Читать книгу The Lost Pianos of Siberia - Sophy Roberts - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSiberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
WHEN I VISITED TOBOLSK for the first time, it was blowing a snowstorm. The weather softened everything – my mood, my expectations. This small town in Western Siberia with its white citadel, circular, frilled towers and windowless walls was built on top of a pleated escarpment. It seemed to belong to the pages of a fairy tale, Tobolsk’s profile glittering with the bulbous gold and turquoise domes of the Russian Orthodox religion. Beside the church stood a seminary – the oldest in Siberia, from which nineteenth-century missionaries were despatched all over the Empire, even to Russian America, when the Tsars’ colonial possessions extended to Alaska and parts of what is now California.* Standing at the heart of this old Siber ian capital, I was close to the site where an important battle took place in 1580 when the Cossack adventurer Ermak Timofeevich ventured east across the Urals with an army of less than a thousand men to defeat the last Sibir khan – an achievement the Tsar rewarded with new chainmail. Unfortunately for Ermak, the weight of his fashionable new armour led to his drowning when he toppled into a river nearby.
Ermak’s story, both mighty and bathetic, marked the beginning of Siberia’s colonization, which saw the Russian Empire expand its territory by more than a hundred times. But if Tobolsk was a symbol of imperial Russia’s glory, the town was also testimony to the punitive tyranny of the Tsarist regime. Before the rise of the Eastern Siberian city of Irkutsk under Catherine the Great, Tobolsk was the main sorting house for Siberia’s incoming exiles. Among them were prisoners of war, including a large Swedish contingent picked up at the 1709 Battle of Poltava – a victory over the Swedish Empire that forever changed the power balance in north-east Europe, to Russia’s advantage. The Swedes not only provided the necessary labour for redirecting the river systems which wind beneath Tobolsk; they also imparted a significant civilizing influence. In 1720, the Scottish traveller John Bell observed the Swedes’ effect on Tobolsk’s culture. He expressed surprise to find such a variety of musical instruments, with the Swedes responsible for introducing several useful arts ‘almost unknown’ before their arrival. Bell attended various concerts with these officer convicts, who also worked as teachers for the Russians.
The Swedes joined the system of penal labour devised by Peter the Great under a late-seventeenth-century initiative called katorga, which banished men and women to Siberia with forced-labour terms. Sometimes amnesty was granted for high-profile political prisoners, usually with a changeover of Tsar, but otherwise marked exiles – the worst offenders with their nostrils split, branded and scarred by a kind of barbed whip called the knout – were deemed ‘officially dead’ in the eyes of the law. For exiles, there was also no return, which was a highly effective way not only to punish people, and push ‘undesirables’ out of sight and out of mind, but to colonize Russia’s acquisitions. With this ambitious penal system to manage, Tobolsk attracted its fair share of officialdom – governors, educators and their wives, and, inevitably, pianos. I had traced and found a few interesting instruments – a beautiful nineteenth-century French Erard, serial number 75796, which had been irretrievably damaged by a burst pipe as recently as 1988. There were a score of pre-Revolution, Russian-made grand pianos, but in poor condition. The civil war had been hard on Tobolsk, said Aleksei, a chatty, energetic one-time priest who had trained at the seminary. He offered to help with my search – a chance encounter that rolled into a whole day of looking when he changed his plans to accommodate a stranger.
Aleksei was tall, handsomely dressed in a black suit, his charismatic presence, whispered my interpreter, reminding her of all the images she had in her head of Peter the Great. He had bright blue eyes, and an even brighter voice that seemed to make the air move differently when he spoke. I suppose both of us were a little bit in love with him. This was partly because Aleksei was everything I didn’t expect of Russian Orthodoxy – a wit, without the long, grave beard I associated with his religion, his cheerfulness so abundant that I soon stopped thinking about the tragedy of the drowned Erard and Tobolsk’s other half-sounding instruments. When Aleksei was studying at the seminary, his favourite game was doing roly-polies off the hill beneath the church in his long black cassock. He would tumble off the edge of the escarpment towards a thicket of wooden houses that flowed beneath the hill like spring’s muddy snowmelt.
