From 1922 to 1964, pianist Heinrich Neuhaus reigned as one of the star instructors at Moscow Conservatory. A virtually endless stream of artistic hopefuls, including acclaimed superstars Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels, passed through legendary “Room 29” where Neuhaus presided over his devoted students. In this first full-length study of the eccentric genius, Maria Razumovskaya paints a sympathetic image of a man displaced in time. An admirer of Silver Age philosophy and avid reader of Friedrich Nietzsche, Neuhaus resided in a state where such cultural heritage was anathema—not to mention his own German-Polish background with links to European rather than Russian cultural circles. Nonetheless, Neuhaus ultimately emerged as a quintessential symbol of Russian culture within the Soviet Union.

Recent scholarship has turned away from individual artists to focus upon the institutional structures underpinning Soviet music (Kiril Tomoff, 2006, 2015; Marina Frolova-Walker, 2016; Pauline Fairclough, 2016). While drawing upon this broader literature, Razumovskaya returns scholarly focus to the individual, interrogating how one talented performer and pedagogue navigated the Soviet system and constructed his own individual creative world, often at odds with official Soviet cultural values. Indeed, it is in this juxtaposition between subjective individual creativity and a state dedicated to collective ideals that Razumovskaya locates the essence of Neuhaus's creative self-construction—or, in his own words, his avtobiografichnost΄ (autobiographicality, 13).

Razumovskaya first explores how, despite his complex, multi-national biography, Neuhaus successfully constructed a “Russian cultural identity” for himself. Born in 1888 in Elisavetgrad (present-day Ukraine) into a multi-lingual (German, Polish, French, Russian) household, from 1903 Neuhaus studied piano at Warsaw Conservatory alongside his older cousin, composer Karol Szymanowski. Neuhaus's subsequent musical training took him to Italy, Berlin, and Vienna, where (after an unsuccessful suicide attempt in 1912) he graduated from the Vienna Academy of Music and received the Groβer Staatspreis für Musik in 1914. This professional success should have laid the groundwork for a successful European career, but Neuhaus was cut off from his expected future when a 1914 summer trip to visit family in Russia proved permanent due to war and revolution. Nor was Neuhaus's life as a famed Soviet concert artist easy personally or professionally: in 1934, his beloved wife Zinaida left him for his close friend, Boris Pasternak. His refusal to evacuate from Moscow in 1941 raised suspicions of possible pro-Nazi sentiments, culminating in arrest and solitary confinement in the Lubyanka Prison—an aspect of the artist's life that Razumovskaya reconstructs through examining previously unseen documents from the FSB archive. After his release (presumably effected by influential friends), Neuhaus returned to a successful life as pianist and pedagogue, though the highest State accolades—such as a Stalin Prize—remained out of reach.

The following chapters are devoted to an in-depth study of Neuhaus's creative persona and pedagogy. Razumovskaya persuasively demonstrates that Neuhaus drew on the Russian Silver Age in “defining. . .a Russian cultural heritage” for himself in opposition to the officially-approved aesthetic of Socialist Realism (89). Indeed, Neuhaus often “taunted the state” through “his own complex writings” that referenced philosophical ideals that were off limits under both Iosif Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev (115). In addition to Neuhaus's particular devotion to Russian repertoire (notably the music of Alexander Skriabin), he espoused the idea that artistic interpretation was a fundamentally spiritual task, and emphasized individual emotional experience as a truth to be expressed in performance (88–108). In Razumovskaya's reading, even Neuhaus's celebrated interpretations of Frederic Chopin's music fall within the realm of “Russian cultural heritage” through the intellectual legacy of Fedor Dostoevskii and “the idea of continuing love of life and people in the face of tragedy” (132).

In identifying Neuhaus's “tangible legacy,” Razumovskaya notes the unique “Neuhausian sound” stressed by many students, as well as his influential 1958 book On the Art of Piano Playing (147–52). She concludes, however, that ultimately the great pianist's legacy rests not in a particular approach to performance or technique, but in his framing of music interpretation through a “vast framework of aesthetic, historic, and moral questions” (152). For Neuhaus, musical associations were deeply personal and idiosyncratic (such as his association of Beethoven's “Waldstein” Sonata with “the ‘velvet nights’ of southern Italy,” 34). The aesthetic and spiritual “truth” that he sought, both for himself and for his students, was thus not a historically exact rendition of the composer's intent, but a dialectical exchange between composer and performer, in which the lived experiences (perezhivaniia) of the performer's life creatively reshaped a composition's symbolic meaning. In this way, Neuhaus assimilated the Orphic image of music's transformative power (an ideal of the Silver Age) into his own creative world.

What emerges from this study is a finely-honed image of an artist deeply committed to the spiritual power of music. By consciously crafting his self-identity as a Russian artist preserving the Silver Age values of individuality, subjective experience and emotional depth, Neuhaus presented a stark contrast to official Soviet values. The fact that his playing and teaching achieved such fame in the USSR suggests that Neuhaus's construction of Russianness found sympathetic resonance within Soviet audiences. Razumovskaya also provocatively concludes that Neuhaus’ unapologetic focus on individuality (with all its imperfections) within the creative process holds contemporary relevance for artists disenchanted with the uniformity of the modern era (175–76). This thoughtful, deeply researched and engagingly written study will be of particular interest to scholars of music history and piano pedagogy, as well as historians of Russian and Soviet culture.