The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Sophy Roberts

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      The priests’ demeanour was deadly serious. They had twenty minutes, they said, before their absence would be noticed. One of them fiddled with a heavy crucifix around his neck like an awkward teenager. Another straightened his back as if he were being pulled tall by a puppet string. With no ceremony, concert hall or church, they started to sing, led by a wide-chested choir regent. For the next ten, fifteen minutes, they barely paused in their plaintive chants, their naked voices making the hairs stand up on the backs of my arms. Something felt innately right about these people – in their precise commitment to their art, and their passionate belief in a divinity greater than themselves. I felt reassured that in a part of the world associated with fear I was now among Siberians for whom music mattered as much as air.

      *

      I am no musician, but music moves me. Catherine the Great, on the other hand, claimed her musical ear was deaf as a post. ‘[I]t’s just noise to me,’ she wrote wryly to a friend, with one account claiming she was assigned court musicians to tell her when to clap. She possessed enough of an ability, however, to remark on her husband’s even more inferior talents when she complained how Peter, grandson of Peter the Great and heir to the Romanov dynasty, used to scratch on a violin in the imperial boudoir in between playing with toy soldiers. Throughout the five-hour-long orchestral concerts at court each week, her husband would play lead violin, to Catherine’s disgust. There was no creature unhappier than herself, Catherine claimed, with her caustic epistolary wit, except for Peter’s spaniels, which he continually thrashed.

      Catherine’s remarks also have to be taken with a pinch of salt. This brilliant, German-born princess might have professed to lack any natural ability for music, but its advancement under her rule was significant, given the country was lagging behind Western Europe’s state of development when she first arrived in Russia in 1744. In the countryside, the peasantry were drumming their feet to the plucking of the balalaika, a traditional three-stringed guitar. Beyond the Romanov court, folk song dominated. A French traveller who ventured to Tobolsk in the year of Catherine’s coronation described a lamentable state of affairs: music in the most sophisticated Siberian towns rang with the sound of bad violins, which were nothing more than pieces of hollowed wood. The Russian Orthodox Church relied on liturgical chants, with instrumental music banned. In 1762, when Catherine’s inept husband expired in shady circumstances – perhaps by throttling, possibly by poisoning, though the official version of events had his death put down to haemorrhoidal colic – Catherine began to change the Empire for ever by consolidating the country’s territorial reach, as well as Russia’s status as a formidable cultural power.

      Catherine was an avid reader. She bought Diderot’s entire library, followed by Voltaire’s, and she sanctioned Russia’s first private printing presses. Her instinct for art collecting was second to none, and she adored English gardens and Scottish architects. Like the vast art collection she acquired, music was a means to establish power and prestige – above all, to bring Russia closer to Europe. She acquired an affection for opera, and opened a theatre where it could be performed in the Hermitage. This gave birth to a national tradition which later influenced the operatic styles and aesthetics in other European countries, including Italy. Her reign – the longest in Russia’s imperial history – also established the infrastructure for Russia’s piano tradition to root as Catherine tipped the balance in the country’s appropriation of European habits.

      Until Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, and France fell from grace, the Russian aristocracy spoke French over their native tongue. Russian men cut their beards so that they might look more like Europeans. Following the latest French fashions, Russian women donned red-heeled shoes, laced themselves into whalebone corsets, and added the odd beauty spot à la Marie Antoinette. Even diseases were fashionably French, with la grippe, observed Tolstoy in War and Peace, ‘being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite’. Throughout Catherine’s reign, Russia’s aristocracy travelled abroad. They brought back with them a taste for opera, chamber music and the new orchestral arrangements coming out of Paris, Leipzig and Vienna, as well as growing curiosity for the new instrument affectionately referred to as ‘the one with little hammers’.

      Clavichords began to appear in Catherine’s court as her ambassadors engaged foreign teachers and commissioned new musical compositions. The Moscow house belonging to Catherine’s friend Ekaterina Dashkova, a talented harpsichordist, was cluttered with these new keyboard instruments, which was a direct reflection of the Empress’s Enlightenment ideas and approbation of European accomplishments. The German harpsichordist Hermann Raupach not only encouraged private concerts; he also taught keyboard at St Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.

      Year by year, Russia’s musical culture developed. In 1776, Catherine was persuaded to hire the Italian composer Giovanni Païsiello as court conductor – the first musician, she wrote, who could turn her inclement ear. What is less clear is whether it was the conductor’s appearance she found attractive, or his musical talents. Another of her lovers – Grigory Orlov, a dashing, music-loving officer – made a note of it when he watched Catherine wrap a fur coat round the shoulders of this enchantingly handsome, dark-haired Italian while he sat playing the harpsichord.

      Whatever it was in Païsiello that Catherine found so engaging, it was enough to ensure that he stayed in Russia for the next seven years, composing numerous keyboard pieces for women of nobility – preludes, capriccios, rondos, a sonata or two. Catherine hired him to teach fortepiano to her son, the future Tsar Paul I, and his wife, the inquisitive, musically talented Maria Feodorovna. After Païsiello came Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer-conductor and favourite of Catherine’s most influential paramour, Prince Grigory Potemkin – a political genius whose passion for music was as intense as his love-making was renowned. Potemkin was Catherine’s true companion in a revolving door of bed-fellows, whose musical obsession ran so deep he would send his courier to Milan to fetch a piece of sheet music. Potemkin’s most significant English biographer writes how he required his choir to be with him at all times – to perform at breakfast, lunch and supper. They also had to join him in the field of war.