I tried to trace its history by contacting the Leningrad Philharmonic as well as Steinway archivists in New York. Identifying the piano’s serial number, Steinway said the piano was an iconic Model D Cherry with German legs, completed on 16 May 1881, shipped without its finish coating to Hamburg, and thence to the father of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s publisher and friend, Alexander Gutheil of Moscow, on 24 February 1882. Then the trail went dead: there seemed to be no knowing how or when it had arrived in Siberia. There was one man, however, who might be able to shed some light: a piano tuner called Igor Lomatchenko. I had been told he was full of knowledge, and had a roomful of instruments in the basement of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre.
Vladimir Biryukov, the president of the Siberian Piano Tuners Association and head tuner at the Novosibirsk Philharmonic, with the Steinway grand he believes was played by the Leningrad Philharmonic-in-exile.
I arrived in Novosibirsk on the day of the Epiphany, a January holiday which Russians celebrate by immersing themselves in holes cut in the ice of frozen lakes and rivers. Down on the Ob, a festival spirit prevailed. Tough Siberian men, bellies folded over their pants like dough, queued to get into the water and receive blessings from a priest. Some of the women wore bikinis; others wore long nighties with high necklines. With breasts sagging and arms folded in for warmth, they looked like pupae, their fragile bodies vulnerable in encasements as thin as paper. There were young men in tight swimmers enjoying the jocularity of stripping down and a morning off work, and friendly babushki pleased to see a foreigner among the festival ranks. Among them was a thoroughly defeated young woman with hollowed cheeks and faraway eyes. As she stood dripping water, the tiny red roses in her cotton gown clinging to her skin, she had the look of someone who no longer remembered if she’d ever laughed.
In the centre of Novosibirsk, the opera house was lit by a pink dawn. At the stage door, musicians came and went for rehearsals. I passed by a run-through of a Verdi opera, then headed into another curl of corridor with stage scenery stored on either side. There was a tiered wedding cake large enough to conceal a small troupe of ballerinas, a Trojan horse, and two huge elephants on wheels. Communist red stars and oriental lanterns hung from ropes. A girl in a black tutu stretched out on a creaky bench.
Igor was in the basement of the opera house practising his cello in front of a wonky music stand. He was middle aged, almost bald, with a jolly face and slightly protruding ears. He had a wide smile, big hands, broad shoulders and a stocky build. He was a member of the opera house orchestra, and the principle tuner responsible for all its pianos. Since 1978, he had occupied Room 1037, a room as hot as an oven in the same basement where in the middle of the war the Tsar’s carpet was rolled out and used as a makeshift bed. More like the inside of someone’s soul than a workshop, Room 1037 was swollen with unexpected possessions that were gathered, layered and piled into corners, hanging from pegs, and stuffed into any available mug or disused paint pot.
The muddle was both commonplace and magnificent – a magical place where a rare musical artefact might lurk, or an astonishing sound be hidden by the limbs of other, less remarkable instruments. A pink snout poked out from behind an upright piano – the papier-mâché head of a suckling pig on a platter, which looked like it had drifted in from a Nutcracker set. A tuxedo hung from the ceiling, the suit ironed until its fibres had taken on a silvery sheen. There was some of the outdoor camouflage that Russian hunters use in the taiga, and a table stacked with boot polish, a collection of mechanical clocks, and stubby paint brushes washed until they were almost bald. The walls were decorated with pictures of bears, Lenin and Louis Armstrong. Various cellos, some missing their fronts, were lying against pianos. A full-size punch bag was suspended over a concert grand in the middle of repair, the precision and the improvisation of Igor’s craft hidden among the pliers, lacquers and copper-wound bass strings, the tuning pins, hinges and wooden ribs. It was as if all the niche skills which had created the early piano industry had ended up here, in a basement in Novosibirsk: the belly-men (who worked with the sounding-board makers), the chipper-ups (the men who gave the instrument its pre-tuning), the key makers, polishers and action finishers.
‘It’s not much,’ said Igor, ‘but it is my life.’
