‘I wish for my life’s roses to have fewer thorns’: Heinrich Neuhaus and Alternative Narratives of Selfhood in Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus (1888–1964) was one of the Soviet era’s most iconic musicians. Settling in Russia reluctantly, he was dismayed by the policies of the Soviet state and unable to engage with contemporary narratives of selfhood in the wake of the Revolution. In creating a new aesthetic field that defined him as Russian rather than Soviet, Neuhaus embodied an ambiguous territory whereby his views both resonated with and challenged aspects of Soviet-era culture. This article traces how Neuhaus adopted the idea of self-reflective or ‘autobiographical’ art through an interdisciplinary melding of ideas from Boris Pasternak, Alexander Blok and Mikhail Vrubel. In exposing the resulting tension between his understanding of Russian and Soviet selfhood, it nuances our understanding of the cultural identities within this era. Finally, discussing this tension in relation to Neuhaus’s contextualization of the artistic persona of Shostakovich, it contributes to a long-needed reappraisal of his relationship with the composer.

I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, which enabled me to visit archives in Moscow in order to undertake research for this article. Translations from Russian are my own unless otherwise stated. Russian titles are given in transliteration following the system employed in Grove Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com>. Common Anglicized spellings are adopted, and Germanicized Russian names are not transliterated. It should be noted that readers may encounter references to Neuhaus’s first name elsewhere as Harry and Henryk (both used by his cousin Karol Szymanowski) and as Garik (frequently used by Boris Pasternak); his name also appears as Genrikh Neygauz or Neigauz in other anglophone literature.

Notes

1 Letter to Lucy Pogosova, 14 October 1955, in Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, Pis ′ma (Correspondence), ed. Anatoliy Iosifovich Katts (Moscow: Deka, 2009), 393.

2 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï: Zapiski pedagoga, 1st edn (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal′noye izdatel′stvo, 1958), trans. K. A. Leibovich as About the Art of Piano Playing: Notes of a Pedagogue (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1973).

3 Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 30. Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97) was one of the most internationally famous pianists of his time. Alexander Goldenweiser (1875–1961) was a Russian pianist and composer, and one of the most important teachers based at the Moscow Conservatory. Konstantin Igumnov (1873–1948) was also a pianist and teacher of great authority at the same institution.

4 Sofia Mikhailovna Khentova, Lev Oborin (Leningrad: Muzïka, 1964), 107. This was especially the case following the first International Chopin Competition in 1927, which had unexpectedly been won by Lev Oborin (1907–74), a student of Igumnov; his compatriot Grigory Ginzburg (1904–61), a student of Goldenweiser, took fourth place. Thereafter the USSR maintained its strong position on the international competition circuit, with many laureates being supported by Neuhaus’s mentorship. For instance, in the 1937 Chopin Competition, Neuhaus’s student Yakov Zak (1913–76) took both first prize and the Mazurka Prize, and Rosa Tamarkina (1920–50) second prize. Neuhaus’s student Emil Gilels (1916–85) won second prize in the International Vienna Competition in 1936 and first prize at the Ysaÿe (now Queen Elisabeth) Competition in Brussels in 1938.

5 Yakov Isaakovich Milstein, ‘Genrikh Neygauz’, in Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, 1st edn, 271–318 (p. 271). Although a translation of Neuhaus’s treatise was published in 1973 (see above, n. 2), the translations of passages quoted in this article are my own.

6 Such generalizations were described by the American art critic Harold Schonberg as ‘inbred and even rather naïve […] Russian teachers such as Heinrich Neuhaus [only] produced formidable instrumentalists; […] good musical sportsmen rather than great artists’. Schonberg, The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 464.

7 This view of the performer as a propaganda commodity is echoed in Marina Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2016).

