Imagine being a piano prodigy who became the toast of Paris during the Roaring Twenties. Imagine surviving the Nazi occupation of France. Imagine making your Carnegie Hall debut in your eighties.
This is the life that forgotten pianist Youra Guller lived, and it’s high time that she be rescued from obscurity.
Today, we’re looking at her remarkable life and career.
Youra Guller’s Childhood and Early Musical Education
Youra Guller
Youra Guller was born Rose-Georgette Guller on 15 May 1895 in Marseille, France.
Her father was a Jewish refugee who fled violent anti-Semitism in Russia. Her mother was a Romanian woman who, tragically, died giving birth to her daughter.
Little Rose-Georgette began playing piano when she was just five years old. Her natural talent was immediately obvious, and she gave her first recital at six.
When she was eight, her father brought her to Madrid to perform the third Beethoven piano concerto.
Time at the Conservatory
Youra Guller, Clara Haskil, and Georges Auric
At the age of nine, she and her father moved to Paris, where she enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire.
Her teacher was pianist and composer Isidor Philipp, who had ties to the greatest pianists of the nineteenth century. He had studied under students of Chopin, Liszt, and Carl Czerny (who himself had studied under Beethoven).
Rose-Georgette made quite the impression at the Conservatoire. At ten, she soloed in a Saint-Saëns piano concerto. The composer himself was in the audience to congratulate the little girl on her triumph.
She won the Conservatoire’s first prize in piano in 1909, when she was in her teens. Her contemporary, Clara Haskil, won second prize, but the following year would soon take the first prize, too. Guller and Haskil’s paths would cross again.
Youra Guller’s Early Career
Youra Guller Plays Chopin album cover
As she embarked on her professional career, she discarded the name Rose-Georgette in favour of Youra. The name was common among the artistic emigres flooding Paris after escaping political unrest in Russia.
She began expanding her horizons as an artist, studying dance – flamenco and ballet – as well as violin.
She also worked with fellow musicians and performers in Paris. In 1913, fellow Conservatoire student Darius Milhaud composed the moody, Ravel-like final movement of his Op. 8 piano suite for her.
Darius Milhaud: Suite, Op. 8 – V. Modéré (Wolfgang Doberlein, piano)
In 1915, she moved to Geneva to take a job at the conservatory there. She had a special interest in new music, and during a wartime Red Cross benefit concert, she played the piano part in a Stravinsky-led performance of The Firebird. Stravinsky was enthusiastic about her talent.
Unfortunately, her health didn’t hold out, and not long afterwards, she had to resign from her teaching job. Sources are vague as to what exactly her health troubles were, but she seemed to have symptoms consistent with chronic fatigue or depression.
After the war, instead of returning to a 9-5 job, she embraced a career as a traveling freelance pianist.
During her travels, she played the entire Beethoven violin sonata cycle with Joseph Szigeti, and also made appearances with violinists Georges Enesco and Zino Francescatti. She also continued to champion new music.
Youra Guller’s Marriage
In 1921, she married a man named Jacques Schiffrin.
Schiffrin was trained as a lawyer but made his career as an editor and translator. He had been born in the city of Baku in present-day Azerbaijan and had moved to France after the Russian Revolution.
At one point, American socialite and art collector Peggy Guggenheim employed him as a secretary and wanted to marry him, but he declined. Instead, his head was turned by Youra Guller.
Even after the wedding, she continued touring, choosing not to retire, as many women of her age and era did.
One British review in January 1927 read:
Here was a superior pianist. She could play perfectly well the F minor Ballade, and anything else, but she was not bent on impressing us. She made herself, seriously and intently, the instrument of the music’s expression. Incidentally, her tone was beautifully strong and pure. She was earnest without pedantry.
Youra Guller Plays Chopin’s Ballade No. 4, Op. 52
Unfortunately, six years into the marriage, strains began showing in their relationship.
Schiffrin’s son André wrote in his 2014 memoir A Political Education:
“My father was also accomplished enough to be considering a career as a cellist, but Guller was understandably obsessed with her own possibilities, and one such professional turned out to be more than enough in a marriage: They agreed to divorce after a few years.”
Professional tensions weren’t the only obstacle to the relationship. She fell in love with another man, and that man had only just recently had his first child with his wife. Ultimately, both relationships came to an end.
A Long Trip to Asia
There are long mysterious periods in the timeline of Youra Guller’s life, one of which comes after her divorce.
