Catherine the Great listening to a performance by Giovanni Païsiello. During his seven-year tenure in Russia, Païsiello composed extensively, and gave piano lessons. This drawing was made by Edoardo Matania in 1881.
With Potemkin by her side, Catherine began to turn into a powerful benefactor of the musical arts. Other noble ladies took lessons at the educational institutions in St Petersburg that Catherine patronized. Foreign teachers serviced an eager market. In September 1791, the music-obsessed Russian envoy to Vienna urged Potemkin to employ a willing Mozart. Unfortunately for Russia, by the end of the year both Potemkin and Mozart were dead.
Mozart had gone to his grave in Vienna struggling to pay his medical bills, unable even to afford firewood. Russia, meanwhile, had been paying its lead musicians so well that Potemkin’s favourite composer was given a village in Ukraine. At the same time, in St Petersburg’s glamorous musical circles, profound changes were underway with the rising influence of Catherine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, whose support of performers and musical education made her a spectacular catalyst for the country’s nascent piano-making industry. Ten years before Potemkin was mulling over the Mozart hiring, Maria Feodorovna had made a trip to Vienna – the city of Haydn and Beethoven, or ‘clavierland’ as Mozart called it – where she had attended the piano duel of the century: Muzio Clementi versus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The event, attended by the great and the good, pitted the two musicians against each other in a kind of eighteenth-century boxing ring.
For Mozart, the encounter was worth no more than a passing comment. ‘[Clementi’s] greatest strength is his passage in thirds, but he has not an atom of feeling or taste – in short, he is a mere machine,’ Mozart remarked in a letter to his father. For Clementi, the event presented a new opportunity; he was quick to hobnob with the Russian ambassador in order to exert his influence in Russian society.
Clementi began exporting his English brand of pianos to Russia – advising his colleagues to ‘make hay while the sun shines’, now the piano was in a much more robust state of development, along with music publishing. In this same period, concert promoters started to hire out privately owned halls in St Petersburg for public performances. Clementi, however, couldn’t resist showing disdain for his new Russian customers. He complained of them being ‘slippery’ in payments, ‘cursedly stingy’, possessing ‘good ears for sound tho’ they have none for sense and style’. As for the Emperor himself, ‘nothing less than a trumpet could make its way through his obtuse tympanum’. The instruments constantly suffered from the climate – ‘keep them some time in a very warm room, in order to discover whether the wood dont warp, or any other mischief don’t ensue,’ Clementi advised his London office. In spite of these hurdles, the orders came rolling in, from bankers, generals and the imperial family. Also nudging into the Russian market, observed the avaricious Clementi, was the French piano maker Sébastien Erard, and the English maker John Broadwood. To counter the foreign invasion, a home-grown piano-making industry began to take off in Moscow and St Petersburg, with state-sponsored tax-breaks luring artisans from Western Europe (especially the German-speaking lands) to set up shop inside Russia’s borders. These émigrés could be sure of lucrative sales, as well as subsidies to help transport pianos into Siberia.
Clementi had a head start on the competition. Through his pupil and sales representative in Russia, the Irish composer and performer John Field, Clementi was able to show off his pianos’ capabilities to Russian customers. Worked to the bone, Field – whom Clementi called ‘a lazy dog’ – functioned like Clementi’s musical puppet. In March 1804, Field became the first virtuoso to truly reveal the emotional depth of the piano to the Russians when he made his public debut in St Petersburg. His performance brought the audience to their feet. Newspapers and journals poured praise upon the Irishman. ‘Not to have heard Field,’ wrote an actor friend of the musician, ‘was regarded as a sin against art and good taste.’ As for St Petersburg, the people’s obsession for the instrument caused one musical commentator to dub the city ‘pianopolis’.
