Liszt leapt on to the stage rather than walked up the steps. Throwing his white kid gloves on to the floor, he bowed low to an audience who lurched from complete silence to thunderous applause, the hall rocking with adulation as he played on one piano, then another facing the opposite direction. At a performance for the Tsarina in Prussia two years earlier, Liszt had broken string after string in his tortured piano. In St Petersburg, his recital was somewhat more successful – a spectacular display of the instrument’s range, jamming rippling notes into music packed with an intense and violent beauty. When John Field heard Liszt perform, he apparently leaned over to his companion, and asked, ‘Does he bite?’ Liszt was considered ‘the past, the present, the future of the piano’, wrote one contemporary; his solo recital to a throng of three thousand Russians ‘something unheard of, utterly novel, even somewhat brazen . . . this idea of having a small stage erected in the very centre of the hall like an islet in the middle of an ocean, a throne high above the heads of the crowd’, wrote another witness to this groundbreaking event. Liszt’s talent was capable of instigating a kind of musical madness, according to Vladimir Stasov, the Russian critic present at Liszt’s St Petersburg debut. Stasov went with his friend Aleksandr Serov to hear him play:
We exchanged only a few words and then rushed home to write each other as quickly as possible of our impressions, our dreams, our ecstasy . . . Then and there, we took a vow that thenceforth and forever, that day, 8th April, 1842, would be sacred to us, and we would never forget a single second of it till our dying day . . . We had never in our lives heard anything like this; we had never been in the presence of such a brilliant, passionate, demonic temperament, at one moment lurching like a whirlwind, at another pouring forth cascades of tender beauty and grace.
Liszt’s Russian tour had a significant effect on the country’s shifting musical culture – not least the validation Liszt gave to Russia’s nascent piano industry when he played on a St Petersburg-made Lichtenthal in an important musical year. In 1842, Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila – considered the first true ‘Russian’ opera for its native character and melody – premiered in St Petersburg. Liszt, who developed a keen affection for Russian folk music, thought the opera marvellous.
While Glinka’s opera was influential, it was still the piano and the splendid character of the virtuoso which enthralled the aristocracy, with instruments being snapped up in Russia now they were no longer a technical rarity. ‘You will find a piano, or some kind of box with a keyboard, everywhere,’ observed one mid-century Russian journal writer: ‘If there are one hundred apartments in a St Petersburg building, then you can count on ninety-three instruments and a piano-tuner.’ It was the same story all over Europe. That same year, the London piano maker Broadwood & Sons was one of the city’s twelve largest employers of labour. Grand Tourists – upper-class men on a coming-of-age culture trip through Europe – couldn’t live away from home without a piano. According to a well-thumbed guidebook, How to Enjoy Paris in 1842, most English families who came to the city for any length of time would want to hire or buy a piano. In Britain alone, the five-year period from 1842 saw sixteen patents issued for new piano technology.
With every development in the instrument’s functionality, the piano’s increasingly expressive capacity was greeted with a flurry of composition. With an emerging merchant class hungry for new luxuries, state subsidies were encouraging a home-grown industry. Russian piano-making was thriving, an early Russian-made salon grand piano costing not much more than a couple of rows of seats at Liszt’s 1842 performance in St Petersburg.
A Russian family pictured with their piano in the 1840s, when the piano became an important symbol of prestige.
As the century progressed, piano technology kept improving, with iron (as opposed to wooden) frames, new ways of stringing, and the development of the upright piano – described by one historian as ‘a remarkable bundle of inventions’, its size and portability well suited to the homes of the swelling middle classes. In 1859, Henry Steinway, a German piano maker who emigrated to New York, patented the first over-strung grand piano, which gave concert instruments greater volume. A richly textured musical establishment evolved not just with piano-playing in Russia but across all sorts of musical genres and institutions – in opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, conservatories and amateur musical societies. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s contribution to classical composition was riding high. Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had joined Europe’s first rank. Lumin aries among Russian piano-players included Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. A Russian national style had fully developed, which was influencing (and even eclipsing) the rest of the Western world. Russia was winning accolades for its instrument-makers at the World Fairs.
