The Seattle Weekly (October 23 - October 29, 1985)
"Piano Man - Obi Manteufel Dreams Of Pushing Piano Designs Beyond Steinway. "
He May Just Be The Man To Do It
by Roger Downey
One evening in late summer, in a large, airy loft in Wallingford, a group of people stand around a workbench watching while two men painstakingly wind a bright coil of untarnished phosphor-bronze wire onto a blue steel pin, tap the pin into a block of rock-hard maple laminate honeycombed by dozens of precisely drilled holes, and loop the other end of the wire over a hook on the far side of a thin sheet of pristine, pale Sitka spruce topped by a curious twist of laminated wood in the shape of a shepherd's crook, its top edge spiky with a long line of much slenderer machine-steel pins.
Wire and pins once aligned to his satisfaction, one of the workmen slowly tightens the wire with quick, smooth pulls of a palm-fitting steel lever, picking the tautening string between pulls with a quick fingernail. When he judges that the thin, twanging note of the string has reached the proper pitch, he puts down his steel tuning tool and picks up a tiny felt-covered hammer, the exact shape of the hammer that terminates the action of a modern piano key, but only half its size.
All the bystanders, already standing close, lean in toward the instrument as the technician delicately taps the taut string with his little hammer. A rich, sweet, bronzy note swells out to fill the air, a sound like a church bell half a mile away in still air. After a moment, there's another sound, a unison sigh -- of relief, of relaxation from tension, of pure pleasure. A 185-year-old musical instrument, voiceless and mute for a century or more, has come back to life.
The instrument in question is a primitive form of piano -- a so-called fortepiano -- built in the city of New York sometime between 1805 and 1810, perhaps with mechanical parts shipped from England. Seattle interior designer Jean Jongeward found it in a New York antique shop and bought it -- not as a playable instrument but as a striking American Federal antique -- when she was hired in 1972 to refurnish the Governor's Mansion of the state of Washington in Olympia.
Rebuilding and recommissioning classic keyboard instruments is not unusual these days, but the Governor's Piano project was unusual in at least two ways. For one thing, the instrument in question was no classic in any sense but age: It was poorly designed and carelessly made inside and out. And the rebuilder, unlike most devotees of old instruments, was not much interested in making the old fortepiano sound as it did when it was new.
"Judging by the design and the way it was put together, I'd bet it sounded terrible then," he says. "Why should anyone spend a lot of time and money putting a bad instrument back into working order? What we wanted to do was make the little thing as good an instrument as it could be, given everything we know about acoustics and materials that its makers didn't know or care about. I wanted it to sound like a Steinway 9-foot grand heard from half a block away. And it darn near does."
That is the kind of irreverent statement which chills the blood of authenticity-in-early-music types, but it is characteristic of Obi Manteufel, the Seattle piano rebuilder who over the last five years has increasingly attracted attention -- and criticism -- for his free-and-easy way with the innards of old pianos. The reference to Steinway is characteristic. Manteufel, like the majority of pianists and piano aficionados, believes that the Steinway piano is the greatest instrument of its kind ever made. But he also makes no secret of his belief that a better piano still can be built, and that he is the man to do it.
Everybody enjoys a David-and-Goliath story. But until very recently, there was no question at all about how a David-and-Goliath battle of pianos would come out. Steinway & Sons, Piano Makers, of Long Island City in the New York City borough of queens, have made fewer than 500,000 pianos since German immigrant Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg opened his shop in a Manhattan loft in 1853. That's a tiny percentage of the tens of millions of instruments produced in the United States. But the name Steinway was and is to the piano what Rolls-Royce was to automobiles, Chateau Lafite to clarets -- a name to conjure with, a synonym for sumptuous perfection.
The Steinway mystique remains, but it is no longer all-powerful. If it were, an event of the kind that will occur this Sunday at the University of Washington's Meany Hall could never have taken place. It is rare enough for half a dozen pianists of international repute to appear together on a single concert platform, even for charity. It is unheard of for them to assemble for such an event and play upon a suite of old instruments acquired, redesigned, rebuilt, and refinished by a single piano maker virtually unknown in the music business three years ago: Obi Manteufel of Seattle, Washington.
