Maria Veniaminovna Yudina (28 August [9 September] 1899, Nevel, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire - 19 November 1970, Moscow, USSR) was a Soviet pianist and teacher, renowned for an intense, uncompromising performing manner and for an exceptionally wide intellectual and spiritual horizon that extended far beyond music. Born into a Jewish family, she was the daughter of the physician and forensic expert Veniamin Gavrilovich Yudin, who was honored as a Hero of Labor, and Raisa Yakovlevna Yudina (nee Zlatina; 1868-1918), a homemaker originally from Moscow.
Yudina began piano lessons at the age of six with Frida Davydovna Teitelbaum-Levinson, a pupil of Anton Rubinstein. In 1912 she entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, studying piano with Anna Yesipova and later with Felix Blumenfeld, Anatoly Drozdov, and Leonid Nikolayev, while also pursuing a broad range of other disciplines. In May 1919 she was baptized and became a committed Orthodox Christian, reportedly an ardent admirer of St. Francis of Assisi; she was associated with the Nevel intellectual circle around Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Pumpiansky, and later served as a prototype for Maria Petrovna Dalmatova in Konstantin Vaginov's novel Goat Song.
After graduating in 1921, she joined the conservatory staff and launched an active concert career, including an early appearance with the Petrograd Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Emil Cooper. In those years she lived at 30 Palace Embankment in Petrograd and often gave benefit concerts for the Political Red Cross led by Yekaterina Peshkova. Her first solo concert in Moscow took place in 1929. In 1930 she was dismissed from the Leningrad Conservatory during the anti-religious campaign against teachers' beliefs. Two years later she obtained a professorship at the Tbilisi Conservatory, and from 1936, with Heinrich Neuhaus's support, she worked at the Moscow Conservatory until 1951. From 1944 to 1960 she taught at the Gnessin Institute, from which she was dismissed for her Orthodox convictions and for sympathies toward contemporary Western music, including the emigre Igor Stravinsky.
Despite restrictions, she continued to appear in public, though she was denied recording opportunities, and at one point was banned from concertizing for five years after reading Boris Pasternak's poems from the stage in Leningrad in response to an encore demand. In 1965 she met Alexander Men at an exhibition of Vasily Vatagin's works, and in 1966 she lectured on Romanticism at the Moscow Conservatory. A regular parishioner at the Church of St. Nicholas in Kuznetsy, she was guided spiritually by Archpriest Vsevolod Shpiller. Yudina lived in persistent poverty by principle and practice, believing an artist should be poor: for years she wore the same dress, often went hungry, and constantly helped people in distress, including persecuted friends and those in exile. In the last years of her life she owned a small cooperative apartment and from 1963 lived in the Academy of Sciences' House of Scientists cooperative on Rostovskaya Embankment in Moscow.
As a performer she often appeared in solo recitals and chamber music, notably with the Beethoven Quartet and the Glazunov Quartet. She was a pioneering advocate of new music in the USSR, giving first Soviet performances of works by Alban Berg, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Bela Bartok, Anton Webern, Olivier Messiaen and others, and maintaining long-term creative relationships with Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. At the same time, she was celebrated for interpretations of Schubert, J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mozart. Pianist Sviatoslav Richter, while noting the radical and even abrasive nature of her approach, emphasized her great talent and later recalled playing Rachmaninoff at her funeral.
Yudina also possessed a strong literary gift, leaving extensive correspondence with figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Suvchinsky, Korney Chukovsky, Boris Pasternak, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as memoirs and reflections on many cultural contemporaries including Vladimir Sofronitsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Pavel Florensky, Lev Karsavin, Aleksei Ukhtomsky, Maxim Gorky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Konstantin Paustovsky, Aleksandr Kochetkov, and Nikolay Zabolotsky. Audiences also remembered the spoken commentaries on music and composers that accompanied her concerts in the 1960s. In the early 1930s she was close to the philosopher Aleksei Losev; their friendship ended in 1934 after a quarrel connected with the belief that she had been portrayed in his novel Woman Thinker.
She remained among Joseph Stalin's favored pianists, yet, according to her student Marina Drozdova, she was not a political dissident in the formal sense. Her last concert took place in 1969; she died in Moscow in 1970 at the age of seventy-one and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery. Her large family included siblings Flora, Anna, Lev, and Boris Yudin, as well as a half-sister, Vera Gottfried. Yudina's posthumous legacy has been preserved not only in recordings, including releases on the Melodiya label, but also in numerous editions of her literary наследие and correspondence published from the late twentieth century onward.
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