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
