhood escapism, was Nietzsche. The exploration of such ideas in Zarathustra likewise reflected itself in Neuhaus’s fear of being trapped in the metaphorical body of the camel, which, eagerly accepting all the heaviest burdens in the name of duty and nobility, could only metamorphose into the lion by looking selfcritically and self-analytically into the self in the isolation of the desert.39 Thus, describing his most confessional “autobiographic” performances of Chopin to Zinaida, Neuhaus had claimed: “Oh, what a joy to be true to the self [. . .] Yes, I must cease being the camel (Zarathustra—remember?).”40 Despite these Germanic undercurrents to the idea of “working on the self,” Neuhaus insisted that this moral desire to constantly elevate oneself was an inherent part of the Russian psyche. Even in Yershov’s fairy-tale poem, Ivan— the epitomized Russian soul—was tempered by work on his arduous quests and underwent a journey of isolation, self-analysis, and self-realization that

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transformed him, albeit with the help of the Little Humpbacked Horse, into the owner of the world’s riches. Presenting the artistic importance of “working on the self” in a wider pedagogical capacity, Neuhaus navigated the Russian audience through the labyrinth of his German-rooted ideals by leading them to such conclusions through their own national cultural inheritance: “I often think about Dostoevsky’s famous speech about Pushkin, about the vsechelovek [the all-man or universal man] . . .41 He did not speak only about the great genius of Russian poetry: he spoke about the Russian person and the qualities of his soul—Pushkin was merely the brightest example to embody this in the highest form.”42 Dostoevsky had used the term vsechelovek as a term related to the unity and simultaneous offering of individuality understood through sobornost’. For Dostoevsky, Pushkin’s devotion to the Russian people alongside his pronounced cosmopolitanism (or “universal sympathy”) made him the perfect vsechelovek, unlike the obshchechelovek (general man) who had no roots and home soil and thus always looked outward. It was a concept aimed at uniting Slavophiles with those who looked to the West, arguing that the cosmopolitanism of the vsechelovek meant that while most European and Russian poets had “turned to foreign nations and often made them one with their own people, and understood them after their own fashion,” Pushkin was able to embody himself within another nationality. Vitally, Dostoevsky’s vsechelovek denoted the ideal Russian soul who would find his national identity through becoming the perfect Orthodox Christian.43 While, of course, Neuhaus’s audience knew Pushkin and Dostoevsky as cultural icons, it is a mistake to assume that the concept of the vsechelovek was as widely known outside the circles of the intelligentsia as he implied. Early twentieth-century Russian philosophers (such as Konstantin Leontiev) had indeed often misunderstood the difference between it and the obshchechelovek. Later, its orientation to Russian Orthodox aims that were taken on by the Silver Age destined the term to become expunged from official socialist historical memory. Speaking of the vsechelovek then Neuhaus used it as inspiration to create a personal contextualization for the ideals he felt Russian artists should adopt. His definition of the vsechelovek can be summarized as a man who has risen spiritually above others, and who is able to accommodate and communicate all aspects of human life, including its less positive facets, within the nobility of himself. Characteristically applying a holistic view of the arts, if in Russian literature this figure for Neuhaus was Pushkin (considered by some in the West to be Russia’s equivalent of Mickiewicz),44 then in music, Neuhaus considered that only Chopin could share this mantle: “Chopin [. . .] embodied in sound the immortal words of Pushkin: prekrasnoye dolzhno bït’ velichavo [the beautiful must be majestic]!”45 Seeing Chopin as what Dostoevsky called a vsechelovek demonstrates that rather than trying to define Chopin in relation to nineteenth-century

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circumstances and his immediate environment, Neuhaus’s understanding of Realism brought him to see Chopin through the filter of his own assimilated experiences. Neuhaus developed a passion for Dostoevsky’s novels: “Again, that familiar and new shock [of rereading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov] awaits me.”46 Neuhaus’s lifelong spiritual and intellectual dependence on filtering his perception of culture through philosophy (“I played little over these past days, but on the other hand I read a lot [. . .], I always need to seek other spiritual sources—otherwise I will simply go mad!”) would have found an inlet through Dostoevsky’s own use of the novel as a forum to share his own philosophical views.47 Foreshadowing what would become existentialist thought, Dostoevsky’s world vision was one that resonated profoundly with Neuhaus’s own sympathies: “Existentialism begins where genius originates.”48 Dostoevsky’s deliberations on the vsechelovek and the idea of humility in order to love all other nations suggested the suffering endured before being able to call oneself a “brother” of all men.49 In Neuhaus’s view of Chopin speaking for all men, he characterized Chopin’s soul in Dostoevskian terms as expressing simultaneously: “Sorrow [and] a love toward people, a breadth [generosity/openness] of the heart . . .”50 Neuhaus, who did not seek to interpret “love” outside the idea of tragedy, would have found in Dostoevsky’s existentialism a common ground that he could bring to his view of Chopin. Konstantin Mochulsky identified the ability to see the greatness of life despite the cruelest trials of fate as an inherently autobiographical feature in Dostoevsky’s output: [Dostoevsky’s letter penned in the hours after the aborted execution was that of a man] who had just seen death before him. In the letter the bewilderment of the soul and joyous excitement of a return to life are sounded.51 Trials and suffering are nothing in comparison to the supreme value of life. “Life is a gift, life is happiness”—Dostoevsky felt intensely the divine mystery of existence, the grace of life. [. . .] The grace of life, which is greater than understanding, greater than its justification, is also spoken of by Prince Myshkin and Ippolit in The Idiot [. . .] and by Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky’s sinners are saved through their love of “living life” (Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov); hearts that are apathetic and numb perish despite all their wisdom.52

It is easy to underestimate the freshness of this outlook since this very duality has often been transformed even within Russian twentieth-century literature as a narrative of an endlessly suffering “tragic soul.”53 For a generation of Silver Age writers including Alexander Blok, Andrei Beliy, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius, Dostoevsky was a symbol of the dark, lachrymose torment that acted as a precedent for spiritual awakening.54 Indeed, the emphasis that Neuhaus placed on the idea of continuing love of life and people in the face of tragedy was perhaps the most important aspect he identified in both

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Dostoevsky and in Chopin’s work. Neuhaus talked about the “joy,” rather than darkness or anguish, that Chopin brings to music and considered his music (particularly the Third Ballade op. 47, Barcarolle op. 60, Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 61) to be among the most life-affirming possible: “I don’t know anything that raises the spirit more.”55 Dostoevsky’s philosophical views, tempered by his fate, must have resonated to a substantial degree with Neuhaus’s own biographical fate. Berta Kremenstein expressed her view of her professor’s plight: If we try to compare the life of Heinrich Gustavovich, even just by skimming the surface, with that of his classmate and friend Artur Rubinstein, we suddenly see the tragedy of Neuhaus’s fate. For a long time he was torn away from the cultured world. We now know that he had suffered his arrest [in 1941–42], deportation, the loss of those closest to him, his relatives, friends, all his awards, the financial struggle . . . But for me—simply his student, who had never risen above the boundary of “teacher-student”—it was as if Neuhaus’s character had never been affected by his biographical facts. He remained himself. [. . .] Neuhaus always returned to the discussion about what work gives to an artist, and he believed that a creative individual cannot look pessimistically upon life: in art is joy.56

Yet, however much Dostoevsky genuinely became an integral part of Neuhaus’s assimilated spiritual inner world, it was an appropriation that he made while redefining himself in the years after 1914 within Russian culture. As with all of Neuhaus’s sympathies, it must be taken into account that these are supplementary influences that enhanced views that were already prevalent in his mind for, indeed, Neuhaus had considered that he was “born” with Chopin’s music. Already from an early age, and decades before he crossed paths with the writings of Dostoevsky, he already felt the composer as an “innate part of [his] being.”57 Given the integral role that the philosophy of Nietzsche occupied in Neuhaus’s thoughts since his youth, it is unsurprising that Neuhaus’s evocation of Chopin as the ultimate expression of the Russian soul as a vsechelovek carries a resemblance to the philosopher’s Übermensch. Indeed, Andrei Beliy had already presented Nietzsche as a truly Russian phenomenon on a par with Dostoevsky in 1916: “The hub of the universe for Europeans is not [. . .] Goethe, Nietzsche or other eminent luminaries of culture [. . .] Nietzsche is ours, because we, Russians, are the only people in Europe who search, suffer, and torment ourselves.”58 The importance of Nietzsche to Russian intellectuals at the fin de siècle and first decades of the twentieth century was reflected in projects such as the mandatory book list for the proposed music section of A. L. Shaniavsky People’s University of Moscow in 1918, which started not with scores but the philosopher’s writings.59

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By the time Neuhaus had integrated himself into Muscovite intellectual society in 1923, however, times had changed. An official Soviet ban on Nietzsche’s writings was enforced from 1922, including everything present in libraries, which lasted well into the late 1970s.60 Therefore, it is conceivable that Neuhaus primarily took advantage of such a resemblance particularly to give himself a way to express his own vision of Chopin in print. Given that Neuhaus’s private correspondence and diaries focused heavily on Nietzsche, it is likely that his extrapolation of analogous ideas from Dostoevsky was, to a certain degree, a cover for his lifelong engagement with the writings of Nietzsche when he tried to share his aesthetic ideals with a wider audience. Thus, away from the eyes of censorship Neuhaus was able to bring into effect his closest philosophical concerns and share them with Russia’s intellectual circles, clothing them in the words of one of Russia’s greatest Realist authors. Nietzsche’s proposition that men were not all created equal, and that some will rise above the masses to speak for them, strongly mirrors Neuhaus’s concept of Chopin: a poet of Poland understood by all not because he descends to their level, but because he is able to awaken in other people the realization of the human essence concealed within them. As identified by Heidegger: “The name Übermensch designates the essence of humanity.”61 Nietzsche considered Art to be the “greatest stimulans to life [because it] lifts a thing beyond itself, enhances it”—a point of view upheld by Neuhaus.62 Accordingly, great art such as Chopin’s, in both Neuhaus’s and Nietzsche’s view, offered a bridge from man to the sublimity of the superman. What particularly ties Neuhaus’s idea of a vsechelovek to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch is the fact that, in both concepts, the transcendence into a superhuman granted man the ability to reflect beauty yet not because they had only seen and felt beauty, but because they had learned to “love” all aspects of life. Because they reflected all aspects of life into art through a noble soul, including suffering and sorrow, their reflection in art was thus beautiful. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche wrote: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it [. . .] but to love it.”63 Although Neuhaus keenly superimposed these Nietzschean ideas onto his understanding of Chopin through the politically admissible “host” of Dostoevsky, in 1949 he found another “host” in the novel Doktor Faustus. His fixation on Thomas Mann toward the end of his life contributed to the aura of his perceived closeness to the Germanic spirit, for Mann was an author almost completely unknown to Russian audiences and, surprisingly, largely ignored by Neuhaus’s contemporaries including Boris Pasternak and Maria Yudina. As his daughter-in-law, Galina Neuhaus, recollected:

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In the last year of Boris Leonidovich [Pasternak’s] life,64 Neuhaus rarely came to Peredelkino, but when he did, they had heated arguments. The main theme of their discussions was Thomas Mann. Heinrich Gustavovich loved his works very deeply and reread them with awe—and Doktor Faustus was particularly dear to him. Neuhaus said that it was a work of genius in which every phrase was laden with profound thought that made you think. Boris Leonidovich was surprised by this awe and did not see anything original and interesting in Doktor Faustus. Heinrich Gustavovich would become angry, argue and cite large chunks of the novel by heart.65

Many of Neuhaus’s students remember their professor’s obsession with the novel, the mention of which was frequently provoked by his despair that their musical interpretations lacked “depth.” For example, Vera Adueva-Kelman admitted: “I remember his indignation [when he realized] that I had such a poor understanding of Thomas Mann’s works.”66 Neuhaus’s student and assistant, Lev Naumov, remembered: “Neuhaus despised those who had not read, for example, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. [. . .] Doktor Faustus in his discussions about literature was a leitmotif like, say, the theme of the ring in Wagner’s Nibelungen.”67 Few of these students could have confessed to understanding why this work was so significant to their professor. Rereading Doktor Faustus with particular dedication from his first encounter with the novel in the original in 1949, it was a work over which Neuhaus “poured hot tears. [. . .] It is a stunning, nearly unbearable book in its strength and depth!”68 Neuhaus immediately considered the novel to be one of the “greatest experiences” of his life.69 Relating in a very personal way to his own views of humanism, history, and music Neuhaus never elaborated in public why this work became so important to him. Yet, the fact that in it, Leverkühn’s career was so overtly modeled on the life and philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (including his supposed mental collapse in 1889 after contracting syphilis, and subsequent proclamation of the Anti-Christ) would not have escaped Neuhaus’s gaze. The Nietzschean-inspired view of art encapsulated in Doktor Faustus, as one reflecting amor fati, had developed the germ set out in Mann’s earlier work Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) (1912): “Composure under the blows of fate, grace in the midst of torment—this is not endurance: it is an active achievement, a positive triumph [. . .] the most perfect symbol of art.”70 Just as Neuhaus spoke of Chopin as the embodiment of “joy” as being art of the highest kind, Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doktor Faustus spoke of “art without anguish, psychologically healthy, not solemn, unsadly confiding, an art per du with humanity.”71 The notion that this art arose from “the winning back of the vital power of feeling” resonated with Neuhaus’s experienced-based idea of Realism, and thus Mann defined an artist in much the same way Neuhaus

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identified the musician-poet: “whoever succeeded in the break-through from intellectual coldness into a touch-and-go world of new feeling, him one should call the savior of art. Redemption.”72 Probably the most important aspect of all to Neuhaus was that this Nietzschean essence in Mann was presented in the ultimate Realist form—as an “autobiographic” narrative—which led him to exclaim: “It stands in the same rank as Homer, Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy—can you imagine?”73 Doktor Faustus indeed was constructed to follow Mann’s aesthetic belief, summarized in his earlier essay “Goethe und Tolstoi” (1921) that “love of ego” should be identified with “love of the world.”74 As detailed by Hannelore Mundt: “To project one’s self into one’s art, to give one’s individual life an important story worth telling, is not considered narcissistic by Mann [who assumes] that whoever loves himself, loves life and the world.”75 As an idea, this self-identification and self-acceptance in order to “love” was one of the most compelling views that supported Neuhaus’s understanding of what it meant to be an artist. Doktor Faustus therefore presented itself to Neuhaus as a pinnacle achievement that fused this philosophical narrative with the artistic. It must be remembered, however, that although Doktor Faustus became, in effect, a symbol of late Neuhaus, very few around him would have been able to relate to it in any way or even have the slightest idea why he felt it offered him such a kindred worldview. Not only was it a rare book in the USSR, with Neuhaus pleading for Lucy Pogosova to obtain for him the only available copy in Moscow, but it did not exist in a Russian translation until 1959–60.76 In advance of the Russian translation (instigated by Natalya Mann, Solomon Apt, and with critical notes by Alexander Gabrichevsky), Neuhaus would have no other option but to find other ways of expressing these same ideas to a wider public—trying to project its ideas of “love,” “autobiography,” and the ApolloDionysius dialectic onto other more culturally recognizable figures. This necessary but fluid movement between Germanic and Russian philosophical centers was an apt reflection of Neuhaus’s rich associative thought processes, which drew widely from influences appropriated from his surroundings, and which given his cosmopolitanism had made it so hard for him to definitely talk about himself in relation to citizenship and abode. It also reflected the universally recognized ease with which the ideas of the greatest artists and thinkers can at once speak of their own time, and in so doing transcend beyond their own epoch and circumstance.

Between Nations What had particularly set Neuhaus apart from other Chopinists of his day was the apparent “authenticity” that he could bring to the composer. Whereas

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other pianists had to cultivate Chopin’s spiritual essence over time, the composer was widely seen as Neuhaus’s birthright.77 Many factors came together to form such a view: Neuhaus’s strongly lisped Russian speech betrayed his Polish mother tongue; his cousin, Szymanowski, formally standing at the helm of the musical branch of the Młoda Polska movement was the country’s contemporary cultural icon; and Neuhaus’s half-Polish uncle was himself considered by Boris Asafyev to stand above all other Chopin interpreters: [Blumenfeld’s playing of Chopin] can be summarized in one phrase: he played as if he were reading Mickiewicz, and in his fingers Chopin’s music sounded like the poetry of the great Polish poet—Romantic in its fullest sense, lyricism of a soul with endless power. I remember that in the summer in Ukraine, Blumenfeld was never without a volume of Mickiewicz and the Polish language in his intonation flowed into the music—I still hear the Crimean Sonnets.78

This Polish association was not a link that Neuhaus sought in any way to diminish. Eager to tie himself to Blumenfeld’s legacy as a great Russian interpreter of Chopin, Neuhaus mirrored many of his uncle’s attitudes to Chopin, and returned to the memory of his uncle’s interpretations of Chopin as an ideal, existing within his living memory, when sourcing his own practical approaches and associations to bring to this music. Neuhaus too referred, on numerous occasions and without any further explanation, to Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets: Is it a crime that instead of Chopin’s B-flat Minor Sonata [no. 2, op. 35] I hear the poetry of Mickiewicz? I can’t help it, but it’s true.79 I sometimes have poetic associations. Once, I played the Largo from Chopin’s B-minor Sonata [no. 3, op. 58] and began to remember the Crimean Sonnets by Mickiewicz: how in the silence of the night he hears a voice that calls to him. That connection made itself forever. Now, as a general rule, I always hear this when I play it.80

While the connection between Chopin and Mickiewicz is one that is widespread as national symbols of Poland, the connection, in all honesty, appears for many pianists to be little more than a required nod. Writing in 1841, Robert Schumann connected Chopin’s Ballades to the ballades of Mickiewicz: “Certain poems of Mickiewicz had suggested his Ballade to him. On the other hand, a poet might easily be inspired to find words to his music; it stirs one profoundly.”81 The unintended result of this connection has been to see Chopin’s music simplistically in relation to Mickiewicz as a musical illustration—notably in relation to the resulting disputes whether Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod was meant to influence Chopin’s opus 23 or opus 38 and whether Świtezianka

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was connected to opus 38 or opus 47. Significantly, these were not questions that interested Neuhaus in his writings on Chopin, or on program music. Suggesting that it was Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 2, op. 35, and not the Second Ballade (one of the key interpretative achievements of Blumenfeld singled out by Asafyev) that provoked the inescapable association with Mickiewicz, Neuhaus chose to distance himself from this tradition. The mark of Mickiewicz’s poetry on the music of Chopin has continually stimulated interest in musicological spheres, particularly in Poland and the West, where it is suggested that Mickiewicz’s poetry is a symbol of the Polish identity. For instance, Karol Berger proposed that just as Mickiewicz became an émigré whose poetry spoke of pilgrimage and wandering, “[the relationship between] temporal structures of Chopin’s musical narrative and the historical narrative in terms of which the composer’s contemporaries established their identity [which] provided the community Chopin identified with most closely, the Polish [émigrés], with a sense of who they were.”82 Significantly, before these kinds of associations were being seriously discussed, at least in early twentieth-century Russian musicology, Neuhaus seems to have genuinely seen Mickiewicz as the poetic alter ego of Chopin. If as already mentioned, Neuhaus saw autobiographicality as the most dominant trait in Chopin’s music then perhaps along with Blumenfeld, he saw Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets offering this link. The Crimean Sonnets are descriptive of the poet’s wandering and pilgrimage to his elusive heartland in the search for his identity. The final verse of the poem draws together the essence of Neuhaus’s Chopin—a composer who poured out his life into music, but whose great suffering does not cloud the “joy” of his art: Thus, Poet, in your youth when storms are wild And passions break upon the heart and brain, To leave their ruin there—shipwrecked and waste— Pick up your lute! Upon it indefiled You’ll find song—pearls that your heart-deeps retain, The crown the years have brought you, white and chaste.83

Intriguingly, despite the obviously deep personal significance that Mickiewicz’s poetry held for Neuhaus, he maintained that any interpreter who had “loved at least once Pushkin to the point of insanity [umopomracheniya]” would be admitted into the same spiritually authentic world.84 Thus, unlike Asafyev’s notion that it was the understanding of the national Polish “intonation” in the original that had given Blumenfeld the privileged distinction of excellence in his Chopin interpretations, Neuhaus sought to unify the two Slavic races. For Neuhaus the vision of Chopin, as through the definition of Dostoevsky’s vsechelovek, had already proven to him that the composer had transcended the boundaries of nationality:

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Internationalism, in the highest definition of the word, which I see in the art of great Russian artists, is the proof of the unquestionable truth which dictates that to raise oneself up to the international, one must do so through the national. In other words, he who strongly loves his people is able to love another’s people—he is on the path to becoming a vsechelovek (to use Dostoevsky’s word).85

Neuhaus’s vision of Chopin as a composer who could speak with “majesty” and “nobility” in a way that was universal and all encompassing, while speaking lyrically or compassionately to the individual, are qualities long associated with Mickiewicz. What seems to be even more significant to Neuhaus, however, was how such qualities pointed to the idea of the Greek epic poets, fused with the urgent Romantic emotive narrative. As Monika Dudli points out: “[Mickiewicz] like Pushkin represents an amalgamation of the most diverse devices—classical, romantic, realistic” and therefore exists “between two general modes of poetry: the logical-rhetorical structure of the [. . .] Enlightenment, and the emotionalexpressive structure of romanticism.” As already proposed by Czesław Miłosz, Mickiewicz’s poetry “spoke of the return of a prodigal son to Homer and Virgil, but the prodigal returned rich in experience.”86 The vision of Chopin outside the widely proliferated image of the devout Catholic had already begun to find itself in Neuhaus’s Italian years. At the time enraptured by the writings of Nietzsche, Neuhaus had rejected the idea of Christian faith and adopted the idea of Italy as Chopin’s spiritual homeland.87 Having then already identified “Michelangelo and others” as pagans, he talks of them as a preChristian and thus as belonging in aesthetic to Antiquity (to Neuhaus it seems the aesthetics of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greek were entirely interchangeable). Bearing in mind that “Raphael and Pushkin” were Neuhaus’s other “pagans par excellence,” and as already noted, Chopin could be seen as the musical embodiment of Pushkin, the summation of these considerations suggests that Neuhaus’s elimination of Chopin’s Catholicism from his identity was deliberate.88 As a consequence, one of Neuhaus’s most significant characterizations of Chopin relied heavily on defining the composer through the merits of Apollonian art. Neuhaus wrote: I have always been held captive by Chopin’s music: the highest clarity, intelligibility, the ability to give joy, the ease with which potential difficulties are overcome—all these point to the Classical legacy in Chopin’s music, and it is not coincidental [that Chopin] causes one to think of his name in relation to that of Raphael and Pushkin. . . . Chopin does not fall into the categorization of “Romantic.” He is equally, if not more, a Classicist in the most pure definition of the word. This is dictated at the very least by his perfection of form, unity and harmony of his creations. It is no accident that Schumann said that if Mozart were alive he would be writing Chopin’s concertos.89

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Neuhaus’s strong accentuation of Chopin’s Apollonian traits is nonetheless observed in conjunction with, and not isolation from, the Dionysian. However, in order to create Chopin’s image as a synthesis of the two, Neuhaus did not seek out the turbulent or anguished elements in the composer’s art, which ordinarily might be associated with the Dionysian. Nor did he equate, as was the practice in early twentieth-century Russia, Dionysius with art’s Slavic spirit.90 Instead, Neuhaus engaged with a very specific and nuanced understanding of what Dionysius could be seen to present through Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy)—a work that he mentioned on numerous occasions in his letters:91 “I received a great sense of satisfaction from the Greek notes [Birth of Tragedy] of Nietzsche. He is a philologist of genius—his historical background is boundless. It is the same three thousand years as with Faust, and unless a person is aware of this, he is always merely eine Eintagsfliege [a mayfly].”92 In The Birth of Tragedy, despite Nietzsche’s assertion that the Apollonian is the manifestation of “the simple, transparent and beautiful [. . .] a language of precision and lucidity,” he is clear that musical art expresses itself only in “the intricate relation of the Apollonian and Dionysian [where] Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of [. . .] all art is attained.”93 Nietzsche summarized the Dionysian force: “not as individuals, but as one living being, with whose creative joy we are united.”94 Chopin’s universality—the idea of speaking with “the highest intelligibility” for all people—which was so important to Neuhaus particularly in relation to his notion of the vsechelovek or Übermensch, ties in with this very specific Dionysian element of Neuhaus’s Chopin. Likewise, the notion of amor fati, an important facet of Neuhaus’s understanding of Chopin’s persona and music, is in essence a manifestation of the Dionysian characteristic (reflected in Mann’s protagonist Adrian Leverkühn) that is accepting of temporal fears because of the ability to see the universal “joy” beyond them. As identified in The Birth of Tragedy: Dionysian art, too wishes to convince us of the eternal joy of existence: only we are to seek this joy not in phenomena, but behind them. We are to recognize that all that comes into being must be ready for a sorrowful end; we are forced to look into the terrors of the individual existence—yet we are not to become rigid with fear: a metaphysical comfort tears us momentarily from the bustle of the changing figures. [Dionysian art] cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: “Be as I am! [. . .] eternally finding satisfaction in the change of phenomena!”95

However, if Dionysius could represent the universality of Chopin, then for Neuhaus’s vision of Chopin, Apollo offers the paradox of his complete individuality. Neuhaus’s sense of Chopin as an individual was extreme to the extent

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that he considered him to be divorced from any historical, even cultural, lineage. Ahistoricizing Chopin, Neuhaus wrote: “It is impossible to view Chopin as a link in a historical progression (for example, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven . . .). His predecessors—Polish folk melos, some Italians, Bach, and Mozart— they are not, in the full sense, his forefathers.”96 This stance in relation to Chopin is significant. As an interpreter and thinker, Neuhaus considered that all great works of art were part of a historical continuum that he defined as “culture.” Neuhaus proposed: “Culture, starting with Hesiod and Homer (and even substantially earlier) up to our day, is a conceivable whole that can not only be understood, but also felt, in other words emotionally experienced.”97 Furthermore, Neuhaus believed that aside from the microcurrents responsible for uniting cultural occurrences existing in close temporal and geographical proximity, all Western art contained common threads. According to Neuhaus, these common threads, in the understanding of an erudite person, allowed one to see seemingly different manifestations of culture in the context of one unified continuum: “For a truly cultured person three or four thousand years is a ridiculously short span of time.”98 The decision to accommodate a view of Chopin outside a historical continuum, and thus one that was radically different from the way in which he saw other composers, demonstrates just how important it was for Neuhaus to be able to identify the Apollonian individual in Chopin’s persona. As discussed by Ofelia Schutte, Nietzsche’s understanding of the Apollonian was an ahistoric element that stands outside of ideas of continuity: “Apollo stands for the principle of individuation and the perfected beauty of the individual phenomenon [. . .]. With the immense power of its image, its concept, its ethical teaching [. . .] the Apollonian process [makes the individual see] the world solely from its standpoint—as if it were the only standpoint.”99 Or, as offered by Thomas Mann in Kretschmar’s famous lecture in Doktor Faustus, this Apollonian nature of art “was at any moment capable of beginning at the beginning, of discovering itself afresh out of nothing, and of creating anew [standing] apart from the main massif of development, alone and [reaching] the most extraordinary and singular heights.”100 It is clear that Neuhaus considered Chopin as an unsurpassable phenomenon in a similar vein. Neuhaus advocated Chopin as a composer with “his own, inimitable” view of the world who cannot stand “anywhere in the same line with other Romantic figures.”101 Furthermore, Neuhaus wrote: “There are those phenomena in art which are not only objectively beautiful, but their [concept] is so convincing, that to apply the term ‘effort’ to the process of getting closer to them loses its meaning. [Chopin’s] music, the spirit of its expression, is so clear and infinitely beautiful that [it seems] to be the only ‘conceivable’ view.”102 In seeing Chopin as a pagan figure from an aesthetic rather than literally historic Antiquity (alongside Michelangelo, Raphael, and

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Pushkin), instead of as a devoutly Catholic Polish émigré, Neuhaus was able to position Chopin along with “Hesiod and Homer” at the beginning of his trajectory of culture. Neuhaus’s Chopin as the amalgamated Ancient Greek Übermensch, who still spoke for all humanity today as strongly as ever, therefore symbolically stood on the most conceivably ahistoric territory. Thus, a synthesis of ahistoric Apollonian simplicity, clarity, individuality, and radiance with Dionysian universality, change, fate, and amor fati, Neuhaus’s Chopin navigates a complex territory. This synthesis is not a resolution of dialectics, but rather the dynamic movement between two distinct spheres of influence. Neuhaus’s Nietzschean vision of Chopin does not resolve disparity by finding common ground between the Apollonian and Dionysian, but instead becomes a path where “Apollo speaks the language of Dionysus”: the radiance of love projected through the complete acceptance of fate.

