So this is still just a story some fifteen years or so in the making of the search a journey of sorts for the perfect piano. Part one is
here. This then is the second of a three-part story of an age-old Bechstein.
part two. [chance]
‘About a year’ the guy said when I asked how long this shop had been in Portland.
I didn't catch his name. Corner of 11th and Alder downtown for now but they were relocating in a month or so across the Willamette. After our brief introduction I moved quick past the Estonias and Schimmels and others up front towards the back of the store with the brick wall. Back there was an L167 with the high-polish Madrona finish. Not a favourite but a similar piano that I sat down to twelve years ago or so in a small piano shop in Tacoma and what led me to this absolute fascination I have with the Bechstein piano. And here - finally - was a Bechstein dealer closer than a couple thousand miles south or east.
I played a few notes then moved on. And there one was ... a D280. The nine-foot concert grand. I had never seen one in person. Too bad I am still far too self-conscious with some suited salesman nice as he was sitting at his desk or mumbling a conversation into his phone to really play. To try to break a string or two (Liszt broke plenty of strings!). So I tinkered some on it is all. No true banging out the cadenza to
Ferocity And Fragility or any of the other crazy things I have stored in my head. I moved over to the more reasonable seven-foot-seven-inch C234 slapped with a price tag of only $163,000 versus the $212,000 of the D280 and played a few phrases from the song I was working on at the moment. Took some photos with my iPhone. Grabbed all the sales brochures they had just for fun. Then wandered back to the salesman.
"Find one you like?" he mused with a slight grin most likely just generally amused at the fact someone was toying on a two hundred thousand dollar instrument wearing canvas Toms shoes and a beatup Mountain Hardwear fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband meant to ward off the bite of a proper cold northwest winter afternoon while outside the light faded from light blue to pink. It was New Year’s Eve day.
"Well no ... but I have an antique Bechstein and was interested in your experience with rebuilding - particularly with Bechstein pianos since you're the only dealer on the West Coast."
I don't know if this took him aback or if he took me any more seriously but for a bit then we talked back and forth while he showed me a late nineteenth-century Chickering or some other American make of a piano that they had rebuilt and shimmed the soundboard me only half-listening since if a piano is not German I am really not interested. I had mentioned mine would need to be shimmed and perhaps recrowned. But he said they had a direct line back to the Bechstein factory in Berlin which did interest me.
So he passed me the card of some guy named Lotof who turned out to be the shop's owner to whom I would shoot off an email with some photos of my 1875 Bechstein attached to get the conversation started. I told him I was undecided about refinishing that I actually quite like the one-hundred thirty-five year-old worn patina scratches and all but that I know it needs all new hammers installed and voiced and the action completely reworked with perhaps new strings and soundboard work but that I wanted to maintain as much of the original parts as possible.
And it struck me while there how I was reminded playing the new Bechsteins of the utter uniqueness of an instrument - mine - nearly a century-and-a-half old. Made from trees felled before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Utterly handbuilt and delivered on horse-drawn carriage weaving through littered cobblestone streets of some late-ninetheenth century European city. The engravings on the soundboard much more illustrious than the new pianos with inscriptions of how they were built for the majesty of emporers and kings (
majestät des kaisers und königs in proper German) and inscribed with the address of the original factory on Johannis Strausse in Berlin.
And the timbre. The sound. How Bechstein's scale design back then just shortly before the overstrung scale became the norm had the tenor strings pass through the bass bridge giving that most important section of the piano one of the most sumptuous near-liquid but still powerful tenor voices imaginable. The action is a double-escapement type similar to the patented action from Sébastien Érard just a few years before the German Louis Renner designed his (and which has been used primarily in all fine pianos since). It was ahead of its time. There is not another like it. This piano here in the corner of my living room one day will be given new life and it will sound absolutely one-of-a-kind.
-----
There was a period then of silence. Maybe two years. It of course seemed much much longer.
A period I mean between pianos. The WG57 was long gone only memories now and the scratchy-sounding hiss of an audio cassette that tries its best to capture the sonority of the low bass strings. The crystalness of the treble. But cannot. Not even close.
I could not long live without a piano of course and so I began searching again this time with a bit of practicality I had lacked just a few years earlier but seemingly inherited with a bit more age no longer that impulsive twenty-year-old who must have a grand piano shoved in tiny living rooms decided whilst sitting on kitchen counters. So an upright it would be. But I still required a big sound and so I only set my gaze on the four-foot ones.