To understand the unlikelihood of Sunday's marathon concert in the framework of the piano world of yesterday, you have to take a closer look at the history of the instrument, at how pianos were and are made and sold. The invention of the instrument is usually attributed to one Bartolommeo Cristofori, an Italian harpsichord player, who, sometime in the first decade of the 18th century, came up with a device which allowed the touch of a key to toss a stiff parchment cushion instead of a leather-covered hammer against a string either soft or hard, thereby producing a soft or loud -- hence the Italian name for the instrument, pianoforte -- which could be sustained as long as the player desired simply by holding down the key, but which would be muffled into silence the instant the key was released by the player's finger.
Keyboard instruments like the early piano were thought of mainly as house instruments, ladies' instruments. It took 50 years or more of experimentation to produce a piano reliable and musical enough to attract the attention of a major composer-performer: Mozart. His concertos for the instrument took the piano out of the drawing room and boudoir and put it on the concert platform once and for all.
In an instrument meant to be played in large halls for paying audiences, volume, brilliance, and mechanical reliability were at a premium, so he who could provide them would be the maker of choice for the new breed of publicly concertizing keyboard artists. For the century 1825 to 1925, from the age of Beethoven to the age of Rachmaninoff, technological development spurred piano technique. In turn, virtuoso technique -- the hands of Liszt, Chopin, or Brahms -- spurred renewed technological innovation.
If a maker sold an instrument to Franz Liszt, he hadn't sold one piano but hundreds -- thousands. The main market for pianos was and remained the domestic market: The parlor piano was the "home entertainment center" of the age, and everyone who bought a piano as a sign of their culture, affluence, and upward mobility wanted a piano which bore the same name as that played by one of the wizards of the keyboard.
Heinrich Steinweg (later Henry Steinway) was just one of dozens of German musical artisans who brought their piano-building talents to the New World. His two sons, Theodore and William, turned the company into an institution unique in the world. Theodore was the engineer, the technician. Along about 1875, he brought all the various mechanical and structural systems a grand piano comprises -- some 12,000 bits of metal, wood, and fabric altogether -- into a harmony of function and purpose never yet surpassed.
But Steinway couldn't have become Steinway without Theodore's brother William, who was the organizer; and what an organizer he was. He made the Steinway property in Queens overlooking midtown Manhattan into a feudal village owing fealty only to the family name. He sponsored two generations of immigrant craftsmen, paying their passage from the old country, giving them jobs in his factory, housing them in his tract homes, educating their young in the schools and libraries he subsidized, selling them the necessaries of life in his company stores, moving them from place to place on his streetcar and ferry lines. Until World War II, "Steinway Village," as it is called in the neighborhood, was a world apart; and it was a world run by and for the heirs of old Henry.
But William was more than a canny businessman; he was a genius of promotion. All piano companies sought endorsements from the stars of the keyboard, not all by entirely aboveboard means. William scorned such penny-ante tactics: He set out, rather like Boeing in another field, to make his company indispensable. Theodore provided a great instrument ; William made sure a great instrument was available, when and where the artist needed it, in tip-top mechanical and sonic condition. All that the artist had to do was agree to be "a Steinway artist," who would play only Steinway instruments in public when Steinway was available.
The Steinway dealer and service network was, and to a large extent still is, a marvel of organization. If a Steinway artist is scheduled to appear at the high school auditorium in Conway, Washington, on Thursday, November 28, 1985, that artist can fly in the afternoon of the concert confident that come hell or high water, snow, sleet, or windstorm, a Steinway will be on the stage when he arrives, tuned, prepped, and playable. Small wonder that pianists vied to be "Steinway artists", small wonder, too, that generations of pianists became, in their mink-lined way, as much indentured to the Steinway system as the German, Austrian, and Czech immigrants who lived, worked, and died on Steinway Avenue.
And small wonder that for generations of music lover, music students, professional musicians of every kind, "Steinway" became a synonym for "quality" -- almost for "piano."
"I recall how it used to be ," says Bill Smith, who retired to his own little West Seattle piano shop in 1979 after 30 years as technician for Steinway's Seattle dealer Sherman Clay, "when some Mrs. Gotrocks ordered a grand piano, how we used to spend about three or four days working on the instrument getting everything just right. I recall how when the word went out that John Steinway [great-grandson of old Henry] was coming to town to sign a few instruments, how we'd be sent down to the floor after he'd signed to put a little varnish over the name. It was something working for them in those days; you felt you were part of a tradition."
