Musical Enactments of Saint Petersburg: Symbolism and Psychology in the Pianistic Processes of Maria Yudina

Through the case of the Soviet pianist Maria Yudina (1899—1970) this article explores how the expressive power of musical performance relates to psychological connections performers make when their interpretative processes subjectively navigate the music within their current socio-cultural environments. It surveys how the literary concept of ‘confessional’ writing (Clark: 1981) emphasised self-exploration as an important interpretational aspiration; and suggests that it was adopted within the musical frameworks of Yudina’s time. However, rather than such frameworks being navigated in a way that manufactures an expected sense of historiographic and communal continuity, Yudina’s artistic processes propose a postmodernist paradigm of culturally constructed subjectivities that treat ‘(hi)stories as strands in a plural and fragmented cultural, social and political landscape’ (Gloag: 2012). Therefore, the article looks at the cultural significance of Saint Petersburg as anthropological ‘place’ (Aucoin: 2017) at two significant times Yudina’s life to explore how its symbolic spaces were filtered through her experiences and engagement with the city’s Silver-Age thinkers, philosophers, writers, theologians and musicians; and became implicated in her psychological creation of contrasting musical enactments of the city – exemplified through her advocacy of the music of Bach and Schubert