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An 1832 drawing by fellow Decembrist Nikolai Bestuzhev of the Volkonskys in their cell at Petrovsky Zavod.
When Sergei Volkonsky’s decade-long hard-labour sentence was up, the Volkonskys had greater freedom to influence Siberian culture, specifically in and around Irkutsk, where they were required to settle in exile. The Volkonskys were allocated a plot in swampy taiga. This was when Maria’s two surviving children learned the native Siberian dialect. Then, in 1844, the Volkonskys bought a house in town.
The Volkonskys’ manor house in Irkutsk.
Year by year, Maria gained confidence under a sympathetic new governor, who became a visitor to her musical salons. She expanded Irkutsk’s hospital for orphans, fought for musical education to be introduced in schools, and raised money to build the town’s first purpose-built concert hall – civic duties that earned her the sobriquet ‘the Princess of Siberia’. When a classical pianist from Tobolsk came to play in Irkutsk, Maria broke protocol for an exile’s wife: she went to the concert, and was given a standing ovation. Sergei led a humbler life; he grew a long beard and frequented the market with a goose under his arm. Nicknamed ‘the peasant prince’, he was simple and unostentatious, deeply respected by Siberians who sought his help. He made numerous friends among the locals, with whom he shared his knowledge of agriculture and strand of liberal political philosophy. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Sergei’s lifelong quest for fairer government looked like it might be coming of age. During the 1848 Spring of Nations, absolutist regimes were toppling and a reformist press was on the rise. Prussian liberals got their constitution, and elective assemblies. In Hungary, serfdom was finally outlawed.
When I visited the Volkonskys’ two-storey house in Irkutsk, now a museum, frost laced the panes and dulled the glow of lamps inside. Upstairs there was a pyramid piano – an instrument of peculiar shape and height, like a concert piano turned up against the wall. The museum staff said it probably belonged to the family’s Florentine music teacher, who had lived in one of the outbuildings. Downstairs, there was a beautiful Russian-made Lichtenthal, which Maria’s brother delivered from St Petersburg. The Lichtenthal, made by a piano maker who had moved to Russia following the Belgian revolution of 1830, was the grandest instrument Maria owned. It was also the most potent surviving symbol of her affection for music, given that Maria’s original clavichord, which had travelled on her sledge from Moscow to Siberia, had disappeared – when or where, no one was quite sure.
As for the Lichtenthal, the instrument behaved awkwardly when a museum worker tried to make the prop stick hold up the lid. The keys were sticky, like an old typewriter gluey with ink. He struck the keys until the softened notes – muted by a layer of dust, perhaps, or felt that had swollen in the damp – started to appear. At first the sound was reed-thin, no louder than the flick of a fingernail on a bell. Inside the piano, the amber wood still gleamed, the strings’ fragile tensions held in place by tiny twists around the heads of golden, round-headed tuning pins. The Lichtenthal, said the museum worker, was full of moods that made it challenging to tune. In Siberia, violent swings in humidity and heat can shrink the wood. The soundboard, a large, thin piece of wood which transforms vibrations into musical tones, can easily crack. Different makers devised different solutions to this problem. Mozart’s favourite maker would deliberately split a piano’s soundboard by exposing it to rain and sun, and would then wedge and glue it back together so that it might never break again.
I traced the Lichtenthal’s restorer who had picked the yellowed ivory tops off the keys to clean them, re-spun the bass strings, and repaired the veneer.* I also wanted to talk to the piano’s current keepers, to see whether they might know of other noble instruments of its type. One thing led to another and via various other city institutions, I was connected with an Irkutsk piano tuner who seemed to hold the keys to my quest. Cutting an elegant figure with a tuning hammer in his leather satchel, he said he had a private collection of forty historic instruments. His most prized piano was a rare 1813 grand which he had bought for a few kopeks from an army general in the early nineties. It was an Andreas Marschall, serial number 5, traced back to a very old Danish maker. He said it was in such bad condition that it was just a box and strings, but one day he wanted to do it up.
I made an appointment to visit the tuner’s Siberian workshop a few months later, but when I arrived back in Irkutsk, he didn’t show up as we had agreed. When I found the numbers of other tuners working in Irkutsk, they seemed reluctant to talk. Feeling the cold of being an outsider in Siberia, I eventually persuaded one of them to act as my paid guide. We drove out to a small apartment, where he was restoring a Bechstein grand. He said it originally belonged to a local cultural activist who had brought the piano to Irkutsk from Moscow in the thirties. The piano was broken up into all its parts with the soundboard laid out like an old drunk waiting to die. It was positioned in front of an electric fire to help dry it out, the keys and strings a jumble on the floor. One day he would finish the restoration, he said; there was a market for these grand pianos in Russia. He showed me another private instrument in his home: an upright Smidt & Wegener piano which he had reason to believe belonged to, or was played by, the wife of Mikhail Frunze, a Red Army commander in the Russian Civil War. The tuner opened the piano up to show me where he had found three gold coins, dated 1898, minted with the face of Tsar Nicholas II. The tuner had sold the coins during perestroika to help make ends meet.
I would find many more secrets like this, said a local musicologist: Siberia’s pianos were full of hidden treasures, like the grand piano her teacher used to own. Inside its workings, the woman had concealed all her jewellery. The piano was her teacher’s family safe. But she warned me I would also need to keep my wits about me, because there were all sorts of complications with proving provenance in Russia. I knew there would also be stories people wouldn’t want told. There was a risk that my research might reveal the original, rightful owner of an instrument, which could open up a cat’s cradle of restitution claims. There would be others who wouldn’t want to talk of the past – any part of it. ‘Some things I cannot speak of,’ said a piano expert I met in Western Siberia: ‘We envy countries which provide easy access to what happened to their families, but here it is different. Access to archives isn’t easy. It’s not open source. It’s expensive. My generation belongs to the war children. We lost one or two of our parents, and ever since have been seeking the truth.’ We all do what we can to keep on going, warned another tuner; stories shift to fit our needs. He said there are pianos with the serial number painted on to the soundboard, and then those with a number moulded into the cast-iron frame. You can repaint a soundboard, he said, but you can’t change a number cast in metal.
This was always going to be my biggest challenge – looking for reliable truth. I wasn’t after a fancy piece of furniture to show off in the equivalent of a Mongolian parlour. I couldn’t have cared less, in fact, how a piano looked. I wasn’t here to fiddle with serial numbers, or pursue old pianos painted up in glossy colours. Such an instrument would be ill matched to a musician like Odgerel, who needed pure sound reinforced by a retrievable inner story. Odgerel’s musical perception was so authentic, she could render J. S. Bach’s ‘Chaconne’* with an exceptional depth of feeling. She could communicate the composer’s unquestioning faith in the divine. More than anything, Odgerel understood how struggle can invest the act of musical creation with the conviction of felt experience.
‘Bach tells us about tragedy and pain in a musical language. Whenever I read about the triumph of the Resurrection I cannot feel very much, but when I play “Chaconne”,’ Odgerel told me, ‘the story comes alive. Bach taught me how to breathe.’
Was it the same for Maria Volkonsky? What did a piano mean to her in exile? Did Siberia allow her to live more intensely than she could have ever done in high society back home? Was it empowering in nineteenth-century Russia to be disconnected from the period’s suffocating rules and expectations around her gender
