1991 when Boris Yeltsin became the first freely elected leader of Russia in a thousand years. Yeltsin immediately set about dissolving the Soviet Union by granting autonomy to various member states. He also overhauled government subsidies in the move to a free-market economy, inducing a chain reaction of dramatic hyperinflation, industrial collapse, corruption, gangsterism and widespread unemployment. As the masses crashed into poverty, the privatization of Russian industries benefitted a few friends of friends in government, who bought oil and gas companies at knock-off prices. Russia’s famous oligarchy was born at the same time as generations of communist ‘togetherness’ were overthrown.
Whether or not Yeltsin’s time was a good or a bad thing for Russians remains a moot point. For pianos, it was a catastrophe. The musical education system suffered. As a new rich evolved, tuners learned how to make a mint by doing up old instruments and selling them off as a kind of bourgeois status symbol. They painted broken Bechsteins white to suit an oligarch’s mansion, decorated them with gold leaf, and occasionally told tall stories about some kind of noble history to increase the piano’s value in a new and naive market. This was a time when Russia was giddy with opportunity and new ways of doing things. It was also a country demoralized by communism’s failure: many people wanted to believe in a rosier version of the past.
Numerous instruments were left to rot in Siberia, either too big to move from apartments, or ignored in the basements of music schools long after the funding had run out. Often all that is left of a piano’s backstory can be gleaned only from the serial number hidden inside the instrument – stories reaching back through more than two hundred years of Russian history. Yet there are also pianos that have managed to withstand the furtive cold forever trying to creep into their strings. These instruments not only tell the story of Siberia’s colonization by the Russians, but also illustrate how people can endure the most astonishing calamities. That belief in music’s comfort survives in muffled notes from broken hammers, in beautiful harmonies describing unspeakable things that words can’t touch. It survives in pianos that everyday people have done everything to protect.
In the summer of 2015, I encountered Russia’s piano history for the first time. It was something new for me: the mysterious, illogical power of an obsession when I started looking for an instrument in Siberia on behalf of a brilliant Mongolian musician. Part of me had always been intrigued by Siberia – a curiosity which had existed since my childhood, when the white space on my globe stretched further than my imagination was capable of. Like Timbuktu, or Ouagadougou, Siberia resonated in a way I couldn’t quite explain, with my bookcase telling the story of a bibliophile’s relationship with a place I assumed I would never visit. When I finally did, something else took hold – a kind of selfish madness to finish what I had started, while at the same time knowing that in a place as vast as Russia the finish might also never come. I began to make digressions into territory I didn’t expect pianos to ever lead me, travelling further and further from my home in England in pursuit of an instrument I don’t even play. It didn’t matter if causality started to fracture – from A, I had to go to C because of what B had told me – because I had begun to fall for Siberia’s unpredictability, for the serendipitous connections and untold experiences that belong to people who make up one of the greatest storytelling nations in the world. I soon realized that what is missing can sometimes tell you more about a country’s history than what remains. I also learned that Siberia is bigger, more alluring and far more complicated than the archetypes might suggest – much bigger, in fact, than all the assumptions I had made when my plans began to germinate, then proliferate, and I found myself caught up in the momentum of travelling a ravishingly surprising place.
All this because of a friendship which formed back in the summer of 2015 with a young Mongolian woman called Odgerel Sampilnorov. Odgerel and I were both staying with a German friend, Franz-Christoph Giercke, in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley, close to Karakorum, the site of the historic capital of Genghis Khan’s empire, not far from the border with Siberia. The Giercke family spent their summers in a ridgeline of gers – the nomads’ round-shaped wood-and-canvas tents, which were pitched a long way from where the road runs out in the fenceless steppe. Odgerel had formerly worked as a piano teacher to Giercke’s daughter and her Mongolian cousins, using an old instrument he had trucked in from the modern capital, Ulaanbaatar.
‘When we first met, Odgerel was only nineteen years old, but within a few hours of hearing her play, I had an epiphany,’ recalled Giercke. ‘Not only did she have a great feeling for Johann Sebastian Bach and the Germany of the seventeenth century, for Bach’s religious devotion and suffering, but she could evoke emotions and memories going back to my East German childhood in Magdeburg and Leipzig. She could play all the key piano pieces of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She could play them by heart, never needing a written score. Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin. I’d never heard talent like it.’
With Giercke’s help and others’, Odgerel studied for nine years at a conservatory in Perugia in Italy. By the time I met her, her playing was sublime. The old instrument was gone, and she gave recitals on Giercke’s Yamaha baby grand, followed by dinners of roasted goat, each animal cooked from the inside out with a bellyful of hot rocks. Outside the ger’s wooden door was a wide plateau cupped by mountains, the steppe’s velvet folds studded with tombs and ancient standing stones left by successive waves of nomadic people. Yaks and horses, more numerous than people in Mongolia, grazed on the riverbank below. Inside the tent, the gathering included a Sherpa cook, a local shaman nicknamed The Bonesetter, and Tsogt, a Paris-trained opera singer from Inner Mongolia who was also a consummate archer. The baritone’s neck was always crooked from trying to fit into the ger’s low opening to listen to the piano concerts, the music’s deep, poignant conflicts floating up through an opening in the roof fashioned from a spoked wheel of painted wood.
One night, Giercke shook his head with irritation. The piano was a modern Yamaha, and out of sorts. It played with an even temper, but in his opinion, the sound wasn’t up to what it was before. Perhaps the steppe’s dry climate had finally caused it damage. Perhaps Odgerel’s tuner needed to return sooner than planned. Giercke leaned over and whispered in my ear his frustration, ‘We must find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia!’
That evening, he handed me a novel by an American author, Daniel Mason, about a British piano tuner who travelled up the Salween River into a lawless nineteenth-century Burma. The tuner was tasked to fix a rare 1840 grand piano belonging to an enigmatic army surgeon employed by the British War Office. The Erard functioned as a symbol of European nineteenth-century colonization in Asia, with many of the book’s themes recalling Joseph Conrad’s story of Kurtz, the painter, musician and ivory hunter who ‘goes native’ in Heart of Darkness. In Mason’s book, whenever the Erard was played, the music brought peace to the warring tribes. Giercke, who had a little bit of Kurtz to him, liked the idea of living ‘upriver’ with a spectacular piano; he saw no reason for a good piano hunt to be cast as fiction, nor to doubt there being pianos in Siberia in the first place: ‘If you, Sophy, would find a piano and bring it here, our story would be real.’ Giercke was a filmmaker and well travelled in Central Asia. He knew enough about the region’s history to believe that there would be instruments out there. He liked the idea of a piano bringing joy to his adopted country, and Odgerel having an instrument of her own – playing it in the Orkhon Valley in summer, and at her home in Ulaanbaatar in winter.
Through that dusty Mongolian summer, Odgerel and I became friends. We talked about her childhood, how her father was a basketball coach and her mother a gymnast. Odgerel’s family were Buryats, an indigenous group with strong Buddhist and shamanistic roots from close to Lake Baikal. In the thirties, members of her family were persecuted under Stalin, when nomadic pastoralism was replaced with collective herds, their Buddhist religion was suppressed, monasteries closed, their intelligentsia killed, and their homeland – defended in a 1929 rebellion that saw some thirty-five thousand Buryats killed – cut up into smaller territories. Some of Odgerel’s relatives fled to Mongolia.
While Odgerel’s story stayed with me,
