Ballade for a Piano:
Grotrian Steinweg 21504
Page 4 of 4

IV. Results.

Three months passed. Patrick e-mailed again. The action is mostly done and back in the piano (only the dampers are not finished—they are the pads which are raised from the strings by the pedal allowing the strings to continue sounding, and then lowered when the player wants the sound to stop), and the keyboard is finished.

Off we go, through mile after mile of oil refineries, to the house, the workshop. Open the door. Tears again.

This time the piano looks finished. It is (sorry for the cliché, but it’s the right word) dazzling. It sits under the bright lights of the Sanfords’ "operating room" looking surely exactly as it looked 100 years ago when it was shipped from the factory in Germany. I walk up and am afraid to touch it.

The ivory keys are white. Not the shiny white of modern plastic keys, but the deep, rich white of ivory. Merle Sanford had removed all the pieces of ivory, cleaned them, and re-glued them with perfect alignment.

Merle Sanford brings a stool and says, "Have a seat." I sit down. My hands are hot and sweating. I am so nervous.

I play a C-major chord, and the piano speaks to me with its own, old, unique voice. One of the best moments of my life.

It’s the same piano, but it’s as if a thick curtain, musty and filled with the a century’s worth of dust, has been removed. The piano has a presence, an immediacy, which it previously lacked. It’s brighter, but not with the piercing quality of current Steinways.

I play more and my fingers immediately tell me that the Sanfords have been feeding the action a bracing diet of super-vitamins. The keys are spry, sensitive, instantly responsive, and no longer with that heavy muscular feel. The burden of a rough century has been lifted from the piano.

At Patrick’s urging, Ronald Sanford pulls the action out, sets it on a table, and gives me a capsule explanation of what they have done.

The action is where most of those 7,000 pieces live, and I’m quickly lost in esoteric technical jargon. But I understand that few parts were replaced. It was a matter of cleaning (tedious but easy) and then adjusting—tedious and difficult, because you adjust, test, re-adjust, test, adjust again. And you do everything 88 times.

That’s all preliminary stuff. Because when the pieces are all back together in basically playable form, you then do a further, extremely delicate series of adjustments for weighting (how hard you have to press a key), speed (how fast the hammer moves when you press a key), and release (the point in the movement of the key at which the mechanism lets the hammer fall back).

And again, you do this 88 times.

But now it gets even more complicated. If you use the same weighting on a low note and a high note, the high note will sound louder to the human ear. Which means the weighting has to be lightest for the very lowest keys and then graduated, become slightly heavier as you move up the keyboard. "Slightly" is the key word here. We’re talking grams, and tenths of grams.

The Sanfords said the dampers would be finished and installed within a couple of weeks, but they would need more time for further adjustments. In addition, Patrick would have to tune the piano several times to get the new strings stretched and set.

Patrick and I left the Sanfords to their miracle-working and drove back to Houston. I was happy, relieved, and now becoming impatient to hear and play the final result.

V. This is It.

The call came in December. They were finished. I went. I played (more tears). Grotrian-Steinweg 21504 was ready for another 100 years. You can see the result in the pictures. I wish you could hear it.

Lucky 21st century.

END

Photos this page: Catherine Swilley.

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