When I visited the Volkonskys’ two-storey house in Irkutsk, now a museum, frost laced the panes and dulled the glow of lamps inside. Upstairs there was a pyramid piano – an instrument of peculiar shape and height, like a concert piano turned up against the wall. The museum staff said it probably belonged to the family’s Florentine music teacher, who had lived in one of the outbuildings. Downstairs, there was a beautiful Russian-made Lichtenthal, which Maria’s brother delivered from St Petersburg. The Lichtenthal, made by a piano maker who had moved to Russia following the Belgian revolution of 1830, was the grandest instrument Maria owned. It was also the most potent surviving symbol of her affection for music, given that Maria’s original clavichord, which had travelled on her sledge from Moscow to Siberia, had disappeared – when or where, no one was quite sure.
As for the Lichtenthal, the instrument behaved awkwardly when a museum worker tried to make the prop stick hold up the lid. The keys were sticky, like an old typewriter gluey with ink. He struck the keys until the softened notes – muted by a layer of dust, perhaps, or felt that had swollen in the damp – started to appear. At first the sound was reed-thin, no louder than the flick of a fingernail on a bell. Inside the piano, the amber wood still gleamed, the strings’ fragile tensions held in place by tiny twists around the heads of golden, round-headed tuning pins. The Lichtenthal, said the museum worker, was full of moods that made it challenging to tune. In Siberia, violent swings in humidity and heat can shrink the wood. The soundboard, a large, thin piece of wood which transforms vibrations into musical tones, can easily crack. Different makers devised different solutions to this problem. Mozart’s favourite maker would deliberately split a piano’s soundboard by exposing it to rain and sun, and would then wedge and glue it back together so that it might never break again.
I traced the Lichtenthal’s restorer who had picked the yellowed ivory tops off the keys to clean them, re-spun the bass strings, and repaired the veneer.* I also wanted to talk to the piano’s current keepers, to see whether they might know of other noble instruments of its type. One thing led to another and via various other city institutions, I was connected with an Irkutsk piano tuner who seemed to hold the keys to my quest. Cutting an elegant figure with a tuning hammer in his leather satchel, he said he had a private collection of forty historic instruments. His most prized piano was a rare 1813 grand which he had bought for a few kopeks from an army general in the early nineties. It was an Andreas Marschall, serial number 5, traced back to a very old Danish maker. He said it was in such bad condition that it was just a box and strings, but one day he wanted to do it up.
I made an appointment to visit the tuner’s Siberian workshop a few months later, but when I arrived back in Irkutsk, he didn’t show up as we had agreed. When I found the numbers of other tuners working in Irkutsk, they seemed reluctant to talk. Feeling the cold of being an outsider in Siberia, I eventually persuaded one of them to act as my paid guide. We drove out to a small apartment, where he was restoring a Bechstein grand. He said it originally belonged to a local cultural activist who had brought the piano to Irkutsk from Moscow in the thirties. The piano was broken up into all its parts with the soundboard laid out like an old drunk waiting to die. It was positioned in front of an electric fire to help dry it out, the keys and strings a jumble on the floor. One day he would finish the restoration, he said; there was a market for these grand pianos in Russia. He showed me another private instrument in his home: an upright Smidt & Wegener piano which he had reason to believe belonged to, or was played by, the wife of Mikhail Frunze, a Red Army commander in the Russian Civil War. The tuner opened the piano up to show me where he had found three gold coins, dated 1898, minted with the face of Tsar Nicholas II. The tuner had sold the coins during perestroika to help make ends meet.