Igor said it was hard to know which instrument most deserved his attention: the Becker brooding in a corner, the Schröder with the tinny top notes, or the unnamed pianos stored too close to each other for anyone to be able to play a note. He talked about how every piano has its own voice: rich, mellow, strident, glassy, warm, thin or cool. Generally speaking, the voice dulls and flattens with age and wear. The hammers harden, strings relax. Soft tones shrivel then vanish. He showed me the modern Steinway concert grand played by Denis Matsuev whenever he was in town, which had its own humidity-controlled storage room. Back in his workshop, he pointed out a sturdy upright in the corner, regarded as one of the best upright pianos ever built – the one I had noticed because of the papier-mâché pig.
‘A 1930s Grotrian-Steinweg,’ said Igor. ‘It’s a German piano, with a tender sound. But then it has seen a great deal. I can hear it in the way it plays.’
Novosibirsk was a city full of interesting instruments, he said. He agreed that the Steinway in the conservatory – the one Buryikov suspected had belonged to or was played by the Leningrad Philharmonic – was indeed superb. He could trace the piano’s movements in Novosibirsk from the seventies, when he believed it was transferred from the city’s opera house to the musical comedy theatre. But he couldn’t track its history any further back in time. He then talked about various pianos that his son was restoring for a local piano collector.
‘You need to meet my children. We’re not one tuner in my family, but three,’ said Igor, his crab-apple cheeks burnished pink with pride.
We arranged to reconvene at the same place in two days’ time to talk some more. Except when that day came, Room 1037 wasn’t the same place at all. Everything had been tidied up: pianos organized, tools sorted. The boxing bag was no longer suspended over the grand piano. The coffee rings had been wiped away, the sheet music put into piles. New seats had been arranged and each one assigned to a Lomatchenko family member. The only other day of the year on which they ever gathered like this was Stalin’s birthday – the same birthday as his, said Vasily Lomatchenko, with a beaming grin.
Vasily was Igor’s father. Despite his eighty-three years, he had an almost lineless face, laughed gaily and sometimes danced on the spot. Vasily wore a freshly pressed pale blue shirt with the top button done up, a woollen sleeveless pullover and polished shoes. Igor’s youngest son, Evgeniy, was shy and slim; he preferred restoring the cabinetry of pianos to tuning. Evgeniy’s brother, Kostya, was in his early forties. He was unusually tall, with boyish blond hair – like a polar bear, said my interpreter. Kostya – joined by his seven-year-old son, who also wore a bow tie – was both a tuner and a restorer. He talked about some of the instruments he knew about or had worked on over the years: a French-made Gaveau thought to have come from a German U-boat, and a concert grand taken back from the Germans at the Battle of Moscow in 1941. Kostya wanted to attend the crème de la crème of tuner training: the C. F. Theodore Steinway Academy in Hamburg. He dreamed of starting a Russian piano factory to manufacture some of the best instruments in the world. He was sensitive, warm and extraordinarily enthusiastic – a tender giant with a kind of bright, child-like soul. When we had first met, he cried. When I asked him why, he said it was because a stranger had come out of nowhere and told him she was interested in his work. When I asked my interpreter to help me understand his response, she said later: ‘Every piano for Kostya is unique. He knows it, and even when he describes how a piano sounds, the beauty touches him deeply. It’s as if he is sensitive to different vibrations to those which you and I can feel.’
The Lomatchenko family, from left to right: Kostya, Evgeniy, Fyodor, Igor and Vasily.
But it was Kostya’s grandfather, Vasily, who hel
d the room’s attention as he began to talk about how his ancestors had ended up in Siberia. Vasily’s father had belonged to the wave of emigrants who left Ukraine at the turn of the twentieth century. They travelled to Siberia by horse cart, and settled in a village called Dovolnoye, about a hundred miles from Novosibirsk. Vasily sounded it out slowly: Dov-ol-noy-ye, which meant something like ‘Pleasant Village’. Vasily’s father, whom he described as a quiet, unaffectionate man, fought for the Whites in the Russian Civil War. At least, they think he did, but Vasily’s father never spoke of it. He was marked out as a kulak, or rich peasant, by Stalin’s regime – an arbitrary process which effectively reallocated wealth based less on formal criteria than the whim of neighbours, local officials and Soviet activists. He was sent to work in the mines for ten years. When he finally returned home, he was despatched to Moscow to fight the Nazis.