Field’s teaching – his students included Aleksandr Aliabiev, who wrote ‘The Nightingale’ in Tobolsk jail, as well as Mikhail Glinka, who described the pianist’s fingers falling on the keys like ‘drops of rain that spread themselves like iridescent pearls’ – made Field so much money, he once used a hundred-rouble note to light his cigar. On another occasion, Field’s dogs chewed his concert earnings. It was a symbol of the sometimes luxurious, often turbulent life Field was to pursue in Russia for the next thirty years, his eccentric genius revealed in the way he wore his stockings inside out, his white tie skewed, and his waistcoat buttoned all wrong. Intemperate and adored, Field was in such a strong position by 1815 that he could reject an invitation to become Russia’s court pianist. By 1823, that job was taken by another brilliant virtuoso who had taken St Petersburg by storm: Polish-born Maria Szymanowska.
When Russia opened its doors to Europe’s growing troupe of performers, they functioned as dazzling endorsements of an instrument that had by now gripped Russia’s heart. In 1838, the German pianist Adolf Henselt – the man with ‘the velvet paws’, as Liszt described his touch – moved to St Petersburg. In 1839, the Swiss virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg thundered into Russia, along with Marie Pleyel – the pretty French prodigy known as ‘the female Liszt’. Passing through St Petersburg at the same time, Pleyel battled (and defeated) Thalberg in a pianistic duel. ‘[E]verything is full of fire, of energy; the piano speaks under her brilliant fingers. It has a soul,’ wrote a reviewer for Journal de St-Pétersbourg. When Clara Schumann played for the Tsar in the Winter Palace in 1844, she described the scene as a fairy tale in One Thousand and One Nights. The truth was probably more mundane. ‘The Russian rouble had a very good clink to German ears,’ wrote Stasov, Russia’s foremost music critic at the time.
I found a book by an American music historian,* which dug deep into the archives of Russian piano-making. Her description of the industry’s proliferation and the distribution of the instruments further east was one of the reasons I took confidence early on that my ‘fieldwork’ looking for pianos in Siberia might glean results. By 1810, six Western entrepreneurs had set up piano workshops in Russia, including a St Petersburg factory founded by the Bavarian-born maker Jacob Becker. This single workshop built more than eleven thousand pianos before the century was out. Orders for instruments came thick and fast, including from Siberia, where pianos had already penetrated in the first half of the century. East of the Urals, music teachers were paid two to three times the amount they earned in Western Russia. In these new towns of the expanding Empire, the piano played an even more important social role than it did in a Moscow drawing room. A piano was a ‘highly respectableising piece of furniture’, observed a British musicologist of the nineteenth century, to affirm one’s European education.
In the 1870s, the Imperial Russian Musical Society opened branches in the Western Siberian cities of Omsk, Tomsk and Tobolsk, with the intention of educating both audiences and musicians. Bookstores selling popular sheet music began to pop up. Piano shops also opened, to ease the distribution of instruments further east. As the century progressed, only a few foreign-made Broadwoods and the odd German Blüthner made it through Russia’s protective trade barriers. This gave the likes of Becker with his home-grown pianos a clear run to dominate the ever-growing domestic market.
And then the wheel of fate turned. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Becker factory became state property, and was renamed Red October. For a while, the USSR’s system of musical education, which spread deep into the provinces, kept up demand for inexpensive Soviet-made instruments. Tens of thousands of uprights were distributed into small towns, with piano factories even opening in Siberia, in Tyumen and Vladivostok. But after perestroika, the old art of piano-making fell away. By the turn of the millennium, the industry had almost died completely. The Red October factory closed in 2004. A piano maker in Kazan turned to coffin-making
before going bust. In the same month I saw the Amur tiger, it was reported that the last of Russia’s piano factories had closed.
So great was the tragedy, there were now men of influence trying to reverse the trend. When I first latched on to this story, the Irkutsk-born classical pianist Denis Matsuev – among the great virtuosos of the twenty-first century – was campaigning to bring back the lost art of Russian piano-making. When we later met in Moscow, he talked about the high level of musical education among Russians, and how he still owned his family’s first Soviet piano: a Tyumen upright, made in one of the main towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The network of music schools had birthed extraordinary careers throughout the history of the Soviet Union, in addition to engendering a unique culture of appreciation. The Russian audience is completely different from the Carnegie Hall audience in New York, Matsuev explained. But Siberians trump them both: ‘They understand everything. They are my number one audience,’ he said, describing the perfectly attentive ‘suspicious silences’ he experienced east of the Urals. I would understand soon enough, he said, when I had spent more time in Siberia.