In the lee of this ledge, Aleksei took me to the Lower Town, where the great and good once lived, including Cath erine’s governor, Aleksandr Aliabiev, a keen patron of the musical arts, and a significant symbol of Catherine’s expanding cultural influence. The governor’s son, also called Aleksandr Aliabiev, became a well-regarded pianist and composer who trained in St Petersburg. After serving his country in the Napoleonic Wars, Aliabiev junior was exiled back to Tobolsk for his alleged involvement in a murky gambling murder, with his most popular song, ‘The Nightingale’, composed during his stint in Tobolsk jail on a piano a Sister of Mercy arranged to be brought to his cell. At least, that’s how the legend goes – one among many that congregate in this old part of town. Aliabiev’s music, however, is eclipsed by the far larger story lurking among Tobolsk’s nineteenth-century boulevards. In the old Governor’s House, the last Tsar and his family were kept under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in 1917 before being moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were eventually murdered. The family’s German music teacher had travelled with them to Tobolsk from St Petersburg. With no piano among their luggage, the Romanovs’ captors therefore had to acquire an instrument, along with other pieces of furniture, from merchants who lived nearby. It was a piano often played by the Empress when she was left by herself, waiting for news of their fate while the civil war intensified.
Aleksei said Tobolsk’s archivists were looking for the Empress’s instrument, but so far without success. He took me up the rickety stairs of the mansion, which workmen were busy renovating in order to turn it into a museum. They showed me handwritten notes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which they had found between the floorboards. That such scraps of history might still lie in cracks like these felt somehow reassuring. Then, when we were finishing up for the day, Aleksei suggested I meet some of his friends who were studying at the seminary. He led me into the priests’ canteen, a bare white room where nine men were already gathered: three of them bearded, four in cassocks, the rest in high-collared, brass-buttoned black suits.
The priests’ demeanour was deadly serious. They had twenty minutes, they said, before their absence would be noticed. One of them fiddled with a heavy crucifix around his neck like an awkward teenager. Another straightened his back as if he were being pulled tall by a puppet string. With no ceremony, concert hall or church, they started to sing, led by a wide-chested choir regent. For the next ten, fifteen minutes, they barely paused in their plaintive chants, their naked voices making the hairs stand up on the backs of my arms. Something felt innately right about these people – in their precise commitment to their art, and their passionate belief in a divinity greater than themselves. I felt reassured that in a part of the world associated with fear I was now among Siberians for whom music mattered as much as air.
*
I am no musician, but music moves me. Catherine the Great, on the other hand, claimed her musical ear was deaf as a post. ‘[I]t’s just noise to me,’ she wrote wryly to a friend, with one account claiming she was assigned court musicians to tell her when to clap. She possessed enough of an ability, however, to remark on her husband’s even more inferior talents when she complained how Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the Romanov dynasty, used to scratch on a violin in the imperial boudoir in between playing with toy soldiers. Throughout the five-hour-long orchestral concerts at court each week, her husband would play lead violin, to Catherine’s disgust. There was no creature unhappier than herself, Catherine claimed, with her caustic epistolary wit, except for Peter’s spaniels, which he continually thrashed.
Catherine’s remarks also have to be taken with a pinch of salt. This brilliant, German-born princess might have professed to lack any natural ability for music, but its advancement under her rule was significant, given the country was lagging behind Western Europe’s state of development when she first arrived in Russia in 1744. In the countryside, the peasantry were drumming their feet to the plucking of the balalaika, a traditional three-stringed guitar. Beyond the Romanov court, folk song dominated. A French traveller who ventured to Tobolsk in the year of Catherine’s coronation described a lamentable state of affairs: music in the most sophisticated Siberian towns rang with the sound of bad violins, which were nothing more than pieces of hollowed wood. The Russian Orthodox Church relied on liturgical chants, with instrumental music banned. In 1762, when Catherine’s inept husband expired in shady circumstances – perhaps by throttling, possibly by poisoning, though the official version of events had his death put down to haemorrhoidal colic – Catherine began to change the Empire for ever by consolidating the country’s territorial reach, as well as Russia’s status as a formidable cultural power.