St Petersburg-made Becker pianos on show at the Paris World Fair of 1878, with the Shah of Persia listening in to the demonstration. In 1900, the Fair’s Russian pavilion caused another sensation, with an advert for the new Trans-Siberian Railway. A painted panorama, scrolled past the windows of the display carriage, compressed the five-and-a-half-thousand-mile-long trans-Siberian journey into a famously pretty sales pitch. The reality, remarked some travellers, did not always prove quite so picturesque.
Then the chaos of the 1917 Revolution ruptured the country’s cultural patrimony. A number of high-profile musicians fled for Germany, France and America. As the Tsarist regime fell apart, Gobelin tapestries, even Van Dyck paintings, were scooped up by departing gentry and opportunistic foreigners in a hurry to leave town with whatever treasures they could salvage. Precious violins were sneaked out under greatcoats, and pianos were tied on top of trains fleeing Russia through Siberia into Manchuria and beyond.
In 1919, one of St Petersburg’s music critics sold his grand piano for a few loaves of bread. ‘Loot shops’ opened up in St Petersburg and Moscow to deal in objets d’art stolen from the rich. During the Russian Civil War, which lasted until 1922, manor houses were raided or burnt. In the aftermath, half-surviving instruments were reconstructed. Pianos were built with jumbled parts, such as a Bechstein keyboard on Pleyel legs.
Two decades later, during the Great Patriotic War, the country’s most significant national treasures were sent to Siberia for safekeeping, including state-owned instruments from Leningrad and Moscow, the country’s best ballerinas and Lenin’s embalmed corpse. Not long after, pianos taken from the USSR’s Western Front,* from the likes of Saxony and Prussia, ended up travelling eastwards with the country’s Red Army soldiers to adorn many a Siberian hearth. As the Nazis advanced, Russians fled their own cities on the European side of the Urals, the trauma of war driving civilians deeper into Siberia, sometimes with an instrument. Other pianos were lost to the German advance or chopped up into firewood. One piano, today in the hands of a well-known musician, was pushed up on its side to black out windows during the Siege of Leningrad when the Nazis starved the city in one of the darkest civilian catastrophes of a horrifyingly bloody century.
Meanwhile, the old expertise in Russian piano-making was changing with the politics. ‘Art belongs to the people,’ Lenin said in 1920: ‘It must have its deepest roots in the broad mass of workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their feelings, thoughts and desires.’ The Soviet government encouraged the production of thousands of instruments, which were distributed through the USSR’s newly formed network of music schools. Piano factories opened in Siberia. Piano rental schemes were introduced for private citizens, with a buoyant market for uprights able to fit into snug Soviet apartments.
This dynamic musical culture, its provincial and social reach far exceeding the equivalent education systems in the West, fell away after 1991 when Boris Yeltsin became the first freely elected leader of Russia in a thousand years. Yeltsin immediately set about dissolving the Soviet Union by granting autonomy to various member states. He also overhauled government subsidies in the move to a free-market economy, ind
ucing a chain reaction of dramatic hyperinflation, industrial collapse, corruption, gangsterism and widespread unemployment. As the masses crashed into poverty, the privatization of Russian industries benefitted a few friends of friends in government, who bought oil and gas companies at knock-off prices. Russia’s famous oligarchy was born at the same time as generations of communist ‘togetherness’ were overthrown.
Whether or not Yeltsin’s time was a good or a bad thing for Russians remains a moot point. For pianos, it was a catastrophe. The musical education system suffered. As a new rich evolved, tuners learned how to make a mint by doing up old instruments and selling them off as a kind of bourgeois status symbol. They painted broken Bechsteins white to suit an oligarch’s mansion, decorated them with gold leaf, and occasionally told tall stories about some kind of noble history to increase the piano’s value in a new and naive market. This was a time when Russia was giddy with opportunity and new ways of doing things. It was also a country demoralized by communism’s failure: many people wanted to believe in a rosier version of the past.