But would I? Part of me was anxious that I can only respond to music in the way I did to the singing priests – the feeling of not knowing what is happening, or why it even matters, except that it does in the moment it is experienced. Unlike so many Russians who benefitted from the Soviet education system, I have no formal musical knowledge. By putting instinct over intellect, and trust before prejudice, there was of course a risk some scoundrel would undo me, and that I would end up with an expensive box of strings no better than the thudding upright Giercke had first bought. But on the other hand, Tobolsk’s singing priests had given me confidence. They had persuaded me to pause for a moment, to believe in people who make all the time in the world to help a stranger who turns up unannounced. They had also held a mirror to my own shortcomings. Time has a life of its own in Siberia. It has a depth and dimension which makes you feel that days shouldn’t be hurried – the opposite of how our time is construed in the West. So when the priest I had befriended suggested I should stay a while longer before I caught the last train out, I wanted to more than anything. But such is the trouble with Siberia. The map is always goading you with how much more territory there is still left to cover.
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* Russian America existed from 1733 to 1867, when the territory was sold to the United States for a paltry US$7.2 million.
* A book I kept close at hand for three years: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014).
4
The Paris of Siberia: Irkutsk
IN THE RUSSIAN STATE NAVAL ARCHIVES in St Petersburg, there is a revealing set of customs papers documenting the travails of a little clavichord – the earliest known record of such an instrument making it across Siberia. It belonged to a socially ambitious naval wife called Anna Bering who, in the 1730s, took this precious instrument from St Petersburg to the Sea of Okhotsk, and then travelled another six thousand miles home again on a magnificent transcontinental journey of exploration using only sleighs, boats and horses. Anna was married to Vitus Bering, a Danish-born sea captain in the service of Peter the Great. Known as the ‘Russian Columbus’, Bering’s job was to establish a postal route across Siberia, build ships on Russia’s Pacific coast, and then penetrate the American Northwest. Anna, along with her clavichord, accompanied him.
If the scale of Siberia is dumbfounding, it is even more so when the map is traced with instruments like Anna’s, which wove their way across the Empire before reasonable means of travel existed. They journeyed along Siberia’s expanding trade routes, usually setting off in the dead of winter when the ground was good for sledges, rather than in summer, when Siberia turned into a mire of mud covered with mosquitoes. Siberia’s rivers were another hindrance for travellers: instead of winding across the Empire from west to east, or vice versa, all the big waterways flowed south to north before emptying into a frozen Arctic Ocean.
Overland travel became easier when the Great Siberian Trakt opened during the reign of Catherine the Great. This was the main post road that ran from the brink of Siberia in the Ural Mountains to the city of Irkutsk, located close to Lake Baikal. The journey was infamous – a bumpy highway covered with slack beams of wood. The discomfort of traversing the road’s length by sledge recalled the sensation of a finger being dragged across all the keys of a piano, even the black notes, remarked a nineteenth-century Russian prince, who served as an officer in Siberia. ‘It is heavy going, very heavy,’ observed Anton Chekhov in 1890, ‘but it grows still heavier when you consider that this hideous, pock-marked strip of land, this foul smallpox of a road, is almost the sole artery linking Europe and Siberia! And we are told that along an artery like this civilisation is flowing into Siberia!’
Various methods available for travelling on ice in Siberia, according to the Jesuit explorer Father Philippe Avril in his 1692 work, Voyage en divers états d’Europe et d’Asie.