8 Kiril Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad: Soviet Music and Imperial Competition during the Early Cold War, 1945–1958 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

9 Vlast ′i khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya: Dokumentï TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoy politike, 1917–1953 gg. (Power and the Artistic Intelligentsia: Documents of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) and the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering, and Corruption/All-Union State Political Directorate/People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs on Cultural Policy, 1917–1953), ed. Andrey Artizov and Oleg Naumov (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnïy fond ‘Demokratiya’, 1999), 6.

10 Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize; Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

11 Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Simon Morrison, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Patrick Zuk, ‘Nikolay Myaskovsky and the “Regimentation” of Soviet Composition: A Reassessment’, Journal of Musicology, 31 (2014), 354–93.

12 Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

13 The official denunciation followed Pravda criticisms of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and his ballet The Limpid Stream.

14 Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Zuk, ‘Nikolay Myaskovsky’.

15 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 514. See also Juri Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, trans. Nicholas Wreden (New York: Dutton, 1951); Andrey Vasilyevich Olkhovsky, Music under the Soviets: The Agony of an Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955); and Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia 1917–1970 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972). This vision has also underpinned more recent studies of the epoch, including Ian Wellens, Music on the Frontline: Nicolas Nabokov’s Struggle against Communism and Middlebrow Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

16 Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 2.

17 Nelson, Music for the Revolution, 161.

18 Lynn Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 273.

19 This information and citation comes from the transcripts of Neuhaus’s NKVD interrogations kindly made available for this study. Moscow, Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Delo P-38569.

20 Russian State Archive for Literature and Art, Moscow (hereafter RGALI), f. 379 op. 1 ye. kh. 37 l. 10.

21 Quoted in David Abramovich Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov (Portraits of Pianists; Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1962), 58.

22 Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 5.

23 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 230–6.

24 Ibid., 237.

25 Igal Halfin, Terror in my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.

26 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, 3, 10–12.

27 This can be seen in the numerous discrepancies between the handwritten manuscripts of articles (RGALI, f. 2775) and their eventual published versions.

28 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava I (Avtobiogaficheskaya)’ (‘Autobiographical Notes: Chapter 1 (Autobiographical)’, in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki: Izbrannïye stat  ′i: Pis′ma k roditelyam (Thoughts, Reminiscences, Diaries: Selected Articles: Letters to Parents), ed. Yakov Milstein, 2nd edn (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1983), 17–35 (p. 31).

29 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Dmitriy Shostakovich’, Sovetskoye iskusstvo (Soviet Art), 2 October 1941, repr. in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 181–7 (p. 183).

30 Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind, 9, 12.

31 Letter to his parents, April 1909, in Neuhaus, Pis′ma, ed. Katts, 121.

32 Rabinovich, Portretï pianistov, 36–8.

33 Neuhaus’s reconstructions show similarity to the mechanisms explored in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso, 1991). See in particular the idea of ‘new nationalisms’ in nineteenth-century Europe that ‘began to imagine themselves as “awakening from sleep”’ (p. 199).

34 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski (Pervonachal′nïy variant)’ (‘Autobiographical Notes (First Version)’), in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 122–30 (p. 127).

35 For a more detailed survey of the civil war in Ukraine following the Revolution, see Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and its Peoples, 2nd edn (London: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

36 See Karol Szymanowski, Korespondencja: Pełna edycja zachowanych listów od i do kompozytora (Correspondence: Complete Edition of the Surviving Letters from and to the Composer), ed. Teresa Bronowicz-Chylińska, 4 vols. (Cracow: Polskie wydawnictwo muzyczne, 1982–2002), i: 1903–1919. Szymanowski (1882–1937) was initially a member of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement Young Poland, and went on to become Poland’s most celebrated twentieth-century composer.

37 Teresa Chylińska, ‘Politics’, The Szymanowski Companion, ed. Paul Cadrin and Stephen Downes (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 189–90 (p. 189).

