I found a book by an American music historian,* which dug deep into the archives of Russian piano-making. Her description of the industry’s proliferation and the distribution of the instruments further east was one of the reasons I took confidence early on that my ‘fieldwork’ looking for pianos in Siberia might glean results. By 1810, six Western entrepreneurs had set up piano workshops in Russia, including a St Petersburg factory founded by the Bavarian-born maker Jacob Becker. This single workshop built more than eleven thousand pianos before the century was out. Orders for instruments came thick and fast, including from Siberia, where pianos had already penetrated in the first half of the century. East of the Urals, music teachers were paid two to three times the amount they earned in Western Russia. In these new towns of the expanding Empire, the piano played an even more important social role than it did in a Moscow drawing room. A piano was a ‘highly respectableising piece of furniture’, observed a British musicologist of the nineteenth century, to affirm one’s European education.
In the 1870s, the Imperial Russian Musical Society opened branches in the Western Siberian cities of Omsk, Tomsk and Tobolsk, with the intention of educating both audiences and musicians. Bookstores selling popular sheet music began to pop up. Piano shops also opened, to ease the distribution of instruments further east. As the century progressed, only a few foreign-made Broadwoods and the odd German Blüthner made it through Russia’s protective trade barriers. This gave the likes of Becker with his home-grown pianos a clear run to dominate the ever-growing domestic market.
And then the wheel of fate turned. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Becker factory became state property, and was renamed Red October. For a while, the USSR’s system of musical education, which spread deep into the provinces, kept up demand for inexpensive Soviet-made instruments. Tens of thousands of uprights were distributed into small towns, with piano factories even opening in Siberia, in Tyumen and Vladivostok. But after perestroika, the old art of piano-making fell away. By the turn of the millennium, the industry had almost died completely. The Red October factory closed in 2004. A piano maker in Kazan turned to coffin-making before going bust. In the same month I saw the Amur tiger, it was reported that the last of Russia’s piano factories had closed.
So great was the tragedy, there were now men of influence trying to reverse the trend. When I first latched on to this story, the Irkutsk-born classical pianist Denis Matsuev – among the great virtuosos of the twenty-first century – was campaigning to bring back the lost art of Russian piano-making. When we later met in Moscow, he talked about the high level of musical education among Russians, and how he still owned his family’s first Soviet piano: a Tyumen upright, made in one of the main towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The network of music schools had birthed extraordinary careers throughout the history of the Soviet Union, in addition to engendering a unique culture of appreciation. The Russian audience is completely different from the Carnegie Hall audience in New York, Matsuev explained. But Siberians trump them both: ‘They understand everything. They are my number one audience,’ he said, describing the perfectly attentive ‘suspicious silences’ he experienced east of the Urals. I would understand soon enough, he said, when I had spent more time in Siberia.
But would I? Part of me was anxious that I can only respond to music in the way I did to the singing priests – the feeling of not knowing what is happening, or why it even matters, except that it does in the moment it is experienced. Unlike so many Russians who benefitted from the Soviet education system, I have no formal musical knowledge. By putting instinct over intellect, and trust before prejudice, there was of course a risk some scoundrel would undo me, and that I would end up with an expensive box of strings no better than the thudding upright Giercke had first bought. But on the other hand, Tobolsk’s singing priests had given me confidence. They had persuaded me to pause for a moment, to believe in people who make all the time in the world to help a stranger who turns up unannounced. They had also held a mirror to my own shortcomings. Time has a life of its own in Siberia. It has a depth and dimension which makes you feel that days shouldn’t be hurried – the opposite of how our time is construed in the West. So when the priest I had befriended suggested I should stay a while longer before I caught the last train out, I wanted to more than anything. But such is the trouble with Siberia. The map is always goading you with how much more territory there is still left to cover.
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* Russian America existed from 1733 to 1867, when the territory was sold to the United States for a paltry US$7.2 million.
* A book I kept close at hand for three years: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014).
IN THE RUSSIAN STATE NAVAL ARCHIVES in St Petersburg, there is a revealing set of customs papers documenting the travails of a little clavichord – the earliest known record of such an instrument making it across Siberia. It belonged to a socially ambitious naval wife called Anna Bering who, in the 1730s, took this precious instrument from St Petersburg to the Sea of Okhotsk, and then travelled another six thousand miles home again on a magnificent transcontinental journey of exploration using only sleighs, boats and horses. Anna was married to Vitus Bering, a Danish-born sea captain in the service of Peter the Great. Known as the ‘Russian Columbus’, Bering’s job was to establish a postal route across Siberia, build ships on Russia’s Pacific coast, and then penetrate the American Northwest. Anna, along with her clavichord, accompanied him.
If the scale of Siberia is dumbfounding, it is even more so when the map is traced with instruments like Anna’s, which wove their way across the Empire before reasonable means of travel existed. They journeyed along Siberia’s expanding trade routes, usually setting off in the dead of winter when the ground was good for sledges, rather than in summer, when Siberia turned into a mire of mud covered with mosquitoes. Siberia’s rivers were another hindrance for travellers: instead of winding across the Empire from west to east, or vice versa, all the big waterways flowed south to north before emptying into a frozen Arctic Ocean.
Overland travel became easier when the Great Siberian Trakt opened during the reign of Catherine the Great. This was the main post road that ran from the brink of Siberia in the Ural Mountains to the city of Irkutsk, located close to Lake Baikal. The journey was infamous – a bumpy highway covered with slack beams of wood. The discomfort of traversing the road’s length by sledge recalled the sensation of a finger being dragged across all the keys of a piano, even the black notes, remarked a nineteenth-century Russian prince, who served as an officer in Siberia. ‘It is heavy going, very heavy,’ observed Anton Chekhov in 1890, ‘but it grows still heavier when you consider that this hideous, pock-marked strip of land, this foul smallpox of a road, is almost the sole artery linking Europe and Siberia! And we are told that along an artery like this civilisation is flowing into Siberia!’
Various methods available for travelling on ice in Siberia, according to the Jesuit explorer Father Philippe Avril in his 1692 work, Voyage en divers états d’Europe et d’Asie.
Chekhov had considered himself well prepared for his journey from Moscow through Siberia to reach the Tsarist penal colony of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Pacific, where he wrote an important piece of journalism about the brutality of the exile system. His mistake was the choice of season. Chekhov undertook his Siberian travels in spring – during rasputitsa, an evocative Russian word, as sticky as clods of earth, used to describe the muddy conditions that come with the thaw. He used a tarantass, a horse-drawn carriage with a half-hood, no springs, and wheels that could be interchanged for runners for the ice. Chekhov packed