In 1953, Vasily also did his military service. He joined a train packed with some four hundred Siberians and set off for Sakhalin Island. Two years later, he went to live in Kuzbass, Siberia’s coal-mining region, where he made do with a tent for the first twelve months. He drove lorries in the Sayan Mountains near the Mongolian border, using dangerous roads which looped up and down the region’s steep ridges. He kept a sack of salt under the seat of his truck which stopped the windows misting up; the salt absorbed the humidity of his breath. Although he liked the solitude of the road, he couldn’t stop wanting future generations of Lomatchenkos to live a different life.
Vasily married and had a son. In 1961, he sold the wooden house he had built during his first winter in Kuzbass, and moved his family to Akademgorodok. This was Siberia’s new science city going up in the forest outside Novosibirsk, an elite Soviet utopia founded in the fifties as a progressive hothouse to attract some of the country’s best brains. Like the university in Tomsk, it was a proud, ambitious institution which gave Siberia enormous credibility – and still does. Vasily found work with the town’s construction crews, while his wife got a job in the canteen at the House of Scientists, Akademgorodok’s main social club.
Despite funds being short, Vasily used a quarter of the money from his house sale to buy a piano from a local second-hand shop. Although he had not received a musical education himself, he bought the instrument in 1962 when his son was five years old in the belief that a cultured life would change the family’s fortunes. Around this time, the musical education system in the Soviet Union was beginning to peak. In the early sixties there were over four hundred thousand primary-age children enrolled in elementary music schools, and twenty-four college-level conservatories. Opportunities were open to all, regardless of status, as musical education was systemized even in the smallest towns. It was a broad cultural transformation supported by all the inexpensive instruments which were being manufactured and distributed more widely than at any other time in Russia’s history. Igor, who played the piano, focused on the cello. He was talented, said Vasily, but as Igor got older there were the usual distractions with football and girls. When Igor quit, his father didn’t argue. Vasily was a man of older Soviet times, who knew how tough life could get. He found his son a job in a concrete factory, where Igor worked until his hands bled – an experience Vasily knew would turn his son back to music.
Six months later, Igor started learning how to tune pianos, and in 1978, landed a job at the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre.
I asked where the instrument was now – the one Vasily had bought with the money from the sale of his house.
‘It’s over there,’ said Igor, pointing at the piano used like a platter for the papier-mâché pig: ‘I showed you yesterday. A 1930s Grotrian-Steinweg.’
Kostya chimed in. ‘I need to show you all the peculiarities,’ he said. ‘Heavy, powerful hammers. A basic, strong construction. Original ivory-covered keys, which would last another hundred years. It’s not the grandest, but the full sound it produces is something unique.’
When the piano’s top was opened, the instrument smelled as if it hadn’t breathed for a while. Igor took out the top door to reveal the serial number: 63216. The back frame of the piano, the classic model 120, was star-shaped, a bit like the British flag – a Grotrian-Steinweg signature, which made these pianos about as good as an upright ever got. The firm bracing allowed the soundboard to vibrate freely, its solidity helping to ensure a tonal stability up and down the octaves.
‘It’s a long-liver,’ said Igor, ‘a robust piano with a bright voice.’
The Grotrian-Steinweg had ivory keys. I pressed a few; a muddy note, a clacking action, then in the higher register, a singing tone, and a light, responsive touch. It could use some tuning pins, said Kostya, which needed to come from Germany, but the hammers were good and strong. They needed some refacing and toning, he said.
As the Lomatchenkos talked between themselves about the superiority of German engineering, I could hear the advice from an English piano manufacturer, Brian Kemble, who was guiding me through the technicalities of my search.
