The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Anastasia made tea, weaving in and out of the city’s cultural history. She told a story about Arnold Katz, among Russia’s most important twentieth-century conductors, and his performances in the House of Scientists. I listened, ate sweets and flicked through an old telephone directory. Vera Lotar-Shevchenko’s name stared back at me with a curious matter-of-factness. Her six-digit number was still there: 65-98-29. The simplicity was beguiling, as if I could just pick up a phone and ask to pop round to hear her play in her apartment, the door half ajar.

  I hung around for a while in Akademgorodok, coming and going, looking for people who remembered Vera. The hotel I stayed in was once the highest building in the city, but only just. In 1959, when Khrushchev visited to check on progress, he instructed the city’s architects to keep their ambitions in check. On the plans, the top four floors of the projected twelve-storey hotel were quickly lopped off.

  I liked the city’s pace. Sunday morning in Akademgorodok felt like a sleepy morning in any university town, with its farmers’ market spread along the sidewalk. On the bonnet of a dove-grey Lada were buckets of berries, pickles, pumpkins, persimmons, and a tub of plump porcini mushrooms, their silky russet tops dusted with frost. The emerald picket fences around the academicians’ cottages were neatly painted, just as they were at the time of the town’s founding. The aeromodelling club established in the sixties for the children of engineers was also still active. At Akademgorodok’s House of Culture, I listened to the town’s chamber orchestra tuning up. Among the string musicians, there was a geology professor who had played with the orchestra since the sixties. He remembered Vera and the balmy early years when Akademgorodok was created.

  Anastasia found what I was looking for: Vera’s last piano was in the care of the University’s Physics and Mathematics School, where Siberia’s cleverest children are sent to boarding school. This is the super-cell of the prodigious Russian brain, each school place dependent upon highly competitive Olympiads designed to harvest talented future scientists out of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The instrument was a Mühlbach grand, serial number 8250, dating from around 1905, when the factory was producing two hundred and fifty grand pianos a year. The German maker was among the foreign artisans who moved to St Petersburg in the nineteenth century, and did a good trade until the factory closed after the October Revolution. In its time, Vera’s instrument was a bestseller: a seven-octave kabinetnyi, or mid-size boudoir grand.

  Anastasia’s discovery had got the school’s staff so excited that a Novosibirsk TV crew was invited to attend the unveiling of the piano, which had clearly seen better days. From descriptions of Vera’s playing, it was easy to imagine how the varnish had worn off, as if Vera had leaned in so hard against the instrument she had blunted its edges. Now it smelled of old age. There was an interview on the evening news. It was during this hullabaloo that I noticed a man standing silently in the background, using a window ledge to prop himself up as he watched the scene play itself out. My interpreter went over to talk with him. She knew who he was: Anastasia had called him a few days before and had been hoping he would turn up.

  His name was Stanislav Dobrovolskiy, a tuner, jazz pianist and professor who had taught advanced piano at the Novosibirsk Conservatory for forty years. He looked like a poor pensioner. Even bulked up with a thick coat and trapper’s hat with the ear flaps down, he resembled a sheet of tissue that might blow away in a wind. His wispy moustache, which extended out beyond the width of his thick-rimmed spectacles, belonged to a different time and place. He was short and frail, reminding me of the story I had heard in Novosibirsk about some new pianos imported from China: the humidity and temperatures were so low in Siberia in winter that the instruments were condemned before they arrived, the moisture sucked out of the pin blocks which meant that the strings couldn’t hold any tension.

  Stanislav had come along because he had tuned the Mühlbach several times in its history. It was a noble instrument, he said. He ran his hands over the strings. This was a piano which needed to be played, he said. He talked about how it was made by artisans who took their time to let the wood adapt. Thirty, forty years it takes to get the raw materials right, he said; Vera’s piano was produced the old way – an art which predated the Revolution.

