In my mind’s eye, Siberia began to burn with possibility, in the faults and folds of a landscape full of risk and opportunity. Names began to roll out of the emptiness: Chita, Krasnoyarsk, the River Yenisei, which is one of Siberia’s four great rivers, along with the Amur, Lena and Ob. I was captivated by how marvellous it would be to find one of Siberia’s lost pianos in a country such as this. What if I could track down a Bechstein in a cabin far out in the wilds? There was enough evidence in Siberia’s musical story to know instruments had penetrated this far, but what had survived?
On my last evening in the forest, I mentioned the idea to Aleksandr over another thin broth of dill and fish-heads with boiled white eyes – the notion of returning to Siberia to look for an instrument.
At first, Aleksandr didn’t address my idea. He talked about his personal history, and his father’s songs. In the Siberian village where Aleksandr was raised, his father had been a music teacher and accordion player; his melodies were well remembered. Aleksandr told me about a musician who ten years before had wanted help moving an old piano into his home in Khabarovsk. He described dragging it to the apartment block then up numerous flights of stairs. Then Aleksandr went back to scanning his camera-trap footage of tigers, leaving me to picture a piano being hauled across pavements of ice. Nothing more was mentioned about music until the last morning as we readied to leave the forest. Aleksandr reminded me of the tiger we had encountered on the path, and the snow pricked with blood. The sighting would be my talisman, he said.
‘You must give it a go,’ he urged. ‘The tiger will bring you luck.’
In my last hours with Aleksandr, a powerful attachment formed in my mind, that I might find as much enchantment in the historical traces of instruments through Siberia as Aleksandr did in the footprints of a rare animal. Instead of tigers, I would track pianos. By knocking on doors looking for instruments, I would be drawn deeper into Russia and perhaps find a counterpoint in music not only to Siberia’s brutal history but to the modern images of this country reported by the anti-Putin media in the West. Driving back out of the forest, I passed the spot where I had seen the tiger. If the silver birches were spirit trees, as the Nanai people believed, I wondered if I should have made a passing act of totemism to persuade Siberia to keep me safe.
When I returned to England, I started looking for good leads. I contacted Pyotr Aidu, a Russian concert pianist who had amassed a Moscow orphanage for abandoned instruments. In his collection, there was an 1820 English Broadwood, and a Russian-made Stürzwage wearing the scars of a firework detonated under its lid – a good brand, much overlooked, and one I should look out for, he advised. He said there were voices worth seeking out in old instruments. In his opinion, restored pianos have better sound than their modern counterparts.
Others disagreed. Numerous piano experts told me that all the reconstruction in the world wouldn’t necessarily make a dead piano sing again. I was told Siberia was a terrible place for pianos, especially because of the low humidity in winter. I was warned that there were strict laws to protect against artefacts of more than a hundred years old leaving the country; more than fifty years, and a piano would need, at the very least, special permission. I decided to home in on Siberia’s old trade routes, including the Trans-Siberian Railway towns that thrived in the nineteenth century, at the same time as Russian pianos spread east. I would use television adverts, social media and local radio channels to track down private instruments with stories. I would need Siberia’s piano tuners on my side. They would know best where history was still to be found in Russian homes. That was by far the most important part to me: gathering the stories, then seeing where they led.
As I marked up my map, I started to understand more clearly how the Tsars’ expansion into Siberia, and their establishment of the exile system, coincided with the state’s desire to bring European piano-making to Russia – and how instruments had trickled into this wasteland over the course of three centuries, contributing to the waves of Russification across old Siberia and lost indigenous cultures. Part of me hoped that the piano, which was such a magnificent symbol of European culture, hadn’t yet made it into a nomad’s tent. Every piano I found would be a victory, but I also wanted to seek out the corners of Siberia which had been left untouched – the parts not even Catherine the Great had managed to pull into line during a reign that helped turn Russia into a European musical nation, and Siberia into a synonym for fear. I not only needed to travel into the musical history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also to look at the piano’s domination, its shifting dominions, and its social role. Only then would I understand the value of something precious in the physical peripheries of Russia at a time when piano music was experienced ‘live’, before radio and recorded music shrank the world. By following the pathway of an object, I would get closer to understanding the place. I would learn that an object is never just an object – that each piano sings differently because of the people who used to play it and polish its wooden case.
