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A review by 101mystic
The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts
3.0
Non-Fiction Book Review: The Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts.
This was a book providing by NetGalley.com for review, and I was very excited when it was approved. I live with my aunt, who is world renown harpist of colour, whose knowledge of harps is always a fascinating thing to learn. So, when I saw this, I requested it and hoped, and one day it got approved.
This book is a new release in North America as of August, and it is a Creative Non-fiction. This isn’t just an account of knowledge of pianos in Siberia, or a listicle as what you would find on BuzzFeed “Top 10 Pianos you wouldn’t believe where we found them!” It’s a narrative of the history of Russia/Siberia, the exploration for these pianos by the author, and how it blends together.
Pianos, like harps, need a lot of love for their gut strings. While some modern pianos will be corded with synthetic strings, the pianos in this book are from the golden age of the pianos, the 1800s. This was before the synthetic strings where used, and so the fact they are in some place as cold and as bitter as SIbera is a little surprising.
Let me give you an idea.
My aunt’s harps, she has quite a few more than one, are kept in a specific room in this house. It is a south-facing window. These harps are mostly antique ones strung with traditional gut strings because she thinks the sound is better – I don’t know, I’m not musical, but I trust her. She has a humidifier that keeps it humid during the cold winters. And when we have thunderstorms in the summer, the strings will continuously be falling out of tune because of the humidity changes. Gut strings are incredibly finicky.
And yet, some of the fantastic European style pianos ended up in Siberia.
I live in a Taiga zone, here in the Canadian Rockies, and it gets cold. I am not in the level of cold that Siberia has. So seeing the title, my brain went, “What.” And I read.
I won’t lie; reading Russian and Siberian names with my dyslexia is a little bit on the hard side, so this book took me a bit longer to get through. But it was worth it. It was a different view of a subset of history I don’t know tons about, as history always intersects with the piano in this book. Some of it was Stalin’s reign or the fall of the Tsars, and some of it was just how people were exiled to the north and chose to bring pianos with them.
And this is explored through the idea that music is a core part of surviving hardship as a human, with a small piece on a reindeer herding tribe that isn’t musical to showcase the difference. It talks about the Romanovs playing the piano in their house arrest, and of the liberal thinkers taking their pianos with them into the wilds, and how those who were building a terrible railroad under the Stalin regime used music to keep themselves moving forward.
It is a dark book at times, as it is whenever you are dealing with some of the darker parts of human history. And there are aspects of how the author mentions some of the things she did that rub a bit wrong with me, but I couldn’t tell you why it bugs me. But I still liked it; I wish I had a good atlas to look at these places to understand where she was, and the history more.
But it’s a beautiful little window into a world, through books, that I do think was a beautiful exploration of a musical instrument, and its place in history.
I think this book would be good for people who like this type of nuanced history. That history is as much about everyday objects and their place in a larger scheme of the world, versus just the Great Man form of history. It won’t teach you a ton about pianos per-say, but it will show you how humans adjust in big moments of history in smaller ways. Sometimes resilience is not just about fighting back. It’s about surviving.
This was a book providing by NetGalley.com for review, and I was very excited when it was approved. I live with my aunt, who is world renown harpist of colour, whose knowledge of harps is always a fascinating thing to learn. So, when I saw this, I requested it and hoped, and one day it got approved.
This book is a new release in North America as of August, and it is a Creative Non-fiction. This isn’t just an account of knowledge of pianos in Siberia, or a listicle as what you would find on BuzzFeed “Top 10 Pianos you wouldn’t believe where we found them!” It’s a narrative of the history of Russia/Siberia, the exploration for these pianos by the author, and how it blends together.
Pianos, like harps, need a lot of love for their gut strings. While some modern pianos will be corded with synthetic strings, the pianos in this book are from the golden age of the pianos, the 1800s. This was before the synthetic strings where used, and so the fact they are in some place as cold and as bitter as SIbera is a little surprising.
Let me give you an idea.
My aunt’s harps, she has quite a few more than one, are kept in a specific room in this house. It is a south-facing window. These harps are mostly antique ones strung with traditional gut strings because she thinks the sound is better – I don’t know, I’m not musical, but I trust her. She has a humidifier that keeps it humid during the cold winters. And when we have thunderstorms in the summer, the strings will continuously be falling out of tune because of the humidity changes. Gut strings are incredibly finicky.
And yet, some of the fantastic European style pianos ended up in Siberia.
I live in a Taiga zone, here in the Canadian Rockies, and it gets cold. I am not in the level of cold that Siberia has. So seeing the title, my brain went, “What.” And I read.
I won’t lie; reading Russian and Siberian names with my dyslexia is a little bit on the hard side, so this book took me a bit longer to get through. But it was worth it. It was a different view of a subset of history I don’t know tons about, as history always intersects with the piano in this book. Some of it was Stalin’s reign or the fall of the Tsars, and some of it was just how people were exiled to the north and chose to bring pianos with them.
And this is explored through the idea that music is a core part of surviving hardship as a human, with a small piece on a reindeer herding tribe that isn’t musical to showcase the difference. It talks about the Romanovs playing the piano in their house arrest, and of the liberal thinkers taking their pianos with them into the wilds, and how those who were building a terrible railroad under the Stalin regime used music to keep themselves moving forward.
It is a dark book at times, as it is whenever you are dealing with some of the darker parts of human history. And there are aspects of how the author mentions some of the things she did that rub a bit wrong with me, but I couldn’t tell you why it bugs me. But I still liked it; I wish I had a good atlas to look at these places to understand where she was, and the history more.
But it’s a beautiful little window into a world, through books, that I do think was a beautiful exploration of a musical instrument, and its place in history.
I think this book would be good for people who like this type of nuanced history. That history is as much about everyday objects and their place in a larger scheme of the world, versus just the Great Man form of history. It won’t teach you a ton about pianos per-say, but it will show you how humans adjust in big moments of history in smaller ways. Sometimes resilience is not just about fighting back. It’s about surviving.