‘It’s simpler than you think,’ said Brian. ‘If you find a piano everyone likes, it’s missing something; it’s too generic. You want to find the instrument somebody is passionately in love with.’
The instrument’s piano maker had an impressive pedigree. Friedrich Grotrian, born in Germany in 1803, first learned his craft when he lived in Moscow at the height of the nineteenth-century Russian piano boom. Friedrich was in Russia, making pianos, when all the great virtuosos passed through, including Liszt. When Friedrich returned to Germany in 1854, he worked for Theodor Steinweg whose father, Heinrich Steinweg, emigrated to the US in 1850 where he changed his name and founded Steinway & Sons three years later. In 1865, Theodor Steinweg went to America to join the family. Back in Europe, Friedrich Grotrian bought out his former employer to operate the Grotrian-Steinweg factory in German Braunschweig. The firm is still in the hands of Grotrian’s fifth- and sixth-generation descendants.*
Finding records would be hard, as I was soon to discover. The Grotrian-Steinweg piano factory in Braunschweig was bombed by the Allies during the Second World War, destroying the archives of seven thousand Grotrian-Steinweg pianos, including, it would seem, evidence of this piano’s original owner. Much later in my travels, I then saw a name that had been inscribed into the instrument itself: the lowest key of the piano was marked with a tuning date of 20 October 1944, and the name of the Klavierstimmer, or piano tuner, Carl W. Aug[xx]t,† based in the town of Allenstein in the former East Prussia. That tuning date, scratched in pencil, was just ninety-four days before the Red Army marched into town. Seven months later, Allenstein was effectively scrubbed off the map. What was left was handed to Poland at the end of the Second World War and renamed Olsztyn.
The Soviet advance on East Prussia from 1944 to 1945 may have been brief, but it took a heavy toll, inducing a massive panic migration. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then an artillery captain stationed in East Prussia, described the looting in Neidenburg thirty-odd miles from Allenstein, in his narrative poem, Prussian Nights:
And through the fires, the smoke, the soot,
The Conquerors of Europe swarm,
Russians scurrying everywhere.
In their trucks they stuff the loot:
Vacuum cleaners, wine and candles,
Skirts and picture-frames and pipes,
Brooches, medallions, blouses, buckles,
Typewriters (not with Russian type)
While Solzhenitsyn mused about the rights and wrongs of his own desire to take three hundred Faber-Castell pencils from a ruined post office, other Soviet officers – permitted to send ten kilos of stolen goods home every month – were bolder. What they couldn’t post, they stuffed into the interiors of their tanks; furniture and even livestock were taken. The vanquished behaved similarly on their way in and out of enemy territory, with Hitler’s determination throughout the war to obliterate a nation’s cultural memory one of the most uncompromising in history. Rather than let their treasures fall into Soviet hands, pric
eless collections were also burnt or looted by civilians before the Red Army arrived. But somehow this little Grotrian-Steinweg had survived, even if the how, why or where remained entirely unclear. It was a mystery, the piano’s roots – where exactly they fitted in to this place and time in history – shackled to a time of chaos.
‘When you hear it, you cannot say it’s very dry, or very glassy, or very metallic,’ said Kostya, as he stroked the piano’s case, who knew only his family’s history with the instrument. ‘It’s balanced, full, a rounded sound. And see the frame? It’s cast iron. It has an integrity, which deserves proper restoration. We need to get some new tuning pins, which hold the strings, restring and make the tunings. If I get those new parts in from Germany, it will take two or three months to fix up.’
I asked Kostya what he thought might be the right finale for the Grotrian-Steinweg, not knowing it for myself.
‘The word “finale” means end. An instrument must be played. It will feel good when that instrument is working again,’ said Kostya as he gently closed the piano shut.
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* The Clementi is among Russia’s most significant lost pianos. It was possibly taken by the Nazis or by the Spanish, both of whom quartered divisions at Leningrad’s Pavlovsk Palace, where the piano was last seen.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 20