Tuning into musical humour

Alfred Brendel, the great Austrian pianist, and Ulrich Gerhartz, the German master technician have forged a strong working relationship around the Steinway piano, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY

IT IS LATE morning in the Shaw Room in the National Gallery in Dublin. Two men peer into the heart of a grand piano. One of them is Alfred Brendel, the great pianist, a musician who has defined his art with singular grace and humanity; the other is Ulrich Gerhartz, a master technician, who travels the world preparing Steinway pianos for the concert platform and services many in Ireland, including those at the Royal Irish Academy of Music and the National Concert Hall. He has been working with Brendel since 1992.

They have a good rapport. Brendel is Austrian, Gerhartz is German and they share a sense of humour as well as a language. The piano belongs to the Royal Irish Academy of Music and has made the short journey from Westland Row to Merrion Square to be used during Brendel’s relaxed, informative lecture, titled “Does all classical music have to be entirely serious?”, which the pianist went on to deliver some hours later, on Saturday night. Gerhartz knows the academy’s piano, a Steinway B – two sizes down from a full grand – having regularly serviced it.

Brendel’s career, which spans more than 60 years, has had that quality of predestination common to so many great musicians.

Now 78, he began playing as a child, started giving recitals and, in 1949, won fourth prize at the Busoni competition. In 1962, he gave his first public performances of the complete Beethoven sonatas in London’s Wigmore Hall. The rest, as they say, is history – in his case, a major chapter of musical history. Gerhartz’s story is very different; he was going to be an architect and had got as far as doing architectural paintings, and then decided he should learn a craft, such as cabinet making. He arrived at the Steinway factory in Hamburg and began building pianos.

"I am a klavierbauer, a piano builder, " Gerhartz says, "If you had told me in the beginning that I would end up preparing pianos for the great and the good, I would have laughed loudly, but this is what has happened."

Born in 1966, the third of four children, he moved with his parents from Hamburg to Vienna in 1978 and spent six years there. “There was no music in my family; my father was a financier – we went to Vienna when he headed Shell Austria – and my mother is a medical doctor.”

His childhood sounds like something out of a Thomas Mann novel. Gerhartz is quick, animated and tells a good story. He is particularly entertaining on the differences between Germans and Austrians, “most especially the Viennese, who claim Beethoven as their own even though he is German,” adding that Brendel, who lives in London and Dorset, “would say of himself, he is a citizen of the world”.

Gerhartz began working with Steinway in 1986 and has been living in London since 1990. “It is a great base and is the world centre of music. For me it is a good triangle: London, Hamburg, New York. London has easy access. There is a great musical life; there are many specialist venues with pianos in constant use and in need of maintenance and repair. Many of the major musicians live there.”

Whereas every violin virtuoso carries their priceless instruments with them, pianists perform on what a venue provides. Gerhartz is not name-dropping when he mentions Murray Perahia, Mitsuko Uchida, Andreas Schiff, Radu Lupo, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Maria Joao Pires and Brendel as being among those for whom he services pianos. They all play differently and they all have specific requirements from a piano. Depth of touch holds the secret. Some players request the piano be set to respond to the lightest of touch, others prefer resistance. And they all prefer Steinway.

It is more than a famous brand, it is a question of world domination, he laughs. How many Steinways are in existence? Without pause, he replies “586,000 – over half a million.” Until recently about 4,000 were built each year, but production has been affected by the recession and it is down to 3,500. It takes a year to build a piano. The average price of a full concert grand is £100,000. They weigh 500 kgs, about the same weight as an average-sized horse. A mixture of hard and soft woods is used, and central to everything is the soundboard, always made of spruce.

So much for the statistics. The Steinway story began when a German-born cabinet maker, Henrich Englehart Steinway, who had built his first grand piano in 1836, in his kitchen, emigrated to New York. He arrived there in 1849 with all but one of his sons and began building pianos. By 1853 business was going so well that the family established a Steinway factory. London Steinway Hall was opened in 1875 as a sales outlet. This was followed five years later by the founding of the Hamburg factory where all the European Steinway pianos are made. The New York factory caters for the southern hemisphere.