I would find many more secrets like this, said a local musicologist: Siberia’s pianos were full of hidden treasures, like the grand piano her teacher used to own. Inside its workings, the woman had concealed all her jewellery. The piano was her teacher’s family safe. But she warned me I would also need to keep my wits about me, because there were all sorts of complications with proving provenance in Russia. I knew there would also be stories people wouldn’t want told. There was a risk that my research might reveal the original, rightful owner of an instrument, which could open up a cat’s cradle of restitution claims. There would be others who wouldn’t want to talk of the past – any part of it. ‘Some things I cannot speak of,’ said a piano expert I met in Western Siberia: ‘We envy countries which provide easy access to what happened to their families, but here it is different. Access to archives isn’t easy. It’s not open source. It’s expensive. My generation belongs to the war children. We lost one or two of our parents, and ever since have been seeking the truth.’ We all do what we can to keep on going, warned another tuner; stories shift to fit our needs. He said there are pianos with the serial number painted on to the soundboard, and then those with a number moulded into the cast-iron frame. You can repaint a soundboard, he said, but you can’t change a number cast in metal.
This was always going to be my biggest challenge – looking for reliable truth. I wasn’t after a fancy piece of furniture to show off in the equivalent of a Mongolian parlour. I couldn’t have cared less, in fact, how a piano looked. I wasn’t here to fiddle with serial numbers, or pursue old pianos painted up in glossy colours. Such an instrument would be ill matched to a musician like Odgerel, who needed pure sound reinforced by a retrievable inner story. Odgerel’s musical perception was so authentic, she could render J. S. Bach’s ‘Chaconne’* with an exceptional depth of feeling. She could communicate the composer’s unquestioning faith in the divine. More than anything, Odgerel understood how struggle can invest the act of musical creation with the conviction of felt experience.
‘Bach tells us about tragedy and pain in a musical language. Whenever I read about the triumph of the Resurrection I cannot feel very much, but when I play “Chaconne”,’ Odgerel told me, ‘the story comes alive. Bach taught me how to breathe.’
Was it the same for Maria Volkonsky? What did a piano mean to her in exile? Did Siberia allow her to live more intensely than she could have ever done in high society back home? Was it empowering in nineteenth-century Russia to be disconnected from the period’s suffocating rules and expectations around her gender and class? Because despite the privations of their exile, the Decembrists didn’t view Siberia as a place only of katorga. ‘The further we moved into Siberia, the more it improved in my sight,’ observed the Decembrist Nikolai Basargin: ‘To me, the common folk seemed freer, brighter, even better educated than our Russian peasantry – especially more so than our estate serfs. They better understood the dignity of man, and valued their rights more highly.’ Siberia, you see, never had a history of serfdom. There were the exiles who came as prisoners of the state, but there were also many, many more migrants who ventured into Siberia for the taste of freedom – to live far from the reach of the Tsar and the moral reprimands of the Russian Orthodox Church.
________________
* Fought from 1979 to 1989 in support of the Afghan communist government.
* Among the exceptions was Nikolai Turgenev (uncle to the novelist Ivan Turgenev), who was out of the country on the day of revolt, and never returned to face the Tsar’s ire.
* The phrase was Pushkin’s. He reportedly fell in love with Maria when she was barely out of her childhood during a holiday he took with her family in Crimea.
* The Volkonsky love story wasn’t perfect. Various historians suggest Maria’s two children were the progeny of her long affair with Sergei’s friend and fellow Decembrist the charismatic Alessandro Poggio, who ran the prisoners’ vegetable garden with Maria’s husband.
* Given its grand provenance, the Lichtenthal was sent from Irkutsk to St Petersburg for a major restoration in the nineties. The then museum director organized delivery of the instrument by military plane to a restorer called Yuri Borisov – a man I went to
meet, dubbed ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, trained by one of the original pre-Revolution masters from the Becker factory.
* J. S. Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ was the final movement of his Partita No. 2 in D Minor, and was written for violin. Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni transcribed Bach’s music for the piano between 1891 and 1892.
5
Pianos in a Sandy Venice: Kiakhta
IN 1856, WHEN MARIA VOLKONSKY made her last visit to Lake Baikal, she described watching the forest animals coming in to drink as if Siberia were a Garden of Eden rather than her prison for the last thirty years. She was leaving Siberia. The new Tsar, Alexander II, had granted amnesty to the twenty-odd surviving Decembrist rebels. Some of the men had already committed suicide before the amnesty came through. Others had lost their wits. One or two were trying to make their living through teaching, farming watermelons, making opticals, or even drawing butterflies for German museums. Among those who stayed on voluntarily after the amnesty was Mikhail Küchelbecker, who was shackled to Siberia by an unfulfilled love affair with a local girl. His headstone stands on the eastern shoreline of Lake Baikal.