________________
* The contemporary American author Ian Frazier recounts a story about Westerners flattering the seventeenth-century Tsars with the idea that their territory ‘exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon’. It didn’t matter that it was potentially untrue: ‘To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.’ This is one of my favourite lines ever written about Siberia – a remark which speaks to the power of the great Siberian myth. Travels in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
* Two of Remezov’s maps are published on the endpapers of this book.
3
Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
WHEN I VISITED TOBOLSK for the first time, it was blowing a snowstorm. The weather softened everything – my mood, my expectations. This small town in Western Siberia with its white citadel, circular, frilled towers and windowless walls was built on top of a pleated escarpment. It seemed to belong to the pages of a fairy tale, Tobolsk’s profile glittering with the bulbous gold and turquoise domes of the Russian Orthodox religion. Beside the church stood a seminary – the oldest in Siberia, from which nineteenth-century missionaries were despatched all over the Empire, even to Russian America, when the Tsars’ colonial possessions extended to Alaska and parts of what is now California.* Standing at the heart of this old Siber ian capital, I was close to the site where an important battle took place in 1580 when the Cossack adventurer Ermak Timofeevich ventured east across the Urals with an army of less than a thousand men to defeat the last Sibir khan – an achievement the Tsar rewarded with new chainmail. Unfortunately for Ermak, the weight of his fashionable new armour led to his drowning when he toppled into a river nearby.
Ermak’s story, both mighty and bathetic, marked the beginning of Siberia’s colonization, which saw the Russian Empire expand its territory by more than a hundred times. But if Tobolsk was a symbol of imperial Russia’s glory, the town was also testimony to the punitive tyranny of the Tsarist regime. Before the rise of the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk under Catherine the Great, Tobolsk was the main sorting house for Siberia’s incoming exiles. Among them were prisoners of war, including a large Swedish contingent picked up at the 1709 Battle of Poltava – a victory over the Swedish Empire that forever changed the power balance in north-east Europe, to Russia’s advantage. The Swedes not only provided the necessary labour for redirecting the river systems which wind beneath Tobolsk; they also imparted a significant civilizing influence. In 1720, the Scottish traveller John Bell observed the Swedes’ effect on Tobolsk’s culture. He expressed surprise to find such a variety of musical instruments, with the Swedes responsible for introducing several useful arts ‘almost unknown’ before their arrival. Bell attended various concerts with these officer convicts, who also worked as teachers for the Russians.
The Swedes joined the system of penal labour devised by Peter the Great under a late-seventee
nth-century initiative called katorga, which banished men and women to Siberia with forced-labour terms. Sometimes amnesty was granted for high-profile political prisoners, usually with a changeover of Tsar, but otherwise marked exiles – the worst offenders with their nostrils split, branded and scarred by a kind of barbed whip called the knout – were deemed ‘officially dead’ in the eyes of the law. For exiles, there was also no return, which was a highly effective way not only to punish people, and push ‘undesirables’ out of sight and out of mind, but to colonize Russia’s acquisitions. With this ambitious penal system to manage, Tobolsk attracted its fair share of officialdom – governors, educators and their wives, and, inevitably, pianos. I had traced and found a few interesting instruments – a beautiful nineteenth-century French Erard, serial number 75796, which had been irretrievably damaged by a burst pipe as recently as 1988. There were a score of pre-Revolution, Russian-made grand pianos, but in poor condition. The civil war had been hard on Tobolsk, said Aleksei, a chatty, energetic one-time priest who had trained at the seminary. He offered to help with my search – a chance encounter that rolled into a whole day of looking when he changed his plans to accommodate a stranger.