Chekhov had considered himself well prepared for his journey from Moscow through Siberia to reach the Tsarist penal colony of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Pacific, where he wrote an important piece of journalism about the brutality of the exile system. His mistake was the choice of season. Chekhov undertook his Siberian travels in spring – during rasputitsa, an evocative Russian word, as sticky as clods of earth, used to describe the muddy conditions that come with the thaw. He used a tarantass, a horse-drawn carriage with a half-hood, no springs, and wheels that could be interchanged for runners for the ice. Chekhov packed big boots, a sheepskin jacket, and an army officer’s waterproof leather coat, as well as a large knife – for hunting tigers, he joked. ‘I’m armed from head to foot,’ he wrote to his publisher. He passed chain gangs of convicts. The company he kept was poor. The coachmen were wolves. The women, who couldn’t sing, were colourless, cold and ‘coarse to the touch’. Inevitably, he got stuck in the seasonal mud, his tarantass caught like a fly in gooey jam.
The tarantass – depicted here crossing a tributary of Lake Baikal – was described by an English traveller in Russia in 1804 as a ‘wooden Machine precisely like a Cradle where People place their Beds and Sleep thro’ the entire of a Winter Journey’. The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (London: Macmillan and Co., 1935).
Travellers put up with the unpleasantness because until the Trans-Siberian Railway arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, the Great Siberian Trakt was the only significant road nourishing Siberia with new blood from European Russia – or at least what had survived the journey over Western Siberia’s malarial Baraba Steppe. As for the lures of Irkutsk, they might not have been quite on a par with St Petersburg – everything in Siberia ran a hundred years behind the rest of Russia, noted an early visitor – but its relative cosmopolitanism provided some relief for travellers. When Chekhov visited, he remarked that Siberia was a place you rarely heard an accordion, blaming the lack of art and music on a pitiless struggle with nature, as if survival and culture were mutually exclusive. But Irkutsk, known as the Paris of Siberia, was an exception. Chekhov thought it ‘a splendid town’ lively with music and theatre, as well as ‘hellishly expensive’, with a very good patisserie.
Irkutsk was sophisticated for the provinces, an upwardly mobile town where it was important to the educated classes to grasp any threads of connection with European culture, which Catherine’s reign had encouraged. In 1782, the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg despatched thirteen hundred books to Irkutsk. A public library went up, designed according to the fashionable European Russian style prevalent in the capital. An orchestra was founded, and a school teaching no less than five foreign languages. By the time of Catherine’s death in 1796, Irkutsk had turned into a critical junction of the two main trans-Siberian routes.
The southern route out of Irkutsk wound east over Lake Baikal, the water traversed either by sledge in winter or by ferry in summer. The roa
d then spurred down towards the dusty Russia–China border town of Kiakhta, a famous staging post on the Eurasian tea route. The north-easterly passage from Irkutsk to Siberia’s Pacific rim was more forbidding: a thirty-day winter journey by dog-sled, reindeer-sled and horse-drawn cart east along the Yakutsk–Okhotsk Trakt to reach the shipbuilding yard of Okhotsk. One fifth of all the silk reaching Western Europe passed through Irkutsk, along with rhubarb – a precious commodity thought to be a miracle cure for a myriad of maladies – and a large share of China’s tea. For anyone of influence travelling across the Russian Empire, Irkutsk was an economic and geopolitical crucible in the heart of Eurasia – a significance symbolized by the elegant belfry at the top of the Church of the Raising of the Cross still dominating a small hill at the city centre where Arthur Psariov, a veteran of the Soviet–Afghan War,* has been ringing the church bells for the last three decades.
We had met the first winter of my search when Arthur led me through the nave, passing a tall priest with the poise of a chess piece, his neck held stiff in a rigid golden cassock. Incense drifted across the altar from a swinging ball and chain, the ball’s to-and-fro setting the measured pace of the priest’s holy incantations. Inside the bell tower, Arthur knew where the stairs’ rungs were weak, the wood spongy, the old nails unreliable with rust. When he skipped a step, I did the same, placing my feet into the crinkled prints he left in the thin membrane of frost that coated the tower’s throat, each staging post in the plexus of narrow steps more treacherous than the next.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 6