I spent almost three weeks poking around the lake, making three different visits. But however hard I wished it, Baikal’s seductive lures – the winter ice, the summer sward crackling with crickets, the red-barked cedar trees arcing out from cliffs – didn’t deliver on the piano discoveries I needed. The settlements were too thin. There was more for me in Kiakhta, the old tea traders’ town on the Mongolia–Russia border depicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as if it were one of the most important centres of nineteenth-century world trade. In Kiakhta, I had been told about a rare Bechstein grand piano.
My tipster was the Mongolian opera singer, Tsogt, who used to stand at the door of the tent in the Orkhon Valley trying to fit into the narrow opening to listen to Odgerel play. He was a Buddhist and a Buryat whose ancestors, like Odgerel’s, had fled the Lake Baikal region in the thirties. His family ended up in Inner Mongolia, which is a part of China. He had trained in music in Beijing. He had also lived for a while in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, one of the Russian Federation’s autonomous republics, and a half-day’s drive from Baikal’s eastern shore. A bear of a man, Tsogt wore leather boots designed with upturned toes so as to tread softly on the snow, and a traditional Mongolian felted del robe, belted below the waist, which made his belly look like a beer casket. We had travelled together across western Mongolia in 2001. Over the years, I had grown fond of Tsogt. I liked watching his tough front fall away in the presence of Bach. So I hired him early on to help look for pianos.
For a while, I heard nothing. Then I received a short and intriguing email: ‘I’m back from Siberia. I find only one grand piano. C. Bechstein – Serial number 7050. Year is 1874. From very little place. No other people has old piano.’
Given the Bechstein’s date, which was before a railway looped south beneath the lake, the piano may have taken a number of different routes. It could have travelled the rutted road running along the craggy south coast. It could also have crossed the lake by boat in summer, or by sledge in winter, or travelled on the Baikal, a British-built icebreaker. The ship, made of parts transported to Russia in pieces, sometimes took up to a week to make the winter crossing – from port to port, less than fifty miles – carrying twenty-five Trans-Siberian Railway cars on her specially designed deck. The carriages would be uncoupled at the water’s edge and shunted on to the ship’s on-board rails. In the depths of winter in 1904, when the ice was too thick for even the ship to break, a seasonal track was laid over Lake Baikal’s frozen surface instead. The first engine across plunged straight through the ice – a blank white canvas which these days is carved by the lonely movements of the few fishermen who still live along Baikal’s shores, the lake’s frozen surface scored with lines from snowmobile tracks and black dots where the fishermen have cut holes. The sweeps and curves look like the drawings of Wassily Kandinsky – an avant-garde, turn-of-the-century Russian artist obsessed by Russian ethnography, the ‘double faith’ combining paganism and Christianity, as well as the relationship between music and painting, between sound, points, lines and planes.
Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of music’s relationship to art, from his 1926 work, Point and Line to Plane.
Kandinsky’s great-grandmother claimed Buryat–Mongol blood. His father was a tea merchant from Kiakhta. One side of the Kandinsky family, who became fabulously rich over the course of the nineteenth century, were descended from church robbers and highwaymen, or so the story goes. Before Kandinsky’s time, when his relations were living in a taiga village east of Lake Baikal, the family were visited by Decembrists, including Sergei Volkonsky, who were entertained by the music from several pianos that the Kandinskys owned.
If the Kandinsky history gave Kiakhta a sprinkling of glamour, the snobbery of nineteenth-century travellers gave the town a rather different reputation. ‘There was not a lady without a large hat decorated with what looked like an entire flowerbed,’ remarked Elisabeth von Wrangell, wife of the governor of Russian America, who ridiculed the local merchants’ wives when she stopped by Kiakhta on her twelve-thousand-mile journey from St Petersburg to America. ‘The Russians, after all that they have borrowed from their western neighbours, remain barbarians at bottom,’ observed Alexander Michie, a Scotsman who tarried in Kiakhta on an 1863 passage through Siberia from Peking: ‘Their living in large houses, and drinking expensive wines, serve merely to exhibit, in more striking colours, the native barbarism of the stock on which these twigs of a higher order of life have been engrafted.’