Numerous instruments were left to rot in Siberia, either too big to move from apartments, or ignored in the basements of music schools long after the funding had run out. Often all that is left of a piano’s backstory can be gleaned only from the serial number hidden inside the instrument – stories reaching back through more than two hundred years of Russian history. Yet there are also pianos that have managed to withstand the furtive cold forever trying to creep into their strings. These instruments not only tell the story of Siberia’s colonization by the Russians, but also illustrate how people can endure the most astonishing calamities. That belief in music’s comfort survives in muffled notes from broken hammers, in beautiful harmonies describing unspeakable things that words can’t touch. It survives in pianos that everyday people have done everything to protect.
In the summer of 2015, I encountered Russia’s piano history for the first time. It was something new for me: the mysterious, illogical power of an obsession when I started looking for an instrument in Siberia on behalf of a brilliant Mongolian musician. Part of me had always been intrigued by Siberia – a curiosity which had existed since my childhood, when the white space on my globe stretched further than my imagination was capable of. Like Timbuktu, or Ouagadougou, Siberia resonated in a way I couldn’t quite explain, with my bookcase telling the story of a bibliophile’s relationship with a place I assumed I would never visit. When I finally did, something else took hold – a kind of selfish madness to finish what I had started, while at the same time knowing that in a place as vast as Russia the finish might also never come. I began to make digressions into territory I didn’t expect pianos to ever lead me, travelling further and further from my home in England in pursuit of an instrument I don’t even play. It didn’t matter if causality started to fracture – from A, I had to go to C because of what B had told me – because I had begun to fall for Siberia’s unpredictability, for the serendipitous connections and untold experiences that belong to people who make up one of the greatest storytelling nations in the world. I soon realized that what is missing can sometimes tell you more about a country’s history than what remains. I also learned that Siberia is bigger, more alluring and far more complicated than the archetypes might suggest – much bigger, in fact, than all the assumptions I had made when my plans began to germinate, then proliferate, and I found myself caught up in the momentum of travelling a ravishingly surprising place.
All this because of a friendship which formed back in the summer of 2015 with a young Mongolian woman called Odgerel Sampilnorov. Odgerel and I were both staying with a German friend, Franz-Christoph Giercke, in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley, close to Karakorum, the site of the historic capital of Genghis Khan’s empire, not far from the border with Siberia. The Giercke family spent their summers in a ridgeline of gers – the nomads’ round-shaped wood-and-canvas tents, which were pitched a long way from where the road runs out in the fenceless steppe. Odgerel had formerly worked as a piano teacher to Giercke’s daughter and her Mongolian cousins, using an old instrument he had trucked in from the modern capital, Ulaanbaatar.
‘When we first met, Odgerel was only nineteen years old, but within a few hours of hearing her play, I had an epiphany,’ recalled Giercke. ‘Not only did she have a great feeling for Johann Sebastian Bach and the Germany of the seventeenth century, for Bach’s religious devotion and suffering, but she could evoke emotions and memories going back to my East German childhood in Magdeburg and Leipzig. She could play all the key piano pieces of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She could play them by heart, never needing a written score. Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin. I’d never heard talent like it.’
With Giercke’s help and others’, Odgerel studied for nine years at a conservatory in Perugia in Italy. By the time I met her, her playing was sublime. The old instrument was gone, and she gave recitals on Giercke’s Yamaha baby grand, followed by dinners of roasted goat, each animal cooked from the inside out with a bellyful of hot rocks. Outside the ger’s wooden door was a wide plateau cupped by mountains, the steppe’s velvet folds studded with tombs and ancient standing stones left by successive waves of nomadic people. Yaks and horses, more numerous than people in Mongolia, grazed on the riverbank below. Inside the tent, the gathering included a Sherpa cook, a local shaman nicknamed The Bonesetter, and Tsogt, a Paris-trained opera singer from Inner Mongolia who was also a consummate archer. The baritone’s neck was always crooked from trying to fit into the ger’s low opening to listen to the piano concerts, the music’s deep, poignant conflicts floating up through an opening in the roof fashioned from a spoked wheel of painted wood.
One night, Giercke shook his head with irritation. The piano was a modern Yamaha, and out of sorts. It played with an even temper, but in his opinion, the sound wasn’t up to what it was before. Perhaps the steppe’s dry climate had finally caused it damage. Perhaps Odgerel’s tuner needed to return sooner than planned. Giercke leaned over and whispered in my ear his frustration, ‘We must find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia!’