Catherine was an avid reader. She bought Diderot’s entire library, followed by Voltaire’s, and she sanctioned Russia’s first private printing presses. Her instinct for art collecting was second to none, and she adored English gardens and Scottish architects. Like the vast art collection she acquired, music was a means to establish power and prestige – above all, to bring Russia closer to Europe. She acquired an affection for opera, and opened a theatre where it could be performed in the Hermitage. This gave birth to a national tradition which later influenced the operatic styles and aesthetics in other European countries, including Italy. Her reign – the longest in Russia’s imperial history – also established the infrastructure for Russia’s piano tradition to root as Catherine tipped the balance in the country’s appropriation of European habits.
Until Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, and France fell from grace, the Russian aristocracy spoke French over their native tongue. Russian men cut their beards so that they might look more like Europeans. Following the latest French fashions, Russian women donned red-heeled shoes, laced themselves into whalebone corsets, and added the odd beauty spot à la Marie Antoinette. Even diseases were fashionably French, with la grippe, observed Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite’. Throughout Catherine’s reign, Russia’s aristocracy travelled abroad. They brought back with them a taste for opera, chamber music and the new orchestral arrangements coming out of Paris, Leipzig and Vienna, as well as growing curiosity for the new instrument affectionately referred to as ‘the one with little hammers’.
Clavichords began to appear in Catherine’s court as her ambassadors engaged foreign teachers and commissioned new musical compositions. The Moscow house belonging to Catherine’s friend Ekaterina Dashkova, a talented harpsichordist, was cluttered with these new keyboard instruments, which was a direct reflection of the Empress’s Enlightenment ideas and approbation of European accomplishments. The German harpsichordist Hermann Raupach not only encouraged private concerts; he also taught keyboard at St Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
Year by year, Russia’s musical culture developed. In 1776, Catherine was persuaded to hire the Italian composer Giovanni Païsiello as court conductor – the first musician, she wrote, who could turn her inclement ear. What is less clear is whether it was the conductor’s appearance she found attractive, or his musical talents. Another of her lovers – Grigory Orlov, a dashing, music-loving officer – made a note of it when he watched Catherine wrap a fur coat round the shoulders of this enchantingly handsome, dark-haired Italian while he sat playing the harpsichord.
Whatever it was in Païsiello that Catherine found so engaging, it was enough to ensure that he stayed in Russia for the next seven years, composing numerous keyboard pieces for women of nobility – preludes, capriccios, rondos, a sonata or two. Catherine hired him to teach fortepiano to her son, the future Tsar Paul I, and his wife, the inquisitive, musically talented Maria Feodorovna. After Païsiello came Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer-conductor and favourite of Catherine’s most influential paramour, Prince Grigory Potemkin – a political genius whose passion for music was as intense as his love-making was renowned. Potemkin was Catherine’s true companion in a revolving door of bed-fellows, whose musical obsession ran so deep he would send his courier to Milan to fetch a piece of sheet music. Potemkin’s most significant English biographer writes how he required his choir to be with him at all times – to perform at breakfast, lunch and supper. They also had to join him in the field of war.
Catherine the Great listening to a performance by Giovanni Païsiello. During his seven-year tenure in Russia, Païsiello composed extensively, and gave piano lessons. This drawing was made by Edoardo Matania in 1881.
With Potemkin by her side, Catherine began to turn into a powerful benefactor of the musical arts. Other noble ladies took lessons at the educational institutions in St Petersburg that Catherine patronized. Foreign teachers serviced an eager market. In September 1791, the music-obsessed Russian envoy to Vienna urged Potemkin to employ a willing Mozart. Unfortunately for Russia, by the end of the year both Potemkin and Mozart were dead.
Mozart had gone to his grave in Vienna struggling to pay his medical bills, unable even to afford firewood. Russia, meanwhile, had been paying its lead musicians so well that Potemkin’s favourite composer was given a village in Ukraine. At the same time, in St Petersburg’s glamorous musical circles, profound changes were underway with the rising influence of Catherine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, whose support of performers and musical education made her a spectacular catalyst for the country’s nascent piano-making industry. Ten years before Potemkin was mulling over the Mozart hiring, Maria Feodorovna had made a trip to Vienna – the city of Haydn and Beethoven, or ‘clavierland’ as Mozart called it – where she had attended the piano duel of the century: Muzio Clementi versus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The event, attended by the great and the good, pitted the two musicians against each other in a kind of eighteenth-century boxing ring.