Aleksei was tall, handsomely dressed in a black suit, his charismatic presence, whispered my interpreter, reminding her of all the images she had in her head of Peter the Great. He had bright blue eyes, and an even brighter voice that seemed to make the air move differently when he spoke. I suppose both of us were a little bit in love with him. This was partly because Aleksei was everything I didn’t expect of Russian Orthodoxy – a wit, without the long, grave beard I associated with his religion, his cheerfulness so abundant that I soon stopped thinking about the tragedy of the drowned Erard and Tobolsk’s other half-sounding instruments. When Aleksei was studying at the seminary, his favourite game was doing roly-polies off the hill beneath the church in his long black cassock. He would tumble off the edge of the escarpment towards a thicket of wooden houses that flowed beneath the hill like spring’s muddy snowmelt.
In the lee of this ledge, Aleksei took me to the Lower Town, where the great and good once lived, including Cath erine’s governor, Aleksandr Aliabiev, a keen patron of the musical arts, and a significant symbol of Catherine’s expanding cultural influence. The governor’s son, also called Aleksandr Aliabiev, became a well-regarded pianist and composer who trained in St Petersburg. After serving his country in the Napoleonic Wars, Aliabiev junior was exiled back to Tobolsk for his alleged involvement in a murky gambling murder, with his most popular song, ‘The Nightingale’, composed during his stint in Tobolsk jail on a piano a Sister of Mercy arranged to be brought to his cell. At least, that’s how the legend goes – one among many that congregate in this old part of town. Aliabiev’s music, however, is eclipsed by the far larger story lurking among Tobolsk’s nineteenth-century boulevards. In the old Governor’s House, the last Tsar and his family were kept under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in 1917 before being moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were eventually murdered. The family’s German music teacher had travelled with them to Tobolsk from St Petersburg. With no piano among their luggage, the Romanovs’ captors therefore had to acquire an instrument, along with other pieces of furniture, from merchants who lived nearby. It was a piano often played by the Empress when she was left by herself, waiting for news of their fate while the civil war intensified.
Aleksei said Tobolsk’s archivists were looking for the Empress’s instrument, but so far without success. He took me up the rickety stairs of the mansion, which workmen were busy renovating in order to turn it into a museum. They showed me handwritten notes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which they had found between the floorboards. That such scraps of history might still lie in cracks like these felt somehow reassuring. Then, when we were finishing up for the day, Aleksei suggested I meet some of his friends who were studying at the seminary. He led me into the priests’ canteen, a bare white room where nine men were already gathered: three of them bearded, four in cassocks, the rest in high-collared, brass-buttoned black suits.
The priests’ demeanour was deadly serious. They had twenty minutes, they said, before their absence would be noticed. One of them fiddled with a heavy crucifix around his neck like an awkward teenager. Another straightened his back as if he were being pulled tall by a puppet string. With no ceremony, concert hall or church, they started to sing, led by a wide-chested choir regent. For the next ten, fifteen minutes, they barely paused in their plaintive chants, their naked voices making the hairs stand up on the backs of my arms. Something felt innately right about these people – in their precise commitment to their art, and their passionate belief in a divinity greater than themselves. I felt reassured that in a part of the world associated with fear I was now among Siberians for whom music mattered as much as air.
*
I am no musician, but music moves me. Catherine the Great, on the other hand, claimed her musical ear was deaf as a post. ‘[I]t’s just noise to me,’ she wrote wryly to a friend, with one account claiming she was assigned court musicians to tell her when to clap. She possessed enough of an ability, however, to remark on her husband’s even more inferior talents when she complained how Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the Romanov dynasty, used to scratch on a violin in the imperial boudoir in between playing with toy soldiers. Throughout the five-hour-long orchestral concerts at court each week, her husband would play lead violin, to Catherine’s disgust. There was no creature unhappier than herself, Catherine claimed, with her caustic epistolary wit, except for Peter’s spaniels, which he continually thrashed.