38 From Szymanowski’s unused fragments for Efebos, quoted ibid.

39 Letter to Szymanowski, 19 October 1919, in Szymanowski, Korespondencja, ed. Bronowicz-Chylińska, i, 598.

40 Letter to Paweł Kochański from Elisavetgrad, 12 July 1919, in Szymanowski, Korespondencja, ed. Bronowicz-Chylińska, i, 578.

41 Letter to Kochański, 23 July 1919, ibid., 580.

42 Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava I’, 32.

43 Ibid.

44 Letter to Szymanowski, 24 December 1919, in Szymanowski, Korespondencja, ed. Bronowicz-Chylińska, i, 606.

45 Letter to his parents, Leonid Pasternak and Rosa Kaufman, from Moscow, 6 March 1939. Boris Pasternak, Pis ′ma k poditelyam i sestram 1907–1960 (Letters to his Parents and Sisters, 1907–1960), ed. Evgeniya Vladimirovna Pasternak and Evgeniy Borisovich Pasternak (Moscow: Novoye literaturnoye obozreniye, 2004), 475–6.

46 Letter from Pasternak to his parents from Moscow, 24 November 1932, ibid., 557. Neuhaus had a history of depression which could prevent him from practising for weeks at a time; he had also made unsuccessful suicide attempts described in Artur Rubinstein, My Younger Years (London: Random House, 1973), 371–3.

47 Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava II (Avtopsikhograficheskaya)’ (‘Autobiographical Notes: Chapter 2 (Autopsychographical)’), in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 35–65 (p. 44).

48 Boris Pasternak’s father, Leonid Pasternak, was a painter and the famous illustrator of Lev Tolstoy’s books, and frequently captured musicians (including Anton Rubinstein and Alexander Skryabin) and music-making on his canvases and sketches. He was in close touch with Nikolai Ge, Konstantin Korovin, Isaac Levitan, Tolstoy, Mikhail Vrubel and many others. As Neuhaus’s friendship with the younger Pasternak progressed, he developed a lifelong passion for the artist’s work. Pasternak’s mother, Rosa Kaufman, was a successful concert pianist who had studied with Theodor Leschetitzky and may have attended the masterclasses of Anton Rubinstein.

49 Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak, 5 August 1931, in Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 220.

50 Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak from Zinovjevsk, 1 August 1931, ibid., 217.

51 For an investigation into the tropes associated with the Slavophile and fin-de-siècle search for ‘Russianness’ as a superior national subject, often linked with the notion of Russian Orthodoxy, and the imperialist ambitions of this nationalism, see Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), and Rebecca Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans: Music, Metaphysics, and the Twilight of the Russian Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).

52 This phrase appears in many of Neuhaus’s letters, including that to his parents from Berlin dated 20 May 1910, in Neuhaus, Pis′ma, ed. Katts, 136.

53 Stanislav Genrikhovich Neuhaus, Vospominaniya, pis′ma , materialï (Reminiscences, Letters, Materials), ed. Nataliya Mikhailovna Zimyanina (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1988), 19–22. Stanislav Genrikhovich Neuhaus (1927–80) was Heinrich Gustavovich’s second son, and a pianist and professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

54 Neuhaus, Pis′ma, ed. Katts, 217.

55 Alexander Vladimirovich Vitsinskiy, Protsess rabotï pianista-ispolnitelya nad muzïkal  ′nïm proizvedeniyem, 1950 (The Process of a Pianist-Interpreter Working on a Musical Composition; Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2008), 82.

56 See Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, besedï i seminarï, otkrïtïye uroki, vospominaniya (Speeches and Appearances, Conversation and Seminars, Open Lessons, Reminiscences), ed. Andrei Fedorovich Khitruk (Moscow: Deka, 2008), 92.

57 Galina Rylkova, The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and its Legacy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

58 Valery Bryusov, Sobraniye sochineniy (Collected Works), 7 vols. (Moscow: Hudozhectvennaya literatura, 1973–5), vi: Stat′i i retsenzii 1893–1924; Iz knigi ‘Dalekie i blizkie’; Miscellanea (Articles and Reviews, 1893–1924; From the Book ‘Far and Near’; Miscellanea; 1975), 80–1.