This time it didn’t take long. I was already sold on the Weber as an excellent and economical instrument with a powerful dynamic that nearly matched what I heard in my head. So a quick trip back to Helmer’s had me signing over a few more thousands of dollars for a new W121 polished ebony upright. Delivered to a rented house off a quiet gravel road a carpeted living room much more practical again than the cramped dusty wood-floors of my former days. Not long after dissolution in tow it moved out with me to a little duplex where I would play it loud up late Julian fast asleep in the room on the other side of the wall never waking. My finger slipping at one point and playing an F-sharp instead of an F and finding amongst a wash of fortissimo minor chords the B major. I remember it clearly scrawling the melody in a sketchbook lying open on the music desk the sforzandos and quadruple forte markings etched in ink dripping on the page I had written it so furiously. Thus was found the ending to an enormous concerto for piano and orchestra.
The Weber could barely contain the sound.
-----
Sergiy. Sergiy Skhabovskyy was his name.
I found him one afternoon by chance. I was on a lunch break surfing around the interwebs when I decided to check out this site called Ebay. Had only heard of it but never used it. So I signed up. Then remembering my promise to myself that one day back sunny autumn in the Tacoma Helmer’s shop how someday I would own a Bechstein grand and with the world of browsing now at my fingertips no longer confined to just the dozen or so piano shops within a couple hundred miles of home I typed the name Bechstein into the search field.
And got a hit.
He lived half a world away. A city that was a blip on a map to which I could only point but knew nothing about. Kiev. Ukraine. He was a piano and customs dealer there and apparently had been trading pianos for years. Aged pianos that had found their way somehow or other from Europe east across once an Iron Curtain now gone just the Caucasus range into Russia and ultimately to him. His online storefront allowed him to sell pianos now to the western world - mostly the United States. Afterall he was selling mainly European brands many of them unheard of and unappreciated here across oceans. Brands that had been around since the dawn of the modern piano. Bösendorfer. Pleyel. Grotrian. Steinweg. Blüthner.
Bechstein.
It seemed too good to be true. An 1875 six-foot-one Bechstein grand that I could actually afford. Though I had started the journey of finding this piano years before with those three chords on a mahogany five-foot-nine it was only just beginning.
I called Kathy later that evening from my tiny apartment. Explained to her in rapid excitement what I had found. The dilemma. Which was basically in order to afford this perhaps chance-of-a-lifetime I had to sell my perfectly acceptable Weber upright on which I had found the B major. That Weber meant something to me even if I knew it was not a Bechstein. And this was also a bit of risk this business of chance. A hundred-and-thirty-some-year-old piano online sight unseen halfway around the world from an eastern city in the Ukraine?
Seemed almost as ridiculous as convincing myself at twenty that I needed a grand piano.
I’d have to fly back to Missouri during the auction for a planned holiday visiting family. In fact it would close the morning I arrived dazed and sleep-deprived stumbling off a redeye flight from Seattle. My sister Kari picked me up at the airport and took me back to her little house parked at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac lined with giant cottonwoods. I followed her in and made my way to the tiny couch having explained the situation on the ride from the airport. How the auction was going to close. Kari didn’t have a computer so she drew me a map to the neighborhood library. ‘Take my car’ she said and went to crash herself. I laid on the couch frantically going over everything in my head. Couldn’t sleep. Not even close my eyese. It would be so easy to just fall asleep I remember thinking. I was so tired. Not have to get up drive her ridiculous monster of a car that nineteen-seventy-six solid steel red Chevy gifted from our grandmother to find a computer at the library hope one was available park myself on it waiting watching the seconds tick down to the end of the auction. I knew nothing of sniping. I thought I’d just wait until a few seconds before the auction ended before putting in my bid. Little did I know ...
But I had made up my mind.
Shrugging off sleep for later as I all too often tend to do I got myself up and grabbed her keys to follow her little map. Finding the library without trouble there was a computer in the middle of the main room where I sat down. Logged in. Five minutes or something. My mind was still racing. Four minutes. Should I? What if this thing was crap? It was all original. Would have to be restored. Thousands of dollars.
But it was a Bechstein.