  It soon became clear that Stanislav knew the Mühlbach’s history better than anyone else in the room. Various sources told me that the piano had been given to Vera by her patron Lyapunov, and then bequeathed to the Physics and Mathematics School upon her death. Only later did I learn that the black-and-white portrait the university staff had placed on the piano for the TV cameras wasn’t a picture of Vera at all. Dead for less than forty years, and her story had been replaced by a stranger’s. It was an error, nothing more – given her lack of memoirs, nobody could be exactly sure of what Vera did or did not look like as a younger woman – but it was also symbolic of the speed and ease with which someone’s history can disappear.

  I arranged to meet Stanislav again, partly because of his relationship with the Mühlbach and also because Stanislav worked as one of the federal experts who analyses the value of a piano. He explained how every instrument has to be sent for an evaluation. During the troubled years of perestroika, Stanislav had also come up with a plan for Soviet customs officers on how to frisk a grand piano for drugs. A piano, he said, was a better place for hiding heroin than down the bell of a trombone. More than anything, I wanted to see him again because of a passing comment he made about surviving the Siege of Leningrad. The way he wore this monumental experience so lightly made for an uncanny feeling in his company.

  We met a couple of times over the next few days, and while his physical strength was failing, his face always wore a slight smile, as if he, too, didn’t quite know why he had lived this long. He brought with him envelopes containing photographs of pianos, his federal certificate, which allowed him to evaluate historic instruments, and his medals for surviving the most devastating siege in recorded history – a relentless assault which he said tuned his ear to music in the first place. To keep him occupied during the blockade, Stanislav’s mother gave him a hand-cranked phonograph, which arrived on his fifth birthday in August 1942, and two hundred records. His mother had acquired them from friends, including musicians in the orchestra which performed the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich’s Seventh. There were recordings of Italian operas, as well as Soviet singers like Vadim Kozin, and Klavdiya Shulzhenko, ‘Russia’s Vera Lynn’ who performed hundreds of concerts for Soviet troops defending the besieged city. Stanislav said he played each piece of music so often that even now he would be able to perform every single melody from memory. As for the records he didn’t like, they had another use. When there was electricity, he sat on the oven with a record between his bottom and the stove top. The records slowly melted, the heat seeping into his bones.

  ‘Music was all I cared about,’ said Stanislav.

  Stanislav was the only child of a single mother. During the siege, he described how familiar streets started to appear strange to him. Leningrad’s most iconic structures were camouflaged to confuse German pilots. St Isaac’s dome was dulled with grey battleship paint, and the spire of the Admiralty scaled by mountaineers so it could be hidden under canvas. One night when his mother moved them from their home in the suburbs to a safer address, he remembered the sharp glances of hungry, frightened citizens as he passed under the city’s gloomy bridges. Nearly eighty years later, the scene still broke into his dreams. The young Stanislav was confused by people sleeping on the streets, their bodies swept with snow. Only later did he realize they were corpses.

  It was cold, always cold – the winter of 1941 to ’42 one of the bitterest in Russia’s twentieth-century history. In his kindergarten, where children tried to warm up around the only furnace, he described how badly he wanted to touch the fire, even if it was just with a single finger. He remembered being loaded into a truck to join an evacuation convoy of children being taken across Lake Ladoga on the city’s north-eas
tern flank. A seasonal ice road crossing the lake was the last route out of the besieged city – and a lethal one when the Nazis took to bombing the evacuees. Lagoda’s ice held for six months during the first winter of the siege, allowing for the escape of half a million people. But the blokadniki, as siege survivors came to be known, also knew the ‘Road of Life’ by another name: the ‘Road of Death’. During the Lake Lagoda evacuations, hundreds of trucks fell through the ice. As for Stanislav, his mother pulled his little body off the back of an exiting convoy just in time. She wanted to keep her only child close to her in the belief it was his best chance of survival.

  Victims of the Leningrad Siege being brought to the city’s Volkovo Cemetery in October 1942.

