There is a story that Stalin requested a recording of a Mozart concerto which Maria Yudina had performed live, only to discover none existed. The orchestra and technicians were summoned in the middle of the night to recreate it. Stalin could command factories and armies but he could not command the past. He could not replay beauty without asking for it. And Maria Yudina herself reportedly sent him a letter thanking him for payment he had arranged for the recording while promising to pray for the salvation of his soul. I imagine Stalin read those words in silence. Perhaps unsettled, someone immune to the gravitational pull of fear. He was after all a person who could sign documents ending lives with the movement of a pen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Outside, the war continued and history sharpened its knives. Yet the music remained beyond coercion. She played Mozart and the dictator listened. Somewhere within the Kremlin, one of the most feared men of the twentieth century was haunted by a woman who sat at a piano and refused, both politically and spiritually, to belong to him. It was during the war, maps shifted daily, and he heard the piano playing late at night over the radio. Maria Yudina, was renowned not only for extraordinary interpretations of Mozart and Beethoven but also for an inconvenient quality uncommon under Stalin, a conscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stalin trusted nobody, but reportedly admired her playing. He had spent years commanding armies and terrifying subordinates with a glance. Yet the woman seated at a piano before a few hundred listeners, seemed to answer a different authority. One can imagine him listening alone in the Kremlin, reviewing reports from the front. The outside world tense with wartime darkness while inside his room, Mozart unfolded from the radio with impossible delicacy. What might desire look like in a man who understood possession better than affection? Probably he lusted after what she represented, freedom of spirit, fearlessness. A person with an inner life unconquered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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