59 Although Blok remained in print after the Revolution because of his initial support for it, after the onset of the 1920s, when the avant-garde became an anathema, his work began to be ignored apart from a small selection of his poetry that was considered steeped in revolutionary spirit.

60 RGALI, f. 2775 op. 1 ye. kh. 116.

61 Letter to Zinaida Neuhaus-Pasternak from Zinovjevsk, 1 August 1931, in Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 217.

62 Berta Kremenstein, ‘Uroki Neygauza’ (‘Neuhaus’s Lessons’), Genrikh Neygauz i yego ucheniki: Pianistï-gnesintsï rasskazïvayut (Heinrich Neuhaus and his Students: As Recollected by Gnessin Pianists), ed. Avgusta Viktrovna Malinkovskaya (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2007), 9–33 (p. 33).

63 Uroki Razumovskoy (Razumovskaya’s Lessons), ed. Stella Zinovyevna Beylina (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2007), 132.

64 Leonid Konstantinovich Dolgopolov, ‘Iskusstvo kak samopozhertvovaniye’ (‘Art as Self-Sacrifice’), Ob iskusstve (About Art), ed. Dolgopolov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1980), 3–59 (p. 16).

65 For a detailed discussion of these issues, see Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

66 See, for instance, Aleksandr Blok, ‘Iz stat ′i “O lirike”’ (‘From the Article “About the Lyric”’), Ob iskusstve, ed. Dolgopolov, 67–83.

67 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Kompozitor-ispolnitel′’ (‘Composer-Performer’), in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 195–204 (p. 199). For a survey of how Neuhaus presented this argument to a public forum through the ideas of the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky, see Maria Razumovskaya, ‘Heinrich Neuhaus: A Performer’s Views on the Realisation of Music’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 46 (2015), 355–69.

68 Lev Aronovich Barenboim, ‘Kniga G. Neygauza i printsipï ego shkolï (Po povodu knigi “Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï”)’ (‘H. Neuhaus’s Book on the Principles of his School (On the Book “About the Art of Piano Playing”)’), Sovetskaya muzïka (Soviet Music), 5 (1959), 116 –22.

69 Lev Aronovich Barenboim, Ėmil′ Gilel′s: Tvorcheskiy portret (Emil Gilels: An Artistic Portrait ; Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1990), 69–70.

70 Anatoly Vedernikov (1920–93) was a respected Russian pianist and teacher. He graduated from Neuhaus’s class in 1947. Later, he famously performed and recorded together prolifically with Sviatoslav Richter (1915–97), another of Neuhaus’s students.

71 As quoted in Grigory Borisovich Gordon, Ėmil′ Gilel′s: Za gran′ju mifa (Emil Gilels: Beyond the Myth; Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2007), 104.

72 Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 121. Neuhaus left Italy in 1909 after having lived there for a couple of years. His parents were particularly anxious that Neuhaus should not commit to marriage at this point, as it would jeopardize all chances of his solo career. Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava I’, 23. Following Neuhaus’s suicide attempt in 1912 after hearing Artur Rubinstein perform Szymanowski’s Second Piano Sonata in Berlin, it is noteworthy that he planned his unsuccessful attempt on his own life so that he would die in Florence. Rubinstein, My Younger Years, 373.

73 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, 7.

74 Jochen Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices in Russia, ed. Heller Klaus (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2004), 280.

75 Ibid., 256.

76 Igor Stravinsky, ‘The Avatars of Russian Music’, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons Translated by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 95–124 (pp. 105–6).

77 Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, ‘Shopen’ (‘Chopin’), Raskat improvizatsiy [ … ] Muzïka v tvorchestve, sud′be i v dome Borisa Pasternaka (The Peal of Improvisation [ … ] Music in the Creativity, Destiny and Home of Boris Pasternak), ed. Boris Aronovich Kats (Leningrad: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1991), 96–9 (pp. 96–7).