I encountered a scene of complete decrepitude. Wooden homes tumbled out over a sandier landscape than I had so far got used to in Siberia. In this barren steppe country, the snow didn’t seem to settle like it did further north, but hung in the air like smoke. Kiakhta’s churches were largely windowless, sometimes steeple-less, and its roads so pitted it was sometimes easier to walk the streets than find a car. The once-grand façades of wooden houses were smeared with graffiti, and one of the cemeteries smelled of urine. There was a menacing stasis to both Kiakhta, where the merchants had their homes and trading houses in the nineteenth century, and Troitskosavsk, the adjacent settlement, which was once populated by the shops, schools and administrators. It felt as though the town was only just surviving, its edge of existence marked by a thin line of trucks lingering for a couple of lazy hours as they waited to cross the border between Russia and Mongolia.
Yet once Kiakhta had been so lively. During its pre-Revolution heyday, the town’s club put on balls and musical events. Concerts by European pianists visiting Kiakhta were advertised in Irkutsk, Tomsk and Chita. At one time in history, there were enough good pianos in town to justify a tuner travelling here all the way from Kiev.
A nineteenth-century account called the town Asia’s ‘Sandy Venice’. Tea caravans, loaded up on to camels, would arrive from Mongolia, looking like the merchants and their ships that once sailed into Italy’s great maritime capital. Up to a hundred horses filled the yard of a Kiakhta merchant’s home. Mansions shimmered with winter gardens. The merchants’ wives ordered their dresses from the Paris couturier The House of Worth, and filled their cellars with rare wines. The merchants also had summer cottages, or dachas, with bathing pools and a boating lake. The children were given donkeys with miniature carriages, and piano lessons from Polish political exiles. At Christmas-time, tables were loaded with champagne. Dressed in masks and festive costumes, the first families of Kiakhta would parade through town with a small orchestra and a local composer. The party would continue through the night to other merchants’ homes, where they danced quadrilles and waltzes.
The reason for this wealth was unique in Russia: for every consignment of tea that passed through this border, Kiakhta’s merchants creamed off a tidy local tax, part of which was invested in local philanthropy. It worked brilliantly until the money started to show signs of drying up after 1869, when the access provided by t
he Suez Canal took business from Eurasia’s camel trains. When the Trans-Siberian Railway was built many miles to the town’s north, Kiakhta’s relevance began to wane even further. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Siberia’s richest marketplace no longer teemed with Chinese, or crates of tea stacked in pyramids taller than the merchants’ homes. But Kiakhta was still very, very wealthy. Right up until the Revolution, it remained a place where pianos – like Kiakhta’s Bechstein grand, which Tsogt had found on my behalf – tinkled with mazurkas and other Polish dances. The Bechstein was thought to be connected to the Lushnikov merchant family, said the guide who showed me around the town’s splendid museum the first time I came.
I went to find the Lushnikov residence where the piano would have stood, close to Kiakhta’s Resurrection Cathedral, which once had columns made of crystal. On top of a small hill looking down on Mongolia, I found the house where the Lushnikovs hosted scientists and explorers, many of whom were stopping on their travels to Central Asia, whether looking for new species, or seeking out the holy secrets of Tibet. Kiakhta was also where Grigory Potanin buried his wife, the brilliant Russian explorer Aleksandra Potanina, who was among the first women to win a gold medal from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. During her funeral, the Lushnikov house was overflowing with mourners. Her husband was among the nineteenth century’s most outspoken advocates for an independent Siberia and an end to the exile system. When the American journalist George Kennan stopped in Kiakhta in the 1880s on his epic journey across Siberia to report on the Tsarist exile system, he too visited the Lushnikovs’ home. ‘We were very often surprised in these far-away parts of the globe to find ourselves linked by so many persons and associations to the civilized world,’ remarked Kennan.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 8
