for solace. ‘Truly, there would be reason to go mad if it were not for music,’ said the Russian pianist and composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.
Russia’s relationship with the piano began under Catherine the Great – the eighteenth-century Empress with a collector’s habit for new technologies, from musical instruments to her robotic timepiece made up of three life-size birds: an owl which twists its head, a peacock which fans its tail (you can almost see the breast rising for a breath), and a rooster which crows on every hour.* Catherine was also the inheritor of Peter the Great’s Westernizing legacy when his founding of St Petersburg in 1703 first ‘hack[ed] a window through to Europe’. Sixteen years after Peter’s death came the Empress Elizabeth, another modernizer, who introduced a musical Golden Age with her affection for European opera. Elizabeth’s extravagant spending habits on Italian tenors and French troupes affected the musical tastes of the Russian elite – a trend which continued after 1762 when Catherine became Empress and augmented Elizabeth’s mid-century influence and generous patronage of the arts. European culture thrived in St Petersburg, even if the deeper questions surfacing in Western Europe – in books by, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher whose theories about the pursuit of individual liberty and the natural equality of men inspired a generation of Romantics – had no place in the Russian court.
While revolution brewed in France, Catherine remained entirely deaf to criticism around Russia’s oppressive system of serfdom, which was such a significant source of imperial wealth. Russian men, women and their children born into feudal bondage were not only vassals employed to work the fields but were also trained as singers and dancers to lighten the manorial gloom. As instrumental music developed, serf orchestras became a distinctly Russian phenomenon, with one well-known musical fanatic of Catherine’s time insisting his entire staff address him only in song. Others were sent abroad to study music – a fashion which continued into the nineteenth century. In 1809 when two of these serf musicians were unhappily recalled to Russia from their training in Leipzig, they took their revenge, and murdered their master by cutting him up into pieces in his bedroom. In Leipzig, not only had they heard beautiful music; they had also tasted liberty.
Punishment was Siberia, where unlucky serfs were routinely exiled without trial for far more trivial transgressions, from impudence to taking snuff. When the dissident Aleksandr Radishchev chronicled the horrors of the Russian system of feudal slavery in his 1790 book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, Catherine cranked up her response.* She exiled her most high-profile naysayer to the penal colony of Siberia, which was rapidly expanding its barbaric shape. When Austria, Prussia and Russia began to carve up Poland and what became known as the Western Provinces – a region that roughly included Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus – Siberia received the first trickle of educated Polish rebels.* Presiding over their fate as exiles were Catherine’s governors, one or two of whom took keyboard instruments with them to their postings in the back of beyond.
This was a time when the instrument was still developing, when even the names of keyboard instruments betrayed an identity problem. The German word Klavier sometimes referred to a harpsichord, spinet, virginal or clavichord. The word ‘clavichord’, if correctly used, referred to an instrument which, like the piano, used a percussive hammer action on the strings rather than the pluck of a harpsichord’s plectrum. Sometimes called ‘the poor man’s keyboard’, it was an instrument which could respond to a player’s fingers, their trembling, sympathetic pauses and emotive intent: ‘In short, the clavichord was the first keyed instrument with a soul.’ Confusingly, however, ‘clavichord’ sometimes also referred to the ‘fortepiano’ – the instrument, which translates as ‘loud-soft’, devised by the Italian maker Bartolomeo Cristofori for the Medici family at the turn of the eighteenth century. What made Cristofori’s invention groundbreaking wasn’t just the piano’s relative portability (unlike an organ): its improved dynamics and musical expression created the illusion there was an entire orchestra in the room.
‘Until about 1770 pianos were ambiguous instruments, transitional in construction and uncertain in status,’ observes one of the twentieth century’s foremost historians on the subject. Catherine’s treasured square piano, or piano anglais, is the perfect example of this evolutionary flux. In 1774, at the dawn of the piano’s vogue, the Empress ordered this new-fangled keyboard instrument from England, made by London’s first manufacturer, a German immigrant called Johann Zumpe. It was the instrument du jour, owned by everyone from Catherine’s great friend the French philosopher and lexicographer Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopédie declared keyboard playing a crucial accomplishment in the education of modern women, to English royalty. Within ten years of its invention, versions of this instrument were being made in England, France, Germany and America. According to one contemporary British composer, Zumpe couldn’t make his pianos fast enough to gratify demand.
Catherine’s 1774 piano anglais, its decorative cabinetry as pretty as a Fabergé egg, now stands behind red rope in Pavlovsk, an eighteenth-century Tsarist pleasure palace outside St Petersburg which functioned as one of Russia’s most important centres of musical life. The piano is displayed alongside a Sèvres toilet set gifted to the imperial family by Marie Antoinette. The Zumpe, which would have been a novelty at the time, has a certain sweetness when playing a slow adagio, but there is also an older, courtlier twang and a tinny thud of keys. Only when the technology’s powerful hammer action improved, thicker strings were stretched to higher tensions, and the pedals were finessed to allow for even better control of the ‘loud-soft’ expression, would the piano’s potential expand into the instrument we know today. This next dramatic phase in piano technology, thriving in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, pushed the instrument into concert halls all over Europe as its more robust mechanisms became better able to tolerate the passions of the virtuoso. In 1821, the French factory Erard patented the ‘double escapement’ action, which allowed for much more rapid repetition of a note without releasing the key. This was when the piano also began to migrate more widely – a trend witnessed by James Holman, a blind Englishman who travelled to Siberia in 1823 for no other reason, it would seem, than to furnish himself with a stack of drawing-room anecdotes. He wrote in his account: ‘One lady of my acquaintance had carried with her to the latter place, a favourite piano-forte from St Petersburg at the bottom of her sledge, and this without inflicting the least injury upon it.’
Violent. Cold. Startlingly beautiful. That stately instruments might still exist in such a profoundly enigmatic place as Siberia feels somehow remarkable. It becomes nothing less than a miracle when one learns that not only did Catherine’s 1774 Zumpe survive a twentieth-century wartime sojourn in Russia’s terra incognita, but that other historic pianos are still making music in sleepy Siberian villages. Where wooden houses seem to cosy up together for warmth, there are pianos washed up and abandoned from the high-tide mark of nineteenth-century European romanticism. This was one of the most important periods in the popularization of the piano, when a new breed of virtuoso performer became its most convincing endorsement.
Soon after arriving in Russia in 1802, the Irish pianist John Field – the inventor of the nocturne, a short, dream-like love poem for the piano – could name his price as both a performer and a teacher in the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg. Field sounded the first chord, as it were, in the Russian cult of the piano, but it was the celebrity of the Hungarian Franz Liszt which turned the Russian love of the instrument into a fever in the 1840s.
Women grabbed at strands of Liszt’s iconic bobbed hair to wear close to their chest in lockets. Fans fought over his silk hankies, coffee dregs (which they carried about in phials) and cigarette butts. German girls fashioned bracelets from the piano strings he snapped and turned the cherry stones he spat out into amulets. In Vienna – one of the great capitals of European music – local confectioners sold piano-shaped biscuits iced with his name. When Liszt left Berlin for Russia in the spring of 1842, his coach was drawn by six white horses and followed by a procession of thirty carriages. When he played in St Petersburg in April, the infamous ‘smasher of pianos’ – a reputation derived from the broken instruments Liszt left in his wake – drew the largest
