All this because of a friendship which formed back in the summer of 2015 with a young Mongolian woman called Odgerel Sampilnorov. Odgerel and I were both staying with a German friend, Franz-Christoph Giercke, in Mongolia’s Orkhon Valley, close to Karakorum, the site of the historic capital of Genghis Khan’s empire, not far from the border with Siberia. The Giercke family spent their summers in a ridgeline of gers – the nomads’ round-shaped wood-and-canvas tents, which were pitched a long way from where the road runs out in the fenceless steppe. Odgerel had formerly worked as a piano teacher to Giercke’s daughter and her Mongolian cousins, using an old instrument he had trucked in from the modern capital, Ulaanbaatar.
‘When we first met, Odgerel was only nineteen years old, but within a few hours of hearing her play, I had an epiphany,’ recalled Giercke. ‘Not only did she have a great feeling for Johann Sebastian Bach and the Germany of the seventeenth century, for Bach’s religious devotion and suffering, but she could evoke emotions and memories going back to my East German childhood in Magdeburg and Leipzig. She could play all the key piano pieces of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She could play them by heart, never needing a written score. Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin. I’d never heard talent like it.’
With Giercke’s help and others’, Odgerel studied for nine years at a conservatory in Perugia in Italy. By the time I met her, her playing was sublime. The old instrument was gone, and she gave recitals on Giercke’s Yamaha baby grand, followed by dinners of roasted goat, each animal cooked from the inside out with a bellyful of hot rocks. Outside the ger’s wooden door was a wide plateau cupped by mountains, the steppe’s velvet folds studded with tombs and ancient standing stones left by successive waves of nomadic people. Yaks and horses, more numerous than people in Mongolia, grazed on the riverbank below. Inside the tent, the gathering included a Sherpa cook, a local shaman nicknamed The Bonesetter, and Tsogt, a Paris-trained opera singer from Inner Mongolia who was also a consummate archer. The baritone’s neck was always crooked from trying to fit into the ger’s low opening to listen to the piano concerts, the music’s deep, poignant conflicts floating up through an opening in the roof fashioned from a spoked wheel of painted wood.
One night, Giercke shook his head with irritation. The piano was a modern Yamaha, and out of sorts. It played with an even temper, but in his opinion, the sound wasn’t up to what it was before. Perhaps the steppe’s dry climate had finally caused it damage. Perhaps Odgerel’s tuner needed to return sooner than planned. Giercke leaned over and whispered in my ear his frustration, ‘We must find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia!’
That evening, he handed me a novel by an American author, Daniel Mason, about a British piano tuner who travelled up the Salween River into a lawless nineteenth-century Burma. The tuner was tasked to fix a rare 1840 grand piano belonging to an enigmatic army surgeon employed by the British War Office. The Erard functioned as a symbol of European nineteenth-century colonization in Asia, with many of the book’s themes recalling Joseph Conrad’s story of Kurtz, the painter, musician and ivory hunter who ‘goes native’ in Heart of Darkness. In Mason’s book, whenever the Erard was played, the music brought peace to the warring tribes. Giercke, who had a little bit of Kurtz to him, liked the idea of living ‘upriver’ with a spectacular piano; he saw no reason for a good piano hunt to be cast as fiction, nor to doubt there being pianos in Siberia in the first place: ‘If you, Sophy, would find a piano and bring it here, our story would be real.’ Giercke was a filmmaker and well travelled in Central Asia. He knew enough about the region’s history to believe that there would be instruments out there. He liked the idea of a piano bringing joy to his adopted country, and Odgerel having an instrument of her own – playing it in the Orkhon Valley in summer, and at her home in Ulaanbaatar in winter.
Through that dusty Mongolian summer, Odgerel and I became friends. We talked about her childhood, how her father was a basketball coach and her mother a gymnast. Odgerel’s family were Buryats, an indigenous group with strong Buddhist and shamanistic roots from close to Lake Baikal. In the thirties, members of her family were persecuted under Stalin, when nomadic pastoralism was replaced with collective herds, their Buddhist religion was suppressed, monasteries closed, their intelligentsia killed, and their homeland – defended in a 1929 rebellion that saw some thirty-five thousand Buryats killed – cut up into smaller territories. Some of Odgerel’s relatives fled to Mongolia.
While Odgerel’s story stayed with me, it was her music which moved me. The more I listened to her play, the more I wondered how an historic piano would sound different in the steppe – an instrument which still resonated with the gentler timbre of the nineteenth century: the moody nocturnes of John Field, the sparkling elegance of Chopin’s Ballades, the earthy texture of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Russian Rustic Scene’.* You don’t need a thundering concert piano in a space as intimate as a Mongolian ger. An interesting European instrument with a mellow voice would duet well with the plaintive morin khuur, the Mongolian horsehead fiddle. The combination was something Odgerel was also beginning to champion as a unique Eurasian style.
Odgerel Sampilnorov’s family. Her Buryat ancestors, originally from near Lake Baikal in Siberia, are pictured in the first image.
We talked a little about the difficulties that might lie ahead, and our mixed motivations. If I were to go and look in Siberia, I would need to understand the story of pianos in Russian culture and how and why these instruments had travelled east in the first place. I love nothing more than listening to people talk, whether in the pages of books, or across a table sharing a meal. Odgerel loves music; she wanted a piano with good sound. Giercke loves all of these things too, but above all, the spirit of adventure. Offering to help pay for the endeavour, he said that only in trying to take on something difficult would something interesting ever happen.
‘We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn’t do it, we would have a story, too, the story of not being able to do it.’ This is how John Steinbeck described his trip to the USSR in the aftermath of the Second World War with the photographer Robert Capa. Steinbeck’s approach appealed to me. So did Anton Chekhov’s, who declared his intention to travel across Siberia in a letter to his publisher in 1890: ‘Even assuming my excursion is an utter triviality, a piece of obstinacy and caprice, yet just you consider and then tell me what I’m losing by going. Time? Money? Will I undergo hardships? My time costs nothing. I never have any money anyway.’ In a fug of piano music, Mongolian vodka and late nights talking under a starry sky, a trip to Siberia sounded almost implausibly exciting. Then summer turned to autumn, and back