SYMP HON Y OF S I GNAT U R E S Thousands of concert-goers, musicians, and students visit Tanglewood each year, the 110-acre former family estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, owned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). But few have laid eyes on a silk quilt hanging in the 1912, nineteen-room summer mansion, Seranak, protected by dim light and quiet winters. Fewer still could have interpreted the embroidered writing scattered across the quilt’s silk front, because it is entirely written in Cyrillic.
Fig. 44. Serge Koussevitzky at his summer home, Seranak, near the Tanglewood grounds.
The inscriptions consist mostly of quotes and signatures, and one date stands out several times amid the unfamiliar letters: 1916. This date coincides with an eleven-year period when the mansion’s most famous owner, Sergei Koussevitsky, was performing throughout Europe as a double-bass soloist and conductor. Koussevitzky (1874–1951) was born near Moscow to a family of musicians. A multiinstrumentalist, he received a scholarship at the age of fourteen to study double bass and music theory in Moscow. By the turn of the twentieth century, Koussevitsky had debuted as a soloist and would relocate to Berlin shortly after with his first wife, dancer Nadezhda Galat.
During the period of 1909–1914, Russia was in political and social upheaval. Nonetheless, Koussevitzky and his orchestra toured by boat up and down the Volga River, which would have brought his music to an expanded audience. Just two years later, the group of people—and their writing—were gathered for an unknown purpose, eventually resulting in the creation of this embroidered quilt.
28 Fig. 45. Background. Details of 1916 silk quilt with silk embroidery signatures, before conservation.