Translating Chopin’s Soul For many, Neuhaus was much more, if not a lot more, a writer and orator than a pianist. Keenly aware of this he confessed: “I madly want to write, black on white, ink on paper to express what lives in my thoughts and feelings.”103 Of all the composers about whom he wrote, Chopin attracted his attention with the greatest urgency. Eager audiences were ready to receive his writings as revelations of historical importance. With the exception of Anton Rubinstein’s thoughts on the composer through his lecture-recitals and scattered across his several books, Neuhaus’s writing of Chopin contended largely with one key text: Liszt’s Chopin (1850). Neuhaus considered Liszt one of the greatest writers and music critics of all time, claiming that despite being overwhelmed with emotion and “breaking the rigorous and professional confines of language,” Liszt was “no less clever than Balzac when he writes about the ‘person of society,’ about [Chopin’s] inner self and conduct.”104 Neuhaus’s opinion also resonated with other musicians and famous Chopin interpreters of his time: Lev Oborin, for instance, believed that Liszt’s “talent as a writer-psychologist” had been successful in capturing the complex and vital relationship between Chopin’s personality and his music.105 As Neuhaus therefore turned to define the “inimitable soul” of the Polish composer, his findings would contend with a powerful and established legacy. Where Liszt sought to define the uniquely Polish facets of Chopin, however, Neuhaus used the leverage of his familial circumstances to bring together the ideas of “Polishness” and “Russianness.” In doing so, Neuhaus challenged listeners to hear the “shared humanism of mankind” as a result not only of Chopin’s specifically “Polish refractions” but also of the broader “Slavic” nature.106 Seeking to explore the Slavic commonality of identity and

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temperament, Neuhaus turned primarily to the similarities between the Polish and Russian languages. In particular, Neuhaus drew on a word that was, according to Liszt, one that Chopin explicitly identified as being central to his work: Żal.107 Neuhaus’s Polish mother tongue would undeniably have added considerable weight to the validity of such an effort, and perhaps even overtaken the perceived rigor of Liszt’s attempts to offer an explanation. Neuhaus’s most detailed translations of żal argued that Chopin’s żal was an element that bound together the Polish and Russian people and was an integral part of their common national sensibilities: Those writing about [Chopin], especially Poles, highlight one characteristic trait in his artistic creation that they define with the Polish word—“żal!” It is a Slavic word, perhaps best likened to the Russian zhalet’ in the sense that the people [country folk] use it—on yeyo zhaleyet, to yest’ lyubit [if he says he “zhaleyet” her, then in other words, it means that he loves her].108

Neuhaus, of course, knew that the Russian word zhalet’ has a far more ordinary use in the language to denote a feeling of compassion, regret, sorrow, distress, and a desire to spare someone or something. As a word in common usage, Neuhaus’s readers would themselves have frequently used the related noun zhal’, of virtually identical pronunciation to the Polish żal, in these contexts: ochen’ zhal’, mne tak zhal’ or kak zhal’ all being ordinary exclamations—“I am so sorry” and “what a pity!” It is significant that Neuhaus asked his readers to think beyond this common usage and instead to consider the term in an archaic sense still used today in the Russian countryside. The remoteness of the countryside allowed the Russian language to retain a tighter link to the old Slavonic—and the use of zhal’ can still be heard in place of the verb to love (lyubit’). Neuhaus further qualified the idea of zhal’ being understood as love in the highest and purest sense by reiterating: “For me ‘żal’ is linked to the Russian ‘zhalet’,’ it is not only an expression of sorrow, but also a love toward people, a breadth [generosity/openness] of the heart. . . .”109 In giving this definition Neuhaus made an important decision to find the Polish word żal reflected in the two Russian words deriving from zhal’, both of which have links to the idea of compassion—zhalet’ and zhalost’. Neuhaus purposefully seems to have avoided mentioning or identifying a third word of common, rather than archaic, use in the Russian language that arises from the same Slavic roots. The Russian verb zhal’ can be understood as the imperative of zhalit’. Separated from zhalet’ by a mere vowel sound, zhalit’ is another term in common rather than archaic usage: its meaning being to sting or bite. By keeping silent about this, Neuhaus concealed the negative connotations of hurt and venom that are therefore an inherent part of the extended linguistic sphere associated with zhal’, and in doing so guided his audience to the rarer and nobler, archaic definition instead.

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This decision is particularly striking given how Liszt’s definition of żal does combine the two contrasting aspects that Neuhaus’s definition obscured: Used in differing contexts, it brings together all the tenderness and humility of a resigned regret [that silently bows before the fiat of necessity and the inscrutable decrees of Providence]110 [but] it can also signify seething malice, censure, thoughts of vengeance and an implacable menace that feeds on sterile bitterness!111

Although it is possible to assume that Liszt’s work (as a French- and Germanspeaking Hungarian) may have been less than authentic, it was nonetheless written with the help of his companion Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Polish woman. The definition of żal, as given in Liszt’s Chopin, tallies with its modern Polish usage as a somewhat archaic word with generally less-than-positive connotations: grief; sorrow; repentance; compassion; regret; to bear a grudge; to show hatred; and to air one’s grievances. Likewise, it might be tempting to assume that the Russian translation of this passage of Liszt’s biography may have shown signs of accidental or ideological adjustment or misunderstanding. The 1936 and 1956 editions, however, show that this too is not the case and that, contrary to possible suspicions of censorship, the more negative elements of the word żal are presented in both these translations.112 Neuhaus’s resulting modification of żal cleanses the word of its negative characteristics and draws the focus to the noble. Being both a native Polish speaker and well aware of Liszt’s biography of Chopin makes it difficult to dispel suspicions that a certain conscious degree of manipulation underlay this modification. For instance, despite Neuhaus’s declaration that he saw Liszt’s Chopin as an accurate likeness of the composer, he guided his audience away from one of the most prominent criticisms that Liszt brought to Chopin and the Slavic character. Beyond the word żal, Liszt’s Chopin had raised the issue of the duality of Slavic character in no uncertain terms: “It was easy to misjudge what he was really thinking, as is generally the case with Slavs whose [. . .] feelings are kept half-hidden, half-revealed, like the coils of an entwined serpent, and it is naïve to take at face value their politeness or their outward humility.”113 The idea of “contradiction” and “double-facedness” were likewise important to Alfred Cortot’s view of Chopin.114 Furthermore, Liszt was convinced that the duality expressed in żal, and in the complex Polish temperament, was expressed in Chopin’s music: Resentments were all the more important in Chopin’s life because they so obviously manifested themselves in his music. [. . .] Almost suffocating and weighed down by repressed violence, in the [mature] works he uses art to speak to himself of his own tragedy. [. . .] A Chopin melody is sometimes so tormented, so nervous, so desperately persistent in its reworking of motifs,

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that it becomes as painful as watching the sufferings of body and soul where death is the only relief. Chopin was prey to a disease which, getting worse from year to year took him while still young—and in the music of which we speak may be found traces of the acute sufferings that devoured him, like the claw marks of a bird of prey on a beautiful body.115

Neuhaus’s writing does not emphasize Chopin’s illness, suffering, or premature death. In fact, the determined avoidance of touching on these well-known aspects of Chopin’s life—while, for instance, frequently discussing the implications of Beethoven’s deafness—is notable in itself. In contrast to Liszt, Neuhaus wrote exclusively of the generosity and Nietzschean nobility of Chopin’s soul: The combination of pity [zhalost’],116 tenderness, compassion, and love that is expressed by the Polish word żal, found its expression in the music of Chopin with an unheard-of strength and it is rightly thought of as one of the most substantial facets of his art. [. . .] From the other qualities, I would first mention his majesty, his inimitable human dignity [which] suffuse all of his Allegro maestoso [works].117

Refusing to acknowledge any possible interpretation of Chopin other than as an open, sincere, and empathetic soul, Neuhaus made clear his belief that the composer’s only anguish was that noble suffering with and for his people. Thus, Neuhaus’s misinterpretation of żal, despite his fluency in both Polish and Russian, could be seen as his rewriting of Chopin’s biography in order to elevate the composer to the noble status defined in the philosophic terms of Übermensch. In considering himself to be a “brother” of Chopin, Neuhaus had always felt that he never had to exert any effort to immerse his “I” into the distinct world of the composer.118 Embracing the subjectivity implied by his amalgamated aesthetic of Realism, which he had created to define himself while adopting his Russian identity as an interpreter, meant that Neuhaus only ever sought to see Chopin as a manifestation of his own personal experiences. As identified by Neuhaus, such a complete “immersion into another ‘I’ is only given to people in the state of love,” and despite the blinding nature that such love could take, he took pride in offering his own reflection in the mirror of Chopin’s music.119 Students, colleagues, critics, and music lovers looked to “Heinrich the Great” to bring them closer to a more profound cultural understanding that transcended borders, epochs, and languages. Many were guided by the belief that Neuhaus’s life beyond the closed borders of the Soviet Union, his multiethnicity, and encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and the wider arts meant he was privy to a more fulfilled and perhaps authentic understanding of music. Identifying Chopin as the most elusive and yet most desired spiritual treasure that Neuhaus could help attain, it is little wonder that people

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listened hungrily to his interpretations of the composer and eagerly followed his writings. Neuhaus’s transformation of Chopin led him to ahistoricize the composer and essentially position him at the birth of culture. Free from previous influence, Neuhaus presented Chopin as the supreme Slav who defined the essence of all future Slavic identities. However, Neuhaus’s internationalization of Chopin across and beyond Slavic borders comes with the sacrifice of the Polish national identity that Neuhaus was perceived to define by those around him. Neuhaus’s deliberate and radical alteration of żal is the symptom of his creation of a new, shared “national” identity: the identity of his own personal moral and philosophical world as an interpreter who both served, and transcended the composer: The interpreter is a complicated and contradictory being. He loves that which he interprets; criticizes it; submits to it completely; and reworks it in his own way. At other times [. . .] that critic with the propensity of a prosecutor dominates his soul. . . . In the best moments he feels the interpreted work as if it were his own—and he sheds tears of joy, and feels anxiety and love for it.120

Chapter Five

Not Ordinary Pedagogy Few pedagogues can claim the fame enjoyed by Heinrich Neuhaus as his name transcended the confines of musical circles to become a national cultural icon and household name. In an environment where music making and interest in culture were seen in many ways as marks of an upright Soviet citizen, Neuhaus’s photo portrait sat atop countless pianos and graced the walls of music rooms.1 For many growing up in the Soviet Union the honor of being admitted to Neuhaus’s class at the Moscow Conservatory was the realization of a childhood dream. His witty remarks and the beguiling, even coquettish, charm of a raconteur attracted large audiences to observe his lessons. The larger the audience the more he came into his own: unlike his esteemed colleagues Alexander Goldenweiser and Konstantin Igumnov, Neuhaus flourished as his students (both his own and those of other professors), colleagues, and music lovers flocked into his famous “Room 29,” and the lack of available chairs and standing room turned windowsills into benches. By 1958 Neuhaus was able to boast of his “suitcase” of competition laureates who had become renowned pianists in their own right. Such a distinction stands alongside the huge number of former students who went on to teach in music schools across the USSR, as well as hundreds of otherwise “musically defective” students who had passed through his hands.2 Neuhaus was well aware of his unprecedented success as a pedagogue of international significance: “There are kind people who (not without cause) will comfort me: you have created a whole school, one of the best in the [Soviet] Union, you have given so many wonderful concerts, your cultural direction is valued not only in the motherland, but also abroad etc.”3 Indeed, his most famous book, About the Art of Piano Playing, which due to high demand warranted being published just three years later in a revised edition, carries the subtitle Notes of a Pedagogue and was translated into German, French, and English during his lifetime. Notwithstanding the fierce loyalty toward their professor demonstrated by students of the “Neuhaus School,” however, there were many instances when it could be difficult to speak of him as a typical pedagogue. Writing about Neuhaus’s lessons, Vera Gornostaeva remembered:

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I remember in my fourth year I had difficulty with Chopin’s Mazurkas. I was playing inflexibly, with a student-like constraint. I came early into the room thinking I might be able to warm up before Neuhaus arrived, but he was already there—unusually early without any students. Seeing me: “Well? Did you bring the Mazurkas?” “Yes,” I replied, “but I won’t play them for you today.” “Why?” “Something about them is not working. . . .” Then he took the volume of Mazurkas and put them on the piano. [Neuhaus] started to play them one after another from the page, genuinely delighting in the music. He played more than half from memory for a long time—two hours in his empty room. I turned the pages, stood, and listened. Only when the door opened and someone came in did he close the music, looked at me and asked: “Understand?” “Yes, I understand,” I said, but to myself what I actually thought was that it would be best if I not play Chopin’s Mazurkas.4

While the encounter had left Gornostaeva overwhelmed, she had certainly felt privileged to have been a witness to such an event. On other occasions, however, she warned that her professor’s teaching could be far less involved, leaving the audience waiting patiently for hours hoping to hear him back on form: “Sometimes he came all sleepy, quiet, and would wearily say: ‘Carry on!’ He could be cranky and sit hunched in his armchair. Later he would come to life and approach the piano. The moment of inspiration would dawn [and] he delved into the music for a long time, infecting us with his keenness.”5 The volatile changes of mood that were hallmarks of Neuhaus’s performances could likewise make his lessons a terrifying experience as his charm suddenly gave way to his fiery temperament. As related by his main teaching assistant, Lev Naumov, one unfortunate day “when the alignment of the stars” had already cast a shadow on the lesson of a talented but lazy student who continually made the same mistake, an enraged Neuhaus threw a “cast-iron ashtray at him”— later qualifying his action with the words: “But you all saw, I did try to miss!”6 The question of Neuhaus’s pedagogy, and also its legacy, is complicated by the fact that within his own mind there was a substantial conflict surrounding his identity as a pedagogue. Indeed, he raised the issue of his intent to resign from his position at the conservatory many times in order to focus on his concert career. It was after all his firm belief that a pianist should not commit to full-time pedagogy until at least the age of fifty. Seeing himself first and foremost as a pianist-interpreter Neuhaus bitterly complained that this identity could not coexist harmoniously with that of a pedagogue. In About the Art of Piano Playing Neuhaus explained: If an interpreter is too burdened with pedagogical work, then every minute he is aware of the ill that this brings to his beloved work—performing.

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[. . .] From personal experience, I know that if I have been over-burdened with pedagogical work and I have little time to practice, then my teaching becomes worse—it lacks temperament, flight of thought—all because my soul is overcast with cloud and dreary. Dreary, because I am stationary [and] not developing myself!7

Throughout his life Neuhaus complained that he spent much energy “stuck in pedagogical mud” more out of necessity than personal desire: “During the course of my life I have suffered too much from pedagogy to consider myself a real pedagogue par vocation. [Sometimes] my dissatisfaction with pedagogy would turn into hatred: from the inhuman burden, lack of rest, leisure, and free air [vol’nogo vozdukha]—all that without which an artist cannot live.”8 Aside from the arduous physical exertion that left him feeling drained as he negotiated the workload of one the most sought-after pedagogues in the Soviet Union, his use of the term “free air” (as opposed to “open air” [otkrïtogo vozdukha]) is poignant. It is a turn of phrase that most usually describes the flight of a bird not held in captivity, but soaring in the open skies. Pedagogy constrained him in a spiritual sense. In the public sphere of open lessons, frequented by outsiders as well as friends, Neuhaus knew full well (including from his own sentence for anti-Soviet propaganda, exonerated only posthumously in 1989) the dangerous consequences that a slip of the tongue might bring in the politically patrolled climate. Beyond his very few trusted students Neuhaus’s true artistic ideas—which evolved from censored influences such as aspects of the Silver Age or Nietzsche’s philosophy and that he liberally shared with friends like Pasternak—simply remained hidden from view. With such a conflicted attitude toward pedagogy, the question then stands: how much of Neuhaus’s teaching, both direct and indirect, can be said to have formed his particular legacy? Already during his lifetime, his student and assistant Tatyana Khludova tackled this question. Khludova’s work was based on her systematic documentation of Neuhaus’s lessons and sought to capture the detailed remarks he made to his students in the course of his teaching. Neuhaus evidently valued Khludova’s efforts since he made arrangements, with the help of Gornostaeva, to realize the publication of certain chapters from her thesis (defended in 1954), which were being reworked into a book: an ambition that was precluded by Khludova’s untimely death in 1957. Neuhaus’s preface, ironically published after his own death to coincide with the centenary of the Moscow Conservatory in 1966, stated: “When one speaks of music, one frequently remembers the Hamletian ‘All this, as you see, are [sic] words, words, words.’ I think that much more convincing than words, will be the deeds of my students—some of whom, as we say, ‘belong to history’ (Richter, Gilels, etc.).”9 Neuhaus’s selection of Richter and Gilels as the two standard bearers for his pedagogical legacy is both thought-provoking and problematic, especially

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since, writing this preface in the final years of his life, he could easily have mentioned his current generation of students who were proving themselves as successful artists: Yevgeny Malinin, Alexei Nasedkin, Anatoly Vedernikov, Eliso Virsaladze, Vladimir Krainev, or Alexei Lyubimov. In fact, there were other students who themselves actively advocated for the idea of a “Neuhaus legacy” far more than could be said for either Gilels or Richter: Teodor Gutman, Vera Razumovskaya (Neuhaus’s Kiev graduates) or Lev Naumov and Vera Gornostaeva (Moscow graduates) can be seen as much more likely and willing candidates to perpetuate the idea of a “Neuhaus legacy” through their own teaching. Therefore, before investigating the significance of what Gilels and Richter offer to the understanding of Neuhaus’s legacy, let us first examine what these many other students offer in the sense of a tangible legacy in terms of actual pianist practices.

The Neuhausian Sound Devoting an entire chapter to sound, separate from technique, in About the Art of Piano Playing Neuhaus wrote: “Since music is sound, then the main concern, the first and most important obligation of any interpreter, is to work on sound.”10 Indeed, one of the central ideas proposed by many of the contributors, predominantly former students, of the book Remembering Neuhaus was that of being able to detect a “Neuhausian sound” at the piano.11 Lidiya Fichtenholz was adamant that people identified her as Neuhaus’s student through her sound.12 In his memoirs Lev Naumov pointed to the resultant “beautiful sound” of the piano as the primary hallmark of Neuhaus’s students.13 Belief in the “Neuhausian sound” is also a particularly important aspect to Vladimir Krainev, Vera Gornostaeva, and Elena Richter, who all refer to Neuhaus’s lessons as, in his own words, “at least three-quarters of the time, devoted to working on sound.”14 The ability to produce a “noble” sound on the piano—without unduly percussive “banging”—was a principle Gustav Neuhaus instilled in all his students from the first lessons. Neuhaus’s sensitivity to both his own sound and that of other pianists was always one of the most important criteria by which he judged a musician’s mastery at the instrument, and he went as far as to claim that a good pianist could make even an atrocious piano produce a beautiful sound after its initial split-second harshness of attack. His reverent and mesmeric attitude to sound reflected itself in the way he worked on preparing his repertoire: “I used to learn pieces in the ‘traditional’ way. Later, I especially came to love a particular method of playing: when one plays very slowly, but with all the nuances, as if looking through a magnifying glass to see ‘what it is made of.’ [. . .] When you work a lot, you keep digging the earth to find a precious

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diamond.”15 Sound, for Neuhaus, was the pianist’s greatest treasure—“Sound should be wrapped in silence, sound should rest in silence,16 like a precious stone in a velvet casket”17—it was the means to “humanize” the piano, to make the “mechanical box live and breathe.”18 Many of Neuhaus’s students recall his distinctive manner of sensitizing the ear to sound by building up an understanding of sound from its quietest artistic manifestation. Naumov recalled how it was characteristic of Neuhaus to try to instill in his pupils the ability to play at the point within pianissimo where “noise” just became a feasible “artistic” occurrence: “This is not yet sound” (ėto yeshchyo ne zvuk); “this is sound” (ėto uzhe zvuk).19 Neuhaus’s distinct attitude to the piano’s sound seems to have been as much a feature of his early pedagogy as it was at the height of his experience and fame. His request for students to play a C-major scale with the right hand with a “quiet, divine sound in ideal legato” and to accompany it with light chords in the left was a task that he had set Vera Razumovskaya at her first lesson in Gustav Neuhaus’s Music School in Elisavetgrad in 1914.20 Along with the specific attention to sound production, Neuhaus’s students talk about the possibilities that Neuhaus demonstrated in the voicing of polyphonic textures, especially in the context of an “ideal legato” produced by the fingers as well as the pedals. Bach was a staple of his pedagogical and personal ritual largely for training a pianistic attitude to sound. It is difficult to find testimony from a student of Neuhaus that does not refer to Bach in one context or another. Razumovskaya underwent thorough study with Neuhaus of the Bach Three-Part Inventions in Elisavetgrad, and learned thirty-three of the Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier in Kiev.21 Such an experience seems to have been typical for Neuhaus’s students. Neuhaus’s students studied a great deal of Bach to develop the independence of voice leading and sound production: Naumov remembered that Neuhaus suggested that his students work on their octaves by playing the Two-Part Inventions by doubling each voice.22 This tradition of extensive Bach study as a way to work specifically on legato was adopted, among others, by Naumov in his own extensive teaching practice.23 Interestingly, these two very specific pianistic facets of sound, shared and defined by Neuhaus’s pupils as part of his “school,” are considered the main characteristics of a greater legacy that called for students to conceive of their performances in elevated terms. A broad range of accounts of interactions with Neuhaus reveal that issues such as sound were to be understood as emotional—a “product of the [interpreter’s] persona.”24 Gornostaeva related that according to Neuhaus, sound was the expression, or literally, “tone” of the soul (ton dushi).25 Elena Richter related how, in her opinion, Neuhaus’s specific remarks on sound and voicing are meaningless unless understood within the context of Neuhaus as a persona who engaged with art, literature, and philosophy.26 Speaking of the individuality of sound, Neuhaus had emphasized that

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it comes not from physical differences in hand structure or from the pianist’s general bearing, but as a result of the interpreter’s intoning (intonirovaniye) of sound. Linked more to the idea of time required to inflect the unfolding sonority of the music to mimic the expressive inflections of speech than to the idea of tempo rubato (“sound-time” [vremenem-zvukom] as opposed to rhythmic time),27 this Neuhausian dimension of pianism existed first as the will to evoke and to sympathize: “One must understand and love the ‘self’ of the piano in order to understand and command it.”28 In talking about sound Neuhaus hardly ever referred to the mechanics involved except in the broadest terms relating to relaxation and the idea of keeping in close contact with the keyboard. This characteristic of Neuhaus’s understanding of touch manifested itself in what Valeri Starodubrovsky recalled as a “clinging onto the keys, caressing them” for which Neuhaus affectionately invented the imaginary name khvatando, made up from the Russian word for “grip” and the suffix -ando.29 Aside from this Neuhaus’s pedagogical approach to sound was summarized in his famous aphorism: “Only by demanding the impossible from the piano are you able to attain the possible.”30 Mark Milman therefore suggested that Neuhaus’s comments on aspects such as sound and polyphony were a balance between the pianistically specific and the illusive, provocative discussions on art, history, and culture that could only be tangentially related to the work in question. Typically, Milman believed that Neuhaus’s specific comments were expected to raise the student’s curiosity for wider culture and for discovering himself: “Woe to the student who was indifferent to the beauty of art and to assimilation of knowledge. ‘One needs to read more: to read, to see, to hear, to feel!’—Neuhaus would shout.”31 While this dimension of Neuhaus’s legacy has widely been isolated as potentially the singlemost important aspect of his influence, it has also proved to be the most elusive to define and seems to have required a willing and open mind from the receiver. Drawing attention to this issue, Gornostaeva wrote: “He had a brilliant wit for which, by the way, he was criticized—people said that he ‘knew how to put dust in people’s eyes’ (I heard all this myself: there was never a lack of fault-finders).”32

Outward Manifestations of a Legacy Despite the “fault-finders,” so much of Neuhaus’s pedagogical approach to the piano was delivered within a vast framework of aesthetic, historic, and moral questions that it grew to be seen as the hallmark of his indelible legacy. Neuhaus’s desire to have these key aspects of his approach linked to his name for posterity saw him actively engage in the creation of a lasting image

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that might reflect this for future generations. Apart from his writing, this was achieved through photographs, many of which seem to have been devised and choreographed with a lot of thought. Such photographs were important to underpinning the idea of a distinct Neuhaus school during his own lifetime, but it seems that Neuhaus equally intended for them to remain as symbols of his endeavors after his death. According to Leonid Levit, who took the famous portrait photographs of Neuhaus in the months before his death in 1964 (figs. 5.1 and 5.3), Neuhaus was aware of the power of photography to make an impression that held a more immediate power than words. Levit related that before he started taking the photographs, Neuhaus conversed at length about the kind of image that was intended, what it revealed about him, and worked together with the photographer to create it.33 Although Neuhaus was ill with a fever during the session, Levit was conscious of the fact that they needed to ensure that the result would not be “less than Neuhaus,” and was particularly pleased that the pianist was equally committed to putting in the effort to look “handsome, emotional, and lively” for the resulting nine portraits. The photograph in figure 5.3 from the early 1950s, although not by Levit, can be assumed to have been produced under similar conditions. It shows Neuhaus (sitting at the piano) surrounded by Nataliya Fomina, Yevgeny Malinin, Anton Ginzburg, and Vera Gornostaeva—some of his most significant students who later talked about a Neuhausian legacy. However, it is the setting of the photograph that is important in terms of how it illustrates the key points of Neuhaus’s legacy as identified in the discussion above. The piano appears to be Neuhaus’s Bechstein: famous for being unyielding and thus, for many students symbolic of their struggle to attain a beautiful sound. His Bechstein was equally known for the seemingly incredible “transformation” of the piano under its master’s hands. As Naumov explained: “At home he had two Bechsteins—both really atrociously bad instruments, wildly battered [by regular heavy use]. I remember playing some Debussy Preludes for Neuhaus. He made a few remarks, then sat at the piano and played—and how he played! I thought to myself: ‘Yes, this instrument is horrendous, but how on earth did he make it play this way?!’ I was dumbfounded.”34 Neuhaus is holding a score of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and likewise it can be faintly made out that the music desk holds another score of Bach. Rachmaninov, considered in Russia to be the ultimate polyphonic composer for the piano not least by Neuhaus himself, is represented by a photograph on the bookcase directly behind Neuhaus. The bookcase, spanning the better part of the wall in the room, is filled with books rather than scores. Their haphazard positioning seems to indicate their constant use and symbolically provides a physical cultural framework to the musical space.

Figure 5.1. A photograph of Neuhaus from the series by Leonid Levit, 1964. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

Figure 5.2. A photograph of Neuhaus from the series by Leonid Levit, 1964 (additional pose). Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

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Figure 5.3. Photograph of Neuhaus (seated) with his students, Nataliya Fomina, Yevgeny Malinin, Anton Ginzburg, and Vera Gornostaeva (left to right), in the early 1950s. Reproduced with permission from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI).

Numerous student accounts show that Neuhaus was prepared to put in an extraordinary amount of time to help structure, focus, and deepen the appreciation of a work’s interpretation. Naumov related that Neuhaus was prepared to spend two to three hours with a mediocre student on the main theme of Chopin’s Piano Concerto in E Minor, op. 11, or Beethoven’s “Tempest” Piano Sonata no. 17 in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2, delving into the work in a great deal of detail.35 Neuhaus too admitted that he could get so carried away by his lessons that if he was teaching a work such as Liszt’s B-minor Sonata then “discussions, corrections, demonstrations, persuasion, and repetitions began from the very first note of the Sonata. Every measure needed analysis and was edited, so to speak. Sometimes we spent a long time on one note or chord [. . .] not to mention my short ‘lecture’ on the meaning of the content in the Sonata. We spent more than three hours, and only covered a third.”36

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Such lessons in which the associative flow of ideas emerges only in the gaps between the hard work of toiling methodically on small issues relating to the score, however, normally took place behind closed doors, and toward the end of his life, increasingly at his apartment. Thus, these varied in content compared to Neuhaus’s “open” lessons in Room 29 and lectures that had made Neuhaus a household name and focused on the delivery of ideas to an audience, which held the playing as an almost inconsequential aspect. It was these “open” lessons that left students and audiences convinced that their extraordinary trajectories needed to be recorded for posterity. Coaxing Neuhaus to confront his fear of recording technology, Pavel Lobanov arranged to bring in a magnetic tape recorder, which given the absence of electric outlets in the rooms at the time was connected to the main power supply through the ceiling light, to capture a handful of such lessons in the final years of the pianist’s life. These lessons are not without limitations: they show the professor ill at ease and taking a while to settle down in order to demonstrate the pieces that were studied particularly frequently (such as the Chopin Ballades nos. 1 and 4)—many of these with mediocre students. Hearing Neuhaus playing on the second piano alongside the student reveals that he had specific expectations about the agogic nuances of the phrase, tempo, and rubato in these works. In calling for the student to show more “plasticity” (plastichnost’),37 Neuhaus’s shadowing of the melodic contours is so specific that it could be argued to form a particular performance tradition if adopted by his students outside the classroom. Comparing Neuhaus’s lesson on Chopin’s Fourth Ballade with Irma Yudina and Ese Elinaite, both recorded at various points in 1962, their choice of tempo is very similar, fluctuating around eighth note = 94–98. In both lessons Neuhaus draws their attention to the dynamics and the kind of rubato he expected. In the lesson with Elinaite (at 2 minutes 44 seconds), corresponding to measures 15 through 18 of the piece,38 Neuhaus clearly demonstrates at the second piano the urgency he wants in the interpretation with the crescendo marking, and the broadening with the diminuendo and subsequent reluctance to leave the final eighth note. In Yudina’s lesson, Neuhaus does not stop at this early point in the work, but the exaggerated manner of the rubato at these hairpins suggests that this has been a point already discussed. The further instances where Neuhaus finds Yudina’s playing rigid, he calls for the treatment of similar dynamics in the same broad manner (for example, in mm. 58–61 shown in ex. 5.1). Although Neuhaus was apparently so thorough in his teaching, and thereby provided a wealth of specific pedagogical devices, performance suggestions, and aphorisms that might be seen as his legacy, some testimonies reveal that this approach did not extend to all his students. Naumov observed that Neuhaus did not want to teach “talented and independent” students, and

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Example 5.1. Frédéric Chopin. Ballade no. 4 in F Minor, op. 52, mm. 58–61.



  

 
   

    




  
   



    




 



  

    


       















 

 





    

 





 









 

 

    

  

 





     

would spend most of his time with the mediocre ones.39 Berta Kremenstein suggested: “Here is the paradox: Neuhaus, undoubtedly was more interested in the better, more talented artists, but worked with them in a more restrained manner, and simply spent less time with them.”40 As a result, it could be argued that the most direct inheritors of a potential legacy in terms of direct pianistic application might actually be those students with less developed individuality, ability, or artistic temperament. The more talented students seem to have experienced Neuhaus’s influence from a distance, mainly as observers of other lessons or in conversations outside the teaching environment. Nataliya Fomina considered her conversations with Neuhaus “much more valuable than his lessons.” It was likewise an attitude echoed by Yakov Zak, who said that while as a student his frustration with his lessons caused him at times to follow temptation and play truant; in the three years as Neuhaus’s assistant he “never missed a class.” Sitting “at a distance” allowed him to absorb and appreciate far more than in active involvement.41 Alexei Nasedkin too said that his best lessons with Neuhaus were those when Neuhaus felt free to talk about his own life and experiences, rather than specifically about the music.42 Because more talented students, some of whom have been mentioned in the above discussion, were given less individual time and generally learned through observing the lessons of others, they are arguably more likely to be successful in expressing their own artistic temperaments. It is in this context that Gilels and Richter, effectively Neuhaus’s two most talented students who arguably had the greatest critical awareness of Neuhaus and his practices, are interesting in what they can reveal about their professor.