78 Dolgopolov, ‘Iskusstvo kak samopozhertvovaniye’, 17.

79 Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, ‘Svecha gorela’ (‘The Candle Burned’), Lyudi i polozheniya (People and Positions) (St Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2016), 405–67 (p. 424).

80 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, rev. edn (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoye muzïkal′noye izdatel′stvo, 1961; repr. Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 1999), 41.

81 Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 363.

82 Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41) was a Russian Romantic poet of the so-called Golden Age, and one of the founders of the psychological novel. Anton Rubinstein (1829–94) was a Russian composer and pianist considered the only serious rival to Liszt, and founder of the first conservatoire in Russia (in St Petersburg). Fyodor Chaliapin (1873–1938) was one of the most famous Russian (bass) opera singers of his time, particularly renowned internationally for his performance of the title role in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910) was one of the most influential painters of the Silver Age, and although he protested against the label, he was said to be a Symbolist artist.

83 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Vladimir Sofronitskiy’, Sovetskaya kul′tura (Soviet Culture), 27 May 1961, repr. in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 248–52 (p. 250).

84 Blok, ‘Iz stat′i “O lirike”’, 68.

85 Famously in the Sixth Sonata, op. 62, which Skyrabin refused to play in public because of its demonic influence, and which he sought to exorcise with his Seventh Sonata, op. 64 (‘White Mass’); in the Ninth Sonata, op. 68 (‘Black Mass’); and even in the early Poème satanique, op. 36. Within current musicological studies referring to the Silver Age, this idea of the Lyric is absent in favour of what, for instance, Taruskin describes as the ‘generalized rhetoric of apocalypse of which the greatest musical exponent – and by contemporary consent, simply the greatest exponent – was Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin’. Richard Taruskin, ‘Safe Harbors’, Defining Russia Musically, 81–99 (pp. 85–6).

86 Rebecca Mitchell’s Nietzsche’s Orphans, focusing exclusively on the final decades of imperial Russia, argues that early twentieth-century educated Russian society became gripped with ‘a growing sense of the need for a specifically Russian culture’ that would divorce itself from Germanic models. The resultant feeling of supreme nationalism capitalized on the perception of a spiritually and socially failed Germany to claim for Russia the premier position of European culture by bringing about a theurgic, national art built on the foundations of a Russian Orthodox morality. For Mitchell, this movement was fanned by wider anti-German sentiment in Russia that came with the outbreak of the First World War, and led ‘Nietzsche’s orphans’ to pin their hopes on the music and rhetoric of Skryabin as an embodiment of a distinctly Russian ‘Orpheus’. With Skryabin’s untimely death, the search moved on with far less success to Medtner and Rachmaninov.

87 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Zametki o Skryabine’ (‘Notes on Skryabin’), Sovetskaya muzïka, 4 (1955), 37–42, repr. in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 204–8 (p. 207).

88 Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, 1st edn, 19.

89 Yurij Anatolyevich Kremlev, Fortepiannïe sonatï Bethovena (1953) (Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas; Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1970), 25–7.

90 Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 14. Goldenweiser was also considered an eminent Beethoven specialist of the time, and was especially noted for his two critical performing editions of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas and variations. His diaries document his interest in the writings of Rolland. See Alexander B. Goldenweiser, Dnevnik: Tetradi vtoraya – shestaya (1905–1929) (Diary: Books 2–6 (1905–1929); Moscow: Tortuga, 1997).

91 Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava II’, 58.

92 See <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel> (accessed 19 December 2013).

93 Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 14.

94 Mïsli o Bethovene (Thoughts on Beethoven), ed. Boris Borisovich Borodin and Arkadij Petrovich (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2010), 41.

95 Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 101.

