Playing until her fingers bled: the dedication of the pianist Maria Yudina

The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more great pianists thrived, despite the extreme danger and discomfort in which they lived and in which some of them died. If we think immediately of Richter, the greatest of them all, and Gilels, there are at least 20 more that we could add without exaggeration. One of the most important was without question Maria Yudina, born in 1899, who astonishingly survived until 1970.

She was not just a sovereign artist but an eccentric of the kind and degree that only Russia seems able and willing to supply. Reading a biography of her as thorough and informed as Playing with Fire, one grows ever more incredulous that she survived so long and went on performing until very near the end of her life.

The author is extremely well placed to narrate Yudina’s life and provide some insight into her art. Elizabeth Wilson lived in Russia for years, was a pupil of Rostropovich and familiar with all the major Russian artists of the latter part of the 20th century. Though she never heard Yudina in the flesh, there is a large number of records and tapes of her playing, most of them ‘live’. When you read of the conditions under which they were made, their sound quality, though far from ideal, is good enough to create a vivid impression of what a performance by Yudina was like.

Wilson doesn’t give an estimate of how many performances Yudina gave, but it must have been thousands, sometimes more than one a day, and her programmes tended to be huge: three concertos straight off was nothing unusual. Her musical gods were Bach, Beethoven and Schubert, performances of all of them available on record.