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Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter: Two Apparently Model Students Neuhaus’s choice of Richter and Gilels to represent his pedagogical legacy may be cynically dismissed as a marketing ploy. Yet, aimed at a Russian rather than international readership, Neuhaus’s audience would have known that he had risen to fame as both a pianist and pedagogue long before either Gilels or Richter joined his famous class in Room 29. It was no secret that both Gilels and Richter had already come to Neuhaus’s class as professional pianists with distinctive artistic identities of their own and clear expectations of what they were hoping to gain from their studies. Thus, they are able to be much more articulate on a higher level about what they felt Neuhaus did offer them and, perhaps more tellingly, what they felt Neuhaus was not able or willing to share—a question that in all likelihood would have been well beyond the scope of Neuhaus’s mediocre students. The circumstances of Gilels’s and Richter’s training prior to joining Neuhaus’s class were very different, not to mention their artistic personalities. This factor, coupled with the musicological hostility (predominantly in Russia and Germany) that has presented Gilels and Richter as opponents may make it seem unlikely that juxtaposing the two pianists can provide any constructive answers.43 However, the following discussion will explore Gilels’s and Richter’s comments with the sole intention of extracting the common elements in their views of what Neuhaus offered to other musicians who were able to receive it at a high level. Therefore, the views of Gilels and Richter on particular questions will be explored side by side. By the time the eighteen-year-old Gilels had enrolled as a student in Neuhaus’s class in the Meisterschule of the Moscow Conservatory in 1935, he had already accumulated a formidable virtuoso repertoire and embarked on extensive concert tours around the USSR following his training with Berta Reingbald at the Odessa Conservatory and his victory at the 1933 All-Union Competition for Pianists.44 Although Richter claimed he had no formal training before coming to Moscow, he too had already made a name for himself in Odessa as a soloist, accompanist, and répétiteur at the Odessa Opera—playing Chopin’s Ballade in F Minor, op. 52, and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 15 in D Major, op. 28 (“Pastorale”), as well as some of his own works, for his admission to Neuhaus’s class in 1937. Richter’s pianistic ability was at a level that, among the pieces Neuhaus set for him to study in his first year at the Moscow Conservatory, was the Liszt Sonata.45 Evidently then, Gilels and Richter had traveled to Moscow in search of something other than what Neuhaus called “pure pedagogy.”46 If Richter and Gilels had already formed musical identities of their own and had technical abilities that evidentially exceeded Neuhaus’s, what

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stimulated them to consider joining Neuhaus’s class? First, it must be noted that both Gilels and Richter were attracted by the class’s reputation. By the 1930s Neuhaus was at the height of his active pianistic and pedagogic careers and thus a natural choice for a pianist wishing to further his art. As summarized by Richter: The three pillars of the Russian piano school [. . .] were Goldenweiser, Igumnov and Neuhaus. Goldenweiser represented the older tradition, a pianist of the pedantic kind. [. . .] Igumnov was an excellent musician and an original pianist [. . .] his tone was radiant and refined, but fairly limited in range. He belonged to another generation, he was much older than Neuhaus, and it was to Neuhaus that all the pianists in Moscow beat a path.47

Gilels too acknowledged how significant Neuhaus’s persona was at the time for young pianists as well as for general musical opinion: “Neuhaus was a gifted and complex individual who aroused the admiration and attention of those around him. For many he was the symbol of high art.”48 Neuhaus was aware of the scale of pianistic talent that he was responsible for nurturing in Gilels and Richter, particularly given their highly developed technical facility. Contending with what he saw as his own modest pianistic means, Neuhaus observed: “When Gilels played Liszt’s Rhapsodie espagnole for me, I always thought that I will never be able to play the octaves as quickly, brilliantly, and as loudly as he could—should I therefore teach him, or should he go to a pianist who can play it even better than he could (alas, that is rather difficult to find)?”49 Gilels himself was adamant that it was Berta Reingbald, his professor in Odessa, who had “formed” his technical pianism through the intensive study of piano transcriptions.50 Thus, Gilels told his biographer, Barenboim, that he was irritated by the “rumor” that it was Neuhaus who had “made” him. With regard to Richter, however, Neuhaus simply corroborated Richter’s own view that he was already very proficient in getting what he wanted out the piano: “Richter is an uncommon phenomenon [. . .] with huge virtuosic capabilities.”51 Considering the issue of Gilels’s and Richter’s respective pianism and the technical aspects reputed to have been central to Neuhaus’s legacy as outlined by other students, it would seem that he had a minimal influence on either musician. Unlike Gilels, Richter did claim that some of his pianistic techniques were indebted to Neuhaus—in particular the Neuhausian sound: “With the opus 110 Sonata [Beethoven] Neuhaus taught me to obtain a singing tone, the tone that I’d always dreamed of. It was probably already in me, but he freed it by loosening my hands and teaching me to open up my shoulders.”52 However, Richter’s statement must be taken with a degree of caution. Despite Neuhaus’s arguably disproportionate praise of Richter’s abilities, he never singled out Richter’s sound as one

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of particularly striking beauty. In fact, the harshness of Richter’s sound is one of Neuhaus’s main criticisms of his pianism.53 Furthermore, even though Gilels was famous for his rich sound, which Neuhaus called the most “noble” and “golden” of all pianists, this was one of the hallmarks of his pianism before he had joined Neuhaus’s class.54 To this effect, Yakov Flier’s article written about his colleague and friend offered the opinion that “already aged sixteen, Gilels was a world-class artist” whose pianistic qualities had largely been formed to a “great artistic height.”55 The extensive study of polyphony, which many of Neuhaus’s students identified as key to their professor’s distinct pedagogical approach to the development of voicing, is largely irrelevant to either Gilels’s or Richter’s experience. Working on developing Gilels’s lyrical sound, Reingbald said that her greatest triumph in this respect was in making Bach Gilels’s favorite composer.56 Gilels remembered that for every lesson with Reingbald he played Bach’s TwoPart Inventions in octaves—a pedagogical device that Naumov had considered Neuhausian. Richter believed that his own serious interest in Bach’s music was lifelong and atypical of his time, going so far as to imply that (despite Neuhaus’s own complete Bach recitals including the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, and lengthy radio broadcasts of Bach’s music),57 he was the first significant pianist to pay attention to the values of Bach’s music in the Soviet Union: “Because the traditional Romantic repertory was so well-established, Bach was rarely played by pianists in the Soviet Union. The Well-Tempered Clavier never appeared on concert programs. [. . .] Before me (and, later, Maria Yudina), I see that only Samuel Feinberg included them in his recitals.”58 Consequently, neither pianist can be said to have successfully tempered their own pianistic manner to reproduce the famous hallmarks of Neuhaus’s playing: Richter never became known for a lyrically nuanced Neuhausian sound, whereas Gilels had already distinguished himself in this respect before coming to Moscow. Moreover, neither pianist needed Neuhaus to instill in them a love and respect for polyphony as one of the most significant outlets for their sound at the piano. So, it can be concluded that for a pianist of Gilels’s or Richter’s caliber and uniqueness it is irrelevant to speak of a technical legacy that stems from their interaction with Neuhaus—even if, as in the case of Richter, the idea of such a legacy with respect to the famous “Neuhaus sound” was anticipated and invited by the pianist. The lack of specific, technical guidance extended to Richter and Gilels stands at the heart of the central paradox that they both presented with regard to being Neuhaus’s chosen inheritors. The two pianists confirm Neuhaus’s own belief that he was not a pedagogue, particularly for pianists who came to him with a highly developed artistic vision. Gilels believed that Neuhaus’s “faults” as a pedagogue stemmed from the fact that, at heart, he never fitted into such a role. Gilels explained:

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A concertizing artist, regardless of what he says, as a general rule cannot be a good teacher: he burns on the stage and gives himself completely there. He needs to hold a large repertoire in his hands and practice regularly. A pedagogue cannot rush, and a true teacher must, first of all, have an exceptional patience. He is busy with his students and can spend hours with them. Together they polish both the technical and emotional aspects of the playing. This brings him real satisfaction if he is a genuine pedagogue.59 An artist cannot be a teacher. This is why Neuhaus had substantial pedagogical defects.60

Richter too considered that Neuhaus was an artist rather than a teacher, and would irritatedly say that Neuhaus was wasting his time with students: “Don’t you understand Heinrich Gustavovich—they won’t play any better anyway!”61 Neuhaus’s naming of Gilels and Richter as his heirs in the preface to the extract of Khludova’s work, mentioned above, is provocative in the way it allows him to shift the balance of his legacy away from his role as a pedagogue. Given the fact that Neuhaus did not leave Eastern Europe after the outbreak of the First World War, his identity as a pedagogue has always been the dominant one in the West—ironically through the association with Gilels and Richter. In Russia, knowledge of Neuhaus as a pianist has meant that the oscillation between Neuhaus-the-pianist and Neuhaus-the-pedagogue is more dynamic, but also largely tends toward the “pedagogue.” Yet, despite Neuhaus’s obvious vision of himself as first and foremost a pianist, even Gilels and Richter presented two different sides of this oscillation. Richter claimed that it was Neuhaus’s persona as a pianist and artist that formed his initial and lasting view of him, rather than his reputation as a pedagogue: “I’d already heard Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus during one of his visits to Odessa and had been bowled over by his playing—he played Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata—and, indeed, by his whole manner. There was something about his appearance that strongly reminded me of my father, but he was really much more light-hearted.”62 It is significant that Richter used his interview with Bruno Monsaingeon, which he knew would be widely disseminated in the West, to try to make the West conscious of Neuhaus as a pianist-interpreter: Although he had only small hands, he was a tremendous pianist, but as he was never allowed to travel abroad, it was only his reputation as a teacher that reached the outside world. [. . .] His performance of Chopin’s E minor Concerto and Beethoven’s “Emperor” were so astounding that I always refused to include them in my own repertory. But his playing was sometimes uneven, as he spent so much time teaching that he had no time left for practicing. Teaching is a terrible thing. It kills you as a pianist. [. . .] I remember a Schumann recital that he gave. He’d begun with the sonatas and played them like a cobbler, with masses of wrong notes in every bar. Next on the

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program came the Kreisleriana—marvelous. As for the Fantasie, you’d have thought it was Schumann himself at the piano.63

Richter believed that Neuhaus’s pianism had an inimitable quality and deeply personal identity that could be compared to the highest levels of artistic individuality such as that embodied by Vladimir Sofronitsky and Maria Yudina.64 Yet, where Richter saw Neuhaus’s pianistic strength, Gilels was never completely convinced that Neuhaus was a great pianist: “By artistic nature, or more specifically, in his soul, he was a big artist (however, he never had perfected the [necessary] pianistic mastery).”65 Unlike Richter, Gilels identified a further, third aspect that he considered to outweigh Neuhaus’s importance as a pedagogue or pianist: the person. Gilels talked of the “novelty” of Neuhaus’s “alluring” manner, his overtly expressed “love of art, and the fact that he was always searching.”66 Thus, in his interviews with Barenboim, Gilels considered Neuhaus’s charisma and magnetism to stem not from his work, but from his being. Gilels suggested that Neuhaus captivated those around him because of the intrigue and richness presented by his “soul,” or in other words, through the glimpses that Neuhaus allowed into his own unique experiences and worldview.

An Impossible Inheritance Neuhaus understood musical interpretation as an autobiographic outpouring of his experiences. Looking within himself to critically analyze his personal autopsychographic experiences, Neuhaus was able to draw his broad knowledge of European culture into the Russian cultural world. His intricately crafted and adopted world as a Russian artist seemed to open up new horizons through which native cultural figures could define their work. In a country with restricted cultural exchange and official censorship of certain European ideals, Neuhaus arguably provided two things: a view into a barred world (the Europe of Neuhaus’s youth), and a way of nonetheless identifying with such barred phenomena within the language and framework of a Russian cultural aesthetic. Identifying breadth of culture as an integral part of Neuhaus’s persona, Gilels attributed Neuhaus’s success as a musical authority to his literary output: “He had a literary talent that was polished by his friendship with a variety of eminent humanitarians. The literary word, as noted by someone, is power and strength.”67 Therefore, Gilels attributed Neuhaus’s influence not through musical deed, but through the written word—an aspect that Richter gives comparatively little emphasis. The substantial written and verbal documentation of Neuhaus’s innermost concerns and views on music and culture does

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not, however, provide the guarantee that it has the capacity to form a tangible legacy for the reader. Even for a musician of Gilels’s caliber, in the years of his studies at the Moscow Conservatory he confronted barriers in deciphering Neuhaus’s distinct autopsychography. Gilels recalled how many of Neuhaus’s remarks and associations simply did not touch him as an interpreter, and that Neuhaus evidently noticed this: “I always left his lessons lonely, and had to rely on my own musical intuition to pull through. I never became someone with whom he spoke openly from the soul. Evidently, he thought I had not grown up to it.”68 Neuhaus’s approach to Gilels both publicly and privately was indeed marked by his belief that although Gilels had come to him as a laureate of the Soviet Union’s then largest competition (the First All-Union Competition of 1933) and was already negotiating his own independent piano career, he still needed guidance in his aesthetic or spiritual artistic development. In About the Art of Piano Playing, Neuhaus had concluded that besides “octaves, temperament, rhythm, artistic will, unified concept, virtuosic brilliance, and penetrating sound,” already apparent in Gilels’s playing, there were deeper issues with regard to the work’s essence that, as an artist, he needed to share with Gilels.69 Juri Jelagin, who sometimes dropped by to hear Neuhaus’s open lessons recalled: “Often, instead of studying piano playing, Neuhaus recited his favorite poetry to [Gilels]—most often, Pasternak’s. Or, he would take him to one of Moscow’s art galleries.”70 This image of Gilels as an apprentice being shown the spiritual world by a master, perhaps not unlike Dante guided by Virgil and Beatrice in the Divine Comedy, contributed to the widespread belief in the music community of what Gilels described in annoyance as the “myth” that Neuhaus “made [him] into an artist.”71 This situation stood in contrast to Neuhaus’s relationship with Richter, which seems to have been more collegial from the outset, possibly in part because of Richter’s German heritage. Whereas Gilels’s career had set itself on the trajectory of Soviet and then international stardom from the outset, helped by Stalin’s interest, Richter’s establishment as one of the USSR’s premiere pianists initially needed persuasion. Neuhaus did much to spread the word of his student’s talents both by word of mouth and in print, and it was a well-known fact that, in the absence of accommodation in Moscow in the 1940s, Richter lived with Neuhaus and his family, where he practiced and slept under his professor’s piano. Furthermore, certain parallels between Neuhaus and Richter are difficult to ignore. Richter’s paternal grandfather was a German who had become a piano maker in Zhitomir (a region that had changed from Polish to Ukrainian ownership), and his father taught piano at the Odessa Conservatory where the family was based in an ethnic German community: thus while Russian was the most widely used language in the household, German speech was never far away.72 In terms of temperament Richter was eager to see the

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similarities between his own father, who had been executed in 1941 for alleged espionage, and Neuhaus, remarking: “Neuhaus was like a second father to me.”73 For Neuhaus many elements of Richter’s development brought to mind his own youth. Writing to his sister’s daughter, Astrid Schmidt-Neuhaus, in 1940 Neuhaus related: “I have wonderful students, especially one—Sviatoslav Richter—a genius. He plays Wagner by memory, also Schreker, Strauss, and all the operas of the world, Stravinsky etc.”74 Contrary to the public image contributed to by Neuhaus of his need to encourage Gilels to make independent and more profound forays into the world of culture as a postgraduate student (rather harshly expressed in print by Neuhaus as Gilels being hitherto only “fed with a baby’s bottle”),75 Neuhaus admitted that his stance in Richter’s lessons was on the basis of “friendly neutrality”: “To teach a learned one spoils him. Most likely, I helped him a little in his development, but mostly he helped himself.”76 It is known, for instance, that Neuhaus liked to set Richter musical puzzles drawn from a broad spectrum of cultural events and literature, a practice that Richter too adopted with his closest associates. Richter seems to have been highly receptive to Neuhaus’s metaphors and poetic descriptions: Heinrich Gustavovich taught me the recitative [from Beethoven’s Sonata no. 17 in D Minor, op. 31, no. 2, “Tempest”]. He would place his foot on the pedal much earlier than when he took the first chord. In other words, he opened the piano’s pores. I couldn’t do it. Then he asked me to “speak” the recitative in the voice of Diogenes from a barrel.77 He joked in this way . . . but for me, it worked!78

Neuhaus made no secret of his delight in sharing what he called his “absurd associations” with Richter. In person and in late night phone calls Neuhaus was driven by a “need” to share “thoughts and thought-lets [mïslishki].” Acknowledging that those around them would evidently think “they were mad,” the two pianists often disagreed with each other’s concepts with Neuhaus considering them to be “absolutely necessary.”79 As related by Richter: [Heinrich Gustavovich and I had a certain “game”]. He asked me: “What does Brahms’s B-minor Rhapsody remind you of? What subject?” This question came totally out of the blue. I anguished over it for days, and could not think of anything. I even thought he might forget about his question. But he asked again. [. . .] My subject: a knight-troubadour falls in love with a princess, whom he has never seen. She takes an interest in the troubadour’s friend. . . . The troubadour succumbs to a fatal illness and the proud princess enters a monastery. Heinrich Gustavovich sat thinking, and then said “Interesting . . . Interesting . . . I would never have thought of this. Yet, this is devilish. If you had read [. . .] Anatole France, you would have understood what happens in the Rhapsody.” He showed me on the piano how the elder

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curses the abode of contention, how he clasps his lyre to his breast and rises onto the highest cape. . . . I have never heard such a Rhapsody. Such passion and such self-burning. That is when I thought that it is best that I should never play the B-minor Rhapsody.80

However, it is important to note that despite such overt similarities between Neuhaus’s and Richter’s need to use imagery, to underpin or direct their interpretative decisions with such scaffolds, Richter did not consider this to be part of Neuhaus’s influence over him. Richter was resolute that he already had such a predisposition before coming into contact with Neuhaus: “One must not play just what is in the notes, but what is between the notes. Like a good artist—he reads between the lines. That is hard. One learns this throughout one’s whole life, although no one teaches this. No one taught me this specifically—I just soaked it up like a sponge. [. . .] I don’t teach because of my belief that one cannot teach anything in the classroom!”81 In the terms that Richter saw it his interaction with Neuhaus was valuable as an opportunity to observe at close proximity the workings of an artistic mind. Like Gilels, Richter evidently was not interested in being told how to think about music. Instead, he enjoyed challenging the depth of his own perceptions, and in this respect, Neuhaus seems to have been a sympathetic and like-minded counterpart. For Richter, Neuhaus was a spiritual role model whose influence had to be invited by the receiver. Richter said that if the student was open to Neuhaus’s influence, he would always be enriched by the interaction: “[Maria] Yudina was kind but her individuality crushed yours. [. . .] Heinrich Gustavovich opened your individuality, got into your soul.”82 It cannot be said that Gilels lacked the intellectual capacity that would potentially have enabled him to engage with Neuhaus’s complex philosophical and literary associations. Yakov Flier characterized Gilels as an artist with a “rare fusion of artistic intellect and artistic imagination.”83 Yakov Zak had spoken of Gilels’s acquaintance in Odessa with the famous musicologist Boris Tyuneyev, who actively sought out talented pianists (who along with Zak and Gilels also included Maria Grinberg and Sviatoslav Richter) to discuss philosophy and aesthetics with them, placing his vast library at their disposal. Zak wrote: I must say that in Odessa there were professors who had a profound influence on our general cultural and aesthetic development. For instance, the music historian [Boris] Tyuneyev had a great influence on the formation of our artistic views and principles, and such musicians as [. . .] Richter owed a lot to him. I was very close to him [therefore] when [Neuhaus scared new students with his expression: “You haven’t read Kant . . .”], although I indeed had not read Kant in the original, I understood what Heinrich Gustavovich meant because of Tyuneyev.84

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Gilels’s situation illustrates just how specific Neuhaus’s web of assimilated and appropriated ideas were to himself. Practically, in the terms of his own pianistic development, Gilels recognized how unsuccessful it had been for him to try to copy the “cultural world” that Neuhaus offered: When I came to Neuhaus, he made changes to my repertoire. He offered that we study Wagner-Liszt’s Isolde’s Liebestod, I learned it, performed it in concert. I quickly realized that I am not doing it my way—that I am playing not only following someone else’s words, but also someone else’s emotions. Neuhaus, of course, had heard the opera and had been to the Wagner festivals. I had never had the opportunity to hear the opera. The piano transcription does not create a worthy impression—there are no voices, no colors and, most importantly, there is no atmosphere of the theater. One needs not only to hear, but to see the opera. Without all this, there was no reason for me to play Isolde’s Liebestod. I could not understand the shortsightedness of the critics [who claimed] this piece had changed me, made me into someone new. I would shudder at these words—words of those who did not understand that I did not want to merely copy someone else, and should not have done so.85

Through this, it can be discerned that although Neuhaus sought to share the dynamic movement between his own experiences or associations and the interpreted music, they were not necessarily directly transferable to another individual. Neuhaus’s fleeting thoughts and more detailed deliberations, which allow a glimpse into how he assimilated and appropriated cultural thought, are best considered as a stimulus for another pianist-interpreter to delve deeper into his own consciousness in preparing an interpretation. It is clear that the work on constructing an interpretation based on the self’s assimilated experience had to be done assiduously by that individual interpreter from his own free will and in his own distinct way. As Gilels summarized: “Heinrich Gustavovich was often irritated when pedagogical intervention was required in relation to myself. He taught according to his mood, and if something made him angry then he simply said: ‘Ducky, [golubchik] you know everything yourself—[just go and] learn it.’”86 Therefore, even if Neuhaus was willing to share the results of his own cultural self-interrogation, he was not willing to give answers to anyone—least of all to talented pianists. As already mentioned, the contradiction of leaving a student to find his own way out in a situation where aspects of the playing were in need of guidance, was amplified in Neuhaus’s relationship with the most talented pianists. In this way, Gilels spoke of how his learning from Neuhaus only really took form outside the traditional didactic context. Gilels explained that the only time he felt that Neuhaus “opened up” before him was during the difficult years of the Second World War in Sverdlovsk: “He put aside his

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prejudice toward me and shared his feelings and thoughts. We made wonderful music together and played four-handed arrangements—it was peaceful and without any irritation.”87 Neuhaus himself seems to have felt a certain guilt over the way in which he knew that his influence over a talented musician like Gilels could only really have a meaningful resonance in offering, rather than in forcing, a critical interaction with art. Neuhaus was aware of Gilels’s disappointment in him as a pedagogue, and wrote in About the Art of Piano Playing: “I shall not hide my sins! With someone like Gilels, the best method (apart from looking at repertoire) would be the daily sight-reading, preferably in four-hand [arrangements], of all the boundless symphonic and chamber repertoire and looking at ‘non-pianistic’ literature.”88 However, even under the veil of guilt, Neuhaus remained steadfast in his position of offering scope for assimilation, but not answers relating to the specific method of its appropriation or manifestation in the context of subsequent pianistic interpretation. This kind of influence-by-consent was in itself an appropriation akin to Neuhaus’s appropriation of musicians as investigated in this book. As discussed, this kind of appropriation was far-reaching because its elusive nature meant it could be based on an imagined and modified response. In a certain respect Neuhaus’s persona was not to be seen as a template outlining the role of interpretation, but as a mirror that showed up your current limitations—which you had to work to improve by yourself. Addressing this issue in different terms, Vera Gornostaeva proposed: “Neuhaus led you into the world of art if you wanted to. Not everyone wanted it.”89 It cannot be ignored that Gilels had grown up in a society that demanded more objectivity, and arguably, driven by industrialization and modernism, a greater demand for “precision.” His critical attitude to Neuhaus’s interpretations led him to the conclusion that his professor “saw stylistic truth through the lens of Romantic spectacles.”90 Thus, just as Gilels saw his professor as “a product of the traditions of the past [nineteenth] century,” he existed in certain ways for Neuhaus as a representative of the generation about which he lamented that “Romanticism is fading away.” Perhaps it is this generational distance that had prevented Neuhaus’s and Gilels’s artistic personalities from fusing and thus created the friction in their relationship. It must be remembered that Neuhaus did see music as an independent, absolute language in itself, despite his propensity for metaphor. Gilels, however, stripped back Romantic metaphysics and program from his engagement with music far more overtly. Rather than speak, like Neuhaus, of getting to know a piece by overindulging in it and “weeping” over its beauty at home, Gilels talked about this same stage of interpretative preparation as a strategic “chess game.”91 Gilels’s discussions about musical interpretation with Barenboim are typified by definite instructions relating to speed, dynamics, and phrase length much more than to evocative moods or narratives.

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The absence of evocative language or metaphor in Gilels’s interpretative process can be traced in the language of other pianists of that generation: Yakov Zak and Maria Grinberg, for instance, who had nonetheless impressed Neuhaus with their interpretations. As indicated in this study, these pianists saw themselves as breaking free from the limitations of Romanticism that they believed Neuhaus typified. Gilels advised: “The language of music is wide. Romanticism is only one aspect of music—there are others, and these have their own worlds, their own traditions, and their own laws. [Unfortunately, Neuhaus’s Romanticism] imprinted itself on everything.”92 Thus, it is evident that in regard to “poetic imagery” and the verbalization of elusive metaphors, which were indispensable to Neuhaus’s mind carried less weight in the ideals of the next generation—with notable exceptions such as Richter. However, although pianists like Gilels felt they had successfully negotiated the limitations of Neuhaus’s Romantic subjectivity, it is nonetheless interesting that poetic imagery does appear from time to time in their discussions on interpretation, often in the most unexpected contexts. For instance, writing about Prokofiev’s melodic language, Gilels compares it to an “alpine flower” and speaks of the pianist needing to be in awe of its scent and beauty.93 What the evaluations of Gilels and Richter have demonstrated so far is that Neuhaus’s influence did not arise out of a traditional didactic capacity that explored issues such as technique and artistic individuality, nor did his influence lie in any apparent universality or accessibility of his metaphors and extramusical associations. Is it possible to speak therefore of other factors common to both Richter and Gilels that be said to stem from Neuhaus’s influence? What Neuhaus seems to have encouraged, if not developed, in both Gilels and Richter was their faith in the enigmatic nature of music based on the deepest respect for the markings in a score. Neuhaus’s idea of the interpreter as needing to have a highly developed moral duty was one shared by Gilels and Richter. Speaking of the spiritual and moral height required of an interpreter, Gilels wrote: Communication with Classical music is for me the greatest spiritual act— the expression of life’s greatest “credo.” One requires immense and absolute purity to stand one-on-one with the work and look it straight in the eyes (without “veils” or “curtains”), capture its features and expression. Every time you turn over the first pages, you strive to understand what the author thought and felt. Evidently, each time the result is not quite right, and so you solve this question again and again—your whole life.94

Like Neuhaus, Gilels believed in the humility that an interpreter needed to have in recognizing the superiority of the composer. Refusing to squander the emotional implication of any small marking left by the composer to the interpreter, in the same way as Neuhaus, Gilels considered it his duty to play from

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an urtext edition and with a critical awareness of the composer and his time: “Any work, created by an author is felt and thought through. As an interpreter, apart from knowing the tonality [etc.] I must investigate what that artist really thought and felt. I must know his aesthetics, his philosophy, his thoughts. . . .”95 The fact that Gilels’s adopted approach of scrutinizing the score for the smallest of emotional clues must have been influenced to some degree by Neuhaus, can be seen in his own admission that he had not been accustomed to such a pedantic approach during his rigorous studies in Odessa: “In my youth I was sometimes careless with my attitude to the score, and even Reingbald sometimes ignored this, or did not notice it. To be let off with such textual inaccuracies with Neuhaus was impossible: like an inspector of the GAI [traffic police] on the street, he immediately stopped and ‘fined’ you. And thank God that I came across such control!”96 Furthermore, despite Gilels’s suspicion of bringing a Romantic aesthetic to all interpreted works, his understanding of his role as an interpreter followed the Romantic Realist aesthetics, modeled by Stanislavsky, as adopted by Neuhaus. Gilels talked about an interpreter’s need to adapt himself to the work and to embody the composer’s feelings and thoughts as he believes are indicated in the score: “An interpreter needs to be, if you like, a chameleon—an interpreter must adapt to the composer all the time, ‘change his colors,’ so to speak.”97 In this way, Gilels recognized spiritual and cultural height in an interpreter as necessary, rather than desirable, in order to embody the experiences of a composer expressed in a composition. Richter too subscribed to similar ideas about interpretation. He considered it of vital importance to observe the accuracy of markings, and saw the interpreter embodying the work, by way of being its reflection: “The interpreter [carries] out the composer’s intentions to the letter. He doesn’t add anything that isn’t already in the work. If he’s talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.”98 Yet, aside from these shared aspects, a crucial difference sets Gilels’s and Richter’s definitions of interpretation apart from Neuhaus’s. When Neuhaus talked about the interpreter, he talked of someone who does not simply reflect or attempt to capture a likeness, but about one who, faced with a composition, “reworked it in his own way.”99 Faced with the task of interpretation, Neuhaus was unafraid to pass the identity of the composer through the filter of his own imagination to make it fit within his unique set of experiences. The resultant transformation of a composer, albeit at times unconscious, was such that it directly took on aspects of Neuhaus’s own “self.” Indeed, in Neuhaus’s case, “interpretation” was not the composer’s work reflected in the interpreter as identified by Richter. Rather, interpretation was a process in which the symbol of the work provides a window into the most intimate and complex elements

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of the interpreter’s own “soul.” Therefore, in seeking to interpret a composer, despite Neuhaus’s claim that all his actions were dictated by moral and ethical considerations that placed him in a role of unquestioning servitude and quasireligious fervor before a composer, the result was that Neuhaus undertook a solipsistic journey of self-interpretation. Neuhaus’s view of interpretation put the pianist-interpreter into the center of the argument (composer-score-interpreter) in a way that both Gilels and Richter avoided. Even speaking about their own interpretations, neither of the two pianists spoke of their own potentially transformative influence over the music. Richter, for instance, denied that he did anything other than “play” exactly what is “on the page.”100 Neuhaus’s idea of autobiographicality was much more forthcoming about the possibility of misinterpretation as a result of the processes of assimilation and appropriation inherent in his particular Realist aesthetic of interpretation. This is especially significant given that an admission of misinterpretation is problematic for an interpreter who, like Neuhaus, demonstrates a “modern,” pedantic sensibility to the score as it seems to undermine his quest for “truthfulness” and authenticity. Intriguingly, despite Neuhaus’s obsession with moral frameworks, he was unfazed by the conflict that was produced when interpreter and composer do not see “eye-to-eye.” Neuhaus embraced conflict as a fertile ground that was necessary for the interpreter to find and give voice to his own individuality as long as it followed that paradox of searching not for the self, but for the attempt to “fall in love with another ‘I.’”101 Neuhaus consistently spoke of conflict as a dialectic and not a dichotomy and, true to his upbringing in late Romantic German philosophy, his understanding of art and life was suffused with his inclination toward Hegelian thought: “Dialectic is in everything. [. . .] Based on thorough examination, one must give one’s own interpretation.”102 Thus, as an interpreter searching for the “truth” of a work, Neuhaus must have ultimately accepted that the interpreted work was neither his own “I,” nor that of the composer—but, as identified by Stanislavsky—a synthesis of the two, where the “I” of the interpreter is no less important: “Truth is born in conflict.”103 If we are to speak of Neuhaus’s legacy, it must be of one that seeks interpretation as an expression of the self and that is unafraid of transforming, with the self, all that it comes into contact with. What we are observing is the legacy of an artist-philosopher. This expressive desire of one’s artistic will is something that can be neither directly taught nor inherited. The expression of one’s artistic will can, however, be encouraged through example, and its scope widened by the assimilation of a wealth of emotional and intellectual experiences. As Neuhaus indicated, the metamorphosis into an interpreter lies in the hands, or rather soul, of each individual pianist. All that can be done is to create the environment in which the unique transformations may take shape:

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Let me use a crude metaphor: imagine that someone who passionately loves flowers has a piece of land that is made up of sand and stone [. . .]. His passion is stronger than the stones and sand, and he patiently drags humus to this spot [. . .] so that the flowerbed blooms. [When] I use metaphor, quote poetry etc., all I am doing is trying to create the earth, the humus, where perhaps with good care beautiful flowers might grow.104

It was advice that shaped every element of Neuhaus’s own artistic life. Finding himself in the apparently barren wilderness of Soviet Russia he brought together select and displaced fragments of Russia’s past that had been destroyed, ignored, and otherwise left to decay by the regime of the socialist state. Transformed and reinterpreted, these fragments permeated Neuhaus’s mind where they fused with his cosmopolitan erudition. Endowed with a new significance they flourished into the ethereal expressivity of his artistry, which adorned the Soviet cultural landscape for nearly half a century.

