The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  Odgerel now performs solo recitals in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley during the summer months. To my knowledge, the Grotrian-Steinweg, which she otherwise keeps under careful, humidity-controlled conditions at her apartment in Ulaanbaatar, is the only piano of its kind in Mongolia, and continues to sing with one of the most beautiful voices I ever heard in two years of searching. Cantabile, Odgerel calls it, after its singing voice: tender, smooth, vulnerable and full of feeling, with a rich, warm bass and a silver treble, the hammers delivering keen, precise blows to achieve a perfect clarity. She keeps Rachmaninoff and Liszt for the Yamaha, and Chopin and Debussy for the sweet, voluptuous colours of the little upright. Her touch connects with the piano’s inner resonance, like an alchemist might turn stone to gold. ‘[John] Field did not so much play his own nocturnes, but dreamed them at the piano,’ observed Liszt of the Irishman who had first set Russia’s hearts alight. That was how it felt listening to Odgerel on the Grotrian-Steinweg. It was as if she were revealing the singing heart of the instrument that had affected so many lives through the centuries, its voice reaching all the way back to Bartolomeo Cristofori’s magnificent invention when the fortepiano’s trembling notes first filled the palace of a glittering Medici prince.

  On their drive back to Novosibirsk through the Altai, the Russians stopped in to visit Leonid Kaloshin, the Aeroflot navigator. Elena then spent a week helping him improve his vegetable garden. Igor, the subway driver, assisted with a local piano delivery on Leonid’s behalf.

  Semion Nyaruy, the Nenets composer I had met in Yamal, died on 4 April 2018. His widow hopes that the Salekhard Department of Culture will build a museum exhibit in his honour, and that Semion’s Tyumen upright will be preserved there. In the short term, the piano may be sent to Semion’s alma mater, the Tyumen music school.

  The captain of the fishing ship, Valentin Lekus, who got his crew to club together and buy a piano to assuage the long months at sea in the North Pacific, also died before this book was published. He sang a song for me when we were together – the 1939 classic ‘We’ll Meet Again’, made famous by Vera Lynn during the Second World War. It was like listening to a man’s heart stripped bare – a gentleman who had given his best years to a hard life on Soviet ships in one of the toughest climates on the planet. When I write this now, the song stays with me as one of the most affecting moments during my time in Siberia, along with the image of a fiddle made with stolen horsehair and Lidiya’s narcissus standing tall in a pool of light.

  I received further news about the Bechstein I had found in Kiakhta, which confirmed the piano had been delivered to Kiakhta Museum in 1979 from the capital of Buryatia, Ulan-Ude. I received no information attributing it to the tea merchant family. So I contacted Bechstein’s archivists instead, and found a fascinating glimmer of a deeper past: in 1874, the piano was despatched to a ‘Nikolai R.’ in Moscow – one of several delivered to the same person that year. Could it have been Nikolai Rubinstein, who had chosen the piano for the Imperial Russian Musical Society in Tomsk?

  Nina Alexandrovna isn’t in good enough health to see the Khabarovsk Stürzwage again in person, but she and the Khidirov family have struck up a close friendship. They often visit Nina in her apartment. They, too, like listening to Nina’s stories about her early childhood in Tobolsk, when the piano was covered in a map. The piano has also now been restored. In the winter of 2018, the Khidirov family arranged for a professional pianist to play the instrument, and then brought Nina a recording of the music. ‘Sometimes an old person cannot die because his or her soul aches or feels pain about something; they need to wait for something in their story to finish,’ wrote my interpreter, as I was finishing up the last few sentences of this book: ‘Nina’s soul is calm. She likes listening to the Stürzwage, knowing that the piano is now with a generous and outstanding family in a house full of love.’ In Nina’s last days, she listens to the music of her childhood.

  It is worth noting that I never made it deep into the Russian Arctic to follow Fridtjof Nansen. I found a polar specialist who could fly me via helicopter close to where I wanted to go in Siberia’s Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. However, my application for a permit was rejected by the FSB a few weeks before we were due to depart. It contained several reasons for refusal, namely ‘Refusal of territorial security authorities in special permit to enter the border zone for foreign citizen.’ I guess the authorities had given up believing I was looking for a piano in the equivalent of outer space, which in many ways, was fair enough. As it happened, the helicopter I was due to fly in crashed on the very charter I would have joined.

  On 9 August 2017, despite my encounter with authorities in the Altai, I was issued with a second year-long writer’s visa to continue my work in Siberia. This was a huge relief to me. Then, on 29 November 2018, I received news that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had rejected my application for a third year of work. Among other things, I was planning to fill in some gaps in my reporting in Krasnoyarsk, an important city on the River Yenisei where, in the last years of the nineteenth century, George Kennan had encountered one of the finest drawing rooms in Russia, replete with paintings by well-known European artists, and, of course, a grand piano.

