Liszt’s Russian tour had a significant effect on the country’s shifting musical culture – not least the validation Liszt gave to Russia’s nascent piano industry when he played on a St Petersburg-made Lichtenthal in an important musical year. In 1842, Mikhail Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila – considered the first true ‘Russian’ opera for its native character and melody – premiered in St Petersburg. Liszt, who developed a keen affection for Russian folk music, thought the opera marvellous.
While Glinka’s opera was influential, it was still the piano and the splendid character of the virtuoso which enthralled the aristocracy, with instruments being snapped up in Russia now they were no longer a technical rarity. ‘You will find a piano, or some kind of box with a keyboard, everywhere,’ observed one mid-century Russian journal writer: ‘If there are one hundred apartments in a St Petersburg building, then you can count on ninety-three instruments and a piano-tuner.’ It was the same story all over Europe. That same year, the London piano maker Broadwood & Sons was one of the city’s twelve largest employers of labour. Grand Tourists – upper-class men on a coming-of-age culture trip through Europe – couldn’t live away from home without a piano. According to a well-thumbed guidebook, How to Enjoy Paris in 1842, most English families who came to the city for any length of time would want to hire or buy a piano. In Britain alone, the five-year period from 1842 saw sixteen patents issued for new piano technology.
With every development in the instrument’s functionality, the piano’s increasingly expressive capacity was greeted with a flurry of composition. With an emerging merchant class hungry for new luxuries, state subsidies were encouraging a home-grown industry. Russian piano-making was thriving, an early Russian-made salon grand piano costing not much more than a couple of rows of seats at Liszt’s 1842 performance in St Petersburg.
A Russian family pictured with their piano in the 1840s, when the piano became an important symbol of prestige.
As the century progressed, piano technology kept improving, with iron (as opposed to wooden) frames, new ways of stringing, and the development of the upright piano – described by one historian as ‘a remarkable bundle of inventions’, its size and portability well suited to the homes of the swelling middle classes. In 1859, Henry Steinway, a German piano maker who emigrated to New York, patented the first over-strung grand piano, which gave concert instruments greater volume. A richly textured musical establishment evolved not just with piano-playing in Russia but across all sorts of musical genres and institutions – in opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, conservatories and amateur musical societies. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s contribution to classical composition was riding high. Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had joined Europe’s first rank. Lumin aries among Russian piano-players included Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. A Russian national style had fully developed, which was influencing (and even eclipsing) the rest of the Western world. Russia was winning accolades for its instrument-makers at the World Fairs.
St Petersburg-made Becker pianos on show at the Paris World Fair of 1878, with the Shah of Persia listening in to the demonstration. In 1900, the Fair’s Russian pavilion caused another sensation, with an advert for the new Trans-Siberian Railway. A painted panorama, scrolled past the windows of the display carriage, compressed the five-and-a-half-thousand-mile-long trans-Siberian journey into a famously pretty sales pitch. The reality, remarked some travellers, did not always prove quite so picturesque.
Then the chaos of the 1917 Revolution ruptured the country’s cultural patrimony. A number of high-profile musicians fled for Germany, France and America. As the Tsarist regime fell apart, Gobelin tapestries, even Van Dyck paintings, were scooped up by departing gentry and opportunistic foreigners in a hurry to leave town with whatever treasures they could salvage. Precious violins were sneaked out under greatcoats, and pianos were tied on top of trains fleeing Russia through Siberia into Manchuria and beyond.
In 1919, one of St Petersburg’s music critics sold his grand piano for a few loaves of bread. ‘Loot shops’ opened up in St Petersburg and Moscow to deal in objets d’art stolen from the rich. During the Russian Civil War, which lasted until 1922, manor houses were raided or burnt. In the aftermath, half-surviving instruments were reconstructed. Pianos were built with jumbled parts, such as a Bechstein keyboard on Pleyel legs.
Two decades later, during the Great Patriotic War, the country’s most significant national treasures were sent to Siberia for safekeeping, including state-owned instruments from Leningrad and Moscow, the country’s best ballerinas and Lenin’s embalmed corpse. Not long after, pianos taken from the USSR’s Western Front,* from the likes of Saxony and Prussia, ended up travelling eastwards with the country’s Red Army soldiers to adorn many a Siberian hearth. As the Nazis advanced, Russians fled their own cities on the European side of the Urals, the trauma of war driving civilians deeper into Siberia, sometimes with an instrument. Other pianos were lost to the German advance or chopped up into firewood. One piano, today in the hands of a well-known musician, was pushed up on its side to black out windows during the Siege of Leningrad when the Nazis starved the city in one of the darkest civilian catastrophes of a horrifyingly bloody century.
Meanwhile, the old expertise in Russian piano-making was changing with the politics. ‘Art belongs to the people,’ Lenin said in 1920: ‘It must have its deepest roots in the broad mass of workers. It must be understood and loved by them. It must be rooted in and grow with their feelings, thoughts and desires.’ The Soviet government encouraged the production of thousands of instruments, which were distributed through the USSR’s newly formed network of music schools. Piano factories opened in Siberia. Piano rental schemes were introduced for private citizens, with a buoyant market for uprights able to fit into snug Soviet apartments.
This dynamic musical culture, its provincial and social reach far exceeding the equivalent education systems in the West, fell away after 1991 when Boris Yeltsin became the first freely elected leader of Russia in a thousand years. Yeltsin immediately set about dissolving the Soviet Union by granting autonomy to various member states. He also overhauled government subsidies in the move to a free-market economy, inducing a chain reaction of dramatic hyperinflation, industrial collapse, corruption, gangsterism and widespread unemployment. As the masses crashed into poverty, the privatization of Russian industries benefitted a few friends of friends in government, who bought oil and gas companies at knock-off prices. Russia’s famous oligarchy was born at the same time as generations of communist ‘togetherness’ were overthrown.
Whether or not Yeltsin’s time was a good or a bad thing for Russians remains a moot point. For pianos, it was a catastrophe. The musical education system suffered. As a new rich evolved, tuners learned how to make a mint by doing up old instruments and selling them off as a kind of bourgeois status symbol. They painted broken Bechsteins white to suit an oligarch’s mansion, decorated them with gold leaf, and occasionally told tall stories about some kind of noble history to increase the piano’s value in a new and naive market. This was a time when Russia was giddy with opportunity and new ways of doing things. It was also a country demoralized by communism’s failure: many people wanted to believe in a rosier version of the past.
Numerous instruments were left to rot in Siberia, either too big to move from apartments, or ignored in the basements of music schools long after the funding had run out. Often all that is left of a piano’s backstory can be gleaned only from the serial number hidden inside the instrument – stories reaching back through more than two hundred years of Russian history. Yet there are also pianos that have managed to withstand the furtive cold forever trying to creep into their strings. These instruments not only tell the story of Siberia’s colonization by the Russians, but also illustrate how people can endure the most astonishing calamities. That belief in music’s comfort survives in muffled notes from broken hammers, in beautiful harmonies describing unspeakable things that words can’t touch. It survives in pianos that everyday people have done everything to protect.
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