96 See Neuhaus’s thoughts transcribed in Vspominaya Neygauza (Remembering Neuhaus), ed. Elena Rudolfovna Rikhter (Moscow: Klassika-XXI, 2007), 281.

97 Vrubel’s painting originally would have been even more striking than it is today. The artist had mixed bronze powder, which has since oxidized, into his paints, in order to present a stunning, glistening effect to the sunset’s rays touching the subjects depicted on the canvas.

98 In Russian, repeating a word (as in ‘blue-blue night’) provides additional emphasis. Mïsli o Bethovene, ed. Borodin and Luk′yanov, 124; open lesson of 1938 as documented in Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Dvenadtsataya sonata Bethovena (c. 1937)’ (‘Beethoven’s Twelfth Sonata (c.1937)’), Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 203–9 (pp. 206–7); Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘O poslednih sonatakh Bethovena’ (‘About Beethoven’s Last Sonatas’), Voprosy fortepiannogo ispolnitel ′stva: Vypusk vtoroj (Questions in Piano Interpretation: Issue Two), ed. Mikhail Grigoryevich Sokolov (Moscow: Muzyka, 1968), 13–22 (p. 16).

99 Neuhaus, ‘O poslednikh sonatakh Bethovena’, 17.

100 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Glen Gul′d’ (‘Glenn Gould’), Kultura i zhizn′ (Cultural Life), 7–8 (1957), repr. in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 211–12.

101 Vera Vasilyevna Gornostaeva, ‘O moem uchitele’ (‘About my Teacher’), Vspominaya Neygauza, ed. Rikhter, 197–286 (p. 286).

102 Yurii Alexandrovich Borisov, Po napravleniyu k Rikhteru (In the Direction of Richter ; St Petersburg: Azbuka-Attikus, 2011), 57. As a compromise, Richter reported that Neuhaus suggested he ‘tried ‘to “speak” the recitative in the voice of Diogenes from a barrel’.

103 RGALI, f. 2774, op. 1 ye. kh. 187.

104 Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, rev. edn, 164.

105 A video clip demonstrating the use of sympathetic resonance in the recitative of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata in D minor, op. 31 no. 2, performed by the author, may be accessed in the Supplemental Material online at <10.1080/02690403.2019.1651498.>

106 Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, 512.

107 Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 107.

108 Blok, ‘Iz stat′i “O lirike”’, 69.

109 Ibid., 72.

110 Ibid., 70.

111 Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, rev. edn, 205.

112 Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, 1–2.

113 Ibid., 4.

114 Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 7.

115 Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize, 90–6. As explained by Frolova-Walker, it was this mechanism of celebrating the folk music as an essential part of being a Soviet artist which had earned the Stalin Music Prize for so many recipients and genres from the Central Asian Republics, Caucasus region (including Armenia and Georgia) and other ethnic concentrations such as the Baltics. Thus, names which are rarely heard in Western musicology – Uzeyir Hajibeyov, Ahmed Hajiyev, Shalva Mshvelidze, Juozas Tallat-Kelpša – were rewarded for artistic merit either alongside, or even above, works by composers recognized today, such as Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Myaskovsky. Similarly, the same process prescribed programmes that were alien, for instance, to Shostakovich’s symphonies in order nonsensically to justify their Soviet ideologies.

116 Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome ; Fairclough, Classics for the Masses; Jelagin, Taming of the Arts.

117 For a summary, see Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans, and Olga Haldey, Mamontov’s Private Opera: The Search for Modernism in Russian Theater (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).

118 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Razdum′ya o Shopene’ (‘Thoughts on Chopin’), Kultura i zhizn′, 3 (1960), in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 233–6 (p. 233).

119 Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava II’, 47.

120 Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome, 289; Tomoff, Virtuosi Abroad. Similarly, the positioning of late-imperial Russia as a supreme leader of a pan-European culture was traced in Mitchell, Nietzsche’s Orphans. From a political aspect, Neuhaus was keenly aware of the implications of Soviet imperialism and was outspoken about what he defined as the annexation of the Baltic States during the Second World War; similarly, he had been critical of the way in which Central Powers and Russia had wrangled over the borders of the new Ukraine and Poland during the First World War. Moscow, Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Delo P-38569.