For Mozart, the encounter was worth no more than a passing comment. ‘[Clementi’s] greatest strength is his passage in thirds, but he has not an atom of feeling or taste – in short, he is a mere machine,’ Mozart remarked in a letter to his father. For Clementi, the event presented a new opportunity; he was quick to hobnob with the Russian ambassador in order to exert his influence in Russian society.
Clementi began exporting his English brand of pianos to Russia – advising his colleagues to ‘make hay while the sun shines’, now the piano was in a much more robust state of development, along with music publishing. In this same period, concert promoters started to hire out privately owned halls in St Petersburg for public performances. Clementi, however, couldn’t resist showing disdain for his new Russian customers. He complained of them being ‘slippery’ in payments, ‘cursedly stingy’, possessing ‘good ears for sound tho’ they have none for sense and style’. As for the Emperor himself, ‘nothing less than a trumpet could make its way through his obtuse tympanum’. The instruments constantly suffered from the climate – ‘keep them some time in a very warm room, in order to discover whether the wood dont warp, or any other mischief don’t ensue,’ Clementi advised his London office. In spite of these hurdles, the orders came rolling in, from bankers, generals and the imperial family. Also nudging into the Russian market, observed the avaricious Clementi, was the French piano maker Sébastien Erard, and the English maker John Broadwood. To counter the foreign invasion, a home-grown piano-making industry began to take off in Moscow and St Petersburg, with state-sponsored tax-breaks luring artisans from Western Europe (especially the German-speaking lands) to set up shop inside Russia’s borders. These émigrés could be sure of lucrative sales, as well as subsidies to help transport pianos into Siberia.
Clementi had a head start on the competition. Through his pupil and sales representative in Russia, the Irish composer and performer John Field, Clementi was able to show off his pianos’ capabilities to Russian customers. Worked to the bone, Field – whom Clementi called ‘a lazy dog’ – functioned like Clementi’s musical puppet. In March 1804, Field became the first virtuoso to truly reveal the emotional depth of the piano to the Russians when he made his public debut in St Petersburg. His performance brought the audience to their feet. Newspapers and journals poured praise upon the Irishman. ‘Not to have heard Field,’ wrote an actor friend of the musician, ‘was regarded as a sin against art and good taste.’ As for St Petersburg, the people’s obsession for the instrument caused one musical commentator to dub the city ‘pianopolis’.
Field’s teaching – his students included Aleksandr Aliabiev, who wrote ‘The Nightingale’ in Tobolsk jail, as well as Mikhail Glinka, who described the pianist’s fingers falling on the keys like ‘drops of rain that spread themselves like iridescent pearls’ – made Field so much money, he once used a hundred-rouble note to light his cigar. On another occasion, Field’s dogs chewed his concert earnings. It was a symbol of the sometimes luxurious, often turbulent life Field was to pursue in Russia for the next thirty years, his eccentric genius revealed in the way he wore his stockings inside out, his white tie skewed, and his waistcoat buttoned all wrong. Intemperate and adored, Field was in such a strong position by 1815 that he could reject an invitation to become Russia’s court pianist. By 1823, that job was taken by another brilliant virtuoso who had taken St Petersburg by storm: Polish-born Maria Szymanowska.
When Russia opened its doors to Europe’s growing troupe of performers, they functioned as dazzling endorsements of an instrument that had by now gripped Russia’s heart. In 1838, the German pianist Adolf Henselt – the man with ‘the velvet paws’, as Liszt described his touch – moved to St Petersburg. In 1839, the Swiss virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg thundered into Russia, along with Marie Pleyel – the pretty French prodigy known as ‘the female Liszt’. Passing through St Petersburg at the same time, Pleyel battled (and defeated) Thalberg in a pianistic duel. ‘[E]verything is full of fire, of energy; the piano speaks under her brilliant fingers. It has a soul,’ wrote a reviewer for Journal de St-Pétersbourg. When Clara Schumann played for the Tsar in the Winter Palace in 1844, she described the scene as a fairy tale in One Thousand and One Nights. The truth was probably more mundane. ‘The Russian rouble had a very good clink to German ears,’ wrote Stasov, Russia’s foremost music critic at the time.