  Hearing the news was like discovering that the person you are obsessed with is as unlikeable as all your friends had suspected. There was an ‘I told you so’ echoing back through my journey which I didn’t want to accept. It felt as if I were effectively being exiled from an exile’s land. After falling for Siberia, I was now unable to return. Something in me felt depleted. But a far larger part of me knew that in spite of everything difficult about Russia, there was also powerful redemption in its extremities. What this country endured is hard to fathom, and that was in the bloody twentieth century alone. Siberia may be on the periphery of our consciousness. It may hold some of the bleakest stories of human cruelty. There may be numerous difficulties to uncovering truth and testimonies, and to accepting the extent of Russia’s calamitous past. But in spite of everything, Siberia is fundamentally life-giving all the same – a wellspring of culture, humanity and moral courage in the last place on Earth I expected to find it, revealed to me by people who not only opened their pianos but also their homes and hearts to a stranger. This book remembers their kindnesses, but above all, the music and memories they shared.

  August 2019

  ________________

  * The British anthropologist Charles Hawes had a similar experience when he was taken in for questioning by Russian authorities on Sakhalin Island at the end of the nineteenth century. Like me, he was circumspect. Like me, he was also surprised by the eloquence of his interrogator: ‘A highly educated man, speaking English, French and German, besides his native tongue, he was surprisingly au courant with English literature.’ Charles H. Hawes, In the Uttermost East (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904).

  To see more of this story in Michael Turek’s pictures, listen to recordings by Odgerel Sampilnorov, and find out more about the search, visit www.lostpianosofsiberia.com.

  A Brief Historical Chronology

  1587 The Western Siberian town of Tobolsk is established. Over the next hundred years, it evolves into the biggest fur centre in Siberia.

  1639 Russians reach the Pacific Ocean for the first time, travelling overland across Siberia.

  1700 Bartolomeo Cristofori, instrument maker to a Florentine Medici prince, produces a new invention that plays soft (piano) and loud (forte).

  1703 Tsar Peter the Great establishes Russia’s new capital, St Petersburg, in the image of a European city, earning it the moniker ‘Venice of the North’.

  1730 Russia begins building the Great Siberian Trakt – an overland trade route from Moscow to China.

  1741 Vitus Bering reaches Alaska from Russia – extending the Empire into what will become known as ‘Russian America’.

  1762 Catherine the Great becomes Empress of All Russia following the death of her husband, Tsar Peter III, in a palace coup.

  1774
Catherine commissions a piano in London. Over the next three decades, the instrument undergoes rapid changes in technology.

  1782 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Muzio Clementi ‘duel’ at Emperor Joseph II’s court in Vienna. Construction begins on Pavlovsk Palace – a centre of Russian musical life throughout the nineteenth century.

  1784 John Broadwood in London is now making more pianos than harpsichords.

  1789 The French Revolution, which lasts until 1799, destabilizes the monarchies of Europe – and attracts the interest of Russian liberals.

  1795 Beethoven begins composing his thirty-two sonatas, reinventing the genre of solo keyboard music.

  1796 Catherine the Great dies. The harpsichord and organ no longer dominate orchestras as the piano gains in popularity.

  1801 Clementi publishes the first ever piano method book, Clementi’s Introduction to the Art of Playing on the Piano Forte.

  1812 Napoleon invades Russia. In September, the Battle of Borodino becomes the bloodiest single day of battle in recorded history, not surpassed until the first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Napoleon succeeds in capturing Moscow but is quickly forced into a retreat made desperate by the brutal Russian winter.

  1821 French piano maker Sébastien Erard patents the ‘double escapement’. With a note able to sound repeatedly without the key having to return to its full height, a new explosion of virtuosity is unleashed.

  1825 The Decembrist Uprising results in the exile of more than a hundred high-profile Russian aristocrats and gentlemen revolutionaries to Siberia.

  1830 By this time, the piano resembles the modern instrument we play today. This is the beginning of the Romantic period, and the golden age of virtuosos. In this same year, Russia crushes the November Uprising in Poland; nearly two thirds of those Poles banished for political offences in the next decade belong to a culturally educated nobility.

  1842 Franz Liszt makes his blistering Russian debut.

  1848 ‘The Spring of Nations’ – the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history – brings down numerous absolutist regimes, but not Russia’s.

  1853 One of the most remarkable years for the piano industry: Steinway & Sons is established in New York, Blüthner in Leipzig, and Bechstein in Berlin.

  1855 Alexander II becomes Tsar. A year later, he grants amnesty to the Decembrist revolutionaries, allowing survivors to return from Siberia to Western Russia.

  1861 Serfdom is abolished by Tsar Alexander II, four years before slavery ends in America. Around this time, Fyodor Dostoevsky publishes The House of the Dead, inspired by the four years he spent in Siberian exile in the 1850s.

  1862 The St Petersburg Conservatory opens – the first school to professionalize music in Russia.

  1863 The January Uprising in Poland, crushed by the Russians, results in a new influx of political exiles to Siberia.

  1867 Russia sells Alaska to America for US$7.2 million.

  1872 The Empress of Russia, Maria Alexandrovna, receives a Steinway concert grand, serial number 25000.

  1877 The phonograph, or record player, is invented, although it won’t be until the 1910s that the device begins to replace the piano as the primary source of music in the home.

