I would find many more secrets like this, said a local musicologist: Siberia’s pianos were full of hidden treasures, like the grand piano her teacher used to own. Inside its workings, the woman had concealed all her jewellery. The piano was her teacher’s family safe. But she warned me I would also need to keep my wits about me, because there were all sorts of complications with proving provenance in Russia. I knew there would also be stories people wouldn’t want told. There was a risk that my research might reveal the original, rightful owner of an instrument, which could open up a cat’s cradle of restitution claims. There would be others who wouldn’t want to talk of the past – any part of it. ‘Some things I cannot speak of,’ said a piano expert I met in Western Siberia: ‘We envy countries which provide easy access to what happened to their families, but here it is different. Access to archives isn’t easy. It’s not open source. It’s expensive. My generation belongs to the war children. We lost one or two of our parents, and ever since have been seeking the truth.’ We all do what we can to keep on going, warned another tuner; stories shift to fit our needs. He said there are pianos with the serial number painted on to the soundboard, and then those with a number moulded into the cast-iron frame. You can repaint a soundboard, he said, but you can’t change a number cast in metal.
This was always going to be my biggest challenge – looking for reliable truth. I wasn’t after a fancy piece of furniture to show off in the equivalent of a Mongolian parlour. I couldn’t have cared less, in fact, how a piano looked. I wasn’t here to fiddle with serial numbers, or pursue old pianos painted up in glossy colours. Such an instrument would be ill matched to a musician like Odgerel, who needed pure sound reinforced by a retrievable inner story. Odgerel’s musical perception was so authentic, she could render J. S. Bach’s ‘Chaconne’* with an exceptional depth of feeling. She could communicate the composer’s unquestioning faith in the divine. More than anything, Odgerel understood how struggle can invest the act of musical creation with the conviction of felt experience.
‘Bach tells us about tragedy and pain in a musical language. Whenever I read about the triumph of the Resurrection I cannot feel very much, but when I play “Chaconne”,’ Odgerel told me, ‘the story comes alive. Bach taught me how to breathe.’
Was it the same for Maria Volkonsky? What did a piano mean to her in exile? Did Siberia allow her to live more intensely than she could have ever done in high society back home? Was it empowering in nineteenth-century Russia to be disconnected from the period’s suffocating rules and expectations around her gender and class? Because despite the privations of their exile, the Decembrists didn’t view Siberia as a place only of katorga. ‘The further we moved into Siberia, the more it improved in my sight,’ observed the Decembrist Nikolai Basargin: ‘To me, the common folk seemed freer, brighter, even better educated than our Russian peasantry – especially more so than our estate serfs. They better understood the dignity of man, and valued their rights more highly.’ Siberia, you see, never had a history of serfdom. There were the exiles who came as prisoners of the state, but there were also many, many more migrants who ventured into Siberia for the taste of freedom – to live far from the reach of the Tsar and the moral reprimands of the Russian Orthodox Church.
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* Fought from 1979 to 1989 in support of the Afghan communist government.
* Among the exceptions was Nikolai Turgenev (uncle to the novelist Ivan Turgenev), who was out of the country on the day of revolt, and never returned to face the Tsar’s ire.
* The phrase was Pushkin’s. He reportedly fell in love with Maria when she was barely out of her childhood during a holiday he took with her family in Crimea.
* The Volkonsky love story wasn’t perfect. Various historians suggest Maria’s two children were the progeny of her long affair with Sergei’s friend and fellow Decembrist the charismatic Alessandro Poggio, who ran the prisoners’ vegetable garden with Maria’s husband.
* Given its grand provenance, the Lichtenthal was sent from Irkutsk to St Petersburg for a major restoration in the nineties. The then museum director organized delivery of the instrument by military plane to a restorer called Yuri Borisov – a man I went to meet, dubbed ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, trained by one of the original pre-Revolution masters from the Becker factory.
* J. S. Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ was the final movement of his Partita No. 2 in D Minor, and was written for violin. Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni transcribed Bach’s music for the piano between 1891 and 1892.
Pianos in a Sandy Venice: Kiakhta
IN 1856, WHEN MARIA VOLKONSKY made her last visit to Lake Baikal, she described watching the forest animals coming in to drink as if Siberia were a Garden of Eden rather than her prison for the last thirty years. She was leaving Siberia. The new Tsar, Alexander II, had granted amnesty to the twenty-odd surviving Decembrist rebels. Some of the men had already committed suicide before the amnesty came through. Others had lost their wits. One or two were trying to make their living through teaching, farming watermelons, making opticals, or even drawing butterflies for German museums. Among those who stayed on voluntarily after the amnesty was Mikhail Küchelbecker, who was shackled to Siberia by an unfulfilled love affair with a local girl. His headstone stands on the eastern shoreline of Lake Baikal.
I spent almost three weeks poking around the lake, making three different visits. But however hard I wished it, Baikal’s seductive lures – the winter ice, the summer sward crackling with crickets, the red-barked cedar trees arcing out from cliffs – didn’t deliver on the piano discoveries I needed. The settlements were too thin. There was more for me in Kiakhta, the old tea traders’ town on the Mongolia–Russia border depicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as if it were one of the most important centres of nineteenth-century world trade. In Kiakhta, I had been told about a rare Bechstein grand piano.
My tipster was the Mongolian opera singer, Tsogt, who used to stand at the door of the tent in the Orkhon Valley trying to fit into the narrow opening to listen to Odgerel play. He was a Buddhist and a Buryat whose ancestors, like Odgerel’s, had fled the Lake Baikal region in the thirties. His family ended up in Inner Mongolia, which is a part of China. He had trained in music in Beijing. He had also lived for a while in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, one of the Russian Federation’s autonomous republics, and a half-day’s drive from Baikal’s eastern shore. A bear of a man, Tsogt wore leather boots designed with upturned toes so as to tread softly on the snow, and a traditional Mongolian felted del robe, belted below the waist, which made his belly look like a beer casket. We had travelled together across western Mongolia in 2001. Over the years, I had grown fond of Tsogt. I liked watching his tough front fall away in the presence of Bach. So I hired him early on to help look for pianos.
For a while, I heard nothing. Then I received a short and intriguing email: ‘I’m back from Siberia. I find only one grand piano. C. Bechstein – Serial number 7050. Year is 1874. From very little place. No other people has old piano.’
Given