Catherine’s remarks also have to be taken with a pinch of salt. This brilliant, German-born princess might have professed to lack any natural ability for music, but its advancement under her rule was significant, given the country was lagging behind Western Europe’s state of development when she first arrived in Russia in 1744. In the countryside, the peasantry were drumming their feet to the plucking of the balalaika, a traditional three-stringed guitar. Beyond the Romanov court, folk song dominated. A French traveller who ventured to Tobolsk in the year of Catherine’s coronation described a lamentable state of affairs: music in the most sophisticated Siberian towns rang with the sound of bad violins, which were nothing more than pieces of hollowed wood. The Russian Orthodox Church relied on liturgical chants, with instrumental music banned. In 1762, when Catherine’s inept husband expired in shady circumstances – perhaps by throttling, possibly by poisoning, though the official version of events had his death put down to haemorrhoidal colic – Catherine began to change the Empire for ever by consolidating the country’s territorial reach, as well as Russia’s status as a formidable cultural power.
Catherine was an avid reader. She bought Diderot’s entire library, followed by Voltaire’s, and she sanctioned Russia’s first private printing presses. Her instinct for art collecting was second to none, and she adored English gardens and Scottish architects. Like the vast art collection she acquired, music was a means to establish power and prestige – above all, to bring Russia closer to Europe. She acquired an affection for opera, and opened a theatre where it could be performed in the Hermitage. This gave birth to a national tradition which later influenced the operatic styles and aesthetics in other European countries, including Italy. Her reign – the longest in Russia’s imperial history – also established the infrastructure for Russia’s piano tradition to root as Catherine tipped the balance in the country’s appropriation of European habits.
Until Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, and France fell from grace, the Russian aristocracy spoke French over their native tongue. Russian men cut their beards so that they might look more like Europeans. Following the latest French fashions, Russian women donned red-heeled shoes, laced themselves into whalebone corsets, and added the odd beauty spot à la Marie Antoinette. Even diseases were fashionably French, with la grippe, observed Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘being then a new word in St Petersburg, us
ed only by the elite’. Throughout Catherine’s reign, Russia’s aristocracy travelled abroad. They brought back with them a taste for opera, chamber music and the new orchestral arrangements coming out of Paris, Leipzig and Vienna, as well as growing curiosity for the new instrument affectionately referred to as ‘the one with little hammers’.
Clavichords began to appear in Catherine’s court as her ambassadors engaged foreign teachers and commissioned new musical compositions. The Moscow house belonging to Catherine’s friend Ekaterina Dashkova, a talented harpsichordist, was cluttered with these new keyboard instruments, which was a direct reflection of the Empress’s Enlightenment ideas and approbation of European accomplishments. The German harpsichordist Hermann Raupach not only encouraged private concerts; he also taught keyboard at St Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
Year by year, Russia’s musical culture developed. In 1776, Catherine was persuaded to hire the Italian composer Giovanni Païsiello as court conductor – the first musician, she wrote, who could turn her inclement ear. What is less clear is whether it was the conductor’s appearance she found attractive, or his musical talents. Another of her lovers – Grigory Orlov, a dashing, music-loving officer – made a note of it when he watched Catherine wrap a fur coat round the shoulders of this enchantingly handsome, dark-haired Italian while he sat playing the harpsichord.
Whatever it was in Païsiello that Catherine found so engaging, it was enough to ensure that he stayed in Russia for the next seven years, composing numerous keyboard pieces for women of nobility – preludes, capriccios, rondos, a sonata or two. Catherine hired him to teach fortepiano to her son, the future Tsar Paul I, and his wife, the inquisitive, musically talented Maria Feodorovna. After Païsiello came Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer-conductor and favourite of Catherine’s most influential paramour, Prince Grigory Potemkin – a political genius whose passion for music was as intense as his love-making was renowned. Potemkin was Catherine’s true companion in a revolving door of bed-fellows, whose musical obsession ran so deep he would send his courier to Milan to fetch a piece of sheet music. Potemkin’s most significant English biographer writes how he required his choir to be with him at all times – to perform at breakfast, lunch and supper. They also had to join him in the field of war.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 5