Conclusion In life Neuhaus’s effect on those around him was profound. His death on October 10, 1964, was mourned as the end of a cultural epoch not only by his closest friends and students, but beyond: “Despite not formally being his student, with news of Neuhaus’s death, in our minds we were saying farewell to a person who had become the symbol of artistry and high spirituality in music. For me this loss severed my ties with the conservatory that had meant so much to me.”1 The idea that the rich inner world supporting his interpretations, his unique autopsychography, was so specific to Neuhaus that it precluded its being passed on as an inheritable legacy, can likewise seem to advocate a bitter sense of finality. Neuhaus thought it inconceivable for a pianist’s inner world of knowledge, emotions, and daily life not to be reflected in some way in his interpretations. As a pedagogue, however, Neuhaus did not try to ingrain his own experiences in the student, but rather tried to awaken the student’s curiosity and capacity for expression. Although Neuhaus gladly left tantalizing elements of his inner world as revealed in his articles, open lessons, performances, and lecture-recitals, it was a spiritual labyrinth that he was reluctant to make accessible. Despite being a vibrant and sometimes scandalous figure on the Soviet music scene, known for his fiery temperament, dreamy gaze, and liberal tongue, few outside his closest circle knew much about his life. Places and events that held emotional significance for him and acted as artistic images that shaped his interpretations, were far too irrelevant to be useful to those who did not share in these experiences. Even when he made direct references to his beloved literary titles, not many could claim that their knowledge of these texts was anywhere as thorough or profound as his, even after spending years in his company. His manner of associated thought was fast-paced and interdisciplinary and it delighted him to weave into his written work unidentified citations of poetry and philosophy. It is, however, unlikely that most of Neuhaus’s audiences would be able to instantly identify and appreciate these fully. Neuhaus’s terrifying reproaches—such as his famous “You have not read Kant!”—were always left open-ended and were never followed by an explanation.

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More often than not, his subjectivity brought together seemingly disparate concepts that evoked a world of culture beyond the canons glorified by socialism. Yet, because they dealt with abstract phenomena largely on the periphery of the state’s priorities, they were tolerated as merely signs of eccentricity. Open criticisms of Soviet achievement, such as his demonstrative insistence that Soviet art had still not achieved anything of historical significance during the haunting meeting summoned by the Union of Soviet Composers denouncing Shostakovich in 1936, or his programming of Medtner’s music during the Stalinist ban, never seemed to cause Neuhaus any significant political repercussions. Despite his German nationality and refusal to evacuate Moscow during 1942, coupled with his outspoken criticism of Soviet policy during his interrogation while held in Lubyanka, he miraculously, and no doubt through the influence and courage of friends, emerged relatively unscathed. Across the USSR people were executed for far lesser reasons and Lubyanka was not a place one expected to leave alive. Not exonerated until twenty-five years after his death, Neuhaus nonetheless had received coveted awards after Stalin’s death and was eventually permitted to once more form part of artistic delegations sent to the Soviet Bloc. Paradoxically, it was the climate of Soviet Russia with its propaganda policy of making art easily understood by the masses that intensified the complexity of Neuhaus’s subjectivity. Compelled to define artistic truth outside the usurped official narrative of Socialist Realism Neuhaus set about creating his own. Discussing the cosmopolitan world of Germanic High Romantic and wider European thought of his youth with sympathetic friends, such as Boris Pasternak, Neuhaus encountered a corpus of fin-de-siècle thought that held truth to be the outpouring of one’s life experiences into art—transformed by Neuhaus into his distinct notion of autobiographicality. Cleansing this Silver Age aesthetic from the rhetoric of revolution and the aspirations of Russian Orthodoxy, Neuhaus clothed his vision of being a Russian artist in its modified decadent robes. Against a backdrop of communism, which focused on defining an identity for the masses, Neuhaus thus celebrated the individual. However, just as the philosophy of his beloved Nietzsche was banned by the regime, the achievements of the Silver Age were expunged from Soviet consciousness. Restrictions of censorship and ideology prevented Neuhaus from fully communicating his adopted aesthetic; instead he offered extensive webs of more acceptable substitution and tantalizing references. Because Neuhaus’s vision of autobiographicality was bound by the artist’s experiences, the truth he searched for was never static, but existed as a malleable concept. As one’s life acquired new experiences it brought repercussions. What had previously seemed important changed. New experiences fortified, enhanced, annihilated, or undermined old ones. Bound like the Demon in a perpetual state of self-searching, Neuhaus’s performances, celebrated for

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their spontaneity and emotional directness, always redefined themselves. In this dynamic flow of ideas subjectivity and conflict became a fertile ground. Whether this meant ignoring the definition of a word in his mother tongue, displacing a composer from his epoch, or making himself a spiritual citizen of a country that he had artistically made in his imagination, Neuhaus was unafraid of creating new worlds. His thirst for new experiences meant that these worlds had evolved throughout his life. In his final years he was beginning to form new associations, which undoubtedly would have influenced the old: His preoccupation with Thomas Mann and Albert Schweitzer became all-consuming, and finally after years of trying and resisting, he was slowly beginning to find he had a sympathetic spot for the music of Anton Webern. Autobiographicality dictated that to create out of life’s experiences, the artist was a child of his time. Ironically, however, to adopt this spiritual worldview of the fin de siècle against a backdrop of the alien policies of Soviet Russia that unexpectedly became his domain, Neuhaus found himself displaced in time and space. It was a displacement of which he was keenly aware. His attitude to music was therefore inextricably linked not to the cultural canons of his time, but with the cultural life he carved out for himself. With the general world order shifting toward the more objectified environment we encounter still today, Neuhaus feared the onset of an age that turned its back on subjectivity as the ultimate governing force of art. He knew himself that his own appropriation and transformation of ideas from Russia’s Silver Age that ran as threads through his pianism and adopted Russian psyche reflected a displaced cultural memory based on ideals that even without the repressions of the Soviet state would already have become antiquated through the mere passage of time. It is exactly the ability to admit the deeply personal nature of his sympathies and experiences with all their virtues and inherent blindness that make his legacy into a timeless symbol—and one whose example can communicate with us even with the passing of generations. The loss of our own ties to cultural memory is a fear that we share today. In relation to pianism, Kenneth Hamilton summarized his thoughts that despite “talent,” modern pianism is “often more uniform and strait-laced” than that of the “Great” Romantic tradition from Liszt to Horowitz.2 Alan Walker’s pessimism has been even more forthright: “Today we live in an age of anonymity. For the first time in musical history pianists seem willing to suppress their artistic personalities. [. . .] They are to be heard in most of the large concert halls of the world every season, to say nothing of the teeming hundreds vacating the world’s conservatories year after year, en route to oblivion.”3 It is indeed a fear that extends far beyond the confines of pianism into our wider creativity and day-to-day lives. Using pianism as a starting point, Neuhaus’s subjectivity sublimated the individuation of the artist. Seeking a world beyond the banality of Socialist Realism’s celebration of mass culture, its accomplishment was anything but

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an exact science. As Richter explained: “Neuhaus would take out your soul, make some experiments on it and return it to you—enriched and beautiful.”4 In Neuhaus’s distinct worldview, the music of a composer was never a design to follow, but rather a mirror through which the pianist reflects himself. Far from fearing this, we should take courage. Reflections are honest appraisals that let us take stock of where we are now and prompt us to refine ourselves through experimentation. Reflections are also ephemeral. Their transient nature inspires us to look beyond the boundaries that are made for us, and those, that at times, we have made for ourselves.

Discography Neuhaus’s discography is compiled from the surviving recordings held in the Russian State sound archive, Gosteleradiofond (Russian State Archive for Radio and Television). D = 33.3 rpm P = 78 rpm T = Tape recording

Studio Recordings Arensky, A. Suite for Two Pianos, “Silhouettes,” op. 23 [with Stanislav Neuhaus] (1950: P-13262)

Bach, J. S. Das wohltemperierte Klavier. Book 1. BWV 846 Nos. 13–18 (1951: D-15060; D-166054)

Beethoven, L. van. Piano Sonata no. 14, op. 27, no. 2, “Moonlight” (1950: P-11805) Piano Sonata no. 17, op. 31, no. 2, “Tempest” (1946: P-3098) Piano Sonata no. 24, op. 78 (1950: D-9620) Piano Sonata no. 30, op. 109 (1950: D-9939) Piano Sonata no. 31, op. 110 (1947: D-2966) Piano Trio no. 7, op. 97, “Archduke” [with Dmitri Tsiganov (violin) and Sergei Shirinsky (cello)] (1951: D-14212) Violin Sonata no. 9, op. 47, “Kreutzer,” I. Adagio Sostenuto-Presto [with Miron Polyakin] (1938: P-19051)

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Brahms, J. Klavierstücke op. 76: No. 1 Capriccio (1951: D-15692) No. 3 Intermezzo (1947: D-1708) No. 4 Intermezzo (1947: D-1708) No. 5 Capriccio (1951: D-16657) No. 6 Intermezzo (1951: D-15694) No. 7 Intermezzo (1951: D15695) No. 8 Capriccio (1951: D-15870) Klavierstücke op. 119: No. 1 Intermezzo (1952: D-1706) No. 2 Intermezzo (1947: D-1706)

Chopin, F. Barcarolle op. 60 (1952: D-19479) Berceuse op. 57 (1953: P-018053) Impromptu no. 3, op. 51 (1953: D-0180055) Mazurka op. 41, no. 2 (1949: P-11128) Mazurka op. 50, no. 3 (1946: P-3118) Mazurka op. 50, no. 3 (1949: P-3119) Mazurkas op. 56, nos. 1, 3 (1953: D-25357) Mazurka op. 59, no. 1 (1949: P-11124) Mazurka op. 63, no. 2 (1953: P-018976) Mazurka op. 63, no. 3 (1953: P-018077) Nocturne op. 9, no. 3 (1949: P-11122) Nocturnes op. 55, nos. 1, 2 (1949: P-11123) Nocturne op. 62, no. 2 (1951: D-16656) Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 11 [Bolshoi All-Union Symphony Radio Orchestra directed by Alexander Gauk] (1951: D-15055) Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 61 (1952: D-19478)

Debussy, C. Preludes. Book 1: No. 1. Danseuses de Delphes (1948: P-018059, D-3070) No. 4. Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (1948: P-018059, D-3070) No. 5. Les collines d’Anacapri (1948: P-018059, D-3070) No. 6. Des pas sur la neige (1948: D-3069) No. 9. La sérénade interrompue (1948: D-3069) No. 12. Minstrels (1948: P-018059, D-3070) Preludes. Book 2: No. 3. La Puerta del Vino (Mouvement de Habanera) (1948: D-3069) No. 5. Bruyères (1948: D-3069)

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Liszt, F. Piano Concerto no. 2 [USSR State Symphony Orchestra directed by Vyacheslav Degtiarenko] (1946: D-19635)

Mozart, W. A. Rondo K. 511 (1950: P-13233) Sonata for Two Pianos K. 228 [with Stanislav Neuhaus] (1950: P-13261)

Prokofiev, S. Visions Fugitives op. 22 (1956: P-021299, P-018239)

Rachmaninov, S. Etude-Tableau op. 39, no. 2 (1946: D-15690) Prelude op. 23, no. 4 (1946: P-3346) Prelude op. 23, no. 1 (1946: P-3355)

Schumann, R. Frauenliebe und Leben op. 42 [with Nataliya Rozhdestvenskaya] (1952: D-19057) Kreisleriana op. 16 (1951: D-10593)

Shostakovich, D. Preludes op. 34, nos. 1, 2, 3, 7, 8 (1956: P-018240, P-018244) Prelude op. 34, no. 11 (1957: P-018245) Preludes op. 34, nos. 13, 14, 16, 18, 19 (1956: P-018246, P-018250) Preludes op. 34, nos. 22–23 (1957: P-018251, P-018252)

Skryabin, A. Piano Concerto op. 20 [Bolshoi Symphonic All-Union Radio Orchestra directed by Nikolai Golovanov] (1946: P-09515, D-1016) 2 Poems op. 32, no. 1 (1950: P-13343) 2 Poems op. 32, no. 2 (1950: P-13344) Poem op. 59, no. 1 (1930s: P-018065) 2 Poems op. 63 (1930s: P-018066) Preludes op. 11, nos. 9–10 (1930s: P-018063) Preludes op. 11 (1948: D-3860) 6 Preludes op. 13 (1953: D-25363)

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Fantasie op. 28 (1953: D-25381)

Recital Recordings 1948. Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (D-21783) Chopin, F. Piano Concerto no. 1, op. 11 [USSR State Symphony Orchestra directed by Nikolai Anosov] March 5, 1949. Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (T-016844) Chopin, F. Piano Sonata no. 3, op. 58 Nocturnes op. 55, nos. 1–2 Fantasie op. 49 Piano Sonata no. 2, op. 35 Mazurkas op. 59, nos. 1–3 Valse op. 42, no. 5 Mazurka op. 6, no. 4 Mazurka op. 63, no. 1 Nocturne op. 15, no. 2 Mazurka op. 68, no. 4 October 11, 1949. Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory (T-01092) Chopin, F. Rondo op. 16 Nocturne op. 32, no. 1 Nocturne op. 27, no. 1 Trois Nouvelles Etudes Concerto Allegro op. 46 Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 61 Impromptu no. 3, op. 51 Mazurkas op. 63, nos. 1–3 Barcarolle op. 60 Ballade no. 3, op. 47 Berceuse op. 57 April 23, 1958. Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, an evening dedicated to his 70th Birthday (T-44420) Schumann, R. Fantasie op. 17 (Durchaus fantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen; Im Legenden-Ton) Skryabin, A. Fantasie op. 28 Feuillet d’Album op. 45, no. 1 Chopin, F

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Polonaise-Fantaisie op. 61 Mazurka op. 50, no. 3

Lessons Neuhaus’s lessons were recorded by Pavel Lobanov between 1954 and 1962. At this time he taught not only at the Moscow Conservatory but also at the Gnessin Institute. These were not professional recordings. Initially they were recorded at Neuhaus’s flat on Chkalova Street on a relatively basic magnetic tape recorder. With the advent of better technology further recordings were made in 1962 on magnetic tape recorders loaned to Lobanov by the director of the Gnessin School, N. A. Svetozarova, and were made at the Moscow Conservatory. These so-called sounded lessons (zvuchashchiye uroki) were first played publicly on October 14, 1966, in the concert hall of the Gnessin Institute. Interest in these recordings was so great that a selection was subsequently issued by Melodiya in 1968, and reissued several times on LP since:

Debussy, C. La soirée dans Grenade (from Estampes), with Ėsey Ėlinayte [Esther Yellin] (1962: D-022885; D-022886)

Chopin, F. Ballade no. 4, op. 52, with Ėsey Ėlinayte [Esther Yellin] (1962: D-022887; D-022887)

Schumann, R. Etudes Symphoniques op. 13, with Alexei Nasedkin (1962: D-019959; D-019960)

All in all, Lobanov recorded Neuhaus working on nearly thirty different pieces with various students. The magnetic tapes are housed in the archive of the Gnessin Academy. Recently, a few additional recordings of lessons has been made publicly available (supplement to Khitruk: 2008) along with some short interviews and silent video footage of Neuhaus:

Bach, J. Prelude and Fugue in C-sharp Minor from Das wohltemperierte Klavier. Book 1. BWV 846, with A. Nasedkin (1962)

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Beethoven, L. van. Finale from Piano Sonata no. 21, op. 53, “Waldstein,” with T. Grodskaya (1954)

Brahms, J. Piano Concerto no. 2, op. 83, with Ė. Sel’kina (1954–5)

Chopin, F. Ballade no. 1, op. 23, with I. Yudina (1962) Ballade no. 4, op. 52, with I. Yudina (1962) Ballade no. 4, op. 52, with Ė. Ėlinayte (1962) Etude op. 10, no. 4, with Ė. Sel’kina (1955)

Debussy, C. La soirée dans Grenade (from Estampes), with Ė. Ėlinayte (1962) Jardins sous la pluie (from Estampes), with Ė. Ėlinayte (1962)

Medtner, N. Skaski op. 20, with Ė. Sel’kina (1954)

Mozart, W. A. Piano Sonata K. 333, with A. Nasedkin (1962)

Prokofiev, S. Visions Fugitives op. 22, nos. 5, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, with L. Vayser (1962)

Schumann, R. Piano Sonata no. 2, op. 22, with G. Gordon (1955)

Skryabin, A. Désir op. 57, no. 1, with T. Grodskaya (1955)

Select Glossary of Names AKHMADULINA, Bella Akhatovna (1937–2010). Russian poet and writer who was part of the Russian New Wave literary movement. Her writing was often critical of Soviet authority, for instance openly opposing the persecution of Boris Pasternak. Her popularity meant that throughout the 1960s she recited her poetry to sold-out stadiums. AKHMATOVA, Anna Andreyevna (1889–1966). Literary pseudonym of one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century (Anna Gorenko) known for her restrained emotion and Classicism of form. Married the Symbolist poet Nikolai Gumilyov, and together they led the Acmeist movement, but divorced in 1918. Although Boris Pasternak proposed to her several times she was married to Vladimir Shileiko (until 1928), and finally Nikolai Punin (who died in a Siberian labor camp in 1953). ALEXEYEV, Alexander Dmitriyevich (1913–96). Musicologist and professor of the history of the piano, piano method, and theory of pianism at the Moscow Conservatory from 1943. Studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Alexander Goldenweiser, graduating from his class in 1938. As a postgraduate he studied history and theory of pianism with Grigory Kogan, graduating in 1941. ASAFYEV, Boris Vladimirovich (1884–1949). Influential Soviet musicologist (writing under the pseudonym Igor Glebov from 1914) and composer. From 1943 Asafyev was director of Research at the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1948 was made chairman of the Union of Soviet Composers. ASMUS, Valentin Ferdinandovich (1894–1975). Philosopher and aesthetic historian whose interests in German philosophy, especially of Kant, contributed to the continuation of the classical European philosophical traditions through the early Soviet era. As a professor at Moscow State University he worked on influential editions, including of Losev and Plato.

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BARENBOIM, Lev Aronovich (1906–85). Eminent Soviet musicologist and pianist born in Odessa but studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Felix Blumenfeld. In 1961 he became head of the departments of musical history, theory, and musicology at the Leningrad Conservatory. BARERE, Simon (1896–1951). Renowned Russian pianist known for his formidable speed and colorful tone. Studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Anna Esipova and Felix Blumenfeld. BARTH, Karl Heinrich (1847–1922). Highly respected pedagogue and musician. Born in Prussia (now Baltiysk, Russia), he studied with the leading pianists of Liszt’s circle: Hans von Bülow, Hans von Bronsart, and Carl Tausig. Famous for his regular performances with Joseph Joachim, and Joachim’s wife, the singer Amalie Schneeweiss. His most influential teaching position was from 1910 as a professor at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, where his students included Artur Rubinstein, Wilhelm Kempff, and Heinrich Neuhaus. BAUDELAIRE, Charles (1821–67). French poets and essayist whose style of prose-poetry was intrinsic to the development of a generation of poets including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. He is credited with the term “modernité” to define the ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis and the need for an artist to capture this in his work. BELIY, Andrei (1880–1934). Pseudonym of the symbolist poet, writer, and cultural critic Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev. Vladimir Nabokov thought his novel, Sankt Peterburg, to be one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Strongly influenced by Vladimir Solovyov, he was also a friend of Alexander Blok. He became one of the strongest influences on the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold. BELZA, Igor Fyodorovich (1904–94). Music historian and composer. Born to a Polish noble family who moved to Kiev after the outbreak of the First World War. Joined the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory after the outbreak of the Second World War. BENDITSKY, Semyon Solomonovich (1908–93). Russian pianist and pedagogue who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1934. Between 1934 and 1946 he taught

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at the Sverdlovsk Conservatory, and then became a professor of piano at the Saratov Conservatory. He was married to Berta Marants. BERDYAYEV, Nikolai Alexandrovich (1880–1921). Religious and political philosopher dedicated to the idea of the salvific nature of the arts, and of Russian Orthodoxy as presenting a possibility for contextualizing Russian nationalism through the Third International. He was expelled from Soviet Russia on the “philosophers’ ship” in 1922. BERMAN, Lazar Naumovich (1930–2005). Known for his fearless virtuoso technique, he was a pianist who had studied with Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory. Despite his fame in the USSR, due to various political issues, he was not widely known in the West until 1975. BLUMENFELD, Felix Mikhailovich (1863–1931). One of the most influential musicians in Russian history. Active as a composer, conductor, pianist, and pedagogue in Kiev, the Petrograd Conservatory, and the Moscow Conservatory. His most famous students included Vladimir Horowitz, Simon Barere, Maria Yudina, and Maria Grinberg. BLUMENFELD, Olga Mikhailovna (1856–1936). Russian pianist and pedagogue. Sister of Felix Blumenfeld. Wife of Gustav Neuhaus, and mother of Heinrich and Natalya Neuhaus. BORODKINA, Militsa Sergeyevna (1890–1962). Friend and fiancée of Heinrich Neuhaus from Elisavetgrad, later, from 1933 his second wife. Mother of Militsa Neuhaus (later Lidskaya). BOROVSKY, Alexander Kirillovich (1889–1968). Russian-born pianist who studied with Anna Esipova at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, graduating with the Great Gold Medal and Rubinstein Prize. He had a successful career as a soloist throughout Russia and gave master classes at the Moscow Conservatory between 1915 and 1920. Subsequently, he toured extensively in Europe. In 1941 he settled in the United States, becoming a professor of piano at the Boston University in 1956. BRUMBERG, Leonid Efimovich (1925–2010). Russian pianist famous for giving the premiere performances of several works by Alfred Schnittke. Studied with Heinrich Neuhuas at the Moscow Conservatory and then became his assistant. Emigrated in 1981 and became based in Vienna.

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BRYUSOV, Valeriy Yakovlevich (1873–1942). One of the principal poets and writers of the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a critic and translator whose work made many previously inaccessible texts available to Russian readers, including works of Emile Verhaeren, Paul Verlaine, and Edgar Allan Poe. CHALIAPIN, Fyodor Ivanovich (1873–1938). One of the most famous opera singers of his time who was known for his deep and expressive bass voice. Although he possessed a wide repertory, his signature role became that of Boris Godunov in the opera by Mussorgsky. His connections with Sergei Rachmaninov and Konstantin Stanislavsky had important consequences for musical life, artistic tastes, and cultural expectations in Russia. After 1921 Chaliapin left Russia and was based mainly in Paris. CHERNETSKAYA-GESHELINA, Esfir Alexandrovna (1890–1922). Russian pianist and pedagogue who studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Vasily Safonov. She taught at the Odessa Conservatory where her students included Berta Reingbald. CHERNYSHEVSKY, Nikolai Gavrilovich (1828–89). Russian materialist philosopher and critic who had a strong influence on the views of Vladimir Lenin. His novel Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?) (which enraged Fyodor Dostoevsky) set out ideas of Russian populism or narodizm that agitated for the revolutionary overthrow of autocracy and the foundation of a socialist society based on the peasant commune. CHISTYAKOV, Pavel Petrovich (1832–1919). Russian painter and one of the leading reformers of the pedagogical systems for teaching art in Russia who called for greater professionalism in art and spoke against the “academic” manner of painting. He was central to the development of the Russian Realist style of the latter nineteenth century. Students included Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Polenov, Ilya Repin, Valentin Serov, and Vasily Surikov. DELSON, Viktor Yulyevich (1907–70). Influential Soviet musicologist and pianist who studied with Vladimir Sofronitsky and Leonid Nikolayev in Leningrad. He subsequently graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he had studied in the piano class of Lev Oborin, and in the theory and history class of Grigory Kogan. DUBYANSKY, Alexander Markovich (1900–1920). One of the most promising Russian pianists of his generation. Studied with Anna Esipova until 1914 before becoming a student of Felix Blumenfeld at the

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Petrograd Conservatory. Befriended Alexander Skryabin and became a notable interpreter of his music. He was the dedicatee of numerous works by Karol Szymanowski, and was admired by Ferruccio Busoni. Left for Kiev in 1918 and committed suicide in 1920. DURILIN, Sergei Nikolayevich (1886–1954). Religious philosopher and cultural historian who was particularly interested in the Russian legend of Kitezh. From 1912 he was the secretary of the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society. EICHINGER, Sylvia Fedorovna (1906–87). Swiss-born violinist and, after the death of Miltsa Borodkina-Neuhaus in 1962, formally the third wife of Heinrich Neuhaus (having already lived with him for several decades previously). FEINBERG, Samuil Yevgeniyevich (1890–1962). Eminent pianist, composer, and theorist singled out for his intellect, who had studied with Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory. Famously presented both books of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier for his graduation recital and became known as a Bach-specialist. He was a professor of the Moscow Conservatory from 1922, and was known for his many transcriptions, as well as for being an influential interpreter of Skryabin and Beethoven and a composer in his own right. FICHTENHOLZ, Lidiya Izrailevna (b. 1924). Studied piano with Berta Reingbald in Odessa before coming to Moscow to study with Heinrich Neuhaus between 1936 and 1946 at the Central Music School for Children, and then at the Moscow Conservatory. FITELBERG, Grzegorz (1878–1953). Polish composer, violinist, and conductor. One of the founders of the modernist movement Młoda Polska (Young Poland) along with Karol Szymanowski, Apolinary Szeluto, and Ludomir Różycki. FLIER, Yakov Vladimirovich (1912–77). An eminent pianist of his day celebrated for his sensitive Romantic style of playing. After studying at the Moscow Conservatory with Konstantin Igumnov he concertized widely from 1934 until 1949, when he stopped due to a hand injury. He returned to the stage in the 1960s making international tours to Europe, Japan, and the United States. Taught as an assistant at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1945 until his death. His most famous students included Mikhail Pletnev, Bella Davidovich, and Rodion Schedrin.

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FLORENSKY, Pavel Alexandrovich (1882–1937). Religious Orthodox priest, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist (involved in the plan for the electrification of rural Russia). A prominent member of the Symbolist movement who published in journals with his friend Andrei Beliy. Arrested in 1928, and then rearrested and exiled to a labor camp 1933. Declined numerous opportunities to go into exile in Paris and was sentenced to death by an extrajudicial NKVD troika in 1937. FOMINA, Natalya Alexandrovna (1930–2013). Studied piano with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory between 1953 and 1960. She went on to teach at the Kazan Conservatory of Music. GABRICHEVSKY, Alexander Georgiyevich (1891–1968). Russian philosopher, translator, and cultural critic. A close associate of the Russian philosopher Gustav Shpet (who introduced Husserlian transcendental phenomenology into Russia). Particularly noted for his writing on Renaissance art and architecture, and for his role in the first Russian edition of the complete works of Thomas Mann. GAUTIER, Theophile (1811–72). French Romantic poet, novelist, and critic who advocated the philosophy of “art for art’s sake.” Among those who widely esteemed his work were Balzac, Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, Proust, and Oscar Wilde. The philosophy formed a vital reference point for Symbolism, Decadence, and Modernism. GE, Nikolai Nikolayevich (1831–94). Russian Realist painter and early Symbolist famous for his works focusing on religious and historical subjects. A frequent visitor at the Pasternak household and friend of Lev Tolstoy. GILELS, Emil Grigoryevich (1916–85). One of the most famous and highly decorated pianists and recording artists of the twentieth century, and the first pianist to play in the United States after the Second World War. After studies in Odessa with Berta Reingbald he joined the class of Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory between 1935 and 1937. A sporadic teaching position at the Moscow Conservatory was constantly interrupted by his concert tours. GINZBURG, Anton Giliarovich (1930–2002). Pianist who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory in 1953. Sometimes performing under the pseudonym Anton Osetrov, he was particularly known for his ensemble performances with cellist Daniil Shafran.