That evening, he handed me a novel by an American author, Daniel Mason, about a British piano tuner who travelled up the Salween River into a lawless nineteenth-century Burma. The tuner was tasked to fix a rare 1840 grand piano belonging to an enigmatic army surgeon employed by the British War Office. The Erard functioned as a symbol of European nineteenth-century colonization in Asia, with many of the book’s themes recalling Joseph Conrad’s story of Kurtz, the painter, musician and ivory hunter who ‘goes native’ in Heart of Darkness. In Mason’s book, whenever the Erard was played, the music brought peace to the warring tribes. Giercke, who had a little bit of Kurtz to him, liked the idea of living ‘upriver’ with a spectacular piano; he saw no reason for a good piano hunt to be cast as fiction, nor to doubt there being pianos in Siberia in the first place: ‘If you, Sophy, would find a piano and bring it here, our story would be real.’ Giercke was a filmmaker and well travelled in Central Asia. He knew enough about the region’s history to believe that there would be instruments out there. He liked the idea of a piano bringing joy to his adopted country, and Odgerel having an instrument of her own – playing it in the Orkhon Valley in summer, and at her home in Ulaanbaatar in winter.
Through that dusty Mongolian summer, Odgerel and I became friends. We talked about her childhood, how her father was a basketball coach and her mother a gymnast. Odgerel’s family were Buryats, an indigenous group with strong Buddhist and shamanistic roots from close to Lake Baikal. In the thirties, members of her family were persecuted under Stalin, when nomadic pastoralism was replaced with collective herds, their Buddhist religion was suppressed, monasteries closed, their intelligentsia killed, and their homeland – defended in a 1929 rebellion that saw some thirty-five thousand Buryats killed – cut up into smaller territories. Some of Odgerel’s relatives fled to Mongolia.
While Odgerel’s story stayed with me, it was her music which moved me. The more I listened to her play, the more I wondered how an historic piano would sound different in the steppe – an instrument which still resonated with the gentler timbre of the nineteenth century: the moody nocturnes of John Field, the sparkling elegance of Chopin’s Ballades, the earthy texture of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Russian Rustic Scene’.* You don’t need a thundering concert piano in a space as intimate as a Mongolian ger. An interesting European instrument with a mellow voice would duet well with the plaintive morin khuur, the Mongolian horsehead fiddle. The combination was something Odgerel was also beginning to champion as a unique Eurasian style.
Odgerel Sampilnorov’s family. Her Buryat ancestors, originally from near Lake Baikal in Siberia, are pictured in the first image.
We talked a little about the difficulties that might lie ahead, and our mixed motivations. If I were to go and look in Siberia, I would need to understand the story of pianos in Russian culture and how and why these instruments had travelled east in the first place. I love nothing more than listening to people talk, whether in the pages of books, or across a table sharing a meal. Odgerel loves music; she wanted a piano with good sound. Giercke loves all of these things too, but above all, the spirit of adventure. Offering to help pay for the endeavour, he said that only in trying to take on something difficult would something interesting ever happen.
‘We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn’t do it, we would have a story, too, the story of not being able to do it.’ This is how John Steinbeck described his trip to the USSR in the aftermath of the Second World War with the photographer Robert Capa. Steinbeck’s approach appealed to me. So did Anton Chekhov’s, who declared his intention to travel across Siberia in a letter to his publisher in 1890: ‘Even assuming my excursion is an utter triviality, a piece of obstinacy and caprice, yet just you consider and then tell me what I’m losing by going. Time? Money? Will I undergo hardships? My time costs nothing. I never have any money anyway.’ In a fug of piano music, Mongolian vodka and late nights talking under a starry sky, a trip to Siberia sounded almost implausibly exciting. Then summer turned to autumn, and back home in England my mood darkened with the leaves and the seasonal malaise. I moved on from the idea of undertaking any Siberian piano hunt until eight months later, when I flew to the Russian Far East. Only when I started travelling deep into the Russian forest did I realize I could no more unsnag the idea of Siberia’s lost pianos than set out coatless into cold so extreme it makes your tears freeze into the lines around your eyes.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 3