121 Hans Günther, The Culture of the Stalin Period (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).

122 Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘O Shopene’ (‘About Chopin’), Sovetskaya muzïka, 2 (1960), 42–5, in Neuhaus, Razmïshleniya, vospominaniya, dnevniki, ed. Milstein, 230–3 (p. 233).

123 Moscow, Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Delo P-38569; Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus, ‘Tvorcheskaya diskussiya v Moskovskom soyuze sovetskikh kompozitorov’ (‘Creative Discussion at the Moscow Union of Soviet Composers’), Sovetskaya muzïka, 3 (1936), 16–60; Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk; Neuhaus, ‘Glen Gul′d’.

124 Neuhaus, ‘O Shopene’, 233–4.

125 Neuhaus, Dokladï i vïstupleniya, ed. Khitruk, 107.

126 Yakov Vladimirovich Fliyer, ‘Shchedrost′ khudozhnika’ (‘Generosity of an Artist’), in Fliyer, Stat  ′i, vospominaniya, interv ′yu (Articles, Reminiscences, Interviews), ed. Elena Borisovna Dolinskaya and Mikhail Mikhailovich Yakovlev (Moscow: Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1983), 235–9 (p. 236).

127 Barenboim, Ėmil  ′ Gilel′s; Barenboim, ‘Kniga G. Neygauza i printsipï ego shkolï ’; Gordon, Ėmil  ′ Gilel  ′s. For a discussion of this situation between Gilels and Neuhaus, see Maria Razumovskaya, ‘Heinrich Neuhaus: Aesthetics and Philosophy of an Interpretation’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Royal College of Music, London, 2015), chapter 5.

128 Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 247.

129 A meeting of writers was called in Moscow on 10 March 1936. The Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette) followed on from the Pravda articles by denouncing Pasternak and several other writers for their ‘formalist conduct’ on 15 March (no. 14, pp. 1–3) and 20 March (no. 17, p. 1). For a further summary of Pasternak’s difficulties with the regime at this time, see Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1989–1998; repr. 2004), ii: 1928–1960, 132–51.

130 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 201–6; Pauline Fairclough, A Soviet Credo: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (Aldershot and Burlingon, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 25.

131 Neuhaus, ‘Tvorcheskaya diskussiya’, 27.

132 Letter to Lucy Pogosova, 24 December 1951, in Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 373.

133 Letter to Berta Marants, 17 May 1952, in Neuhaus, Pis ′ma, ed. Katts, 376.

134 See, among others, Neuhaus’s letters to Mark Milman from Sverdlovsk, 25 January 1944, and to Boris Kuftin from Tsaltubo, 29 November 1948. Ibid., 263, 321.

135 Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 206.

136 Neuhaus, Ob iskusstve fortepiannoy igrï, rev. edn, 213.

137 Neuhaus, ‘Tvorcheskaya diskussiya’, 27.

138 Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices in Russia, 290.

139 Halfin, Terror in my Soul, 244.

140 Pravda, 17 February 1936, 3. This is the summarized version of Neuhaus’s speech, which has underpinned certain investigations of the denunciation of Shostakovich. For example, it was presented in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 206.

141 Neuhaus, ‘Avtobiograficheskie zapiski: Glava II’, 48.

142 Moscow, Central Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, Delo P-38569, 29–30.

143 Photograph taken in 1958; reproduced and discussed in Maria Razumovskaya, Heinrich Neuhaus: A Life beyond Music (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 71. The Tenth Symphony was withheld from performance until December 1953 owing to the post-1948 anti-formalism campaign following Stalin’s death in March that year.

144 Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices in Russia, 290.

145 Taruskin, ‘Safe Harbors’, 98.