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GINZBURG, Grigory Romanovich (1904–61). Pianist who was largely credited for his role in the revival of interest in Liszt’s piano transcriptions in Russia. Studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Alexander Goldenweiser and won fourth prize in the International Chopin Competition in 1927 in Warsaw. He was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1935 (after being an assistant from 1929). GIPPIUS, Zinaida Nikolayevna (1869–1945). Major poet, novelist, and theurgic thinker of Russian Symbolism. Married to Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Although a critic of tsarist rule after 1905, she denounced the 1917 Revolution and emigrated initially to Poland in 1918, and subsequently to France and Italy. Exile became an important subject in her work. GODOWSKY, Leopold (1870–1938). Pianist, composer, and pedagogue born in Soshly near Vilnius in imperial Russia. Despite brief studies with Ernst Rudorff he claimed to be largely selftaught. One of the first pianists to talk about the idea of “weight principle,” which remains important to many pianists today. A protégé and friend of Camille Saint-Saëns, he concertized widely in Europe and America. In 1906 he took over Busoni’s master classes at the Vienna Academy of Music. At the outbreak of the First World War, Godowsky left Vienna for the United States. His most significant pupils were Issay Dobrowen and Heinrich Neuhaus. GOLDENWEISER, Alexander Borisovich (1875–1961). One of Russia’s most important pedagogues and pianists as well as a composer and writer. He studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Alexander Siloti and Pavel Pabst, and composition with Mikhail IppolitovIvanov, Anton Arensky, and Sergei Taneyev. He became a close acquaintance of Lev Tolstoy, and often played for him and discussed musical aesthetics. His professorship at the Moscow Conservatory lasted from 1906 to his death in 1961. Between 1922 and 1924, and then 1939 and 1942 he was also the director of the Moscow Conservatory. Goldenweiser was involved in setting up the Central Music School (TsMSha), a music school for gifted children. His most famous students included Samuil Feinberg, Rosa Tamarkina, Tatyana Nikolayeva, Grigory Ginzburg, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Dmitri Bashkirov, Lazar Berman, and Nikolai Kapustin. GOLUBOVSKAYA, Nadezhda Semyonovna (1891–1975). Russian pianist and pedagogue. Graduated from St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1914 where she studied with Alexandra Rozanova and Sergei Lyapunov, being a contender for the Rubinstein Prize, which was won that year by Sergei

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Prokofiev. She wrote influential books on musical interpretation, Iskusstvo ispolnitelya (1978), and pedaling, Iskusstvo pedalizatsii (1965). GORDON, Grigory Borisovich (b. 1936). Soviet pianist, pedagogue, and musicologist who graduated from Heinrich Neuhaus’s class at the Gnessin Institute in 1952. Gordon has been teaching at the Gnessin Institute since 1963. GORNOSTAEVA, Vera Vasilyena (1929–2015). Pianist and pedagogue who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory from which she graduated in 1955. Between 1955 and 1959 taught at the Gnessin Institute and from 1959 at the Moscow Conservatory where she became a professor in 1966. GRINBERG, Maria Izrayelevna (1908–78). First Soviet pianist to make a complete recording of the Beethoven Sonatas (released in the 1970s). Studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Felix Blumenfeld, and after his death, in the class of Konstantin Igumnov. After initial hardships, including the arrest and execution of her husband, and father, she became a much sought-after pianist in the USSR. When she was later allowed to tour abroad, she undertook fourteen concert tours. She was only made a professor at the Gnessin Institute in 1969. GROSSMAN, Emanuel Iosifovich (1913–54). Russian pianist and laureate of the 1932 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1935. Between 1931 and 1953 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory and between 1943 and 1951 at the Gnessin Institute. GUMILYOV, Nikolai Stepanovich (1886–1921). One of the most influential poets and literary critics of the twentieth century. Cofounder of the Acmeist movement. Arrested and executed by the Cheka on the allegation of participation in the “Tagantsev conspiracy”—a case fabricated by Yakov Agranov, chief organizer of the Stalinist Show Trials and Great Purge in the 1930s—to terrorize intellectuals who were viewed as potentially in opposition to the Bolshevik regime. GUTMAN, Teodor Davidovich (1905–95). Pianist who studied in Kiev with Heinrich Neuhaus. After teaching at the Kiev Conservatory between 1924 and 1926, he spent another five years studying with Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory where he became Neuhaus’s assistant. Gutman had a successful recital career and was a laureate of the

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International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1932. Gutman taught at the Moscow Conservatory between 1930 and 1943. In 1944 he became a professor at the Gnessin Institute and his pedagogical success required him to cease to concertizing. IGUMNOV, Konstantin Nikolayevich (1873–1948). One of Russia’s most important pedagogues and pianists who worked alongside Goldenweiser and Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. He studied piano privately with Nikolai Zverev in Moscow from 1887 with classmates Sergei Rachmaninov and Alexander Skryabin, and in 1888 at the Moscow Conservatory with Alexander Siloti and later with Pavel Pabst, and composition with Sergei Taneyev. Upon graduating from the conservatory in 1894 Igumnov became an acclaimed pianist and sought-after pedagogue. He became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1899, and between 1924 and 1927 its director. His most famous students included Lev Oborin, Maria Grinberg, Yakov Flier, Bella Davidovich, Yakov Milstein, and Rosa Tamarkina. IPPOLITOV-IVANOV, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1859–1935). Russian composer who was most influential in his capacities as a pedagogue and conductor. Became a professor of the Moscow Conservatory in 1893, serving as its director from 1906 until 1922. Restructured the Tiflis School of Music into the Georgian State Conservatory in 1924, and took up the role of principal conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre in 1925. IVANOV, Vyacheslav Ivanovich (1866–1949). Russian Symbolist poet, philosopher, and cultural critic who was a friend and admirer of Alexander Skryabin. Emigrated to Rome in 1924. JUON, Pavel Fedorovich (1872–1940). Composer born in Moscow into a Swiss-German family, he had studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, and violin with Ivan Grzimali. Juon pursued further studies in composition in Berlin. In 1906 he replaced Joseph Joachim as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin (Königlichen Akademischen Hochschule für Musik). Emigrated to Switzerland following the October Russian Revolution in 1917. KELDISH, Yuri Vsevolodovich (1907–95). Important Soviet musicologist, and between 1926 and 1932 a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM). After the disbanding of RAPM, he became a member of the Union of Soviet Composers. From 1930 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor of the history

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of Russian music in 1957, and music history at the Leningrad Conservatory. Between 1957 and 1961 he was the chief editor of the journal Sovetskaya muzïka. KHENTOVA, Sofia Mikhailovna (1922–2002). Best known as a musicologist who wrote about forty books, mainly on pianists, and for her series on Shostakovich. She also taught piano at the Leningrad Conservatory. KHLUDOVA, Tatyana Alexeyevna (1915–57). Soviet pianist, organist, and pedagogue who had studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1941. She went on to become Neuhaus’s assistant from 1947 but died of cancer only ten years later. Neuhaus highly valued her documentation of his lessons, the basis of her doctoral thesis (Moscow, 1954). KLINDWORTH, Karl (1830–1916). German pianist, composer, violinist, and music publisher. A pupil of Liszt from 1852 in Weimar, who became one of his closest friends and disciples. In 1868 accepted Nikolai Rubinstein’s invitation to teach piano at the Moscow Conservatory. While in Russia, he made influential editions of Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s works. In 1882 he returned to Germany. KNUSHEVITSKY, Sviatoslav Nikolayevich (1808–1963). Russian cellist famous for his partnership with David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin as a piano trio, and for his performances as part of the Beethoven Quartet. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1941, becoming a professor in 1950. KOCHAŃSKI, Paweł (1887–1934). Polish violinist born in Odessa in imperial Russia. After touring Europe widely, he returned to Poland in 1907 to teach at the Warsaw Conservatory before succeeding Leopold Auer as a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a close friend of Karol Szymanowski and collaborated with the composer on numerous violin works, most notably Myths (1915) and the first Violin Concerto. After the Russian Revolution he taught in Kiev between 1917 and 1919 before leaving for Poland. He emigrated to the United States to continue his solo career, and taught at the Juilliard School. KOGAN, Grigory Mikhailovich (1901–79). Influential pianist, musicologist, and pedagogue whose career suffered notable setbacks due to the hostility of the Soviet regime toward him for his interest in “bourgeois” music including Busoni, Mahler, and the Second Viennese school.

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He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1926 and later became head of the academic department from 1932 to 1943. Between 1932 and 1968 he toured different conservatories in the USSR with his famous series of lectures on pianism. KOROVIN, Konstantin Alexeyevich (1861–1939). Leading Russian painter and member of Savva Mamontov’s Abramtsevo Circle and exhibited with the Peredvizhniki artists. A close associate of his contemporaries Valentin Serov and Isaac Levitan. KRAINEV, Vladimir Vsevolodovich (1944–2011). Pianist and pedagogue who studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Heinrich Neuhaus, graduating in 1967 and undertaking postgraduate studies there until 1969. He became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory in 1987, and later a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover, Germany. KRAMSKOY, Ivan Nikolayevich (1837–87). One of the leading painters and intellectuals of his time in Russia. Became disillusioned with the “academic” art that he saw at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts and led a group, the Revolt of the Fourteen, which brought about his expulsion from the institution. He spoke of the moral substance of art and the need for a psychological Realism, founding the group known as the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers). KREIN, Alexander Abramovich (1883–1951). Composer who studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergei Taneyev, Leonid Nikolayev, and Boleslav Yavorsky. In the Soviet Union he held several official musical administrative positions. KREMENSTEIN, Berta Lvovna (1923–2008). Pianist, pedagogue, and musicologist who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Gnessin Institute, graduating in 1950. KREMLEV, Yuli Anatolyevich (1908–71). Musicologist and pianist who studied at the Leningrad Conservatory in the piano class of Maria Yudina, and history and theory with Boris Asafyev. He went on to teach at the Leningrad Conservatory. LERMONTOV, Mikhail Yuryevich (1814–41). The most important poet after the death of Alexander Pushkin, and icon of Russian Romanticism. Founder of the tradition of the Russian psychological novel.

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LESCHETIZKY, Theodor (1830–1915). Polish pianist, pedagogue, and composer. By the invitation of Anton Rubinstein he taught from 1852 until 1877 in St. Petersburg, where he married one of his most famous pupils, Anna Esipova. Returned to Vienna to create one of the most famous private piano studios in Europe. His students included Ignaz Friedman, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Artur Schnabel, Mark Hambourg, Alexander Brailowsky, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Paul Wittgenstein, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Elly Ney, and Mieczysław Horszowski. LEVIT, Leonid Alexandrovich (b. 1925). Russian photographer famous for his portrait photographs of Heinrich Neuhaus, Sviatoslav Richter, Dmitri Shostakovich, and many other Soviet artists. LEVITAN, Isaac Ilyich (1860–1900). Russian landscape painter famous for his ability to capture the “mood” of a landscape. His work received great acclaim and he became part of the Peredvizhniki movement. He was also a lifelong friend of the writer Anton Chekhov. LUNACHARSKY, Anatoly Vasilyevich (1875–1933). The first Soviet People’s Commissar of Education in charge of education and culture, held the Narkompros position given to him after the October Revolution in 1917 until 1929. Proficient in eight languages, he had studied philosophy in Zurich being particularly fond of Nietzsche. Corresponded with H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and Romain Rolland. Advocated a lenient policy toward working with artists hostile to Bolshevik views. He lost his important positions in power with the rise of Stalin. Appointed Soviet ambassador to Spain in 1933, he died in Menton, France, on his way there. LYUBIMOV, Alexei Borisovich (b. 1944). Russian pianist, organist, and harpsichordist. He studied at the Central Music School, and then at the Moscow Conservatory between 1963 and 1968 with Heinrich Neuhaus and Lev Naumov, where his development was also influenced by Maria Yudina. He taught chamber music at the Moscow Conservatory between 1968 and 1975, and between 1997 and 2010 was head of the historical music department. Since 1998 he has taught piano at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. MALININ, Yevgeny Vasilyevich (1930–2001). Russian pianist who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1954 and becoming Neuhaus’s assistant as well as embarking on a recital career. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1958. In the 1990s Malinin relocated to Germany.

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MANDELSTAM, Osip Emilyevich (1891–1938). One of the greatest Russian Silver Age poets. Alongside other Symbolists including Nikolai Gumilyov formed a group known as the Acmeists. He was arrested and interrogated about a poem that was highly critical of Stalin and the regime, “Kremlin Highlander,” but received the lenient sentence of exile. Following attacks from the literary establishment during the Great Purge of 1937 he was arrested and charged with “counterrevolutionary activities.” He died on the way to the labor camp. MARANTS, Berta Solomonovna (1907–98). Russian pianist and pedgaguge, especially noted for her chamber music performances. She initially studied with Berta Reingbald in Odessa and continued her studies with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory. She became one of his close friends, and promoted his ideas in the then newly established Sverdlovsk and Gorky Conservatories where she taught for many years. Was married to Semyon Benditsky. MEDTNER, Nikolai Karlovich (1879–1951). Russian Silver Age pianist and composer who wrote in a style rooted in high German Romanticism. Kept close company with Symbolist writers and thinkers through the connections of his elder brother, Emilii. His music fell in and out of favor in Soviet Russia. Left Russia in 1936 and settled in London. MEREZHKOVSKY, Dmitri Sergeyevich (1866–1941). Russian poet, novelist, religious philosopher, and critic who was one of the founders of Russian Symbolism who played an important role in the revival of theurgic interests among the Russian intelligentsia. Critical of the Bolshevik rise to power, he emigrated to Poland in 1918, and then France. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times. Married to Zinaida Gippius. MEYERHOLD, Vsevolod Emilyevich (1874–1940). Russian theater director, producer, and actor. He began acting under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko before becoming the chief producer at the Komissarzhevskaya Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre before founding his own company, the Meyerhold Theatre, in 1920. His experiments in Symbolism and psychophysical body mechanics inspired many artists including filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein. He was arrested, tortured, and executed in 1940. MICHAŁOWSKI, Aleksander (1851–1938). Polish pianist, composer, and teacher. Famous for his delicate touch and interpretations of Chopin. Studied with Carl Reinecke and Ignaz Moscheles at the Leipzig Conservatory, and then with Carl Tausig in Berlin.

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MICKIEWICZ, Adam (1798–1855). Born within what was then imperial Russia he is regarded as the national poet of Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus. He is most famous for his epic poems Pan Tadeusz, Konrad Wallenrod, and Grażyna, and his Crimean Sonnets are considered to be some of the finest examples of Polish lyric poetry. MILMAN, Mark Vladimirovich (1910–95). Soviet composer who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1935. Taught at the Moscow Conservatory between 1935 and 1942, and then from 1943. He became a professor in 1964. MILSTEIN, Yakov Isaakokovich (1911–81). Russian pianist, pedagogue, and influential musicologist, and a distant relative of Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. Studied with Konstantin Igumnov at the Moscow Conservatory from 1929 to 1932. His career as a virtuoso pianist was cut short by problems with his hands. In 1935 he became as assistant to Konstantin Igumnov until 1948. After the death of Igumnov he continued to teach and also write extensively, becoming an important authority on Liszt. MOGILEVSKY, Yevgeny Gedeonovich (b. 1945). Russian pianist who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus, Stanislav Neuhaus, and Yakov Zak at the Moscow Conservatory between 1962 and 1969. In 1964 he won first prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels (the thrird Soviet pianist to do so after Emil Gilels and Vladimir Ashkenazy). MYASKOVSKY, Nikolai Yakovlyevich (1881–1950). One of the USSR’s leading composers known as the “Father of the Soviet Symphony.” Studied composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Lyadov at St. Petersburg Conservatory where he befriended Sergei Prokofiev. Taught at the Petrograd and Moscow Conservatories where his students included Aram Khachaturian, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Vissarion Shebalin, German Galynin, and Rodion Schedrin. NASEDKIN, Alexei Arkadyevich (b. 1942). Pianist and pedagogue who studied with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Moscow Conservatory in 1961, and after Neuhaus’s death continued his studies with Lev Naumov until 1966. He started teaching piano at the Moscow Conservatory in 1966 and became a professor in 1982. NAUMOV, Lev Nikolayevich (1925–2005). Besides Neuhaus’s son, Stanislav, he was the most important pedagogue to carry on Heinrich Neuhaus’s ideas. After studying composition at the Moscow

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Conservatory, he graduated from Neuhaus’s piano class in 1951. Neuhaus’s chief assistant from 1956. Held his own class from 1963, becoming a professor in 1972. NESTEROV, Mikhail Vasilyevich (1862–1942). One of the most innovative artists of his time. He studied in St. Petersburg with Pavel Chistyakov and became a member of the Peredvizhniki circle. Nesterov became a representative of religious symbolism in Russian art and was one of the earliest Symbolists. NEUHAUS, Ada (1887–1972). Cousin of Heinrich Neuhaus. Settled in Germany from around 1910. NEUHAUS, Adrian Genrikhovich (1925–45). Eldest son of Heinrich Neuhaus and Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak. NEUHAUS, Galina Sergeyevna (1927–98). Wife of Stanislav Neuhaus. NEUHAUS, Gustav [Wilhelmovich] (1853–1937). Father of Heinrich and Natalya Neuhaus. Married to Olga Blumenfeld. NEUHAUS, Militsa Genrikhovna (1929–2008). Mathematician and daughter of Militsa Borodkina and Heinrich Neuhaus. Later Militsa Lidskaya. NEUHAUS, Natalya Gustavovna (1884–1960). Elder sister of Heinrich Neuhaus. Pianist and pedagogue who married a former prisoner of war and violinist, Steinbach, and emigrated with him to Oberhausen in Germany in 1917. Widowed in 1921 or 1922. NEUHAUS, Stanislav Genrikhovich (1927–80). Famous pianist and pedagogue. Son of Heinrich Neuhaus and Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak. Brother of Adrian Neuhaus. NEUHAUS, Zinaida Nikolayevna (1897–1966). See Pasternak, Zinaida. NIKOLAYEV, Leonid Vladimirovich (1878–1942). Pianist and pedagogue who taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory where his students included Vladimir Sofronitsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, Alexander Krein, Pavel Serebryakov, and Natan Perlman.

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NIKONOVICH, Igor Vladimirovich (1935–2012). Russian pianist and pedagogue who graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Heinrich Neuhaus in 1958. His work at the Skryabin Museum put him in close contact with Vladimir Sofronitsky in the late 1950s. OBORIN, Lev Nikolayevich (1907–74). Russian pianist whose unrivaled fame as an interpreter of Chopin was sealed by winning the first International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1927. Studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Konstantin Igumnov as well as composition with Nikolai Myaskovsky and Grigory Katuar. He went on to teach at the Moscow Conservatory becoming a professor in 1935, and simultaneously continued his performing career until his death. OGINSKI, Michał (1765–1833). Polish composer, diplomat, and politician, best known for his polonaise Pożegnanie Ojczyzny (Farewell to the homeland). His Polonaises influenced a generation of musicians including Maria Szymanowska. PAPERNO, Dmitri Alexandrovich (b. 1929). Pianist who studied with Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1951, and with Maria Grinberg. From 1967 taught at the Gnessin Institute and emigrated to the United States in 1976. PASTERNAK, Boris Leonidovich (1890–1960). Russian poet, novelist, and translator, who initially studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory in the hope of becoming a professional pianist. Famous in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago, and being forced by the USSR to turn down the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. His poetry continued the aesthetics of the Silver Age and served as a role model for many younger Russian poets. PASTERNAK (née Lurye), Yevgeniya Vladimirovna (1898–1965). Russian artist and first wife of Boris Pasternak between 1922 and 1931. Mother of Leonid Pasternak. PASTERNAK (née Yeremeyeva-Giotti), Zinaida Nikolayevna (1897–1966). Former student and, between 1918 and 1930, first wife of Heinrich Neuhaus. In 1932 married Boris Pasternak. She was the mother of Adrian and Stanislav Neuhaus, and Leonid Pasternak. PLEKHANOV, Georgi Valentinovich (1856–1918). Russian revolutionary and philosopher who was among the first to identify himself as a Marxist. Emigrated to Switzerland in 1880 following political

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persecution for attempting to overthrow the tsarist regime. Became an outspoken opponent of the Soviet regime that came to power in 1917, yet was held in high regard by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as a founding father of Russian Marxism. RABINOVICH, David Abramovich (1900–1978). Eminent Soviet musicologist and pianist who studied at the Petrograd Conservatory with Leonid Nikolayev and in 1930 graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Konstantin Igumnov. RAZUMOVSKAYA, Vera Kharitonovna (1904–67). Pianist and pedagogue known for her highly expressive playing. Studied at Gustav Neuhaus’s music school in Elisavetgrad before continuing with Heinrich Neuhaus at the Kiev Conservatory. Between 1922 and 1924 she taught at the Kiev Conservatory, later moving to the Leningrad Conservatory to continue her studies with Leonid Nikolayev, graduating in 1931. In 1933 she started to teach at the Leningrad Conservatory and became a professor in 1946, continuing to teach there until her death. REGER, Max (1873–1916). German composer particularly known for his densely polyphonic writing. His chromatic harmony and Baroque influences marked him as a successor to late nineteenth-century Romanticism, and a forerunner of early twentieth-century modernism. REINGBALD, Berta Mikhailovna (1897–1944). One of the most significant pedagogues based at the Odessa Conservatory. She taught Emil Gilels, Berta Marants, Lidiya Fichtenholz, Tatiana Goldfarb—who all went on to study with Heinrich Neuhaus—and also Maria Grinberg. REPIN, Ilya Yefimovich (1844–1930). Russian artist lauded for his ability to capture human emotion in a style of psychological Realism. He was respected by Lev Tolstoy and associated with members of the Peredvizhniki movement, particularly Arkhip Kunidzhi, Valentin Serov, and Mikhail Vrubel. RICHTER, Elena Rudolfovna (b. 1938). Pianist and pedagogue graduated from Heinrich Neuhaus’s piano class at the Moscow Conservatory in 1961, and between 1964 and 1967 continued postgraduate studies with his son, Stanislav Neuhaus, becoming his assistant. Later was an assistant to Vera Gornostaeva and Yevgeny Malinin, becoming a professor in 1999.

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RICHTER, Sviatoslav Teofilovich (1915–97). One of the most famous pianists and recording artists of the twentieth century. Born near Zhytomir in imperial Russia his father was a German émigré pianist, organist, and composer. As an adolescent he taught at the Odessa Conservatory and accompanied rehearsals at the Odessa Opera. He came to Moscow in 1937, joining Heinrich Neuhaus’s class at the Moscow Conservatory, where he quickly rose to fame and remained his professor’s friend and confidant. ROLLAND, Romain (1866–1944). French historian and writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. His work on Beethoven was central to Russian and early Soviet concepts of the composer. RUBINSTEIN, Anton Grigoryevich (1829–94). Considered the only virtuoso pianist to rival Franz Liszt, and composer and conductor. Introduced Russia’s first musical institutions including the Russian Musical Society in 1859 and the first Russian conservatory in the imperial capital St. Petersburg in 1862. Widely seen as the symbolic founder of professional Russian pianism. RUDORFF, Ernst (1840–1916). German conductor, composer, teacher, and pianist. He grew up in an environment that was closely connected to the era’s great artists and thinkers: his mother was a friend of Felix Mendelssohn and a student of Carl Zelter, the house was frequented by Ludwig Tieck and Johann Friedrich Reichardt. After studying a short time with Clara Schumann in 1858, he became her lifelong friend. SABANEYEV, Leonid Leonidovich (1881–1968). Composer, music critic, and mathematician who graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Taneyev, and Nikolai Zverev, as well as the mathematics and physics department of Moscow University. Became a close friend of Alexander Skryabin and wrote about his music. Emigrated to France in 1926. SAFONOV, Vasily Ilyich (1852–1918). Russian pianist, conductor, and pedagogue. He quickly made a name for himself as a soloist, and also in ensemble with Leopold Auer and Karl Davidov. From 1885 he taught at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, and following the invitation of Piotr Tchaikovsky, at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming its director in 1889. His most famous students included Alexander Skryabin, Nikolai Medtner, and Josef and Rosina Lhévinne.

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SAVSHINSKY, Samarii Ilyich (1891–1968). Pedagogue and pianist whose books on pianism proved influential including: Pianist i ego rabota (The Pianist and His Work) (1961), Rezhim i gigiena pianista (Routine and Hygiene for a Pianist) (1963), Rabota pianista nad muzïkal’nïm proizvedeniem (Working on a Musical Work) (1964), and Rabota pianist nad tekhnikoy (The Work of a Pianist on Technique) (1968). He taught at the Leningrad Conservatory where his students included Lazar Berman and Vitaly Margulis. SCHLOEZER, Boris Fyodorovich (1881–1969). Philosopher and music critic, and brother of Skryabin’s second wife (Tatyana Schloezer). Keen advocate of Skryabin’s philosophical efforts in presenting music as the symbol of an ultimate unifying force. Emigrated to France in 1917. SCHWEITZER, Albert (1875–1965). German theologian, organist, philosopher, and medical missionary. Received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life” (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben). SEREBRYAKOV, Pavel Alexeyevich (1909–77). Russian pianist and pedagogue who studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating in 1930 and taking postgraduate studies until 1932. He taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1932, also being its rector between 1938 and 1951, and 1961 and 1977. SEROV, Valentin Alexandrovich (1865–1911). Celebrated Russian portraitist and member of the Peredvizhniki circle. Studied with Ilya Repin and Pavel Chistyakov. Later in his life focused on the dramatic depiction of artists and musicians such as Chaliapin, Yermolova, and Gorky. SHAGINYAN, Marietta Sergeyevna (1882–1982). Poetess, writer, and close friend of Sergei Rachmaninov and the Medtner brothers (Nikolai and Emilii). SHEBALIN, Vissarion Yakovlevich (1902–63). Influential Russian composer who studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Reinhold Glière and Nikolai Myaskovsky. Taught at the Moscow Conservatory (being its director between 1942 and 1948) and Gnessin Institute, and was the artistic director of the Central Music School (TsMSha). SOFRONITSKY, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1901–61). One of the most charismatic and popular Russian pianists of his generation, known best for his interpretations of Skryabin, Schumann, and Chopin.

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Studied at the Petrograd Conservatory with Leonid Nikolayev alongside Maria Yudina and Dmitri Shostakovich. Although a reluctant pedagogue, he taught at the Leningrad Conservatory between 1936 and 1942, and then at the Moscow Conservatory until his death. A close friend of Heinrich Neuhaus. SOLOVYOV, Vladimir Sergeyevich (1853–1900). Russian religious philosopher and poet who coined the idea of vseyedinstvo (allunity) that influenced many thinkers, poets, and artists of Russia’s Silver Age. STANISLAVSKY, Konstantin Sergyevich (1863–1938). Pseudonym of Konstantin Alexeyev, the most famous theater and opera director, actor, and pedagogue of his time. Reformed acting through the development of a psychological “Realist” style of acting that was based on the creation of an emotionally true character. In 1898 he cofounded the Moskovskiy Khudozhestvennïy teatr (Moscow Art Theatre) with Vladimir NemirovichDanchenko. He was also chairman of the Russian Musical Society, set up by the Rubinstein brothers, from 1886. SZELUTO, Apolinary (1884–1966). Pianist and composer born in St. Petersburg, Russia, initially studying at the Saratov Conservatory. From 1905 to 1908 he studied piano under Leopold Godowsky in Berlin. He founded the modernist movement Młoda Polska (Young Poland) together with Karol Szymanowski, Ludomiw Różycki, and Grzegorz Fitelberg. Returned to Warsaw in 1918 where he worked for the Ministry of Justice. SZYMANOWSKI, Karol (1882–1937). Most significant Polish composer of the twentieth century and cousin of Heinrich Neuhaus. Studied with Gustav Neuhaus in Elisavetgrad, then at the Warsaw Conservatory from 1901. Significant member of the modernist movement Młoda Polska (Young Poland). Settled in Warsaw in 1919. From 1926 was director of the Warsaw Conservatory. TAMARKINA, Rosa (1920–50). Russian pianist who studied with Alexander Goldenweiser, and for a time with Heinrich Neuhaus before continuing with Konstantin Igumnov. Took second prize at the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1937 at the age of just seventeen. Between 1940 and 1944 she was the wife of the pianist Emil Gilels. She taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1946 and continued performing until her untimely death from cancer. TOLSTOY, Alexei Nikolayevich (1883–1945). Russian writer particularly known for his historical and popular science fiction novels. He also penned some of the most famous Soviet books for children

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including the Adventures of Buratino. A relative of both the writers Ivan Turgenev and Lev Tolstoy. TROPP, Vladimir Manuilovich (b. 1939). Russian pianist and pedagogue who first studied at the Gnessin Institute, and then at the Moscow Conservatory with Teodor Gutman. Upon completing his studies he became a pedagogue at the Gnessin Institute. TSVETAEVA, Marina Ivanovna (1892–1941). One of the greatest Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century who was greatly influenced by the Sliver Age Symbolist movement. Her daring experimentation with language made her a pioneering chronicler of her time and human psychology. Left Russia in 1922, returning in 1939. Her husband, Sergei Efron, and her daughter were arrested on charges of espionage in 1941. Following her husband’s execution, she committed suicide. TYUNEYEV, Boris Dmitriyevich (1883–1934). Russian musicologist and critic who taught at the Odessa Conservatory in the 1920s until his death. He was widely educated and had a vast library with which he encouraged talented pianists in Odessa to become familiar. VEDERNIKOV, Anatoly Ivanovich (1920–93). Famous for his collaborations with Sviatoslav Richter in the 1940s and 1950s. Studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Heinrich Neuhaus in 1936. In 1958 he started to teach at the Gnessin Institute, and from 1980 at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1985. VIARDO, Vladimir Vladimirovich (b. 1949). Russian pianist and pedagogue who studied with Irina Naumova at the Gnessin College, and then with Lev Naumov at the Moscow Conservatory. VIRSALADZE, Eliso Konstantinovna (b. 1942). Influential pianist and pedagogue born into a musical family in Tbilisi. First studied piano with her grandmother, a student of Anna Esipova, and later at the Moscow Conservatory with Yakov Zak. She often played for Heinrich Neuhaus and considered him as both her pedagogue and mentor. Taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1967 as an assistant of Lev Oborin and then Yakov Zak, and has taught her own class since 1977. VITSINSKY, Alexander Vladimirovich (1904–84). Russian musicologist who wrote about the psychology of interpretation in the Stanislavsky tradition. His teachers included Konstantin Igumnov, Lev Oborin, and Alexei Chichin. He was evidently a talented pianist who played Balakirev’s Islamey and Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto for his graduation recitals in

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1929. Started teaching at the Moscow Conservatory in 1936 and turned his energy to the piano-pedagogy department until 1979. VOSKOBOINIKOV, Valery Mikhailovich (b. 1939). Studied with Heinrich Neuhaus and now lives in Italy where he was the president of the Neuhaus Association. VRUBEL, Mikhail Alexandrovich (1856–1910). Regarded as the preeminent Russian Symbolist painter, a label that he himself disputed. Studied with Pavel Chistyakov and associated with the artists of the Peredvizhniki movement. He became interested in late Byzantine art, early Renaissance painting, and Orientalism (some of this deriving from Russian folklore and stories), which influenced his style and subject matter. YERMOLOVA, Maria Nikolayevna (1853–1928). Considered by Konstantin Stanislavsky to be the greatest actress he had ever known. She was the first person to be awarded the honor of People’s Artist in 1921. YUDINA, Maria Veniaminovna (1899–1970). Russian pianist and pedagogue known for her formidable recitals, eccentric manner, association with modern Western composers (Stravinsky, Boulez, Hindemith, Berg, Schoenberg, and Messiaen), overt display of Russian Orthodoxy, and public support of writers or poets who were “out of favor” with the regime—all of which affected her career, particularly during the Khrushchev years. Studied at the Petrograd Conservatory with Anna Esipova, Felix Blumenfeld, and then Leonid Nikolayev. Taught for a time at the Tbilisi and Moscow Conservatories, and between 1944 and 1960 at the Gnessin Institute. ZAK, Yakov Izrailevich (1913–76). Significant Russian pianist and pedagogue. Winner of the Third International Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1937, which established his career as a recitalist. After initial studies at the Odessa Conservatory he studied with Heinrich Neuhaus, graduating from the Moscow Conservatory in 1935. For a time he and Emil Gilels played as a piano duo. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1935, and was given his own class in 1938, becoming a professor in 1947 where his most notable students included Nikolai Petrov, Yevgeny Mogilevsky, and Eliso Virsaladze. ZOSCHENKO, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1958). Popular Soviet satirist and writer. Developed a style of satirical writing that mocked official demands for simplicity but endeared him to his readers. Denounced by the Zhdanov decree of 1946.