By the time Bill Smith, fresh from the US Army and looking for a job, got sent by a Veterans' Administration job counselor to Sherman Clay, the tradition was already on shaky ground. The century of the piano as center of the middle-class family evening ended abruptly in 1925 with the advent of radio. World War II ended the continuity of immigrant workmanship at Steinway (the company spent most of the war making gliders for the Army Air corps). Then in the mid-1950s came Japanese pianos, first modestly by ones and twos, spinets and uprights, then in their thousands, in all sizes and qualities up to full-size 9-foot concert grands.
For 75 years, Steinway had been the unquestioned top of the piano line; somehow, in the '50s and '60s, somebody blinked and the effortless dominance was lost, never quite to be recaptured. European makes like Bechstein and Boesendorfer began making inroads in the snob market. Baldwin (the only important American maker of quality pianos remaining of the 250-odd that had existed in 1900) began pressing Steinway hard in the very area of their great dominance: artist support. In 1981, Steinway New York (the firm has also had an independent branch in Hamburg, Germany, since 1880) made only 3,400 pianos, less than 2 percent of the shriveled US market.
It wasn't just marketing that suffered. Even fans of the Steinway piano and the Steinway firm admit that the company let quality slide dangerously for a few years before Steinway was acquired from the family by the musical-instrument division of the media conglomerate CBS in 1972. Despite the iron hand in the velvet artist-support glove, numerous touring piano virtuosi began complaining publicly about the state of the Steinway as an instrument; among them Gary Graffman, Andre Watts, Byron Janis, and most damaging, technician-virtuoso Anton Kuerti.
Steinway's response to criticism, unfortunately, was to deny that any had taken place, and to take reprisals against artist who stepped out of line. Kuerti in particular was slapped good and hard, when Steinway refused to let him perform on any of its instruments at New York's "Mostly Mozart" festival because of a 1973 article in the pianists' trade journal Clavier.
Most observers agree that under the CBS aegis Steinway pulled out of its slump and began producing instruments with their old consistency again. But the mystique was tarnished. Now criticisms that would never have been voiced in the past achieved general circulation. Plagued by the continuing slack state of the premium piano market and competition from abroad (one out of three pianos sold worldwide today is made by the Japanese firm of Yamaha), CBS put the company back up for sale a couple of years ago.
In September, they finally found a buyer, though not in time to prevent temporary closure of Steinway's Astoria factory and the laying off of all 500 employees there. A consortium of Boston-area businessmen including the former international marketing director of Polaroid and the heirs to a heating-oil fortune have taken the firm over for a sum representing what CBS chief financial officer Fred J. Meyer called a small loss to CBS -- hence something less than the $22 million CBS is reported to have paid the Steinway family in 1972 for the company. The Boston group has promised to keep both the Astoria and Hamburg factories going. But there seems to be general agreement that it's going to take more than an influx of capitol and marketing-strategies-as-usual to put the queen of pianos back on her pedestal.
Curiously enough, as fortunes of Steinway today have darkened, the Steinway of old is riding high. Pianos, like organs, are machines, and machines don't really improve much with age. Generally speaking, the older a violin, the more expensive; the reverse is so with pianos, or used to be. But that's changing: A hundred-year-old Steinway worth a few thousand dollars at most five years ago -- and that more for its hand-carved case than its mechanism -- might go for five times as much today, and prices are accelerating.
A piano, particularly a grand piano, even a baby grand 5 feet or less in length, is a big investment, and consequently piano reconditioning and rebuilding has always existed in a small way. "A rebuild" can amount to nothing more than restringing, or it can entail replacement of a worn-out action, or even, in extreme cases, replacement of cracked pin-blocks and soundboards: repairs that involve taking the interior of the instrument completely apart and essentially starting from scratch.
There are a number of piano technicians in the Seattle area who rebuild pianos; none of them rebuild quite as freely as Obi Manteufel, whose reconstructions, both fans and critics say, are often effectively new instruments, not reconditioned old ones. One reason Manteufel can be so cavalier about the way he reconstructs pianos is that, unlike most rebuilders, he owns the pianos he works on, selling them only when the rebuilding and refinishing job is complete.
