Youra Guller was the daughter of a Russian father and Romanian mother. She began studying the piano at the age of four and two years later gave her first recital. At the age of eight she was in Spain playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 37 with an orchestra conducted by Thomas Breton. From Spain she went to Berlin where Joseph Joachim heard her and was greatly impressed with her talent. She then entered the Paris Conservatoire where she studied the piano with Isidor Philipp, winning the premier prix at the age of twelve. Guller had been studying with Philipp for six months before he realised that she was sight-reading the works he was assigning her to study, and the following year she appeared at one of Éduoard Colonne’s Concerts Colonne playing a piano concerto by Saint-Saëns, causing the composer to congratulate her on the stage.

Many recitals and concerts followed, but at the age of twenty Guller stopped performing in order to study the teaching principles of Theodor Leschetizky and to study the violin with Ginette Neveu. She had already studied ballet and Spanish dancing and her extraordinary appearance apparently led to her being offered a part in a Hollywood film that had been originally intended for Greta Garbo. For a year she taught piano at the Geneva Conservatory but found it ‘extremely tiresome’because she was also playing concerts; while there, she met and befriended Stravinsky who thought her to be one of the best interpreters of his work. Guller gave up teaching in Geneva and moved to Paris where she met Ravel, Prokofiev, Florent Schmitt, Gabriel Pierné and ‘Les Six’. Pablo Casals and Jacques Thibaud thought highly of her and they often played chamber music together. Milhaud wrote pieces for her including Printemps and his Suite Op. 8. During her career Guller played chamber music with George Enescu and Zino Francescatti; and with Joseph Szigeti she played all the Beethoven sonatas for violin and piano.

In Paris in the early 1920s Guller played an unidentified Piano Concerto in C major by Mozart and first appeared in London in 1923 in a series of piano recitals arranged by The Pianoforte Society. At the Wigmore Hall her recital included sonatas by Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin. A critic noted, ‘The wisdom of inviting a young pianist like Miss Guller to contribute to a series in which the other artists are players so eminent as Cortot, Dohnányi, and Sauer was abundantly justified.’ The critic went on to admire her tone and pedal work but resigned himself to saying, ‘But why try to describe the methods of achieving what is done by that immediate musical intuition which, raised to so high a point, is genius in interpretation? Miss Guller sent us all away from the hall filled with a deep contentment of spirit.’ She had success throughout Europe playing in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, Budapest, Brussels, Bucharest and much of Switzerland. She even played in the Philippines where The Tribune reported, ‘The theatre was filled to overflowing, testifying to the manner in which the talented and eminent European pianist’s fame had spread.’

She returned to London from 1926 to 1928, but the critics were now more restrained. ‘The resulting cool detachment is not unattractive in its individuality, but does not invite imitation, ’ wrote one critic. In 1929 Guller gave a private recital for Viscountess Cowdray at a dinner party for Princess Helena Victoria, but after that she did not appear before the London public again for fifteen years.

Guller in fact disappeared from the concert scene. Her performances were unreliable, she suffered from ill-health and apparently some form of drug-addiction. She also experienced malnutrition in occupied France during World War II. At one point she went to Shanghai to find some sort of artistic regeneration. It is surprising to see that by 1951 Guller herself was writing letters from France to the BBC in London requesting a broadcast. This was denied, but she did, however, reappear in London on 2 June 1954. The recital at London’s Wigmore Hall was described as the ‘re-appearance of the distinguished pianist’. The first half was standard repertoire: Bach’s Italian Concerto BWV 971, a Mozart sonata, some Brahms, and Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor Op. 35. The second half contained a Schubert waltz and music by Granados, Milhaud and Stravinsky. After this, Guller broadcast intermittently for the BBC as well as for various radio stations in Switzerland where she was now living (in Geneva). In 1965 and 1966 she gave three recitals at London’s Wigmore Hall. The Times found her Liszt Sonata ‘extremely uneven’, but The Daily Telegraph found it ‘a technical and imaginative tour de force of the first order’. At the last recital Guller played one of her specialities, Beethoven’s final Piano Sonata, Op. 111. ‘Every note she played was reinforced by the experience of a lifetime, and from each of her interpretations the listener emerged so enriched in spirit that passing discomforts of a purely technical kind faded into insignificance.’

In February 1971 Guller made her debut at Carnegie Hall in New York. She was seventy-six years old (not seventy-two as reported in the press) and the members of a small audience ‘…were aware of an unusual experience. This became an evening shared as though they had dropped into a friend’s house, as well as one strangely tinged with an aura of the past that they knew had been recaptured momentarily.’ A Golden Jubilee concert at the Wigmore Hall in 1973 led to a recording session with Nimbus records. It is tragic that so little of Guller’s art has been preserved as she was a truly great pianist. She was, however, very unpredictable and her performances would depend on how she felt at the time. As early as 1923, The Times critic realised that Guller possessed ‘that immediate musical intuition’. She relied on this intuition and it was not always dependable. If she did not feel in the right mood for a performance she played badly; if she did, she played superbly. A broadcast of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor Op. 21 with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Moshe Atzmon from 1968 makes uncomfortable listening as Guller sounds nervous, unrehearsed and ill at ease; yet a broadcast in 1962 from Zürich of the same work led Mieczysław Horszowski to write in his diary, ‘Listened with Franz and Tory to Chopin’s Concerto in F minor played by Youra Guller. Beautiful!’

Guller’s few commercial discs are all worth hearing. Apparently she made no recordings during the height of her success in the 1920s, but in 1995 Dante licensed an EMI tape recorded in 1956 which they released on compact disc. It is a sublime collection of Chopin: eleven mazurkas and five nocturnes played by Guller at her best, and this recording gives some idea of her stupendous talents. In 1973 for Erato in France she recorded the last two Beethoven sonatas in readings that are profound and beautiful. The Nimbus disc mentioned above contains short works recorded in 1975, by which time Guller was eighty years old and did not have sufficient technique to give a completely convincing performance of Chopin’s Ballade in F minor Op. 52, good though it is; but the rest of the disc, which is mainly of miniatures, is excellent.

Other recordings in radio station archives need to be published. Although the BBC has only retained the Chopin Concerto No. 2 in its archive, Guller’s BBC recordings of the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9 and Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 110 have survived. Other important recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 Op. 58 and Stravinsky’s Piano Sonata also exist, as do private recordings of some of her Wigmore Hall recitals from the mid-1960s.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).