Notes Introduction 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Letter dated October 14, 1955. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 393. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 17. It is also related as a longstanding motto in Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 198; Asmus, “O Genrikhe Neygauze,” 11–12. Dubal, Art of the Piano; Kammertӧtons and Mauser, Lexikon des Klaviers; Rubinstein, My Young Years. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) fond 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 129. Dorliak, “Untitled essay,” 103. Letters dated October 11, 1961, and July 5, 1963. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 486, 527. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, 166. Barnes, Russian Piano School, xix. Mil’shteyn, “Genrikh Neygauz,” 271. Neuhaus’s work has been translated into many languages including English by Leibovich (Neuhaus, Art of Piano Playing). Because Leibovitch’s translation has significant omissions in comparison to Neuhaus’s 1961 revision, this book will refer to Neuhaus’s 1958 and 1961 original versions, and retranslates the relevant quotations into English. Schonberg, Great Pianists, 464. Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad. This view of the performer as a propaganda commodity is echoed in FrolovaWalker, Stalin’s Music Prize. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. This issue will be explored in more detail in the following chapters. Neuhaus’s scathing attitude toward the crippling effects of censorship, Socialist Realism, and the state’s cultural policy are most clearly documented in the transcript of his interrogation dated October 3, 1941 (Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 26). This kind of historically self-aware personality is distinct from the practices of Soviet autobiographies, although on the surface they do have certain parallels: Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Halfin, Terror in My Soul. Instead, it refers to autobiographical writings of the Russian intelligentsia from the 1830s and particularly their interest in the philosophy of Hegel. For a summary see Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices, 279–90.

206 ❧ notes to pp. 5–10 16. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 446–48. 17. The issues surrounding Shostakovich’s denunciation and in particular Neuhaus’s speech at the Union of Soviet Composers will be discussed in chapter 2. At this point it is necessary to point out that Shostakovich also thought that this denunciation would be short-lived since he immediately set to work on his Fourth Symphony in order to prepare it for rehearsals for a September premiere. He was forced to withdraw the work, and instead the Fifth Symphony was performed in November 1937, which fully rehabilitated him: Fairclough, Soviet Credo; Fay, Shostakovich. 18. Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 514; Jelagin, Taming of the Arts; Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets; Schwarz, Music and Musical Life. This vision has also underpinned more recent studies of the epoch including Wellens, Music on the Frontline. 19. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya, 6. 20. Fairclough, Classics for the Masses; Fay, Shostakovich; Nelson, Music for the Revolution; Schmelz, Such Freedom; Zuk, “Nikolay Myaskovsky.” 21. Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad, 132. 22. Zuk, “Nikolay Myaskovsky,” 358–59. 23. Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 161. 24. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, 273. 25. The expulsions of students mirrored the student purge of 1924, which sought to correct perceived ideological perniciousness of having too many pianists and women among the students. Applications to the conservatory were restructured to make it easier for “Party and Komsomol members to be admitted, as well as children of workers, peasants, and children of peasants.” Most of these failed their entrance examinations and more than 80 percent of the students admitted continued to be “of bourgeois origins.” The only significant difference that these purges made to the student body was that it reoriented the piano faculty into a male-dominated student body. As summarized by Sargeant, nothing really changed and the normal result of the entrance exams was simply “camouflaged by distorting the social origins of applicants and new students.” Sargeant, Harmony and Discord, 274–75. 26. Pshibishevsky was arrested on March 1, 1937, and executed on August 21 that same year for alleged espionage and preparation for terrorist activities. He was exonerated on September 15, 1956. 27. Gol’denveyzer, Dnevnik, 59. Neuhaus’s letter to Lucy Pogosova dated August 29, 1954. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 387. Similar remarks about Neuhaus can be found in Goldenweiser’s diary. The relationship seemed to reach a crisis point in 1957–58 when Neuhaus asked for his colleague’s forgiveness (see Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 408–9.). 28. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 66. 29. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 486; Barenboym, “Kniga G. Neygauza”; Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s; Lidskiy, “Besedï V. K. Merzhanova”; Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilel’s. 30. Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 217–45. 31. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 32. 32. Lidskiy, “Besedï V. K. Merzhanova.”

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33. Lidskiy, “Besedï V. K. Merzhanova.” Neuhaus’s letter and Gilels’s response are also mentioned in Nina Dorliak’s recollections in Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 233–34. 34. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 66. 35. Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 104. 36. See letter dated October 11, 1961. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 486. 37. Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz, 66. 38. Lidskiy, “Besedï V. K. Merzhanova.” 39. As quoted in Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 104. 40. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 292. 41. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 39. 42. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i; Stanislavskiy, Moya zhizn’; Stanislavskiy, Rabota aktyora, 1938; Stanislavsky, My Life in Art. 43. Sabaneyev, “Muzïkal’nïye besedï,” 850. 44. Letter to Ada Neuhaus from Palanga dated July 5, 1963. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 526. 45. Rylkova, Archaeology of Anxiety, 17–18. For a wider study of the role of memory across the evolution of Russian arts, see Leatherbarrow and Offord, History of Russian Thought. 46. Transcript of Neuhaus’s conversation with pedagogues at a seminar published in Neygauz, “Beseda s pedagogami,” 127. 47. As cited in Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 2. 48. Kopatyayev, “Kompozitor-rabochiy,” 9. 49. Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans. 50. Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 219. 51. Neuhaus’s diary extract dated November 13, 1962. Neygauz, “Dnevnik poslednikh let,” 73. 52. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 84. 53. Neygauz, “Razdum’ya o Shopene,” 235. 54. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 106. 55. See Neuhaus’s letter to his son, Stanislav, dated July 7, 1964. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 548. 56. Alekseyev, Istoriya fortepiannogo iskusstva, 1 and 2:210. 57. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 31. 58. Frolova-Walker, Russian Music, 21.

Chapter One 1.

2.

Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 17. All Russian names consist of a first name, patronymic, and surname. Felix was Heinrich Neuhaus’s middle name given to him by his family; and Gustavovich is the patronymic following the usual Russian convention. Since 1991, numerous discussions have ensued about renaming the town. Following a vote to rename Kirovograd back to Elisavetgrad in 2015, a draft law by the Ukrainian parliament has ruled it inadmissible for its evocation of Russian historical connections. Since July 2016 it has been called Kropyvnytskyi.

208 ❧ notes to pp. 19–25 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Wilhemovich is a patronymic and was thus only appended to Gustav Neuhaus’s name after he moved to Russia. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 17. Catalogue Item no. 5 in the Heinrich Neuhaus Museum at the Kirovograd Music School for Children No. 1. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 123. For a detailed investigation of the Neuhaus family’s piano factory, see Mũhlenhoff, Die Pianofortefabrik. Confirmed by Gustav Neuhaus’s letter to Ferdinand Hiller dated October 12, 1870. Bambauer, “Meine Stellung Hier,” 17. Nikonovich and Skryabin, Vspominaya Sofronitskogo, 104. Letter dated June 6, 1878. Bambauer, “Meine Stellung Hier,” 76. Gustav Neuhaus’s song cycle was published by Verlag von Karl Hochstein, Heidelberg, and his pamphlet for reforming the notation system was published privately in Bochum. Clevischer Volksfreund, no. 20, March 11, 1882 and no. 21, March 15, 1882, as printed in Mühlenhoff, Die Pianofortefabrik, 101. Gustav Neuhaus’s work on the concave keyboard was published by Walther & Apolan, Berlin. Neuhaus’s accounts of his contact with piano factories in a letter to Christine Bremer in Cleve on July 18, 1929, are quoted in Mühlenhoff, Die Pianofortefabrik, 102. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 18. Maria Szymanowska was born in Warsaw in 1789 as Marianna Agata Wołowska. She was one of the first women to have had a successful virtuoso solo career, which, in many ways, mirrored that of Clara Schumann. She married the wealthy landowner Józef Szymanowski. Szymanowska settled in St. Petersburg, the capital of Imperial Russia where she lived from the 1820s until her untimely death as a victim of the cholera epidemic of 1831. She was admired by Wolfgang von Goethe and Adam Mickiewicz, and was considered to have influenced the music of Frédéric Chopin. Her daughter, Celina, married Adam Mickiewicz. The other Maria Szymanowska, Mikhail Blumenfeld’s wife, was the daughter of Józef Szymanowski’s brother, Zygmunt, and Pelagia Sawicka. In his autobiography, Heinrich Neuhaus wrote that he thought his father’s music school had opened in 1898. See Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 18. The Russkaya muzïkal’naya gazeta, no 43, October 24, 1899 (column 1085) reported that the school’s first academic year would be 1899/1900. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 18. Polyanovskiy, 70 let v mire muzïki, 5. Boris Pasternak’s letter dated November 24, 1932, from Moscow. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 558. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 19. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 20. Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 48–49. Olga Blumenfeld-Neuhaus was Catholic, although her father was an atheist. Heinrich Neuhaus was confirmed in the Protestant Church at the age of sixteen.

notes to pp. 25–34 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

❧ 209

Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 124–25. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 126. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 125. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 126. Nasedkin, “(Untitled),” 215. Neygauz, “Yeshchyo o Rikhtere,” 290. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 125. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 47. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 230. Letter to his parents from Warsaw dated December 21, 1903. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 15–16. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 15–16. See, for example, letter to his parents from Tymoszówka dated August 6, 1905. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 33. Letter to his parents from Kalkar dated June 6, 1905. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 29. Young Poland in Music was headed by an informal group of composers, most of whom had studied with Zygmunt Noskowski at the Warsaw Conservatory. The group effectively disbanded with the outbreak of the First World War. As cited in Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski, 32. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, 27. Letter to his parents from Dortmund dated May 23, 1905. Katts, G. G.Neygauz: Pis’ma, 25. Neygauz, “Pamyati Leopol’da Godovskogo,” 171. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated April 15, 1906. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 42. Neygauz, “Pamyati Leopol’da Godovskogo,” 171. Letter to his parents from Warsaw dated December 21, 1903. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 19. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated January 15, 1906. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 42. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated November 22, 1905 (Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 37) and February 17, 1906 (Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 47.). Letter to his parents from Berlin dated January 5, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 78. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated November 1, 1907. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 69. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated December 4, 1907. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 72. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 21. Letter to his parents from Nervi dated February 2, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 85. Letter to his parents from Florence dated January 25, 1909. Ibid., 114. Letter to his parents from Florence dated March 30, 1909. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 118.

210 ❧ notes to pp. 34–43 53. Review from the English newspaper Musical News as quoted in Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 436. 54. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 23. 55. Boris Pasternak’s letter from Moscow to his parents dated November 24, 1923. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 557. 56. Letter to his parents from Nervi dated February 2, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 84. Letter from Florence dated December 1, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 103. 57. Letter to his parents from Rome dated March 23–28, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 91. 58. Neuhaus wrote to Gabrichevsky on July 16, 1959, that when reading Nietzsche’s “Menschliches” he felt that he was “among good men.” Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 437. 59. Nietzsche, Human: Part II, 85. 60. Neygauz, “Razdum’ya o Shopene,” 234. 61. Nietzsche, Human: Part II, 271. 62. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 22. 63. Sviatolsav Richter arranged for Neuhaus to be given the necessary permission to join him on his tour of Italy in 1965. Neuhaus died on October 10, 1964. 64. Letter to his parents from Florence dated April 27, 1909. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 121. 65. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 23. 66. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 33. The reference to 1941–42 was censored out of publication and only appears in the manuscript. RGALI fond 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 9. 67. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated April 17 and 21, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 130–31. 68. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated April 27, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 132. 69. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated April 17, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 130–31. 70. Letter to his parents from Berlin dated April 27, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 132–33. 71. Letter to parents dated December 8, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 151. The subsequent letters show that the concerto appearance was canceled due to practice-related injuries Neuhaus sustained to his hands. 72. See Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 45. 73. As cited in Gerig, Famous Pianists, 287. 74. This phrase appears in many of Neuhaus’s letters, including that to his parents from Berlin dated May 20, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 136. 75. Letter to his parents dated May 7, 1910. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 134. 76. Letter to his parents dated January 22, 1911. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 154. 77. Rubinstein, My Many Years, 372–73. 78. Letter to his parents dated January 22, 1911. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 154. 79. See Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 122. 80. See Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 169.

notes to pp. 43–52

❧ 211

81. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 169. 82. Letter to his parents from Vienna dated September 10, 1913. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 169. 83. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 169. 84. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 171. 85. Letter to his parents from Kalkar dated February 1, 1914. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 180. 86. Letter to his parents from Vienna dated September 24, 1913. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 171. 87. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 30.

Chapter Two 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 177. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 30. Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 36–37. Letter to his parents dated May 1916, from Petrograd. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 183. Letter to Olga Blumenfeld dated August 30, 1916, from Elisavetgrad. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 185. Letter to his parents dated November 4, 1916, from Tiflis. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 186. Letter to his parents dated December 2, 1916, from Tiflis. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 188. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 188. For a more detailed survey of the Civil War in Ukraine following the revolution, see Magocsi, History of Ukraine. Karol Szymanowski’s letter to L. Unyekhovsky in Minsk from Elisavetgrad dated November 1917. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja. Wightman, Karol Szymanowski, 210. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski (Pervonachal’nïy variant),” 127. See Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja. K. Szymanowski, “Chto ne umirayet (V russkoy intellegentsii)’.” Voyna i mir, no. 5, November 6, 1919 (OS). Illustration 292 in Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja. Also given as October 20, 1919, in Cadrin and Downes, Szymanowski Companion, 189. From Szymanowski’s unused fragments for Efebos quoted in Cadrin and Downes, Szymanowski Companion, 189. Letter from Elisavetgrad dated July 12, 1919. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja, 1:578. Letter to Glière from Elisavetgrad dated 1918. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 191. Letter to Kochański dated July 23, 1919. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja, 1:580. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 32.

212 ❧ notes to pp. 52–62 20. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava I,” 32. 21. Letter to Szymanowski dated October 19, 1919. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja, 1:598. 22. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Symanowski, 143–44. 23. Letter dated November 1 (OS October 19), 1919. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja, 1:598. 24. Letter dated December 24, 1919. Bronowicz-Chylinska, Karol Szymanowski Korespondencja, 1:606. 25. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 232. 26. Vladimir Horowitz had been Felix Blumenfeld’s student in Kiev. For accounts of their duo recitals, see Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 76–77. 27. Neuhaus’s letter to Kochański dated November 15, 1918, and Szymanowski’s letter dated October 27, 1918. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 190. 28. Neygauz, “Yeshchyo o Rikhtere,” 290. 29. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 13. 30. From Zinaida Pasternak’s memoirs as presented in Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 19. 31. Letter to his parents from Tiflis dated January 15, 1926. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 193. 32. Letter to his parents from Kiev dated February 1929. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 202. 33. Rubinshteyn, Lektsii, 552–58. and Kehler, Piano in Concert, 2: 1096–99. 34. See Kehler, Piano in Concert, 1:375–76, 1: 460–461. 35. Letter to Felix Blumenfeld from Klavdiyevo dated June 20, 1927. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 196. 36. Quoted in Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 203. 37. Letter dated June 9, 1931. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 57–58. 38. Anastas’yeva, Vek lyubvi, 167–68. 39. The group “Svobodnoy ėstetiki” was a prerevolutionary association that met to discuss the philosophy of art. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 42. 40. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 44. 41. For example, Neuhaus’s letter to Asmus dated May 30, 1927, discusses the philosopher’s article on Spinoza with great interest. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 195. 42. Pasternak’s letter to his sister from Moscow dated January 16, 1929. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 475–76. 43. Letter from Moscow dated March 6, 1939. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 475–76. 44. Pasternak’s poem Mne Bramsa sïgrayut (1931), in Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 45–46. 45. Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak’s memoirs. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 22. 46. Podol is one of the oldest districts of Kiev locate on the banks of Dnieper, where it seems Neuhaus performed the open-air concert. 47. Pasternak had written to Zinaida to tell her that he based Lara on her. However, there is also reason to believe that Lara was influenced by the writer

notes to pp. 62–72

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

❧ 213

Olga Ivinskaya who was Pasternak’s companion for the last thirteen years of his life. Pasternak’s letter to his sister dated July 30, 1931. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 515. Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak’s memoirs. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 19. Letter dated March 8, 1931. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 511. Pasternak, “Vospominaniya,” 181. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 511. Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus from Moscow dated April 29, 1931. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 204–5. Letter to his sister dated February 11, 1932. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 526. From the poem “Royal’ (pod vpechetleniyem igrï G. G. Neygauza),” dated April 16, 1931. Pasternak kept his suicide attempt a closely guarded secret, but wrote about it at length to his sister in a letter dated February 11, 1932. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 526–27. Pasternak’s letter to his parents from Moscow dated November 24, 1932. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 557. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 557. Gustav Neuhaus’s letter to Felix Blumenfeld dated March 12, 1928, in response to what is a lost letter from his son. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 200. As cited in Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 56. Zhilov, “Iz kontsertnïkh zalov,” 162. Zhilov, “Iz kontsertnïkh zalov,” 162. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated March 21, 1958. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 413. Letter from Boris Pasternak to his relatives dated August 6, 1933. Pasternak and Pasternak, Boris Pasternak, 584. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 11. For a clipping of the article, see http://tehne.com/event/arhivsyachina/ sumbur-vmesto-muzyki-baletnaya-falsh-1936. A meeting of writers was called in Moscow on March 10, 1936. The Literaturnaya gazeta followed on from the Pravda articles by denouncing Pasternak and several other writers for their “formalist conduct” on March 15 (no. 14, 1–3) and March 20 (no. 17, 1). For a further summary of Pasternak’s difficulties with the regime at this time, see Barnes, Boris Pasternak: 1928–1969, 132–51. Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front, 201–6. Neygauz, “Tvorcheskaya Diskussiya,” 16. Neygauz, “Tvorcheskaya Diskussiya,” 27. Among others, Neuhaus’s letters dated January 25, 1944, from Sverdlovsk and November 29, 1948, from Tsaltubo. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 263, 321. Neygauz, “Dmitriy Shostakovich,” 183. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 225–28; Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; Halfin, Terror in My Soul.

214 ❧ notes to pp. 72–76 74. The Tenth Symphony was withheld from performance due to the post-1948 antiformalism campaign until December 1953 (following Stalin’s death in March that year). 75. The mention of Gorky and Rolland in this speech has been misleading for some contemporary scholars. Sheila Fitzpatrick wrote that Neuhaus was “influenced by Gorky’s and Rolland’s concept [of] the Revolution.” Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front, 206. 76. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 213. 77. Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices, 290. 78. Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 244. 79. Neygauz, “Tvorcheskaya Diskussiya,” 27. 80. Shteynberg, “Tvorcheskaya Diskussiya,” 38. 81. Pravda, February 17, 1936. This is the summarized version of Neuhaus’s speech, which has underpinned many investigations of the denunciation of Shostakovich since it was presented in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front., 206. 82. See Neuhaus’s critique of a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which, despite numerous corrections by a state censor to make it more appropriate to the Soviet vocabulary of the time, was subsequently never published, and likely retracted by Neuhaus. Its wording is highly uncharacteristic of his writing or any of his transcribed speeches or lessons when discussing Beethoven: “person of enormous moral standing” (chelovek ogromnoy nravstvennoy vïsotï), “tireless worker” (neutomimïy deyatel’), and “warrior for the revolutionary ideals of mankind” (borets za revolyutsionnïye idealï chelovechstva). Khitruk, G. G. Neygauz, 14. 83. Del’son, “Genrikh Neygauz,” 99. 84. Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 33. 85. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 194. 86. Some details transcribed from Neuhaus’s interrogation files have been published in M. Neygauz, Istoriya Aresta. These have formed the basis for investigations including Klause, Der Klang Des Gulag, 594–97. These published transcripts, however, contain various omissions of interviews and official documents (the materials of which were made available to Militsa Neuhaus but she chose not to disclose them). Many of these instances are not indicated by editorial parentheses, and the published transcripts differ from the original documentsin some details and chronology. Furthermore, although Militsa Neuhaus explains that the interrogations were transcribed by NKVD officers (and are therefore not in Neuhaus’s own hand), she does not acknowledge or indicate the presence of numerous clarifications, deletions, and marginalia registered by the various officers at the specific request of Neuhaus, which are always marked by his signature. The lack of acknowledgment of these amendments, or indeed their dissemination, can be misleading, and contributes to why Klause and other researchers have questioned the validity of such documents, which they conclude were fabricated by NKVD officers as they wished (“nach Gutdünken”) (Klause, Klause, Der Klang Des Gulag, 594). 87. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 6.

notes to pp. 76–81

❧ 215

88. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 21–22. 89. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 18. Although Zak had stayed in Moscow, he was widely known as Neuhaus’s student anyway through newspapers, along with Tamarkina and Gilels, because of their widely publicized competition successes. 90. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 23. 91. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 24. 92. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 25–27. 93. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 27. 94. The term “gnilaya itelligentsiya” (rotten intelligentsia) was used by Tsar Alexander III in relation to the liberal press. It became a popular phrase (wrongly attributed to Lenin) that became common usage following the 1934 film Chapayev. It was used by the Bolsheviks in a derogatory way to quell liberal thinking by reinforcing the idea of a sabotaging privileged class that could not understand the concerns of the Soviet people. 95. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 29–30. 96. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 37. 97. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 60. 98. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 62–63. 99. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 64–66. 100. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 67. 101. The currently classified file number is given in the documents as no. 8-14502. 102. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 24. 103. Ural’skaya gosudarstvennaya konservatoriya imeni M. P. Musorgskogo. 75 let istorii. 104. See Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 33. and Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma. 105. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569, 85. 106. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 267–81. 107. Master Genrikh, Russia, Telekanal Kul’tura (Documentary film), 2008. 108. Letter to Alexander Goldenweiser dated December 1957 and January 1958. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 408. 109. Tsentral’nïy arkhiv Federal’noy bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsiy, Delo P-38569. 110. For a description of the administration and history of the award, see FrolovaWalker, Stalin’s Music Prize.

216 ❧ notes to pp. 81–85 111. Stenograph of plenary session on March 11, 1954. RGALI fond 2073 op. 2 ye. kh. 21, 31. 112. Stenograph of plenary session on April 3, 1954. RGALI fond 2073 op. 2 ye. kh. 37, 39. 113. RGALI fond 2072 op. 2 ye. kh. 27, 40. 114. Stenograph of plenary session on January 21, 1954. RGALI fond 2073 op. 2 ye. kh. 30, 18–19. 115. RGALI fond 2073 op. 2 ye. kh. 34. 116. RGALI fond 379 op. 1 ye. kh. 37 l. 10. 117. Letter to Serafima Mogilevskaya dated June 1956, in which where he also refers to a congratulatory telegram received from Nadezhda Golubovskaya. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 395. 118. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 194. 119. Letter to L. A. Pogosova from Moscow dated September 24, 1950. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 358. 120. Letter to Astrid Schmidt-Neuhaus sometime in the spring of 1940. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 238. 121. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 56. 122. Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 60. 123. Neuhaus related the “colossal interest” of the concert administrator in organizing the duo recitals in several letters including to Lucy Pogosova dated April 4, 1950. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 351. 124. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 351. 125. Bogatyrs were characters from Slavic legends and are akin to the knights-errant. “Tri Budrïsa” is a reference to Pushkin’s “Budrïs i ego sïnov’ya” (Budrys and His Three Sons), which is in itself a translation of Adam Mickiewicz’s “Trzech budrysów.” See letter to Stanislav Neuhaus from Palanga dated July 9, 1963. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 528. 126. As indicated in various letters sent in the summer and autumn of 1957. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 404–7. 127. Letter from Tsikhisjvari dated August 30, 1958 (Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 423.), and his letter to his son Stanislav from Tsikhisjvari dated July 14, 1958 (Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 419). 128. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated December 5, 1958. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 428. While from this point Neuhaus did not give concerts he did continue to practice (although no longer on a regular basis), and still looked for possible medical relief from the ongoing pain in his hand. 129. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated September 19, 1958. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 424. As a point of comparison, Kogan’s U vrat masterstva, for which Neuhaus wrote the foreword, had a total print run of only 2,200 copies. 130. Letter to Irina Shumaskaya from Moscow dated January 11, 1959. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 429. 131. Letter to Zinaida and Boris Pasternak, and Stanislav Neuhaus from Jaundubulti dated July 26, 1960. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 462–63. 132. Letter to Irina Shumskaya from Koktebel dated July 17, 1956. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 396–97.

notes to pp. 85–94

❧ 217

133. Neuhaus’s letter to Isaac Zetel from Crimea dated July 29, 1956. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 398. 134. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 398. 135. Barenboym, “Kniga G. Neygauza,” 122. 136. Barenboym, “Kniga G. Neygauza,” 116–22. 137. Barenboym, “Kniga G. Neygauza,” 121–22. 138. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 12. 139. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 10. Neuhaus is referring to Literaturnaya gazeta no. 54, 1959. 140. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 12. 141. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 414. 142. Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 38.

Chapter Three 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Neygauz, Istoriya Aresta, 21. As cited in Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 58. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 54. “Mighty Handful” was a group of prominent composers from St. Petersburg also known as “The Five” (Moguchaya kuchka): Cesar Cui, Mili Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 105. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s. RGALI fond 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 107 and 109. Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 263. Letter to Lucy Pogosova dated December 24, 1951. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 373. Letter to Berta Marants dated May 17, 1952. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 376. Program published in Kehler, Piano in Concert, 2:894. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 347. Neuhaus erroneously gives the Shostakovich Preludes as opus 35. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 204–8. Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 75–87; Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz. Ivanov, Skryabin. Florenskiy, Imena, 19. Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 31–34. Ivanov, “Skryabin i dukh revolyutsii,” 190–94. Venchik is also the specialized botanical term for the corolla. Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 77. Lunacharskiy, “O Skryabine,” 7–11. As cited in Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 58. Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 75–76. Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 75–76.

218 ❧ notes to pp. 94–99 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 102. Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 75–76. D. Zhitomirsky (1958) as cited in Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 42. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 92. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 205. It must be noted that several other artists found fault with Sabaneyev’s presenation of Skryabin’s legacy (including writing reviews for concerts that never took place, and giving conflicting views and accounts depending on the situation at hand). Skryabin’s friend (and Neuhaus’s colleague at the Moscow Conservatory) Alexander Goldenweiser was concerned about the “untruths” Sabaneyev presented in his writings about the composer, and how he claimed to be the only figure at the helm of promoting Skryabin’s legacy. See Gol’denveyzer, Dnevnik, 39. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 207. There are many references to Sofronitsky’s devout outlook, which he believed to be fundamental to his art. See, for instance, Nikonovich and Skryabin, Vspominaya Sofronitskogo, 34–132. Citation is from Sofronitskaya, “(Untitled),” 10. Sosina, “V Odessu,” 208. For a more detailed analysis of the influence of Skryabin on Szymanowski, see Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz. Neygauz, “Velikiy pol’skiy muzïkant,” 25. Neuhaus ceased giving recitals consisting entirely of Szymanowski’s works: a practice he upheld on his return to Russia and until his professorship in Kiev. However, a program from the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory dated April 17, 1926, shows that he did at times try to perform his cousin’s work: Szymanowski’s Sonata no. 3, op. 36; Ravel’s Sonatina; Debussy’s La soirée dans Grenade and Jardins sous la pluie; Skryabin’s Etudes op. 42 (F-sharp Minor and F-sharp Major), Deux poèmes op. 63, and Sonata no. 7, op. 64 “White Mass”; and Prokofiev’s Pieces op. 32, and Sonata no. 4, op. 29. RGALI fond 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 109 l. 5. Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz, 47. Khitruk, G. G. Neygauz, 15–32. and Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 204–8. Kats, “Probuzhdennïy muzïkoy,” 28. Vladimir Sofronitsky, a great friend of Neuhaus, was also fond of such games and some people believe that this phrase was actually his. Sergei Prokofiev also devised many phrases that read the same both forward and backward, and shared these with Sofronitsky. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 164. Merkulov, Uroki Zaka, 24. Zak complained that Neuhaus demonstrated the “truly magical colors of sound,” but that “how exactly to achieve this was left up to the student to discover.” Merkulov, Uroki Zaka, 24. Untitled article by H. S. Neuhaus, son of Stanislav Neuhaus, in Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 131. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 207.

notes to pp. 99–108

❧ 219

47. Pasternak, “Okhrannaya gramota,” 90. 48. Olga Raevsky-Hughes suggested that Skryabin’s work after 1908 ceased to exert any influence over Pasternak. See Raevsky-Hughes, Poetic World of Boris Pasternak, 13–14. 49. Pasternak, Doktor Zhivago, 266. 50. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 208. 51. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 206. 52. Gol’denveyzer, Dnevnik, 56. 53. Neygauz, “Kompozitor-ispolnitel’,” 199. 54. Neygauz, “Zametki o Skryabine,” 205. 55. Billington, Icon and the Axe, 349. 56. Repin, Dalėkoye i blizkoye, 381–82. 57. Dostoevskiy, Dostoevskiy ob isskustve, 58–60. 58. Kogan, Izbrannïye stat’i, 211. 59. Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera, 16–17. 60. Bryusov, Sobraniye sochineniy, 6:80–81. 61. Berdyayev, Sub Specie Aeternitatis, 31–32. 62. For instance, Nikolai Gumilev’s poetry. RGALI fond 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 116. 63. Barnes, Boris Pasternak: 1890–1928, 75. 64. Tolstoy, “Tak chto zhe nam delat’?” 104. 65. Pasternak, “Shopen,” 96. 66. Tolstoy, “Tak chto zhe nam delat’?” 103. 67. Letter to L. A. Pogosova from Moscow dated September 24, 1950. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 358. 68. Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices, 281–86. 69. Neygauz, “Razdum’ya o Shopene,” 235. 70. Kogan, Izbrannïye stat’i, 211. 71. Pasternak, “Shopen,” in Kats, Raskat improvizatsiy, 96–97. 72. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 40. 73. Nikolayev, “Vzgljadï G. G. Neygauza,” 168. Although published in 1961, this article attempts to characterize Neuhaus’s pianism at the height of his powers in the 1920s and 1930s. As explained in the editorial footnote, the article was written “long before” the publication date. 74. Neygauz, “Beseda s pedagogami,” 108–9. 75. Neygauz, “Iz vospominaniy,” 286. 76. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 92–93. 77. Vitsinskiy, Protsess rabotï, 82; emphasis added. 78. See Khitruk, G. G. Neygauz, 92. 79. Letter to his parents from Nervi dated February 15, 1908. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 87. 80. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 173. 81. Kremenshteyn, “Uroki Neygauza,” 33. 82. Neygauz, “K chemu ya stremilsya,” 82. 83. Neygauz, “K chemu ya stremilsya,” 81. 84. Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera, 33.