  Inside the city, the bombardments mostly happened in the early evenings, and shuddered on until nightfall. Some attacks Stanislav remembered more clearly than others, like the bomb which took out the house next to where he was playing with friends. The buildings lost their façades. In one flat there was a grand piano, its legs caught on masonry so the instrument dangled over the street.

  You got used to a way of doing things, said Stanislav, who learned to count the fifteen-second gaps in gunfire when you could run for safety. Most of the time he was left home alone. He remembered cakes made of milled sunflower, fashioned into slabs so tough you had to cut them with a chisel or drive in a nail. His mother would queue for twenty-four hours in breadlines for an eighth of a loaf. You did anything to survive, he said. One of their family friends suspended a piece of sugar from the ceiling. She hung it there because the thought of it made everything else taste that little bit sweeter. His mother cut the bark from birch trees and put it through a mincer. She made cutlets by mixing the pulp with carpenter’s glue, which contained protein from fishbones. Once his uncle came home with a rabbit. They ate the meat and boiled the rest down to soup. It turned out they had eaten a cat – a lie Stanislav never forgave.

  But in all this horror there was a curious redemption to be found in Stanislav’s soundscape. He described Uncle Pavel, a neighbour sharing the same Soviet apartment. A violinist with the Orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee, Uncle Pavel asked Stanislav to sing whenever he was at home. Stanislav, who was shy, would lie on his back under the bed with the covers drawn up over his head, his fingers beating out the rhythm on the springs as if it were a guitar. Uncle Pavel was fond of birds. He had a captive bluethroat – a pretty, robin-like bird, too small to be eaten – with an outstanding skill. Uncle Pavel would play on his violin while the bird sat in a cage covered with a dark cloth. After several repetitions the bird would remember the melody. When Uncle Pavel removed the cloth, the bird was then given the few crumbs they could spare as a reward.

  One summer, a friend of his mother’s taught him how to wire up a bottle to find a radio wave. Then she got her hands on a trophy radio set, made by Telefunken, taken from the Germans.

  ‘It was jazz I got interested in once the blockade was over,’ said Stanislav. ‘I would listen to different music, picking up banned radio waves from Europe and America. After three or four years, I got quite good at gathering radio parts and fixing them. I had a German radio book to help me. Empfänger-Schaltungen der Radio-Industrie. I made money doing up these machines for other people. That’s how I earned three thousand roubles to pay for part of my first grand piano; the rest my stepfather paid for. I was about eighteen years old. I found the instrument myself, in an antiques shop, but I only understood its uniqueness later. It was a pre-Revolution grand, with a very delicate upper register, produced by Carl Rönisch. I’ve always liked German engineering.’

  Rönisch was a manufacturer from Dresden who opened a St Petersburg workshop in 1897. The Rönisch action lasted well in extreme conditions; it was strong enough to handle the trials of shipping, which is one of the reasons Rönisch pianos sold well in the Spanish and British colonies, as well as in Russia. Rönisch tweaked the seasoning and finishes for the Russian climate, and along with Jacob Becker became one of the market leaders who distributed grand pianos to settlers moving into towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Stanislav talked about how Rönisch’s instruments were popular with the founder of the Imperial Russian Musical Society, Anton Rubinstein. The more he talked, the less Stanislav’s remembering focused on the siege than on the music that punctuated his past. He was using pianos in the way J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons.

  Stanislav progressed rapidly through the city’s elite musical institutions, winning places at the St Petersburg State Academic Capella and the Leningrad Conservatory. As the city recovered from the war, he started listening to Voice of America. From 1946 onwards, Willis Conover presented an hour of jazz between 11 p.m. and midnight. In 1959, the New York Times estimated that thirty million people outside America were listening in.

  ‘I can still hear his voice,’ said Stanislav. ‘My mother switched on the radio to help me sleep. She thought I was a good boy, going to bed on time. Really, I was just wide awake listening to Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the Casa Loma Orchestra. The music kept playing in my head.’

