The Lost Pianos of Waterloo

Year Two, Week 28, in one pianist’s journey to perform the 32 sonatas of Beethoven

In the farthest reaches of Pearson airport in Toronto, where my fellow islanders gather for their bumpy little flights out to the eastern border of Canada, I was sent an Air Canada email that there would be no in-flight entertainment. Too over-tired – from a week spent performing three different concert programs, giving a masterclass, and dashing to hear Beethoven’s choir-and-orchestral work Missa Solemnis in Toronto – to settle into sleep on the flight, I went on my phone to find a book to download. There I stumbled across Sophy Roberts’s travelogue, The Lost Pianos of Siberia.

Flight? What flight? Two hours later, I looked up from Roberts’s book to see that we were angling over the north shore of the Island.

I listened to a YouTube interview with Roberts this morning, in which she says she started her journey, and book, by putting two wildly different symbolic constructs together in one concept, then setting out to investigate.

Pianos, thought of as ambassadors of Western European culture. Siberia, thought of as a vastness into which European culture disappears to die.

A piano in a former Soviet music hall - Alamy

I’m reading the book slowly, letting it shake up my thinking about my future direction. You know, the “lost pianos” of Canada would also make for a striking travel adventure or book.

Before her journey, Roberts was galvanized by a visit she’d made to Mongolia, where she’d heard a young Mongolian woman, a marvellous pianist, play Bach in a tent on an inadequate piano. Roberts was drawn into a conversation about how to find the artist a more suitable one, and so she was on the lookout as she set out for neighbouring Siberia.

Grand pianos have much in common with cars. The essence of both is really to serve as a personal mechanical travel vehicle for a human. Both are operated from a dashboard of similar width, both have aerodynamic curves, both have similar price points, and both require an ace mechanic. What you get for 5,000, 60,000, or 250,000 dollars in a grand piano is the rough equivalent of what you get for your money in a car. The depreciation rate is roughly similar, and you have your similar distinctions between workhorse vehicle, antique collector’s item, or state-of-the-art luxury object.

People are generally aware that acoustic pianos have lost their formerly central place in domestic households. One’s grandparents’ piano becomes one of those sticky family problems. It’s hard to donate, since institutions don’t want to pay for the maintenance or restoration of old pianos. It’s even hard to give away, since moving and tuning costs are high. Fraught conversations ensue: is it old furniture, fit for the dump, or is it the symbol of much that you (or some of you) hold dear about your family’s cultural history?

And who can be found to move, tune, or restore an old piano? The only professional training school for piano technicians in Canada – the former piano technology program at the University of Western Ontario – closed down years ago. Piano technicians are an endangered species.

With its usual flair for entrepreneurial survivalism, the piano-building industry has stepped up to offer us instruments that are easier to maintain, easier to transport, easier on the neighbours, and easier to play.

Digital pianos are lighter, more mobile, and always “in tune”. What is meant, though never explained, is that they are set to a tuning system called “Equal Temperament”. This standardized system offers a convenient approximation of being in tune. It is impossible to “perfectly” tune a piano, for reasons I’ll not get into here.

But beside digital solutions, even acoustic pianos are manufactured these days not so much for their beauty of tone as for their ease and standardization of touch. That means you don’t need to have a technician on speed-dial, in order to fix the wonky irregularities and stuck notes that crop up in less standardized models.

Ironically, many professional pianists who ideally would seek a more idiosyncratic and interesting sound, including myself, will own a standard workhorse piano simply to keep their financial overhead low. The gold standard for an even, regular, standarized “good” piano is Yamaha, closely followed by Kawai. My workhorse piano is a Yamaha baby grand. When Canadian pianist Jamie Parker was my colleague, his was a Kawai baby grand. Music schools are full of these instruments. They hold their market value better than most brands. Institutions can predictably schedule them for replacement and maintenance. And they draw the least complaints from their users.

For great beauty is unique beauty. Rare and beautiful pianos exist in the eyes of their unique beholders, with no consensus possible. These are the pianos that become “lost pianos”.