Manteufel is unlike most piano technicians, too, in style. More typical of the craftsmen who rebuild old instruments is someone like Ed McMorrow, who shares his workshop in a concrete Pioneer Square basement (its function indicated only by a cardboard "Pianos R Us" sign taped to the front door) with soundboard-maker Dean Tatham. McMorrow runs his rebuilding shop as a sideline to his main job as one of the fines and highest-paid piano tuners and technicians in the Seattle area (Steinway dealer Sherman Clay refers much of its work to him), and he runs it very much on traditional lines, using Steinway specifications, Steinway parts and Steinway conventional wisdom in his approach: "If it's worked for a hundred years -- why change it?"
Manteufel is the total opposite of the soft-spoken McMorrow. He is a Personality -- flamboyant, passionate, talking a mile a minute with bludgeoning intensity. As for his pianos, their motto might be: "If it hasn't worked in a hundred years -- isn't it time for a change?"
Not that Manteufel despises the art of the great piano-makers, Steinway in particular. In fact, talking to him, one sometimes suspects he thinks he is Theodore Steinway, or at least that he's possessed by Theodore's spirit.
The difference in style between a McMorrow and Manteufel probably has a lot to do with the different directions from which they came to the job.
"I was always very interested in science in school," says McMorrow, who grew up on the Olympic Peninsula. "It was when I went to college I started hanging around the music department because I liked musicians and got more serious about playing myself. I started working on pianos because I wanted to have a good one to play with a treble that would sing and a midrange that wouldn't go 'blat.'"
Manteufel, on the other hand, came at the piano the other way around. he grew up in a somewhat bizarre Tacoma household ruled with a rod of iron by a German grandfather who thought music was a fine accomplishment for a youth just so long as it wasn't taken too seriously. Manteufel took it so seriously that he was touring schools at the age of 14 with Tacoma Junior Symphony playing Lizst's second piano concerto.
The obsession continued into college, where Manteufel was supposed to be studying pre-law. Instead Manteufel, who had begun rebuilding the action of his own piano at home when he was 12, spent his time hanging out at the piano lab of the University's chief piano technician, Don Galt, for years the technical editor of the national tuners and technicians' magazine. Time caught up with Manteufel at the end of his sophomore year. Close to flunking out, he was offered a deal by his grandfather: Promise to straighten out and get your pre-law degree and I'll buy you a Mercedes. "I took the money and bought a piano with it," Manteufel says. "He never really forgave me, but I didn't care."
Cut off from the family coffers, Manteufel worked as a Seattle Transit bus driver while taking lessons from Bertha Ponce Jacobson, retired UW piano professor. His playing attracted the attention of Pauline Bolster, a former girls' school headmistress and socialite who agreed to contribute to his support and studies. When she died, she left the bulk of her substantial estate to Manteufel, who helped care for her in her final illness.
That inheritance came at a crucial time in Manteufel's life. For years he had been practicing the piano for hours a day, ostensibly on the track of a piano soloist's career, but with no real inclination to concertize. "I just wanted to play the piano," he says today. "I didn't really want to play it for anyone." But he did have a dream. Over the years, in conversations with the tuner and technician Darrell Fandrich who helped service his own piano, Manteufel had talked, as many a young technician had before, about researching the secrets of piano construction locked in instruments built in the 50 years around the turn of the century, the acknowledged golden age of piano building. Now he had the money to carry out his dream.
Manteufel had seen numerous old battered classic instruments on his several trips to Europe. Now, through an antiques-importing house, he began collecting old disused instruments. One of the oldest, an 1876 "Centennial" model Steinway, was found in the pit of a London theater slated for demolition, piano and all. there were many others: Bluethners from Leipzig, Bechsteins from Berlin, Boesendorfers from Vienna, even a straight-strung Erard of the 1840s -- the same model of piano which Wagner composed all his later works.
Taking apart and reassembling these old pianos in a sequence of studios and workrooms from Tacoma to the University District, Manteufel and Fandrich began refining their ideas about what makes a piano great. Fandrich concentrated his attention on calculating scales -- the sequence of wire types, diameters, and lengths that gives a piano its characteristic tone. Manteufel spent most of his efforts on working out the contribution of the bridge and soundboard to the workings of the instrument.
