The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts

Author:Sophy Roberts [Roberts, Sophy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473543492
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, which officially opened on 12 May 1945, carried another layer of heroic significance: it was where the Soviet Union’s cultural treasures – including musical instruments – were evacuated for safekeeping during the Nazi onslaught. It was used as the main storehouse for some of the greatest works of art in Russia’s possession, delivered from both Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery and Leningrad’s Pavlovsk Palace and State Hermitage Museum.

Packing was done in a hurry.20 Some three thousand pieces were sent from the Tretyakov, including the string instruments that had been gathered with such enthusiasm after the October Revolution. The largest canvases were transferred on to rolls – including Vasily Surikov’s famous nineteenth-century painting depicting the Old Believer and religious martyr Boyarina Morozova being carried off to Siberia in an exile’s chains. The collection was then loaded on to railway wagons bound for Siberia, followed by another two thousand works, and fifty museum employees and their families.

Owing to the speed of the Nazi encirclement, the evacuation of artworks from a besieged Leningrad was even more frantic. As the noose tightened, Pavlovsk Palace – a centre of musical culture in Russia ever since the late eighteenth century – became a target for German guns. Museum staff buried what they could in the palace grounds.21 Leningraders boxed the porcelain toilet set, gifted to the Romanovs by Marie Antoinette, in freshly cut grass. They wrapped up breakables in imperial dresses. A member of Pavlovsk’s staff made sketches of how the interior looked before it was abandoned, as well as the swagged curtains of the Tsar’s baldaquin bed.22 Priceless treasures too large to extract were abandoned where they stood, including Maria Feodorovna’s late-eighteenth-century Clementi upright grand piano.fn1

Siberian painter Vasily Surikov’s Boyarina Morozova being returned to the walls of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, in 1945 after its wartime stay in Novosibirsk.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.