  In 1960, Stanislav started teaching at Kirov Music College. This was also when he had to give up his beloved Rönisch because it wouldn’t fit into his Soviet dormitory. Five years later, he moved to Novosibirsk. He joined a jazz band and supplemented his earnings with piano tuning now and again, while also working as an expert for the Russian customs authorities.

  Every historic instrument should carry a passport, he said, denoting its status in the Russian national heritage. Mühlbach, Diederichs and Stürzwage were brands the Russian Cultural Ministry tended to keep in the country. But there were a few exceptions, he said. There were many Beckers in circulation before the factory was nationalized. He called Becker the Russian Steinway. He reminded me that German engineering was rooted in Russia’s piano-making history – that despite the war the two countries were closely bound.

  When his mother saw German prisoners of war at the end of the siege, she said they looked even more starved than the Leningraders – eighteen-year-old boys who had no more asked for a war than the Russians whose bodies his mother was dragging on sledges from the hospital to barges on the River Neva. In the fifties, Stanislav worked as a tour guide for Leningrad’s permanent collection of musical instruments. He took a delegation of Germans to visit the Russian Museum. The group stopped at a siege painting. It was the colour of lead and depicted a frozen Neva clogged with bodies.

  ‘I will never forget the silence,’ he said. ‘The Germans stood with their arms against their bodies, tears running down their faces.’

  Stanislav told a story about a German boat that saved his life. When he was a young boy, he was out on the water sailing with his mother at her yacht club when a storm blew in out of nowhere. She quickly bundled him into the cabin below before the boat flipped. The yacht, which was German-made, was strong enough to right itself, with a keel which didn’t snap.

  ‘Look for a piano with good German engineering,’ he advised me. ‘The most reliable in the world.’

  From that day on, Stanislav Dobrovolskiy had never lost his respect for German design. The Germans saved him from drowning. The Germans taught him how to wire up a radio. The Germans showed him how a good piano should be made to stand the test of time.

  ________________

  * Galich was effectively hounded out of the Soviet Union in June 1974. Some years later, he was found dead in Paris, electrocuted when he tried to plug in a new tape recorder. His story is told in Alexander Galich, Songs and Poems, trans. Gerald Stanton Smith (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1983).

  PART THREE

  Goodness Knows Where

  1992–Present Day

  ‘Often the object of desire, when desire is transformed into hope, becomes more real than reality itself.’

  – Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands

  ‘’Tis wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier.’

  – Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude

  ‘There are many kinds of endings – triumphant and tragic, poetic and laconic, funny and melancholic, majestic and expiring. We find endings that present a final conclusion and others that leave things open. Open endings, as in Schumann’s “Kind im Einschlummern” or Liszt’s “Unstern” (Disaster) point into the unknown and the mysterious, unseal an enigma.’

  – Alfred Brendel, A Pianist’s A–Z

  15

  A Game of Risk: Kamchatka

  IN 1986, THE LEGENDARY Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter took a piece of cardboard bearing a map of the USSR, and with a dark-blue marker drew a route through Siberia, filling in the names of all the places he wanted to visit. He put the plan into his suitcase and set off to achieve his goal – a journey from Moscow to the Pacific and back again, travelling partly by road and partly by rail, stopping often to perform piano recitals. On this epic tour he was accompanied by his friend the philologist and writer Valentina Chemberdzhi, who subsequently published her recollections of the journey.

  Richter was aware of the intensive foreign tours made by Franz Liszt – and the comparison is enlightening. Both men endured endless bumpy potholes to get to where they wanted to play. They also both made do with whatever instrument they were presented with, Liszt performing on a rattling Tompkinson upright in an Irish hotel sitting room, and Richter on all manner of Soviet equivalents in the small towns scattered through Siberia. Contrary to popular myth, Richter didn’t bring with him his favourite Yamaha (‘it’s hard to imagine a grand piano in a yurt or in the taiga!’ observed Chemberdzhi). ‘In deepest Russia, I didn’t always have these fine instruments – far from it; but I paid no attention,’ said Richter. ‘In any case, there have been times when I’ve played on terrible pianos, and played extremely well.’