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