Three minutes. One bid. So it was just going for the asking price. I’d have to put in a bid of at least fifty dollars more. Two minutes. The library suddenly seemed too warm and stuffy compared to the crisp outside. Could I do this? I’d miss the Weber. There was nothing wrong with it. But it wasn’t a Bechstein. It wasn’t a Bechstein. One minute. Time was flying. The seconds ticked down. I typed in my bid. Watched the clock on the wall as the second hand ticked. Ticked. Ticked. Waited. Held my breath and clicked ‘place bid.’
-----
‘Congratulations! You are winner!’ the email from Sergiy read in broken English.
Through a string of emails spanning the next couple of weeks I had printed out back then and found dusty in that box of music stuff he and I worked out the details of shipping a six-foot-one grand piano from the Ukraine to Seattle. Customs. Escrow. Inspection.
It arrived here in a wooden crate a month and a half later. Cleared customs at the airport and was heaved into a truck. Driven south to that little duplex of mine brought in through the front door and set up in the far corner of yet another cramped way-too-small-for-a-grand-piano living room.
But it was real. Part of me couldn’t believe it.
The first order of business was to find a technician to come and look it over. Make sure it was okay. I found the slip from Emmanuel Piano Service dated the seventh of November oh-five. Didn’t charge me anything and scribbled in the lines of the invoice how it needed a full set of new hammers and backchecks. Several tunings to bring it back up to A435 - he wasn’t recommending tuning it to the modern standard of A440 (where the A above middle C - A4 - beats at four hundred forty cycles a second). And two treble strings were broken and needed to be tied off.
As he gathered his tools putting them back in a worn old leather satchel he stood up straight and I remember him looking at me and asking me how much I paid for it. I told him. He paused for a second as if to think that over I don’t know before telling me it was worth four times that - smiling - and showing himself out the door.
-----
It took a few moments for the realization to sink in after I saw the screen flash that I had won the auction. I remember just leaning back in the chair and sitting there. Time passed. Eventually getting up again and grabbing Kari’s keys to make my way back to her car back to that little house of hers under cottonwoods losing its big yellow leaves the end of that Missouri September.
‘So?’ I remember her asking as I came through her front door exhausted not just from the redeye but the whole ordeal it seemed. In my typical sense I non-chalantly explained how I now owned a Bechstein. Then crashed back on her dusty couch.
Turns out I could have just as easily lost. Not knowing how Ebay worked at the time and with someone already having placed a bid and me only placing mine fifty dollars higher ... if that someone had put in a max bid just a penny more than me he would have won. A penny. I didn’t realize this until months later. I hadn’t really known what I was doing afterall.
But it was meant to be. Or something like that I told myself. Just meant to be. The whole thing.
Sitting up late on kitchen counters in crowded apartments over casseroles scrawling notes adding and subtracting. Deciding out of the blue nowhere even to really put one that I needed to have a grand piano. Traveling north and south between Seattle and Portland looking in every piano shop finding a five-seven Weber and being told to check out the six-foot. Despite my reservations of what difference five inches might make shrugging my shoulders but regardless following his advice and heading south. Instead of just finding it and leaving deciding to walk around the rest of the shop finally in the last corner spotting a five-nine mahogany piano which on the fallboard read plainly and simply: ‘C. Bechstein.’ Sitting down at it. Reaching out to touch the keys. Playing three chords. Dying inside the sound of it absolutely unbearable. Sitting down one afternoon during lunch to check out Ebay and remind myself of my need for a Bechstein. And searching. And finding. Staving off sleep after a cross-country redeye to follow a scribbled map to a library to find a computer to place a bid not knowing what I was doing. The other guy not having placed a bid higher than mine.
Winning.
All of it. The search was over but the journey was not.
-----
No. 8056 - the eight-thousand-fifty-sixth piano Carl Bechstein crafted in his factory on Johannis Strasse in Berlin - as I have come to call my piano - needed attention. The invoice from Emmanuel Pianos proved it. It was old. Worn. Tired. I would sit up nights silence filling the room under the pale light of a single lamp wondering whose hands had played it? What music had they played? Its journey across mountains and oceans. After it all one hundred thirty-five years it found its way to me. And it needed to be restored.
It would be some time before I would find myself wandering into that Bechstein dealer in Portland some freezing New Year’s Eve day wearing canvas Toms and a beatup Mountain Hardware fleece hair all unkempt from a wool headband to ask a kind man about restoring it.
But I had gotten a sense of its depth of tone. Its character. Its sound. And I knew it was all there waiting ... just waiting to be unleashed.
to be continued ...