Transporting pianos can be problematic. Gerhartz recalls arriving in Switzerland to prepare a piano which had been shipped there: “As soon as I opened it and saw the damage, I realised it must have been dropped from quite a height.” But the modern piano, its evolution initially caused by the demands of no less an artist than Beethoven, is a tough instrument. For ordinary pleasure-playing, a piano, tuned once a year, can last a lifetime. Yet concert playing is very different and highly demanding. A concert performer will put huge pressure on their regular rehearsal instruments, never mind a concert piano on which they are performing for the first time. “Concert pianos such as these, in this use, peak between the age of three and five. By 10, they should ideally be retired,” says Gerhartz.

It takes a minimum of 90 minutes, and sometimes far longer, to service and prepare a piano, regulating, voicing and balancing every note between bass and treble. There are other factors, too – some orchestras play at a different pitch. Aside from his technical expertise, musicians like Gerhartz. He inspires confidence. He will persist with an instrument until he is absolutely satisfied with the clarity of the sound. And he, in turn, loves working with musicians. “I get to work with people I admire, through my part in all of this.” He gestures wide with both hands. “I have got to know people I admire, like Alfred Brendel.”

A TALL, LACONIC MAN, Brendel is very droll, possessed of good comic timing. His farewell concert appearance in London, in October 2008, inspired tears of joy at the career, sorrow at its passing. He took his final bow in Vienna in December. Brendel has always been unique, an intellectual with a very human approach to music. He is also a poet and has written widely on music. It was Brendel who once admitted to an interviewer that he had written a poem “in which Beethoven murders Mozart in order to take full possession of the key of C Minor”.

This playfulness underpinned Brendel’s lecture, which demonstrated how effectively humour can be used in a potentially technical paper. Central to Brendel’s thesis is the instrumental wit evident in the work of Haydn and Beethoven. Haydn was known to have an innocent sense of mischief and a comic style; Beethoven, for all his woes, including the premature onset of deafness, had an earthy sense of fun. Brendel drew on the Diabelli Variations as he set out to prove “that humour, wit and irony are indeed crucial elements of certain works of great music, particularly by Haydn and Beethoven”.

The audience seized on every musical interlude as if it were manna from heaven, which it was, while the pianists present knew exactly how difficult a feat Brendel was not only attempting, but executing, with style.

He mentioned having consulted a 19th-century German music dictionary for an entry on humour – which he duly found. “There is no mention of humour in the New Grove,” he said. One thing years as a concert performer alerted him to was the amount of coughing to be heard during performances, “but rarely laughter”.

“Man thinks, God laughs,” quoted Brendel, and he stressed the differences between Mozart’s comedy, which was mainly vocal, and the instrumental variety used by Haydn and Beethoven. With ironic regret he pronounced “there is no humour in Chopin or Liszt”.

Interestingly, the humour he perceived was more playful than wry or ironic. And there is always the effort of arriving at the composer’s intention. “To expect a player to radiate amusement is a tall order,” he conceded, “players look unduly grim.” As he pointed out: “you cannot sit there starting the Moonlight sonata with a smile on your face”.

EARLY IN THE LECTURE, Brendel said with open wonder “I don’t know if the public in Handel’s time ever laughed during a performance”. There is no record. Brendel, who has a scholarly interest in music history, engaged with his audience, even pushed it into looking at familiar pieces in a different way.

Celebrity is a curious thing; many people walked up to Alfred Brendel simply to say hello and thank you – not just for a clever lecture but for the years of sublime artistry in performance and recordings (many of which were recorded live). If the Royal Irish Academy of Music intends to follow this event with further invited guest appearances from great performers, there will be very many happy music fans queuing for tickets. Ulrich Gerhartz has no difficulty admitting he is content, even if his life is chaotic and he lives “on call” to the needs of great pianists. If he had one wish, what would it be? “Easy – to have been able to present Beethoven with one of our pianos.”