  1881 Tsar Alexander II is assassinated by revolutionaries in St Petersburg.

  1891 Work begins on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  1894 Nicholas II becomes Tsar. George Bernard Shaw declares ‘the pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry’.

  1896 Piano manufacturing hits boomtime in America.

  1897 Lenin is exiled to Siberia for three years, along with other leaders of the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Lenin’s noble status means his experience of exile is far more comfortable than that of his poorer comrades.

  1903 Joseph Stalin is first exiled to Siberia. Between now and 1913, Stalin is exiled seven times, managing to escape on six occasions.

  1904 The Trans-Siberian Railway opens.

  1905 Tsarist authorities respond violently to a peaceful protest on ‘Bloody Sunday’. Russia loses the southern half of Sakhalin Island at the end of the Russo-Japanese War.

  1908 Henry Ford introduces the Model T motor car. In the West, it won’t be long before the car overtakes the piano as a show of status.

  1913 Tsar Nicholas II celebrates the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty.

  1914 The First World War begins. Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire declare war on Russia.

  1917 The February Revolution takes place. Tsar Nicholas II abdicates, and the imperial family are taken to Siberia. The October Revolution establishes Lenin’s power. The Russian Civil War begins.

  1918 The Tsar and his family are murdered in Ekaterinburg. Lenin introduces the Soviet system of forced labour camps.

  1922 Vladivostok falls to the Red Army, and the Russian Civil War is finally over. Shamanism, animism and totemism are officially banned.

  1924 Lenin dies, making way for Stalin, who will become one of the most powerful, murderous dictators in history.

  1929 ‘De-kulakization’ and rapid industrialization begins in the USSR, signalling the end of private land ownership and the start of widespread famine.

  1936 Stalin’s Great Purge begins.

  1939 The Second World War effectively halts piano building worldwide. Materials and manpower are in short supply.

  1942 Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C Major premieres in Leningrad during the Nazi siege.

  1953 Russian piano manufacturing increases tenfold, from now until 1970. Nikita Khrushchev is in power – a period of ‘de-Stalinization’.

  1958 American pianist Harvey Van Cliburn wins the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, indicating a thaw in Soviet–US relations.

  1964 Leonid Brezhnev is in power. An ideological clampdown begins.

  1969 From quiet beginnings, Japan now manufactures more pianos than any other country.

  1985 Mikhail Gorbachev is in power. Perestroika begins a political movement to transform the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which leads to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

  1986 Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter travels across Siberia. Vladimir Horowitz makes a homecoming trip to the Soviet Union, travelling with his concert grand Steinway & Sons Model D piano.

  1991 The Soviet hammer and sickle is taken down from the Kremlin and replaced by the new tricolour flag of the Russian Federation.

  2000 Vladimir Putin wins his first presidential election.

  2016 The search for the lost pianos of Siberia begins.

  Selected Bibliography

  The Notes give a clear indication of the books I have relied on for their scholarly expertise. This selected bibliography focuses on the literary, adventurous and sometimes eccentric first-hand accounts from travellers past and contemporary, which are currently available in the English language (aside from Valentina Chemberdzhi). I have also included fiction, and one or two critical historical texts that readers interested in Siberia might consider essential reading. Also listed: some expert music books for those with a keener interest in this side of the story, and a small selection of relevant films.

  Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death, trans. Alison Anderson (London: Random House, 2010)

  Dmitri Alioshin, Asian Odyssey (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1940)

  Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004)

  Vladimir Arseniev, Dersu the Trapper, trans. Malcolm Burr (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939)

  Avvakum, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself, trans. Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees (London: Hogarth Press, 1963)

  Glynn R. Barratt, Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974)

  Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen Lane, 2016)

  Anton Chekhov,
Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (Surrey: OneWorld Classics, 2007)

  Valentina Chemberdzhi, V puteshestvii so Sviatoslavom Rikhterom (Moscow: M. RIK ‘Kul’tura’, 1993)

  Anthony Cross, In the Lands of the Romanovs: An Annotated Bibliography of First-hand English-language Accounts of the Russian Empire (1613–1917) (Cambridge: Open Book, 2014)

  Galya Diment and Yuri Slezkine (eds), Between Heaven and Hell: The Myth of Siberia in Russian Culture (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993)

  Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (New York and London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

  Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance (London: Penguin, 2003)

  Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010)

  Andrew Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863–1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

  Eugenia Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari (London: Persephone Books, 2014)

  V. D. Golubchikova and Z. I. Khvtisiashvili (eds), Practical Dictionary of Siberia and the North (Moscow: European Publications & Severnye Prostory, 2005)

  Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)

  Charles H. Hawes, In the Uttermost East (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904)

  A. J. Haywood, Siberia: A Cultural History (Oxford: Signal Books, 2010)

  Alexander Herzen, My Exile in Siberia (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1855)

  James Holman, Travels through Russia, Siberia, Poland, Austria, Saxony, Prussia, Hanover, &c. &c. Undertaken during the Years 1822, 1823 and 1824, While Suffering from Total Blindness, and Comprising an Account of the Author Being Conducted a State Prisoner from the Eastern Parts of Siberia (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825)