I found a book by an American music historian,* which dug deep into the archives of Russian piano-making. Her description of the industry’s proliferation and the distribution of the instruments further east was one of the reasons I took confidence early on that my ‘fieldwork’ looking for pianos in Siberia might glean results. By 1810, six Western entrepreneurs had set up piano workshops in Russia, including a St Petersburg factory founded by the Bavarian-born maker Jacob Becker. This single workshop built more than eleven thousand pianos before the century was out. Orders for instruments came thick and fast, including from Siberia, where pianos had already penetrated in the first half of the century. East of the Urals, music teachers were paid two to three times the amount they earned in Western Russia. In these new towns of the expanding Empire, the piano played an even more important social role than it did in a Moscow drawing room. A piano was a ‘highly respectableising piece of furniture’, observed a British musicologist of the nineteenth century, to affirm one’s European education.
In the 1870s, the Imperial Russian Musical Society opened branches in the Western Siberian cities of Omsk, Tomsk and Tobolsk, with the intention of educating both audiences and musicians. Bookstores selling popular sheet music began to pop up. Piano shops also opened, to ease the distribution of instruments further east. As the century progressed, only a few foreign-made Broadwoods and the odd German Blüthner made it through Russia’s protective trade barriers. This gave the likes of Becker with his home-grown pianos a clear run to dominate the ever-growing domestic market.
And then the wheel of fate turned. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Becker factory became state property, and was renamed Red October. For a while, the USSR’s system of musical education, which spread deep into the provinces, kept up demand for inexpensive Soviet-made instruments. Tens of thousands of uprights were distributed into small towns, with piano factories even opening in Siberia, in Tyumen and Vladivostok. But after perestroika, the old art of piano-making fell away. By the turn of the millennium, the industry had almost died completely. The Red October factory closed in 2004. A piano maker in Kazan turned to coffin-making before going bust. In the same month I saw the Amur tiger, it was reported that the last of Russia’s piano factories had closed.
So great was the tragedy, there were now men of influence trying to reverse the trend. When I first latched on to this story, the Irkutsk-born classical pianist Denis Matsuev – among the great virtuosos of the twenty-first century – was campaigning to bring back the lost art of Russian piano-making. When we later met in Moscow, he talked about the high level of musical education among Russians, and how he still owned his family’s first Soviet piano: a Tyumen upright, made in one of the main towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The network of music schools had birthed extraordinary careers throughout the history of the Soviet Union, in addition to engendering a unique culture of appreciation. The Russian audience is completely different from the Carnegie Hall audience in New York, Matsuev explained. But Siberians trump them both: ‘They understand everything. They are my number one audience,’ he said, describing the perfectly attentive ‘suspicious silences’ he experienced east of the Urals. I would understand soon enough, he said, when I had spent more time in Siberia.
But would I? Part of me was anxious that I can only respond to music in the way I did to the singing priests – the feeling of not knowing what is happening, or why it even matters, except that it does in the moment it is experienced. Unlike so many Russians who benefitted from the Soviet education system, I have no formal musical knowledge. By putting instinct over intellect, and trust before prejudice, there was of course a risk some scoundrel would undo me, and that I would end up with an expensive box of strings no better than the thudding upright Giercke had first bought. But on the other hand, Tobolsk’s singing priests had given me confidence. They had persuaded me to pause for a moment, to believe in people who make all the time in the world to help a stranger who turns up unannounced. They had also held a mirror to my own shortcomings. Time has a life of its own in Siberia. It has a depth and dimension which makes you feel that days shouldn’t be hurried – the opposite of how our time is construed in the West. So when the priest I had befriended suggested I should stay a while longer before I caught the last train out, I wanted to more than anything. But such is the trouble with Siberia. The map is always goading you with how much more territory there is still left to cover.
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* Russian America existed from 1733 to 1867, when the territory was sold to the United States for a paltry US$7.2 million.
* A book I kept close at hand for three years: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014).