Beethoven was deluged with dozens of pianos from various makers during his life. From the many, he valued a few: an Erard from France; a Broadwood from England; and several pianos built by the powerhouse couple of Johann Andreas and Nanette Streicher in Vienna. Nanette Streicher’s father, Mozart’s piano builder, had started the business. Frau Nanette Streicher was the one piano technician who, if speed dial had existed, would certainly have been on Beethoven’s. Besides being a great piano builder and the technician for all of his pianos, Frau Streicher helped him with hiring servants, household matters, and novel remedies for his deafness such as building him a piano that had an extra string for each note. If you go to Beethoven’s grave, bring an extra flower for Frau Streicher’s family grave, found next to Beethoven’s.

At the Streicher gravesite pictured above, Johann Andreas and Nanette are buried below their son, Johann Baptiste, who inherited their company.

Johann Baptiste, the son, built pianos owned and preferred by Schumann, Brahms, and perhaps most famously, Franz Liszt.

One of the “lost pianos” of Waterloo, Ontario, the city where I played my concerts this past week, is a gorgeous, full-sized concert piano built by Johann Baptiste Streicher. It hides in an inner, windowless room on the fourth floor of Laurier’s music faculty, from where it never emerges to be heard in public these days. There is no piano technician in Waterloo Region trained in the maintenance/restoration of such vintage pianos, so the school strictly limits its use. But this instrument was used in a recording of the Robert Schumann piano concert by pianist Andreas Staier with l’Orchestre des Champs-Élysées directed by Phillipe Herreweghe. If you take a listen, here, you will find that its claret tones are very far removed from a bright modern Yamaha. I myself performed a live CBC radio broadcast on this piano, which can be heard here.

News headlines were made when Waterloo Region recently suffered the bankruptcy of its fine professional orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. Far more quietly, the Centre in the Square, Kitchener’s concert hall once built to house the symphony, did away with its nine-foot concert piano made by the Baldwin piano company. It was rescued by piano technician Paul Wall, one of Southern Ontario’s finest technicians. Paul lovingly restored the instrument, and then, with the Baldwin in tow, left the region to settle in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. Kitchener-Waterloo’s loss is the historic town of Annapolis Royal’s major gain. The Baldwin now resides in the garrison church of St. Luke’s Anglican, where a wonderful new concert series is now run by the church’s music director, pianist Heidi Fewster. This is where I’ll be playing all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas on Saturdays and Sunday in July. There, I greet the Baldwin like the treasured wise friend it is.

Other remarkable “lost pianos” remain in Waterloo Region, like the Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand, signed by many celebrities, found in the home of pianist Leslie De’Ath. De’Ath has had it tuned, not in standard “Equal Temperament”, but in the esoteric Valotti tuning system. He is preparing to record, someday, the Well-Tempered Clavier of Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of 48 Preludes and Fugues in all the major and minor keys.

Then there is the nine-foot Schimmel concert grand piano in a Presbyterian church in Cambridge, just south of Kitchener. It is a luxurious, gleaming, purring machine, imported from Germany by local benefactors John A. and Joyce Pollock. I’ve performed Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto No. 5 with the Cambridge Symphony on that instrument and found it well-suited to the acoustic of its large venue.

I practised for my concerts in Waterloo on an especially touching “lost piano”, the older Steinway B grand piano in the home of Jan and Jean Narveson. There, it was once played on by great pianists too numerous to list, during the decades of recorded house concert presentations for which Jan was awarded the Order of Canada. I would swear that both the piano and the walls retain the spirit of all of that artistry.

Many wonderful “lost pianos” are domestic uprights, treasured by families, latterly found for sale or as a free giveaway online. For those interested in this subject, I recommend a lovely memoir called The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, by Thad Carhart. I was delighted by how Carhart encourages our love and appreciation of all the little idiosyncracies of eccentric pianos. Along the way, he devotes a chapter to his experience of auditing a masterclass given by my late teacher Gyorgy Sebok, one of the great “lost pianists” of the twentieth century.

“Lost pianos” are less newsworthy than the latest products of technocrats. Finding one is a human pleasure, contrary and splendid.

.