220 ❧ notes to pp. 108–115 85. Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak from Zinovjevsk dated August 1, 1931. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 217. Neuhaus frequently reminded Zinaida that she only loved him “after successful recitals.” 86. Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak dated August 5, 1931. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 220. 87. Dolgopolov, “Iskusstvo kak samopozhertvovaniye,” 17. 88. Pasternak, “Sestra moya, zhïzn’,” 96. 89. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 41. 90. Dolgopolov, “Iskusstvo kak samopozhertvovaniye,” 16. 91. Nikolayev, Mastera sovetskoy pianisticheskoy shkolï, 170. 92. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 127. 93. See Khludova, “O pedagogicheskikh printsipakh,” 185. 94. Neygauz, “Poėt fortepiano,” 191. 95. S. Neygauz, “Ustarel li romantizm?” 195. 96. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 107. 97. Blok, “Iz stat’i ‘O lirike,’” 68. 98. The Demon was also the subject of a seven-act opera by Anton Rubinstein completed in 1871. 99. Neygauz, “Vladimir Sofronitskiy (1961),” 250. 100. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 363. 101. Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 185–89. 102. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 226–27; Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 288. 103. Literally: “blue-blue night.” In Russian, repeating a word is used for additional emphasis. Borodin and Luk’yanov, Mïsli o Bethovene, 124. Open lesson in 1938 as documented in Neygauz, “Dvenadtsataya sonata Bethovena,” 206–7; Neygauz, “O poslednikh sonatakh Bethovena,” 17. 104. Transcribed in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 281. 105. Borodin and Luk’yanov, Mïsli o Bethovene, 41. 106. Neygauz, “O poslednih sonatah Bethovena,” 16. 107. Khitruk, G. G. Neygauz, 101. 108. Blok, “Iz stat’i ‘O lirike,’” 69. 109. Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 58. 110. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 197–286. 111. Merkulov, Uroki Zaka, 24. 112. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 197. 113. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 217. 114. Blok, “Iz stat’i ‘O lirike,’” 70. 115. Nikolayev, “Vzgljadï G. G. Neygauza,” 174. 116. Neygauz, “Dnevnik poslednikh let,” 73. 117. Blok, “Iz stat’i ‘O lirike,’” 72. 118. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 48. 119. Neygauz, “Strast’, intellekt, tekhnika,” 274. 120. Neygauz, “Velikoye i prostoye,” 177. 121. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 69–70. 122. Barenboym, “Kniga G. Neygauza,” 116–22.

notes to pp. 115–125

❧ 221

123. Neygauz, “Razdum’ya o Shopene,” 235. 124. Citation from S. Neygauz, “Ustarel li romantizm?” 195. The article is thought to date from the beginning of the 1970s, published in the internal newspaper of the Moscow Conservatory. 125. Neygauz, “K chemu ya stremilsya,” 106. 126. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 63. 127. Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 63. 128. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World, 207. 129. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 92. 130. Letter to L. A. Pogosova from Moscow dated January 15, 1962. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 493. 131. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 457. 132. Busoni, Essence of Music, 41. 133. Khitruk, G. G. Neygauz, 115. For an investigation into the parallels between Neuhaus’s and Stanislavsky’s understanding of interpretation, see Razumovskaya, “Heinrich Neuhaus,” 355–69. 134. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 457–58. 135. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 453. 136. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 460. 137. Neygauz, “K chemu ya stremilsya,” 81–82. 138. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 101. 139. Barenboym, “Vospitaniye muzïkanta-ispolnitelya.” 140. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 461. 141. Stanislavskiy, Stat’i, 469.

Chapter Four 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Bėlza, “Genrikh Velikiy,” 74. Riasanovsky, “Image of Peter the Great,” 234–303. Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices, 282. See Neuhaus’s various letters to Gabrichevsky. In relation to the music of Webern, see Schmelz, Such Freedom, 128–29. Four families here probably refer to Pasternak’s brother and his wife who had also come to spend the summer in Irpen. The poem describes the climate of fear in the Soviet Union and the “Kremlin highlander’s” delight at his rampage of murder. It was read by Mandelstam to small gatherings of friends including Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. He was arrested six months after these readings. During the interrogation, he wrote the poem out by hand, but was not sentenced to death or the Gulag. Stalin personally telephoned Boris Pasternak (who had met the dictator on previous occasions) and chillingly said that the case against Mandestam was being analyzed, and asked why Pasternak had not spoken up for Mandelstam. It is not known how Mandelstam avoided more severe punishment, particularly given the sinister significance of Lubyanka as a place of routine execution.

222 ❧ notes to pp. 125–127

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Mandelstam was arrested a second time in 1938 and in August was sentenced for counterrevolutionary activities to five years in the Gulag, where he died that December. In 1794 Ogiński wrote his thirteenth polonaise, Pożegnanie ojczyzny (A Farewell to the Homeland), which in Russia still enjoys a status similar to that occupied by Pachelbel’s Canon or Boccherini’s Minuet in Europe, despite its strong connection symbolically, as well as possibly literally, to Poland’s struggle for independence. For an indication of the adoption of the Polish polonaise in Russia (including as the country’s national anthem at the time of Catherine the Great), see Goldberg, “Appropriating Poland,” 74–88. The degree to which Russia adopted Poland’s musical and literary culture even in the generation preceding Heinrich Neuhaus’s can be seen in the subject matter selected by composers such as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. In Goldberg, Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, 99, Halina Goldberg discusses the importance of Adam Mickiewicz’s ballad Świtezianka in the formation of Polish narratives on national identities by composers such as the composer Maria Szymanowska. It is interesting to note in relation to this that in 1897 Rimsky-Korsakov composed the cantata Svitezyanka op. 44, dedicated to Sergei Taneyev. At the time, this was considered an important contribution to the aesthetics of Russian musical nationalism. Alekseyev, Istoriya fortepiannogo iskusstva, 210–11. Mil’shteyn, Konstantin Nikolayevich Igumnov, 250. Sofronitskiy, “O Shopene (fragment),” 60. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 43. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 232. This organization existed between 1923 and 1932. It worked alongside the Manufacturing Collective of Students of the Moscow Conservatory, PROKOLL, established in 1925. Their aim was to cleanse music of the unproletarian. The RAPM published critiques and statements in two journals: Proletarskiy muzïkant (1929–32) and Za proletarskuyu muzïku (1930–32). Cited in Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 62. Four pianists in total from Russia went to compete in the Chopin Competition of 1927: from Moscow—Oborin, Ginzburg, Briushkov, and from Leningrad: Shostakovich. They represented the three more dominant “Russian piano schools” at the time (Igumnov, Goldenweiser, and Nikolayev). Neuhaus had only recently started teaching at the Moscow Conservatory in 1922, whereas Goldenweiser had been a professor from 1895 and Igumnov from 1899. Leonid Nikolayev had taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1909 (from 1912 as a professor). Karol Szymanowski’s interview as quoted in Misulovin, “Pol’skiy kompozitor,” 75. Ėrenburg, “V Pol’she,” 74. Moskal’ is a derogatory racial slur for “Russian” in the Polish, Ukrainian, and Belorussian languages. Oborin, “O Shopene,” 185. Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad. Oborin, “O Shopene,” 185.

notes to pp. 127–132

❧ 223

22. Khentova, Lev Oborin, 107–8. 23. http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/persons/detail/name/gutman/id/2825 and http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/persons/detail/name/grossman/id/2828 (accessed January 14, 2014). 24. http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/persons/detail/name/malinin/id/2843 (accessed January 14, 2014). 25. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 69. Yakov Flier won first prize in the 1936 Vienna Competition. 26. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 235. 27. Citation from Neygauz, “Ustarel li romantizm?” 195. 28. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 173. 29. Asmus, “O Genrikhe Neygauze,” 11. 30. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 31. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 32. Razumovskaya, “Ob otvetstvennosti ispolnitelya,” 132. 33. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 34. Razumovskaya, “Ob otvetstvennosti ispolnitelya,” 132. 35. The phrase that Neuhaus uses s kondachka has no direct translation into English. It describes the object it refers to as having been acquired unjustly, through luck and without any effort, preparation, or forethought. Citation from Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 233–34. 36. Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares was published outside of Russia first, in English, two years earlier with certain differences compared to the later Russian version. 37. Pasternak, “Shopen,” 96. 38. Kremenshteyn, “Uroki Neygauza,” 33. 39. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 54. 40. Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak from Zinovevsk dated August 1, 1931. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 217. 41. Hudspith, Dostoevsky. 42. Neygauz, “Luchezarnïy talant,” 247. 43. Kostalevsky, Dostoevsky and Soloviev, 72–74. 44. Dziediszycka, “Romantic Other.” 45. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 236. 46. Neuhaus’s letter to A. G. Gabrichevsky dated August 2, 1959. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 439. 47. Letter dated September 10, 1908, from Manuilovka, in Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis CS, 99. 48. Neygauz, “Dnevnik poslednikh let,” 73. 49. Rancour-Laferriere, Slave Soul of Russia, 239–40. 50. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 233. 51. Dostoevsky had been sentenced to death by firing squad on the December 23, 1849, but with minutes to spare his sentence was commuted by the tsar. Instead Dostoevsky was sent to a Siberian labor camp. 52. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, 142. 53. Frolova-Walker, Russian Music.

224 ❧ notes to pp. 132–138 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

Leatherbarrow and Offord, History of Russian Thought, 182. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 233. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 280. Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 230. Belïy, Peterburg, 594. Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 5. Sineokaya, “Rossiyskaya Nichsheana,” 2–3. For a general overview of Nietzsche in Soviet Russia, see Overy, Dictators. Sarnov, “Zachem mï otkrïvaem zapasniki,” identifies a letter by Maxim Gorky dated November 8, 1923: “Out of the news that simply shatters the mind in Russia . . . the following are banned: Plato, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Lev Tolstoy . . . and many other heretics.” Schrift, Nietzsche, 27. Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 51. Magnus, “Deification,” 171. Pasternak died on May 30, 1960. From Galina Neuhaus’s article, in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 128–29. From Adueva-Kelman’s article, in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 33. From Naumov’s article, in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 138. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated November 16, 1950. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 360. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated December 7, 1949. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 344. Mann, Death in Venice, 205. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 322. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 321. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated December 7, 1949. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 344. Mann, “Goethe and Tolstoy,” 103. Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann, 111. Letter to Lucy Pogosova from Moscow dated December 7, 1949. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 344. Neuhaus’s “Polishness” was an important aspect of Rabinovich’s (1962) and Delson’s (1966) characterization of his interpretations of Chopin, and equally was highlighted by the musicologist, Sofia Khentova: “Tied in kinship to the famous Polish musical surname Szymanowski, Neuhaus understood and sensitively felt the national sources of Chopin’s poetry” (Khentova, Lev Oborin, 107). Asaf’yev, “Shopen,” 197. Neygauz, “Beseda s pedagogami,” 138. Neygauz, “Dve besedï,” 96. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 143. Berger, “Chopin’s Ballade Op. 23,” 76–77. Mickiewicz, Crimean Sonnets (final verse) translated by Edna Underwood. See www.sonnets.org/mickiewicz.htm (accessed February 8, 2014). Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 112.

notes to pp. 139–146

❧ 225

85. Neygauz, “Luchezarnïy talant,” 247. 86. Dudli, Pushkin, Mickiewicz, 33–34. 87. Although this continued rejection of religion might be explained to a degree by the political climate of Neuhaus’s adulthood, it is interesting to note that Neuhaus nevertheless publicly alluded to religious terminology. 88. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 234. 89. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 234. 90. See Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, 91. 91. See Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 437. 92. Neuhaus’s letter to A. G. Gabrichevsky dated August 2, 1959, Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 439. 93. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 67, 130. 94. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 104–5. 95. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 104–5. 96. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 97. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 233. 98. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 212. 99. Schutte, Beyond Nihilism, 18. 100. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 63. 101. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 232. 102. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 234. 103. Diary entry for January 25, 1962, in Neygauz, “Dnevnik poslednikh let,” 65. 104. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 223. 105. Oborin, “O Shopene,” 184. 106. Del’son, Genrikh Neygauz, 108–9. 107. Hughes, Liszt’s Chopin, 83. 108. Mil’shteyn, G. G. Neygauz, 236. 109. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 233. 110. Additional translation enclosed in square brackets has been completed by the current author from the French-language edition Liszt, Chopin, which is otherwise missing in Hughes, Liszt’s Chopin. 111. Liszt, Chopin, as printed in Hughes, Liszt’s Chopin, 83–84. 112. A reprint of the 1936 edition of the passage in question can be found in Zasimova, Kak ispolnyat’ Shopena, 103. The 1956 edition was published by the Moscow publishing house Gosudarstvennoe Muzikal’noe Izdatel’stvo. 113. Liszt, Chopin, as printed in Hughes, Liszt’s Chopin, 64–65. 114. Cortot, In Search of Chopin, 175–79. 115. Liszt, Chopin, as printed in Hughes, Liszt’s Chopin, 64–65. 116. Zhalost’—the desire to spare someone from some sorrow or to show compassion for someone’s feelings. 117. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 236. 118. Neygauz, “O Shopene,” 234. 119. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 120. Neygauz, “Velikoye i prostoye,” 177.

226 ❧ notes to pp. 147–152

Chapter Five 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 195. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 166. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 41. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 197. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 197. Lev Naumov, in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 133–35. Similar testimonies from Naumov can be found in Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 167. Neygauz, “Avtobiograficheskiye zapiski: Glava II,” 41. Neuhaus’s preface to an extract of Khludova’s thesis is published in Sokolov, Voprosï fortepiannogo ispolnitel’stva (1965), 167. Sokolov, Voprosï fortepiannogo ispolnitel’stva (1965), 64. The book in question is Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza. Fikhtengol’ts, “(Untitled),” 96. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 45. To support his point about the uniqueness of Neuhaus’s sound, Naumov speaks of the famous sound researcher, Nikolai Alexandrovich Garbuzov, who investigated the sounds of leading pianists. Naumov maintains that Heinrich Neuhaus and Vladimir Sofronitsky had the greatest range between pianissimo and fortissimo. See articles in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza. The quote about working on sound is from Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, 68. It is directly quoted or paraphrased by the pianists mentioned above. Vera Gornostaeva talks about the “Neuhaus sound” in the documentary Tikhonova, Master Genrikh. Vladimir Krainev said that “the main thing Neuhaus worked on with me, was my sound—the beauty of the tone, on the legato, piano, forte.’ See Kraynev, “(Untitled),” 218. Lev Naumov’s own memoirs Pod znakom Neygauza also highlights this at considerable length throughout the book. Vitsinskiy, Protsess rabotï, 65–66. Pokoit’sya: to find peace. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 89. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 67. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 45–46. According to Naumov, Neuhaus as sensitive to harsh sounds as to sounds that reminded him of someone speaking through a sore throat. Neuhaus apparently asked students to remember that sound should not be made from plaster, but from marble. Beylina, “Vekhi tvorcheskogo puti,” 11. Beylina, “Vekhi tvorcheskogo puti,” 11. Neuhaus also recommended that Naumov study the fast Bach Preludes to “develop his fingers” instead of scales. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 62. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 44. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 46. Gornostaeva, “Master Genrikh,” 202. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 7. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 66.

notes to pp. 152–161 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

❧ 227

Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 75. From an untitled article in Zimyanina, Stanislav Neygauz, 141. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 75. Mil’man, “Pamyati uchitelya,” 100. Gornostaeva, “O moem uchitele,” 195. See Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 247–48. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 42. Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 44. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 179–80. For example, see Neuhaus’s lesson with Irma Yudina on Chopin’s fourth Ballade (1962) at 3 minutes 36 seconds (Track 12 on the CD) Zvuchashchie uroki Neygauza as a supplement to Kremenshteyn and Lobanov, “Zvuchashchie uroki Neygauza,” 422–35. This is not however exclusive to this lesson and is a feature of all the recorded lessons on this CD. (Track 13 on the CD) Kremenshteyn and Lobanov, “Zvuchashchie uroki Neygauza.” Naumov, Pod znakom Neygauza, 44. Kremenshteyn, “Uroki Neygauza,” 31. Fomina, “(Untitled),” 181; Vitsinskiy, Besedï s pianistami, 170–75. Nasedkin, “(Untitled),” 216. The question of the complex and at times evidently strained relationship between Neuhaus and his two students is intentionally not explored in detail. Neuhaus did not recognize Gilels as a significant talent and independent musician when Reingbald arranged for Gilels to play for Neuhaus preceding the All-Union Competition in 1933. However, when Richter played for his “audition” Neuhaus immediately hailed him as a genius. This issue had already been raised by the musicologist Lev Barenboim in his criticism of Neuhaus’s book About the Art of Piano Playing, and was explored in the framework of three hypotheses in his unfinished monograph, Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 66. The issue of Neuhaus–Richter–Gilels has recently resurfaced and is a much debated topic, particularly in Russia; see Gordon, Ėmil’ Gilels: Za gran’ju mifa and its sequel Ėmil’ Gilel’s i drugiye: Kniga v raznykh zhanrakh. A biographical sketch of Emil Gilels can be found in Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s. Gilels was enrolled in Neuhaus’s class until the spring of 1938, and taught there until 1941. Gilels’s repertoire of works studied with Berta Reingbald between 1930 and 1936 can be found on pp. 41–42. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 25. Neuhaus uses this expression in many writings including Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961). Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 30. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 68. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 180–81. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 38–39. Neygauz, “Svyatoslav Rikhter,” 179. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 29. See, for example, Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 98.

228 ❧ notes to pp. 161–166 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 98. Dolinskaya, Yakov Fliyer, 235. Reyngbal’d, “Godï uchyobbï Ė. Gilel’sa,” 40. On May 13, 1950, Neuhaus wrote to Lucy Pogosova that on May 23 he was scheduled to perform a live radio broadcast of Bach on the central channel lasting a whole half hour. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 353. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 48. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 36. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 148. Diary entry for January 27, 1962. Neygauz, “Dnevnik poslednikh let,” 66. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 25. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 28. Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 151. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 68. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 64. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 68. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 71–72. The most contentious public remark by Neuhaus in regard to Gilels in Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï has done much to fuel the musicological tension between the different “supporters” of Gilels, Richter, and Neuhaus: “When E. Gilels came to study with me in the [postgraduate] course at the Moscow Conservatory, I had to tell him once: you are a grown man who can eat beef steaks and drink beer, but up to now you have been fed with a baby’s bottle.” Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 169. Similarly, Alexander Goldenweiser wrote: “In the First All-Union Competition [for musicianinterpreters in 1933], the wonderful pianistic talent of the young Emil Gilels made a vivid impression, mainly through his superb interpretation of Liszt’s Fantasia on themes from Mozart’s ‘Figaro.’ In the competition his interpretation of Brahms’s Variations on a theme of Handel was not special.” See Gol’denveyzer, “Itogi Vtorogo vsesoyuznogo konkursa,” 265. Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 247. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 66. The notion of Gilels’s playing acquiring spiritual depth after his studies with Neuhaus can be seen, for instance, in Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 247. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 7–11. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 26. Katts, G. G. Neygauz: Pis’ma, 238. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 169. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961). Diogenes of Sinope was a Greek philosopher (412 BC–323 BC). Diogenes lived in poverty, and was said to live and sleep in a large jar, often translated as barrel. Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 57. Neygauz, “Masterstvo pianista,” 161. Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 46. Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 134.

notes to pp. 166–176 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

❧ 229

Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 135. Fliyer, “Shchedrost’ khudozhnika,” 236. Vitsinskiy, Besedï s pianistami, 166–67. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 68. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 74. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 71–72. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 175. Extract from an interview with Vera Gornostaeva from the documentary film Gornostaeva, “Master Genrikh,” at 23 seconds (film length 39 min 05 seconds). 90. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 69. 91. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 147. 92. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 70. 93. Gilel’s, “Velikiy sootechestvennik,” 455. 94. Blagoy, “Ėmil’ Gilel’s,” 267. 95. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 137. 96. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 69. 97. Barenboym, Ėmil’ Gilel’s, 147. 98. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 153. 99. Neygauz, “Velikoye i prostoye,” 177. 100. Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter, 153. 101. Neygauz, “Van Klibern,” 242. 102. Neuhaus’s aphorisms in Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 288. 103. Rikhter, Vspominaya Neygauza, 288. 104. Neygauz, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï (1961), 176–77.

Conclusion 1. 2. 3. 4.

Paperno, Zapiski moskovskogo pianista, 151. Hamilton, After the Golden Age, 259. Walker, “Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor,” 135. Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru, 134.

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Index About the Art of Piano Playing, 2, 84–85, 98, 117, 147–48, 150, 164, 168 accessibility, 94–95, 110, 112, 125, 169, 173. See also Soviet cultural policy actor, 116–19. See also lived experience; Stanislavsky, Konstantin Adik. See Neuhaus, Adrian Akhmadulina, Bella, 1, 121 Akhmatova, Anna, 6, 14, 104 agencies (political). See censorship; NKVD; Soviet cultural policy Alexandrov, Anatoly, 76, 90 allzumenschliches. See under Nietzsche, Friedrich amor fati. See under Nietzsche, Friedrich anarchy, 49–51. See also Ukraine Ancient Greek epic poetry / philosophy. See Antiquity anti-German sentiment, 46 Antiquity, 35–36, 139–42. See also Renaissance Apollo / Dionysius, 107, 139–42 Arensky, Anton, 32, 83 art for art’s sake, 103 art galleries, 18, 164 art is life, 108, 118 artistic image, 26, 109, 114, 173, 165; Diogenes’ barrel, 165; Himalayas, 73; Italian cemetery / cypresses, 11–12, 34; mountains, 112; night, 112, 137; sky, 112–13; velvet Italian night, 34, 115. See also autobiographicality; autopsychography; confessional; emotion; scaffold; soul

Artistic Realism, 101, 106, 130. See also autobiographicality; autopsychography; emotion; lived experience; Pasternak, Boris; Silver Age Asafyev, Boris, 137–38 Asmus, Valentin, 14, 60–61, 67–68, 76, 84–85, 89, 121, 129 atheism, 25, 36, 93, 105, 113 Austria, 1, 22, 24, 46, 50 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 21, 46 autobiographic, 13–14, 15, 17, 19, 22–24, 28, 33, 45, 51, 75, 86–87, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 117, 120, 130, 132, 136, 163 autobiographicality (avtobiografichnost’), 13, 55, 106–10, 115, 129, 138, 171, 174–75. See also artistic image; lived experience autopsychography (avtopsikhografiya), 12–14, 18, 55, 86, 164, 114, 163, 173 avant garde, 104. See Silver Age Babadzhanyan, Arno, 90 Babel, Isaac, 5–6 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 8, 12, 26, 43, 47–48, 57, 69, 108, 118, 141; and Well-Tempered Clavier, 11, 34, 55, 66, 151, 153, 161 banned art. See censorship Barenboim, Lev, 10, 85, 115, 118, 160, 163, 168 Barere, Simon, 59, 95 Barth, Karl Heinrich, 37–40, 43, 117 Baudelaire, Charles, 103. See also Silver Age

248 ❧ index Bayreuth, 21, 24 beauty, 102–3, 107–8, 114–15, 134, 141, 152. See also Silver Age, soul, sublimation Bechstein piano, 22, 153 Becker piano, 22 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 8, 18, 31, 34, 39, 43, 47, 52, 57–58, 60, 74, 86, 96–97, 112–13, 115, 118, 141, 145, 156, 159–60, 162, 165; “Hammerklavier,” 43, 57, 86, 112, 162; Opus 109, 34, 58, 112; “Tempest,” 57, 156, 165; “Waldstein,” 34, 15 Beliy, Andrei, 18, 104, 132–33 Benditsky, Semyon, 3, 80, 95 Berlin, 19, 21, 24, 27, 30–34, 37–41 blacklisted. See censorship Blok, Alexander, 35; “Annunciation,” 116; and Lyric Angel-Demon, 109– 14, 119; as a Realist, 104, 108; Twelve, 93; and Silver Age, 130, 132 Blumenfeld, Felix, 22–28, 30, 32, 41, 46–49, 51–51, 55–56, 59, 83, 89, 94, 107, 125, 137–38 Blumenfeld-Neuhaus, Olga, 23–25, 56; and Neuhaus’s letters to parents, 22, 28–30, 32–33, 37, 40, 43, 45, 50, 53, 57, 63–65, 83, 107. See also Neuhaus, Gustav Blüthner, 22, 34 Bolshevik, 3; and Neuhaus’s criticism of the regime, 78; and Soviet identity, 93, 126; and Ukraine, 49–53 Bolshoi Theatre, 74, 93 Borodkina, Militsa, 53, 61, 64 Borovsky, Alexander, 47–48 Bösendorfer piano, 20 Brahms, Johannes, 20, 24, 39, 43, 47–48, 58, 82, 97, 118, 121–22, 165 Brest-Litovsk Treaty, 49–50. See also Civil War; Ukraine Bryusov, Valery, 103–4 Busoni, Ferruccio, 32, 43, 45, 117 Calcar. See Kalkar

censorship, 1, 4, 6, 17–18, 27, 51, 73, 77, 90, 101, 112, 125, 134, 144, 149, 163, 174 centenary: and Beethoven, 112; and Moscow Conservatory, 116, 149 Central Music School for Gifted Children (TsMSha), 67, 76. See also Moscow Conservatory Chaliapin, Fyodor, 117 Chekhov, Anton, 35, 102, 116–17 Chopin, Frédéric, 8, 14, 18–19, 24, 26, 28–32, 34, 36, 39, 43, 47–48, 54–55, 57–59, 61, 66, 68, 73, 83, 87, 96–98, 107–8, 118, 125–35, 137–46, 148, 156–59, 162; pedaling in Ballade no. 1, 99–100. See also Mann, Thomas; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Pasternak, Boris; vsechelovek Christianity, 25, 35–36, 92–93, 96, 105, 131, 135, 139; and Catholicism, 35, 139, 142. See also atheism Civil War, 1, 49; and looters, 50–51, 56, 59, 96. See also Revolution (Russian); Ukraine Clementi, Muzio, 32, 39. See also technical drills Cleve. See Kleve Cologne, 19, 21, 24 Commissariat for Education, 7, 52, 56, 93 communism, 3, 5–6, 53, 72, 174 Communist Party, 78–79, 82 competitions, 2–3, 59, 67–68, 73, 81, 126–28, 147, 159, 164. See also Warsaw composer, 59; meeting at the Union of Soviet Composers, 68–69, 73, 78; and Boris Pasternak, 15, 59; and role of interpreter, 13, 16, 26, 38, 55, 95, 109, 113, 117–18, 169–70, 174; and studies with Juon, 32, 38; and studies with Schreker, 43 confessional, 108–9, 113, 115, 130. See also Artistic Realism; autobiographicality; Blok, Alexander; Lyric Angel-Demon

index cosmopolitanism, 4, 18–19, 21, 23–25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 72, 122, 131, 136, 172, 174 counterrevolutionary sentiment, 51, 53, 73, 75–76. See also arrest Crimea, 59, 64, 84 Czechoslovakia, 49 Czerny, Carl, 32. See also technical drills dacha, 61, 72, 121. See also Irpen Dante, 37, 164 Davidova, Natalya, 53 death, 1, 5, 8, 10, 15, 18, 26, 64, 68, 78, 80–82, 90, 92, 95, 105, 112, 115, 121, 129, 132, 145, 149, 153, 173–74 Debussy, Claude, 83, 118, 153 Demon, 108, 110–13, 115, 119, 174. See also autobiographicality; Blok, Alexander; Vrubel, Mikhail denunciation, 5–6, 51, 68–69, 174. See also censorship Dionysius, 107, 140, 142 directorship (of Moscow Conservatory). See Neuhaus, Heinrich: rectorship Dortmund, 21, 24, 29 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 18, 35, 92, 103, 108, 131–34, 138–39 Dubyansky, Alexander, 53 Düsseldorf, 21, 24 Egon, Petri, 95 Eichinger, Sylvia, 10, 64, 79 Elinaite, Ese, 157 Elisavetgrad, 19–24, 37, 39–40, 43–44, 48–52, 54–55, 59, 61, 64, 151 embodiment, 11, 13, 92–96, 102, 108, 113, 129, 131, 135, 139, 163, 170. See also autobiographicality; lived experience émigré, 5, 36, 46, 88, 90, 138, 142. See also citizenship; Slavic identity; Soviet identity emotion, 12–13, 31, 47, 61, 66, 94, 141, 142, 151, 162, 167, 169–71, 173, 175; and Blok, 109; emotional scars, 80; and psychorealism, 117;

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and Russianness, 102–8. See also autobiographicality espionage, charges of, 74, 79, 165 Ettinger, Pavel, 24 etudes, 32, 39, 43, 58, 84, 89, 91, 95 exile, 37, 80, 84, 90, 125. See also Neuhaus, Heinrich: arrest; Sverdlovsk existentialism, 105, 108, 115, 132–34 exoneration, 80, 149, 174. See Lubyanka Fascism, 74, 77–78. See also Nazism; Second World War feeling, 13, 28, 32, 35, 37, 39–40, 53, 59, 73, 85–87, 92, 94, 97, 103, 105–7, 115–19, 127, 135–36, 142–43, 146, 149, 152, 168, 170. See also autopsychography; emotion Feinberg, Samuil, 76, 81, 90, 106, 161 Feliks Kon Higher School of Music, 7 fin de siècle, 15, 17, 102, 107, 115, 133, 174–75. See also Blok, Alexander; Pasternak, Boris; Silver Age; Vrubel, Mikhail First World War, 1, 17, 33, 162. See also Brest-Litovsk Treaty Florence, 21, 33–34, 36–37, 40 Florensky, Pavel, 25, 92 Fomina, Nataliya, 153, 156, 158 foreign, 3, 6, 24, 41, 39, 57, 75–76, 85, 88, 101, 121, 126, 128, 131 formalism, 68–69, 72. See also Soviet cultural policy Frankfurt, 21, 24 free artist, 47 Gabrichevsky, Alexander, 14, 76, 84–85, 89, 121, 136 genius, 12–13, 16, 60, 69, 90, 96, 107, 111–15, 131–32, 135, 140, 165, 170. See also existentialism Genoa, 21, 33, 35 Germany, 1, 6; Germanic outlooks, 14–15, 25, 39, 88–89, 96, 120–23, 130–31, 134, 136, 19–20, 22–24, 27, 29, 30, 35, 40–41, 46–50, 54, 64, 73–77, 85, 99, 147, 159, 164, 171, 176