"Basically the soundboard is to the piano what the speaker cone is to a sound system," he says. "Its purpose is to amplify the sound that the strings put into it without introducing any distortions of its own. The more the soundboard vibrates as one diaphragm, the better. So the essence of good soundboard design is to find a balance between stiffness and flexibility, between bridge mass and soundboard mass, that will allow the maximum potential energy to be pumped into the board by the strings and the maximum efficiency in turning that energy into sound waves."
Manteufel's soundboards are, on the average, thinner, stiffer, and more tensely arched ("crowned") than normal; beyond that, it's hard to say what sets them apart from the crowd. But their effect on musicians, some musicians at least, is beyond question. Manteufel's most important conquest to date is the American virtuoso Byron Janis, who first encountered one of his instruments when taken to visit Manteufel's Wallingford studio by Symphony board veteran Hans Lehmann last February.
"He played a Bluethner and my Mason Hamlin CC-2 that I had here at the time. He loved them. I went down with him to Pantages Theater in Tacoma to hear him play the Centennial. And he liked that best of all."
Sitting in Manteufel's basement right now is another "Centennial" of somewhat later vintage than Tacoma's, waiting for rebuilding. The customer: Byron Janis, who plans to use it for recordings in New York and Paris.
Selling the remodeled Pantages theater a rebuilt "Centennial" with a new experimental soundboard had been Manteufel's coup to date. Janis' love of the instrument rapidly led further: to the Festival of Pianos this weekend --
"It is inconceivable the University could have gotten together this roster of musicians if Byron hadn't vouched for the project to them," Manteufel says
-- and to a Caribbean cruise this winter, on which two Manteufelized instruments will join celebrities like Janis and flutist James Galway for two weeks beneath tropic skies.
Janis' enthusiasm may inadvertently have helped bring into the open the latent conflict between Manteufel and the Seattle piano establishment. The conflict centered on Steinway Grand serial-number 460134, better known as the "Gina Bachauer," purchased by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 1979 in honor of the Greek-born virtuoso, a frequent soloist here. Almost from its first appearance with the Symphony, the Gina Bachauer was controversial. Seattle Times music critic Melinda Bargreen, herself a pianist, tied into it repeatedly, and numerous visiting artist criticized the instrument's wooly tone, heavy touch, and lack of carrying power.
Everybody had a prescription for the Gina Bachauer. Sherman Clay, who sold the instrument to the Symphony, naturally said that the problems were simply a matter of breaking in and adjustment (no piano, not even the greatest, comes off the assembly line ready to play its best). Others suggested that the piano had problems that mere adjustments wouldn't fix. Among them -- he has never been loath to give an opinion -- was Manteufel, and among admirers of Manteufel's pianos were members of the Symphony Board of Trustees. When Byron Janis gave his endorsement to Manteufel's way with an instrument, they were encouraged to ask why Manteufel shouldn't give the Gina Bachauer a going-over.
It is one thing to rebuild 100-year-old instruments; it is quite another to attack the putative problems of a brand-new top-of-the-line instrument sold and serviced by a reputable, still-functioning sales representative. Resentment of what were perceived to be Manteufel pretensions to superior knowledge boiled over, at Sherman Clay, in the Symphony offices, and to some extent in the Piano Technicians Guild itself -- because the man responsible for the care and adjustment of the Gina Baucher is conservative tuner-technician (and pillar of the Guild) Ed McMorrow.
The tempest seems to have died down today, though it led at its height last spring to angry letters to and from Steinway, one angry resignation from the Symphony board, and covert charges of malfeasance, cover-ups, and even sabotage. Today, SSO conductor, manager, and board are unanimous in support of the instrument and McMorrow's handling of it. Manteufel maintains that he had nothing directly to do with fomenting the crisis. But he clearly still thinks he knows what's wrong with the Gina Bachauer, and there's a lingering tension among local piano cognoscenti, who feel that the last shots in the battle haven't yet been fired.
McMorrow professes no anger at Manteufel, but insists that a pianist-turned-builder like Manteufel lacks the experience necessary to make the kind of judgements he makes. "Obi still won't sit down and take a couple weeks to learn to tune," he said last week.