It is said that in the 1930s, she left Europe for what was supposed to be a ten-day tour of Shanghai, but somehow got caught up in the political turmoil surrounding the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), and was unable to return safely to Europe for a period of years.
We don’t know exactly how, but somehow during this time she escaped to Bali before coming back to Paris.
Facing Hitler
When she arrived, the Nazis were invading France. French residents of Jewish descent, like Guller, were in particular danger.
She fled south to her hometown of Marseille. Starting in 1940, the seaport became a magnet for all those threatened by the violence of totalitarian rule.
That year, journalist Varian Fry established the American Rescue Committee, which attempted to evacuate artists, writers, musicians, philosophers, and other members of the avant-garde who were in danger.
Transatlantic | Official Trailer
The trailer to the Netflix series Transatlantic, which is about the French resistance in Marseilles during this time.
The trailer to the Netflix series Transatlantic, which is about the French resistance in Marseilles during this time.
Guller did not manage to leave the country. However, she connected with Countess Lily Pastré, an heiress and patroness of the arts.
In 1940, Countess Pastré began an organization of her own: “Pour que l’esprit vive” (or “May the spirit live”). Its goal was to provide financial support to artists.
In addition to that financial support, Pastré also went out on a limb and sheltered many vulnerable people at her Château Pastré. One of her lucky tenants was Youra Guller. Others included pianists Clara Haskil and Monique Haas, cellist Pablo Casals, and composer Darius Milhaud, among many others.
Ever the genteel hostess, the countess began organizing nightly concerts at the chateau. Many were working with Varian Fry to get out of the country. Yours Guller, however, stayed in France. In no small part due to the support of Countess Pastré, Guller survived.
Youra Guller’s Postwar Life
There is limited information available about Youra Guller’s entire life, but the postwar years are especially hazy.
Music Web International contributor Jonathan Woolf claims that “Guller is said to have suffered a crisis of confidence in the post-war years.” Her health also continued to be poor.
However, in 1955, whether out of desire or economic necessity or both, she returned to the concert platform after a long break.
She made a recording in 1956 of various Chopin works for the Ducretet-Thomson label. In 1959, she explained her absence in an interview with Radio Suisse Romande, saying that she had been ill for a number of years but was making a comeback.
Youra Guller, interview by Franz Walter
A Late-In-Life Carnegie Hall Debut
The last highlights of her career came in the 1970s.
In 1971, at the age of eighty-one, Youra Guller made her Carnegie Hall debut. There was a sense that she was an artefact from another age. The New York Times reported:
Youra Guller, a pianist who enjoyed some renown in Europe in the period between the two World Wars, appeared – out of the past, as it were – at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night to play a recital.
Since Miss Guller, who is now in her 70s [sic], has apparently not concertised regularly for many years, it is hardly surprising that her performances on this occasion suggested little of the pianistic mastery she must have had at one time.
It was in the Ballade that Miss Guller achieved her most compelling interpretation. It had a lot of rhythmic freedom but was shapely in its overall design and told of a tradition of performance style that is not heard nowadays to any extent.
Even in this, however, as in the other works, the pianism was not very well controlled. The tone was seldom beguiling, and the pedaling sometimes confused harmonies and obscured clarity.
All in all, this was a recital that, for old times’ sake and for reasons of gallantry, one would have liked to praise, but that, for one reason or another, did not really work out very well.
Youra Guller Plays Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes Op.13
Her Astonishing Late Recordings
In 1973, at the age of seventy-eight, she recorded the last two Beethoven sonatas for the Erato label.
The reception of this performance was very different to her Carnegie Hall recital: Leslie Gerber wrote in Notes in September 2002 that “the playing is of the utmost profundity, among the greatest Beethoven interpretations ever recorded.”
Youra Guller Plays Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 Op.111
In these later years, it seems as if her playing may have been inconsistent: workaday one day, then sublimely inspired the next.
She followed her Beethoven recording up with a 1975 recording of some Bach/Liszt transcriptions, a smattering of Baroque pieces, and a Chopin etude.
Youra Guller’s Final Years
Toward the end of her life, many of the great musicians she had befriended over the course of her long career banded together to organise a pension for her.
Contributors included Martha Argerich, Yehudi Menuhin, and Radu Lupu.
Yours Guller died on New Year’s Eve in 1980, at the age of 85.
Even though there is still much to learn about her life, one thing is clear: she was one of the most extraordinary musical survivors of her generation.
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