250 ❧ index Gilels, 2, 9–10, 18, 64, 68, 76, 79, 81, 90, 106, 115, 128, 149–50, 158–71 Ginzburg, Anton, 3, 74, 153, 156 Ginzburg, Grigory, 74, 81, 106, 126 Glazunov, Alexander, 23 Glière, Reinhold, 52 Glinka, Mikhail, 35, 69, 102, 107, 125 Godowsky, Leopold, 30–33, 38, 40–41, 43–44, 58, 107, 117–18 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 23, 35, 122, 129, 133, 136 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 3, 7–8, 9, 67, 72, 80–81, 89, 102, 106, 126, 147, 160 Gorky, Maxim, 72, 90; and Moscow Art Academic Theatre, 117 Gornostaeva, Vera, 3, 75, 80, 82, 113, 147–53, 156, 168 Grand Hall (Moscow Conservatory), 58, 66, 80, 90, 99, 120 Grieg, Edvard, 16, 28, 83 Grinberg, Maria, 166, 169 Gutman, Teodor, 3, 128, 150 hand-copied scores of Shostakovich, 69, 90 Hanon exercises, 25, 27. See also technical drills Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 23, 112–13, 171 Heinrich the Great (epithet), 1, 18, 120, 122, 145. See also Little Humpbacked Horse Hesiod, 141–42. See also Antiquity Hiller, Ferdinand, 19–20 Hitler, Adolf, 73–74, 76. See also Fascism Hochschule für Musik (Berlin), 32, 37. See also Barth Homer, 36, 136, 139, 141–42. See also Antiquity Horowitz, Vladimir, 54, 83, 95, 175 Igumnov, Konstantin, 3, 7–8, 10, 76, 81, 88–89, 106, 126–27, 147, 160 imagery. See artistic image

Imperial Russia, 1, 12, 15, 17, 19–20, 22, 25, 27, 41, 47, 49, 57, 87, 91, 95–97; and Nicolaevan, 105, 121, 125. See also intelligentsia Imperial Russian Music Society, 48 imprisonment. See Lubyanka intelligentsia, 4–5, 18, 64, 73, 78, 88, 93, 97, 102, 105, 120–21, 130–31 internationality, 1, 18, 34, 44, 67–68, 72–73, 77, 86, 120, 126–27, 139, 146, 147, 159, 164 interpretation, 11–14, 20, 31–32, 34, 55, 61, 63, 99, 109–10, 114–18, 128, 145, 156–57, 163, 167–71 interpreter, 13–14, 26, 94–95, 106, 109–10, 114–16, 118, 127–30, 137–38, 141, 145–46, 148, 150–52, 162, 164, 167, 169–71. See also autobiographicality interrogations. See Lubyanka Irpen, 61, 64, 97, 121 isolation. See Lubyanka Italy, 1, 11–12, 33–38, 40, 55, 107, 115, 139, 141 Ivan (Russian folk character), 123–25, 130. See also Little Humpbacked Horse Ivanov, Vyacheslav, 93 Izvestiya (newspaper), 68, 127 Juon, Pavel, 32, 38. See also composition Kant, Immanuel, 23, 25, 60, 130, 166, 173 Kazan, 74, 79 KGB, 5, 17. See also NKVD Kharkov, 49, 54 Khentova, Sofia, 127 Kherson, 20–21, 23, 33, 41, 43, 49 Khludova, Tatyana, 85, 149, 162 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 4, 81 Khrushchev, Nikita, 80 Kiev, 2, 21, 41, 49–51, 53–58, 60–61, 63, 66, 79, 94–96, 108, 121, 150–51 Kiev Conservatory, 48, 52–55 Kirovograd. See Elisavetgrad

index Kleve, 21, 24, 43 Knushevitsky, Sviatoslav, 16 Kochański, Paweł, 47, 51–52 Kogan, Grigroy, 11, 105, 118, 130 Koktebel, 14, 84, 121 Komissarzhevskaya Theatre, 104. See also Silver Age Kon, Feliks, 7 Koussevitsky, Sviatoslav, 46 Krainev, Vladimir, 3, 150 Kraków, 126 Kremenstein, Berta, 75, 107, 133, 158 Kuibyshev, 74 Latvia, 54, 77 Leipzig, 27 Lenin, Vladimir, 57, 82 Leningrad, 2, 58, 73–74, 78, 90, 95, 125. See also Petrograd; St. Petersburg Leningrad Conservatory. See St. Petersburg Conservatory Leopardi, Giacomo, 36. See also Antiquity Lermontov, Mikhail, 111. See Demon Leschetizky, Theodor, 20, 39, 60 lessons, 10, 17–18, 26–28, 30–32, 85, 147–51, 157–58, 164–65, 173 Levit, Leonid, 153–55 Levitan, Isaac, 104. See also Peredvizhniki lichnost’, 4, 78, 105, 120. See also Slavic identity Liszt, Franz, 19–21, 27, 29, 32, 38–39, 57–59, 83, 122, 142–45, 156, 159–60, 167, 175; B-minor Sonata, 20, 32, 38, 156; La Campanella, 39, 95; Rhapsodies, 43, 95, 160 Little Humpbacked Horse (konyokgorbunok), 123–25, 131. See also Heinrich the Great; Mandelstam, Osip lived experience, 11–13, 18, 105, 107, 114, 116–18. See also Artistic Realism; autobiographicality; autopsychography; emotion; NemirovichDanchenko, Vladimir; Stanislavsky, Konstantin

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Lobanov, Pavel, 157 love. See Nietzsche, Friedrich: amor fati; żal Lubyanka, 6, 75, 80, 125, 174. See also Neuhaus, Heinrich: arrest; NKVD Lufer, Abraham, 79 Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 56–57, 93. See also Commissariat for Education Lurye, Yevgeniya. See Pasternak, Yevgeniya Lvov, 54, 126 lyric, 43, 96, 109; Lyric Angel-Demon, 116, 119, 129–30. See also autobiographicality, confessional; Blok, Alexander; Vrubel, Mikhail lyricism, 38, 58, 102, 114, 127, 137, 139, 161. See also sound Lyubimov, Alexei, 3, 150 Malinin, Yevgeny, 3, 81, 83, 128, 150, 153, 156 man’s worth, 114. See also lichnost’; morals Mandelstam, Osip, 1, 5, 14, 63; “The Grand Piano [inspired by the playing of H. G. Neuhaus],” 122–23; Stalin Epigram / Kremlin Highlander, 125. See also Little Humpbacked Horse (konyok-gorbunok) Mann, Thomas, 121; Doktor Faustus and Chopin, 134–36, 140, 175; Der Tod in Venedig, 135. See also Apollo / Dionysius; autobiographicality; Nietzsche, Friedrich: amor fati Manuilovka, 20–21, 33, 37, 45 Marants, Berta, 3, 80 marriage, 23, 55–56, 61, 64–65, 95 Medtner, Nikolai, 15, 57, 90–91, 104, 174 Meisterschule, 41, 43, 46–47 memory, 20, 47, 69, 80, 121, 131, 137, 148, 165, 175; cultural memory, 13–14 Merzhanov, Viktor, 10–11 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 5–6, 104 Michałowski, Aleksander, 27–28, 30

252 ❧ index Michelangelo, 35–36, 139, 141. See also Antiquity; Renaissance Mickiewicz, Adam, 131; Crimean Sonnets, 137–39; Konrad Wallenrod, 137; Świtezianka, 137 Mirabeau, Honoré, 123 misinterpretation, 145, 171. See also autobiographicality Młoda Polska, 29, 89, 137. See also Szymanowski, Karol modernité, 103, 105. See also beauty; Silver Age Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, 73, 77. See also Second World War monographic concerts, 54–55, 118 morals, 15, 27, 59, 86, 92, 102–4, 108, 114–15, 122, 129–30, 146, 152, 169, 171. See also lichnost’; Nietzsche, Friedrich Moscheles, Ignaz, 27, 39 Moscow, 2–3, 22, 25, 37, 46, 48, 50–51, 54, 56–58, 60–64, 69, 74–76, 78–80, 84, 88, 91–95, 97, 99, 108, 111, 116– 17, 120–21, 125, 127, 133, 136, 150, 159–61, 164, 174 Moscow Conservatory, 1, 3, 6–8, 10, 32, 56–59, 65, 67–68, 73–74, 78–80, 83, 90, 97–99, 107, 116, 120, 128–29, 147–49, 159, 164, 173–75; Grand Hall, 58, 66, 80, 90, 99, 120; Meisterschule, 10, 159 Moskvin, Ivan, 88 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 83, 139, 141 multiethnicity, 1, 25, 145 Munich, 21, 24, 33 Mussorgsky, Modest, 8, 52, 125 Myaskovsky, Nikolai, 4, 57, 69, 90 Narkompros, 7, 52, 68. See also Commissariat for Education; Lunacharsky, Anatoly narodnost’, 101. See also accessibility narrative. See artistic image nationalism. See Russianness; Slavic identity; Soviet identity

Nasedkin, Alexei, 3, 150, 158 Naumov, Lev, 3, 83, 126, 135, 148, 150– 51, 153, 156–57, 161 Nazism, 15, 73–77. See also Second World War Nechkina, Militsa, 88 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 116–17. See also lived experience; Realism; Stanislavsky, Konstantin nerves (as intense emotional quality), 94, 109, 144 Nervi, 21, 33 Nesterov, Mikhail, 103–4. See also Peredvizhniki Neuhaus, Adrian, 56, 64, 135, 140; tuberculosis, 75, 79 Neuhaus, Astrid, 165 Neuhaus, Gustav, 19–24; and patented concave keyboard with concentric action frame, 21, 26–27, 29–30, 32–34, 37–38, 43, 51, 55–56, 59, 64–65, 76, 98, 106, 108, 150–51. See also Blumenfeld-Neuhaus, Olga Neuhaus, Heinrich: accuracy, 16, 27, 38–39, 170; arrest, 6 13, 75–80, 88, 125, 133 (see also Lubyanka; Second World War); bravura technique, 58, 65, 84, 106; charisma, 1, 18, 33–34, 39, 47, 58, 65, 80, 84, 116, 122, 147–48, 163; citizenship, 32, 136, 174 (see also cosmopolitanism; Soviet identity); concertizing, 30, 48–49, 56–58, 62–64, 79–80, 83, 95, 159, 162; concerto repertoire, 2, 28–29, 39, 43–44, 47–48, 57–58, 61, 63, 74, 83–84, 89–91, 95, 108, 112, 127, 139, 156, 162; concerts, 2, 8, 17, 22, 29, 31–32, 40, 47, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 62, 80, 82–84, 89–91, 95, 98, 104, 120–21, 148, 159, 161, 167, 175; coquettish manners, 9, 33, 85, 147; dandy manners, 1, 8, 33, 91; debut, 47, 83, 88, 95; diphtheria, 66; encores, 58–59, 66, 83, 94; German nationality, 75, 175; hands, 39–40, 65, 67; lisped accent, 24, 137;

index nerves, 63, 65; paralysis, 66–67, 80, 83; polyneuritis, 66.; professorship, 1, 55–57, 59; propiska, 43; recording (dislike of), 16–17, 82, 99, 157; rectorship (of Moscow Conservatory), 68–73; suicide, 37, 40; teaching (dislike of), 18, 148–49; technique, 29, 32, 34, 38–39, 43, 58–59, 65, 97–99, 118, 129, 150, 160, 169; treatment for hand paralysis, 66, 83–84, 160; unevenness (as a performer), 39, 59, 64, 99, 162; volatile temperament, 2, 30, 39, 59, 86, 96, 148 Neuhaus, Natalya (Talya), 23, 27–28, 52–53, 55 Neuhaus, Olga. See Blumenfeld-Neuhaus, Olga Neuhaus, Stanislav, 3, 56, 62, 64, 83, 99, 110, 115, 128 Neuhaus-Pasternak, Zinaida (Zina), 55–56, 61–64, 79, 83, 121, 130, 132 Neuhaus School, 23, 147, 153 Neuhausian manner, 66, 107, 126, 152– 53, 161. See also lyricism; Neuhaus, Heinrich: charisma; sound Nicolsky, 40. See also Neuhaus, Heinrich: suicide Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 15, 18, 23, 25, 35–36, 76, 79, 85, 87, 95, 133, 139, 141, 149, 174; allzumenschliches, 10, 18; amor fati and Chopin, 134–35, 140, 142; The Birth of Tragedy, 140; Morgenröthe, 35; Nietzschean, 10, 93, 136, 145; Übermensch, 133–34, 140–42, 145; Zarathustra, 130. See also morals; nobility Nikolayev, Alexander, 106, 114 Nikolayev, Leonid, 81 Nikolayeva, Tatyana, 90 NKVD, 5, 17, 75, 78–80. See also Neuhaus, Heinrich: arrest nobility; and Chopin, 144–45; and Dostoevsky, 108; and Nietzsche, 36, 130, 134, 145; and pianism, 16, 26, 39, 94, 161; and Pushkin, 131, 139; and

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Rolland, 72; and Skryabin, 94; and żal, 143. See also morals; vsechelovek Nuremberg, 24, 52, 123 Oborin, Lev. 81, 98, 126–27, 142 obshchechelovek, 131. See also Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Slavic identity; vsechelovek; Odessa, 52–53, 159–60, 162, 164, 166, 170 Oistrakh, David, 74 On the Art of Piano Playing. See About the Art of Piano Playing Order of Lenin, 82 Orpheus, 15, 92 Orthodoxy, 15, 25, 91–93, 96, 103, 115, 131, 174. See also Christianity overtone, 98. See pedaling Pasternak, Boris, 1, 5–6, 14, 17, 24, 34, 58, 60–66, 69, 76, 79, 87, 89, 91, 104–7, 121, 134–35, 149, 164, 174; and autobiographicality, 104–9; and Brahms, 121; and Chopin, 61, 98; Doctor Zhivago, 14, 62, 101; and Moscow Conservatory, 97; overtones, 98; Peredelkino, 64–65, 97, 135; and Peredvizhniki, 104; Realism, 105–6, 109, 129–30; and Silver Age, 104, 112; and Skryabin, 60, 99–101; suicide attempt, 63–64; and Tchaikovsky, 98; and Tolstoy, 62, 104–5, 130; Volkhonka, 60; and Wagner, 97–99 Pasternak, Leonid, 62, 97 Pasternak, Yevgeniya, 61–63 Pasternak, Zinaida. See Neuhaus-Pasternak, Zinaida pedagogy, 18, 85–86, 118–19, 130, 147– 49, 151, 153, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171. See also teaching pedaling, 22, 91, 98–99, 100, 150–51, 165 People’s Artist of the RSFSR (order of merit), 82 Peredelkino, 14, 64–65, 97, 135. See also Pasternak, Boris

254 ❧ index Peredvizhniki, 103–5 Petrograd, 46–50, 57, 88, 91–93. See also Leningrad, St. Petersburg Petrograd Conservatory. See St. Petersburg Conservatory philosophical, 15, 24, 26–27, 34–38, 59–60, 85–86, 89, 92, 95–96, 99, 103, 108, 112, 114, 132–34, 136, 145–46, 166 philosophy, 12, 14, 25–26, 35, 44, 72, 86, 99, 101, 109, 112, 114, 117, 121, 132–33, 135, 145, 149, 151, 166, 170–71, 173–74. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich pianism (as a culture), 1–3, 8–12, 15–16, 18, 23, 25. See also competitions piano makes. See Bechstein; Becker; Blüthner; Bösendorfer; Steinway Podol, 61. See also Irpen poeticism, 61–62, 66, 94, 106–10, 121, 137–38, 165, 169 poetry, 2, 14–15, 24, 29, 36, 58–61, 63, 83, 85–86, 98, 104, 107–10, 114, 121, 131, 137–39, 164, 172–73 Pogosova, Lucy, 82, 136 pogroms, 49 Poland, 21, 49, 53, 73, 77, 125, 134, 137–38 Polish, 7, 22–24, 27–29, 38, 45, 47, 49–50, 54–55, 65, 77, 88, 96, 120, 125–26, 137–38; and Polishness, 141–46, 162, 164. See also Slavic identity politics. See Soviet cultural policy; Soviet identity Poltava, 20–21, 49, 54 practice. See technical drills; technique Pravda (newspaper), 68–69, 72–73 programming. See Neuhaus, Heinrich: concerts Prokofiev, Sergei, 4, 47, 57–58, 76, 84, 90–91, 128, 169 Prokofieva, Elena (Lina), 76 proletarian, 7–8, 112, 126

propaganda, 3, 69, 75, 88, 101, 127–28, 149, 174 provinces, 19–20, 23, 25, 33, 37, 40–41, 48, 58 Przybyszewski, Bolesław. See Pshibishevsky, Boleslav Pshibishevsky, Boleslav, 7–8, 68, 128 psyche, 15, 87, 127, 130, 175. See also autobiographicality; autopsychography; soul psychography, 26. See also autopsychography psychorealism, 15. See also Artistic Realism; Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Stanislavsky, Konstantin; Peredvizhniki purges, 5, 7, 73 Pushkin, Alexander, 35, 69, 80, 83, 102, 108, 123, 129, 131, 138–39, 142. See also Slavic identity Rabinovich, David, 47, 87 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 8, 15–16, 60, 83, 89–91, 117, 153 Raphael, 36, 139, 141. See also Antiquity; Chopin, Frédéric; Renaissance RAPM, 126–27 Ravel, Maurice, 58 Realism, 17, 78, 91, 101–5, 107–9, 115–16, 119, 130–35, 145, 170–71. See also Artistic Realism; autobiographicality; autopsychography; Socialist Realism recital, 2, 16, 19–20, 26, 33–34, 39, 41, 43–44, 47–48, 54–58, 57, 61, 63, 66, 74, 79–80, 84–85, 88, 90–91, 97, 99, 118, 122, 125, 142, 161–61, 173 Reger, Max, 47, 83, 88 regime. See State (Soviet) Reinecke, Carl, 27 Reingbald, Berta, 159–61, 170 Renaissance art, 34, 36. See also Antiquity repertoire, 21–22, 30, 34, 38–40, 43, 52, 57, 68, 82–85, 89, 90–91, 94, 126, 128, 150, 159, 161–62, 167–68 Repin, Ilya, 62, 103–4

index representational art, 118. See also lived experience; Stanislavsky, Konstantin Revolution (Russian), 1, 7, 15, 17, 27, 49, 51, 54, 72, 89, 91–94, 96–97, 101–2, 112, 115, 123, 174. See also Civil War Rhine, 24, 122; Rhineland, 20 rhythm, 12, 61, 152, 164 Richter, Sviatoslav, 2, 6, 9–10, 18, 37, 64–65, 68, 74, 76, 85, 90, 149–51, 158–66, 169–71, 176 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 32, 35, 52, 95–96, 125 Rolland, Romain, 72, 90 romanticism, 4, 15, 36, 47, 58, 72, 96, 105–6, 115, 128, 137, 139, 141, 161, 168–71, 174–75 Rome, 21, 33, 35, 139 rubato, 31, 91, 117, 157 Rubinstein, Anton, 20, 31, 58, 60, 142 Rubinstein, Artur, 1, 29, 38, 40–41, 43, 53, 58, 89, 133 Rüdesheim, 24 Rudorff, Ernst, 19, 30 Russia, 1–2, 4, 9, 14–15, 20–21, 27, 32–33, 35, 41, 46–47, 49–51, 53, 55, 57, 59–61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 72–77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87–89, 91–93, 96, 101–2, 104–6, 112, 115–21, 125–28, 131, 134, 140, 153, 159, 162, 172, 174–75 Russian, 3, 10, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 21–25, 27, 32–33, 35, 40–43, 46–47, 49, 51–52, 56, 65–67, 69–72, 74–75, 82, 84, 88–96, 102–8, 110, 113, 115–21, 124–34, 136–39, 143–45, 152, 154–56, 159, 163–64, 174–75. See also Slavic identity; Soviet identity Russian Empire, 18, 21, 46, 49, 53. See also Imperial Russia Russianness, 18, 88–89, 111, 116, 119, 142. See also Slavic identity Russo-Polish War, 54, 96, 126. See also Revolution; Ukraine Sabaneyev, Leonid, 13, 92, 96

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saintliness, 16, 35, 39. See also existentialism Saratov, 66, 74, 76, 78, 90, 95 Savshinsky, Samarii, 118 scaffold, 12, 166. See also artistic image scales, 25, 99, 151 Schloezer, Boris, 92, 96 Schmidt-Neuhaus, Astrid, 165 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 23, 25 Schreker, Franz, 43, 165 Schubert, Franz, 21, 107 Schumann, Robert, 8, 19–21, 24, 26, 39, 47, 52, 57, 59, 66, 82–83, 118, 137, 139, 162–63; Fantasie, 57, 59, 66, 82, 163; Kreisleriana, 20, 39, 163 Schweitzer, Albert, 36, 175 Second World War, 5, 27, 57, 73, 88, 167; aerial bombardment, 16, 74; evacuation, 75; Lubyanka, 6 13, 75–80, 88, 125, 133. See also exile; Sverdlovsk Serebryakov, Pavel, 128 Serov, Valentin, 104 Sevastopol, 21 Shatskaya, Valentina, 73 Shatsky, Stanislav, 7–8, 67–68 Shebalin, Vissarion, 88 Shikhmatova, Countess, 20, 33. See also Manuilovka, Florence Shostakovich, Dmitri, 4–6, 68–73, 81, 84, 88, 90–91, 128, 174. See also hand-copied scores Siberia, 62–63 Sicily, 34–35 Silver Age, 4, 14–15, 35, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103–5, 107, 109, 111–13, 115–17, 119, 121, 131–32, 149, 174–75. See also autobiographicality; autopsychography; confessional; Lyric Angel-Demon; soul Skryabin, Alexander, 8, 15, 18, 55, 57–58, 60, 66, 69, 87, 90–99, 101–2, 104, 109–10, 112, 118, 125 Slavic identity, 15, 89, 91–92 102, 125, 131, 136–42, 144; and żal, 143–46. See also Russianness

256 ❧ index Slobodyanik, Alexander, 3 sobornost’, 92, 131 socialism, 3–4, 7, 78, 82, 91, 93, 101–2, 112, 115, 123, 131, 172, 174. See also Soviet identity Socialist Realism, 13, 17, 78, 101, 104, 106, 116, 174–75 Sofronitsky, Vladimir, 27, 81, 85, 94, 96, 106, 126, 163 Solovyov, Vladimir, 25, 92 soul, 13, 18, 25, 37, 43, 60, 82, 86, 92, 102, 105, 107, 109–10, 113, 117, 119, 129–34, 137, 142, 145–46, 149, 151, 163–64, 166, 171, 176. See also autobiographicality; autopsychography; existentialism; Russianness; vsechelovek sound, 22, 38–39, 61, 98–99, 113–14, 129, 131, 150–53, 160–61, 164. See also lyricism; Neuhausian manner Soviet Bloc, 2, 6, 68, 174 Soviet cultural policy, 3, 4, 72, 878; and Pravda denunciations, 68–73; and Neuhaus’s anti-Soviet sentiment, 76–79. See also accessibility; censorship; Lubyanka Soviet, 2–6, 9, 14–15, 17–18, 27, 54, 56–57, 60, 68-69, 72–80, 82, 88, 90–91, 93, 102, 104, 110–12, 115–16, 118, 121, 126–28, 130, 134, 147, 149, 164, 172–75 Soviet identity, 4, 6, 7, 13, 18, 69, 72, 73, 88, 93, 112, 115, 126, 136, 147, 174. See also Slavic identity Soviet Union, 1–2, 4–6, 8, 18, 41, 57, 59, 68, 72–75, 77, 82, 101, 129, 145, 147, 149, 161, 164 Spinoza, Baruch, 60 spirit, 12–13, 25, 37, 61, 72, 83, 93–94, 96, 101, 103, 109, 112, 118, 123, 125–26, 130, 133–34, 140–41. See also soul spirituality, 12, 14–16, 18, 25–27, 33–34, 37, 39, 55, 59–60, 86, 89, 92–93, 102, 104, 108, 111, 113, 116–17, 128–30, 132–33, 137, 139, 145, 149, 164, 166,

169–70, 173, 175. See also autobiographicality; existentialism; soul St. Petersburg, 21–23, 30, 32, 41, 46, 55, 103–4, 109. See also Leningrad; Petrograd St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts, 103. See also Peredvizhniki St. Petersburg Conservatory, 23, 47 Stalin, Josef, 5, 7, 68, 72, 74, 77, 79, 81–82, 90, 125, 164, 174; and Stalinist, 4, 72, 80, 115–16, 120–21, 123, 125 Stalin Prize, 77, 80–82 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 12, 102, 116–19, 130, 170–71. See also lived experience State (Soviet), 4–7, 10, 17–18, 26–27, 44, 65–80, 84, 91–93, 101, 112, 115, 117, 119, 125, 127, 129, 172, 174. See also censorship; regime; Soviet cultural policy; Soviet Union Steinway, 22, 52 Steuermann, Eduard, 45 Strauss, Richard, 29, 38, 52, 106, 165; Burlesque, 31; Westfälisches Musikfest, 29 subjectivity, 4, 9–11, 17–18, 115, 145, 169, 174–75 sublimation, 13, 105–6, 134, 175. See also Silver Age superman, 59, 134. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich; vsechelovek Sverdlovsk, 74, 79–80, 84, 90, 167 Switzerland, 32, 33, 35, 47 symbolism. See artistic image; Silver Age Szeluto, Apolinary, 29. See also Młoda Polska Szymanowski, Karol (Katot), 22–27, 29, 32–35, 38, 42–43, 47, 50–53, 55, 74, 83–84, 89, 91, 96–97, 120–22, 126. See also Młoda Polska Talya. See Neuhaus, Natalya Tamarkina, Rosa, 76, 81 Taneyev, Sergei, 32, 83, 94 Tausig, Carl, 27, 38

index Tbilisi, 2, 48, 80, 95. See also Tiflis Tchaikovsky, Piotr, 8, 11, 22, 35, 52, 69, 89, 97–99, 102, 105, 125, 127, 129 teaching, 8, 11, 20, 27, 31, 38–39, 44, 48–49, 56–57, 65, 67, 73, 83, 141, 148–51, 156–58, 160, 162. See also under Neuhaus, Heinrich technical drills / exercises, 26–27, 29, 31, 38, 159–62 temperament. See Neuhaus, Heinrich: charisma Tiflis, 48–50, 55, 57–58, 62, 95; Tiflis Conservatory, 48 Tolstoy, Alexei, 88 Tolstoy, Lev, 8, 62, 92, 102–5, 108, 117, 130, 136. See also Artistic Realism tradition, 16, 27, 36, 60, 62, 69, 106, 115, 127, 129, 138, 150, 151, 157, 160–61, 167–69, 175 tragedy. See Apollo / Dionysius truth, 40, 96, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 114– 15, 117–19, 139, 168, 170–71, 174. See also Artistic Realism; morals; Russianness; Slavic Identity tsar, 51, 75, 92, 120; and the Little Humpbacked Horse, 123, 125 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 14, 104 Tuberculosis. See under Neuhaus, Adrian Tymoszówka, 22, 29, 50; looters, 50–51, 52 Tyuneyev, Boris, 166 Übermensch. See under Nietzsche, Friedrich Ukraine, 19; Ukrainian People’s Republics, civil war, and Kiev Uprising, 49–50; Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, 53, 126, 137, 164. See also Civil War; Russo-Polish War Ural Conservatory, 79. See also Sverdlovsk urtext edition, 170 USSR. See Soviet Union

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Vakhtangov Theatre, 74 Vedernikov, Anatoly, 3, 11, 150 Venice, 21, 33 Vienna, 20, 24, 40–41, 43–44, 47, 128 Vienna Academy, 41, 46, 64; Staatspreis, 44 Virsaladze, Eliso, 3, 150 virtuosity, 34, 39, 106, 160, 164. See also technique virtuoso, 10, 19, 22–23, 27, 32, 37–38, 59, 83, 159 Volkhonka, 60. See also Pasternak, Boris Vrubel, Mikhail, 87, 104; Demon (seated), 110–13. See also Blok, Alexander; Silver Age vsechelovek, 131–34, 138–40. See also Dostoevsky, Fyodor; Nietzsche, Friedrich: amor fati vsenarodnost’, 110. See accessibility; Soviet cultural policy vseyedinstvo, 92, 96. See also sobornost’ Wagner, 15, 21, 24–27, 38, 52, 83, 85, 89, 96–99, 123, 129, 135, 165, 167. See also Pasternak, Boris Wanderers. See Peredvizhniki Warsaw, 21, 24; Chopin Competition, 68, 126–28; Conservatory, 27, 29, 50, 53–54, 96 Webern, Anton, 175 Weimar, 27 Wittgenstein, Carolyne, 144 Yasnaya Polyana, 62 Yellina, Esther. See Elinaite, Ese Yeremeeva-Giotti, Zinaida. See NeuhausPasternak, Zinaida Yermolova, Maria, 102, 116. See also Stanislavsky, Konstantin Yershov, Piotr, 123, 130. See also Heinrich the Great; Little Humpbacked Horse; Mandelstam, Osip Young Poland. See Młoda Polska Ysaÿe Competition, 128. See also competitions

258 ❧ index Yudina, Maria, 6, 74, 134, 157, 161, 163, 166 Zak, Yakov, 3, 74, 76, 81, 113, 128, 158, 166, 169 Zakopane, 45

żal, 143–46. See also Chopin, Frédéric; Slavic identity; sublimation Zhitomir, 164 Zhitomirsky, Daniel, 94–95 Zurich, 64

HEINRICH NEUHAUS

Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) was one of the most charismatic and sought after pianist-pedagogues of the twentieth century, earning a formidable reputation in the West as one of the pillars of Russian pianism through the success of his star pupils Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter and his book About the Art of Piano Playing. Maria Razumovskaya’s Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life beyond Music is the first critical study of this masterful artist. It explores what went on in his teaching studio but also seeks to understand the vibrant circumstances that underpinned Neuhaus’s unique outlook and approach. These circumstances include his formative years of study in Europe alongside Karol Szymanowski (his cousin) and the renowned pianist Artur Rubinstein, the turbulence of life during the Russian Civil War, Neuhaus’s meteoric rise to fame in Moscow, and his lifelong friendship with the poet Boris Pasternak. Razumovskaya’s book draws on previously unseen documents relating to Neuhaus’s arrest and imprisonment in the infamous Lubyanka for criticizing the Soviet regime. By revealing how these influences helped form Neuhaus’s distinct vision of a performer’s subjectivity—what he called an artist’s “autopsychography”—the book emphasizes important aesthetic principles and practices that were adopted by creative artists eager to escape the banality and limitations imposed by Socialist Realism.

HEINRICH NEUHAUS

MARIA RAZUMOVSKAYA, a recital pianist and researcher, teaches at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Literature and Arts.

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com

RAZUMOVSKAYA

Cover photograph by Leonid Levit, 1964. Courtesy of the Russian State Archive of

A Life beyond Music MARIA RAZUMOVSKAYA