"It took a long time to pull together all the different systems that go to make a piano; you can't just charge in and start changing everything over-night and expect it to come out as good as a piano made according to tradition. I'm more worried than anything else by (sic. Probably "about" would be better) the longevity of Obi's instruments."
Manteufel can be just as crisp in reply.
"I look at a piano as a pianist does. Many tuners don't even play the piano; and they often listen to the instrument from a tuner's point of view, not a player's. But the sound that's important is not what you hear from 2 feet away but what an audience hears 20 to 200 feet away. The same thing applies to adjustment. When you put in hours upon hours of heavy practicing a day, a difference in action weight of a fraction of a gram can be the difference between progress and a painful injury. That's why my actions are so very, very friction-free."
Years ago when they were first starting out, Manteufel and Fandrich used to joke about "hot-rodding" pianos. Today Manteufel doesn't care for the term. "We have made certain modifications in the traditional way a piano is rebuilt; but there's nothing extreme about what we do. The idea is really to get back to the tradition of the piano as a handcrafted work of art. We don't use automotive lacquer because it's new but because it's much stronger than normal wood enamels. The same thing goes for bronze paint that goes on the cast-iron frame.
"We've been ordering strings from Mapes of Elizabethton, Tennessee, to our own specifications for years; now Mapes tells us other rebuilders are doing the same. Our hammers come from Renner of Stuttgart who makes hammers for the Hamburg Steinway, again, to our own specifications. Everybody used to use the finest cashmere wool for bushings; we still do. It's not for looks but function.
"Here's the perfect example: Sound travels from the string into the bridge and soundboard through a nail which presses the string against the bridge. Standard pianos use a soft iron nail; we use a tapered machine-steel pin. Vibrations then travel from the string to the bridge and soundboard with less loss of energy. The pulse that reaches the soundboard is stronger, cleaner; the result is a more immediate response, with less mushing out of the tone.
"It's not just using traditional materials that matters; it's how you choose them. Everybody uses Sitka spruce for soundboards, because sound travels faster in spruce than any other suitable wood. Traditionally, good-quality soundboards have 12 grains to the inch. Sound, which is energy, travels on the hard fine grains. Our soundboards, made from lumber cut from logs compressed on one side by prevailing winds, run 17 or more grains to the inch: Again, the whole soundboard vibrates more as a unit and the tone stays clean.
"You can go on and on. But the key when you come right down to it is not materials but workmanship. A piano can be brand-new and made out of the finest materials, but without loving assembly and finishing it will probably be mediocre. You can take an old instrument, even one not built to a very good design, and by careful rebuilding and modification and tweaking you can pull it into the ballpark of a great instrument. You can mass-produce pianos: but you can't mass-produce a great piano."
So far, Manteufel has rebuilt and sold only a dozen or so instruments, though he has orders and plans for a dozen more in the next year. His long-term ambition is to build a great piano of his own with Darrell Fandrich, who has finished refining the scale design for the Manteufel "Dread-naught" which he believes will be the ultimate scale design for a concert instrument. Manteufel's longtime partner Robert Grafiuos, who works on all aspects of building but takes a particular interest in the appearance of the firm's instrument, has a clear mental picture of the prototype Manteufel: "elegant, with a long lean profile, an immediately identifiable silhouette."
A new Steinway grand today costs upwards of $40,000; the tonier European instruments, with shipping, duty, etc., can run you $60,000 or even $80,000. Manteufel thinks that once he's in production, he can build the best piano in the world somewhere in the middle of that range. (Manteufel now rebuilds other people's pianos, depending on how much has to be done, for up to $10,000; he sells his own rebuilt instruments for $20,000 to $40,000.)
"Once the piano stopped being a piece of furniture in everybody's house," he says, "the market split in two. Today there's a market for strong plain hard-working pianos, practice instruments and the like, and for concert instruments: There's no middle range. I think that's what went wrong at Steinway, back in the '50s: They decided to expand to go after the middle of the market, and the middle wasn't really there.
"The Asian piano ruled and rules the whole lower-price end of the piano business, and I can't imagine anyone investing enough money to set up an American plant that could compete with the Japanese and Koreans on their own ground. The future of the piano in America is on the high end -- the highest end of the high end, where mass-production doesn't count and hand-craftsmanship and musical superiority and superb finishing do. That's where I want to be. That's where I am."