Clavichords began to appear in Catherine’s court as her ambassadors engaged foreign teachers and commissioned new musical compositions. The Moscow house belonging to Catherine’s friend Ekaterina Dashkova, a talented harpsichordist, was cluttered with these new keyboard instruments, which was a direct reflection of the Empress’s Enlightenment ideas and approbation of European accomplishments. The German harpsichordist Hermann Raupach not only encouraged private concerts; he also taught keyboard at St Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.
Year by year, Russia’s musical culture developed. In 1776, Catherine was persuaded to hire the Italian composer Giovanni Païsiello as court conductor – the first musician, she wrote, who could turn her inclement ear. What is less clear is whether it was the conductor’s appearance she found attractive, or his musical talents. Another of her lovers – Grigory Orlov, a dashing, music-loving officer – made a note of it when he watched Catherine wrap a fur coat round the shoulders of this enchantingly handsome, dark-haired Italian while he sat playing the harpsichord.
Whatever it was in Païsiello that Catherine found so engaging, it was enough to ensure that he stayed in Russia for the next seven years, composing numerous keyboard pieces for women of nobility – preludes, capriccios, rondos, a sonata or two. Catherine hired him to teach fortepiano to her son, the future Tsar Paul I, and his wife, the inquisitive, musically talented Maria Feodorovna. After Païsiello came Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer-conductor and favourite of Catherine’s most influential paramour, Prince Grigory Potemkin – a political genius whose passion for music was as intense as his love-making was renowned. Potemkin was Catherine’s true companion in a revolving door of bed-fellows, whose musical obsession ran so deep he would send his courier to Milan to fetch a piece of sheet music. Potemkin’s most significant English biographer writes how he required his choir to be with him at all times – to perform at breakfast, lunch and supper. They also had to join him in the field of war.
Catherine the Great listening to a performance by Giovanni Païsiello. During his seven-year tenure in Russia, Païsiello composed extensively, and gave piano lessons. This drawing was made by Edoardo Matania in 1881.
With Potemkin by her side, Catherine began to turn into a powerful benefactor of the musical arts. Other noble ladies took lessons at the educational institutions in St Petersburg that Catherine patronized. Foreign teachers serviced an eager market. In September 1791, the music-obsessed Russian envoy to Vienna urged Potemkin to employ a willing Mozart. Unfortunately for Russia, by the end of the year both Potemkin and Mozart were dead.
Mozart had gone to his grave in Vienna struggling to pay his medical bills, unable even to afford firewood. Russia, meanwhile, had been paying its lead musicians so well that Potemkin’s favourite composer was given a village in Ukraine. At the same time, in St Petersburg’s glamorous musical circles, profound changes were underway with the rising influence of Catherine’s daughter-in-law, Maria Feodorovna, whose support of performers and musical education made her a spectacular catalyst for the country’s nascent piano-making industry. Ten years before Potemkin was mulling over the Mozart hiring, Maria Feodorovna had made a trip to Vienna – the city of Haydn and Beethoven, or ‘clavierland’ as Mozart called it – where she had attended the piano duel of the century: Muzio Clementi versus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The event, attended by the great and the good, pitted the two musicians against each other in a kind of eighteenth-century boxing ring.
For Mozart, the encounter was worth no more than a passing comment. ‘[Clementi’s] greatest strength is his passage in thirds, but he has not an atom of feeling or taste – in short, he is a mere machine,’ Mozart remarked in a letter to his father. For Clementi, the event presented a new opportunity; he was quick to hobnob with the Russian ambassador in order to exert his influence in Russian society.
Clementi 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