Punishment was Siberia, where unlucky serfs were routinely exiled without trial for far more trivial transgressions, from impudence to taking snuff. When the dissident Aleksandr Radishchev chronicled the horrors of the Russian system of feudal slavery in his 1790 book, A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, Catherine cranked up her response.* She exiled her most high-profile naysayer to the penal colony of Siberia, which was rapidly expanding its barbaric shape. When Austria, Prussia and Russia began to carve up Poland and what became known as the Western Provinces – a region that roughly included Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus – Siberia received the first trickle of educated Polish rebels.* Presiding over their fate as exiles were Catherine’s governors, one or two of whom took keyboard instruments with them to their postings in the back of beyond.
This was a time when the instrument was still developing, when even the names of keyboard instruments betrayed an identity problem. The German word Klavier sometimes referred to a harpsichord, spinet, virginal or clavichord. The word ‘clavichord’, if correctly used, referred to an instrument which, like the piano, used a percussive hammer action on the strings rather than the pluck of a harpsichord’s plectrum. Sometimes called ‘the poor man’s keyboard’, it was an instrument which could respond to a player’s fingers, their trembling, sympathetic pauses and emotive intent: ‘In short, the clavichord was the first keyed instrument with a soul.’ Confusingly, however, ‘clavichord’ sometimes also referred to the ‘fortepiano’ – the instrument, which translates as ‘loud-soft’, devised by the Italian maker Bartolomeo Cristofori for the Medici family at the turn of the eighteenth century. What made Cristofori’s invention groundbreaking wasn’t just the piano’s relative portability (unlike an organ): its improved dynamics and musical expression created the illusion there was an entire orchestra in the room.
‘Until about 1770 pianos were ambiguous instruments, transitional in construction and uncertain in status,’ observes one of the twentieth century’s foremost historians on the subject. Catherine’s treasured square piano, or piano anglais, is the perfect example of this evolutionary flux. In 1774, at the dawn of the piano’s vogue, the Empress ordered this new-fangled keyboard instrument from England, made by London’s first manufacturer, a German immigrant called Johann Zumpe. It was the instrument du jour, owned by everyone from Catherine’s great friend the French philosopher and lexicographer Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopédie declared keyboard playing a crucial accomplishment in the education of modern women, to English royalty. Within ten years of its invention, versions of this instrument were being made in England, France, Germany and America. According to one contemporary British composer, Zumpe couldn’t make his pianos fast enough to gratify demand.
Catherine’s 1774 piano anglais, its decorative cabinetry as pretty as a Fabergé egg, now stands behind red rope in Pavlovsk, an eighteenth-century Tsarist pleasure palace outside St Petersburg which functioned as one of Russia’s most important centres of musical life. The piano is displayed alongside a Sèvres toilet set gifted to the imperial family by Marie Antoinette. The Zumpe, which would have been a novelty at the time, has a certain sweetness when playing a slow adagio, but there is also an older, courtlier twang and a tinny thud of keys. Only when the technology’s powerful hammer action improved, thicker strings were stretched to higher tensions, and the pedals were finessed to allow for even better control of the ‘loud-soft’ expression, would the piano’s potential expand into the instrument we know today. This next dramatic phase in piano technology, thriving in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, pushed the instrument into concert halls all over Europe as its more robust mechanisms became better able to tolerate the passions of the virtuoso. In 1821, the French factory Erard patented the ‘double escapement’ action, which allowed for much more rapid repetition of a note without releasing the key. This was when the piano also began to migrate more widely – a trend witnessed by James Holman, a blind Englishman who travelled to Siberia in 1823 for no other reason, it would seem, than to furnish himself with a stack of drawing-room anecdotes. He wrote in his account: ‘One lady of my acquaintance had carried with her to the latter place, a favourite piano-forte from St Petersburg at the bottom of her sledge, and this without inflicting the least injury upon it.’
Violent. Cold. Startlingly beautiful. That stately instruments might still exist in such a profoundly enigmatic place as Siberia feels somehow remarkable. It becomes nothing less than a miracle when one learns that not only did Catherine’s 1774 Zumpe survive a twentieth-century wartime sojourn in Russia’s terra incognita, but that other historic pianos are still making music in sleepy Siberian villages. Where wooden houses seem to cosy up together for warmth, there are pianos washed up and abandoned from the high-tide mark of nineteenth-century European romanticism. This was one of the most important periods in the popularization of the piano, when a new breed of virtuoso performer became its most convincing endorsement.
Soon after arriving in Russia in 1802, the Irish pianist John Field – the inventor of the nocturne, a short, dream-like love poem for the piano – could name his price as both a performer and a teacher in the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg. Field sounded the first chord, as it were, in the Russian cult of the piano, but it was the celebrity of the Hungarian Franz Liszt which turned the Russian love of the instrument into a fever in the 1840s.
Women grabbed at strands of Liszt’s iconic bobbed hair to wear close to their chest in lockets. Fans fought over his silk hankies, coffee dregs (which they carried about in phials) and cigarette butts. German girls fashioned bracelets from the piano strings he snapped and turned the cherry stones he spat out into amulets. In Vienna – one of the great capitals of European music – local confectioners sold piano-shaped biscuits iced with his name. When Liszt left Berlin for Russia in the spring of 1842, his coach was drawn by six white horses and followed by a procession of thirty carriages. When he played in St Petersburg in April, the infamous ‘smasher of pianos’ – a reputation derived from the broken instruments Liszt left in his wake – drew the largest audience St Petersburg had ever seen for such an event.
An 1842 drawing of Liszt playing to a frenzied Berlin crowd, the scene not unlike a modern rock concert.
Liszt leapt on to the stage rather than walked up the steps. Throwing his white kid gloves on to the floor, he bowed low to an audience who lurched from complete silence to thunderous applause, the hall rocking with adulation as he played on one piano, then another facing the opposite direction. At a performance for the Tsarina in Prussia two years earlier, Liszt had broken string after string in his tortured piano. In St Petersburg, his recital was somewhat more successful – a spectacular display of the instrument’s range, jamming rippling notes into music packed with an intense and violent beauty. When John Field heard Liszt perform, he apparently leaned over to his companion, and asked, ‘Does he bite?’ Liszt was considered ‘the past, the present, the future of the piano’, wrote one contemporary; his solo recital to a throng of three thousand Russians ‘something unheard of, utterly novel, even somewhat brazen . . . this idea of having a small stage erected in the very centre of the hall like an islet in the middle of an ocean, a throne high above the heads of the crowd’, wrote another witness to this groundbreaking event. Liszt’s talent was capable of instigating a kind of musical madness, according to Vladimir Stasov, the Russian critic present at Liszt’s St Petersburg debut. Stasov went with his friend Aleksandr Serov to hear him play:
We exchanged only a few words and then rushed home to write each other as quickly as possible of our impressions, our dreams, our ecstasy . . . Then and there, we took a vow that thenceforth and forever, that day, 8th April, 1842, would be sacred to us, and we would never forget a single second of it till our dying day . . . We had never in our lives heard anything like this; we had never been in the presence of such a brilliant,