Building a concert piano is a complex undertaking. The first challenge is to select a suitable piece of wood from which to craft the soundboard – the soul of the instrument. C. Bechstein uses only mountain spruce grown at elevations above 1,000 metres for this purpose. Many other components are crafted from maple, beech or mahogany. A concert piano consists of around 20,000 individual parts – from back posts to casing walls to keys and hammers to the playing mechanism and frame – and the construction of a single piano can take up to a whole year. The role of piano-maker Katrin Schmidt in this undertaking is a particularly meticulous one: Schmidt must tune and intonate the instrument’s 230 strings. Her task is made all the more difficult by the piano’s steel strings, which lose their tension frequently until the piano has matured. And what’s more, young pianos are sensitive to the slightest changes in temperature and humidity. Her work is a tightrope act, akin to making music from a horde of children humming wildly different tunes.
To achieve her goal, she must re-tune the instrument again and again, tightening and stretching its strings. All 230 strings must be tuned at least four times. Applying a tuning lever to each of the piano’s tuning pins, Schmidt must carefully adjust the strings to their proper tension – a task that requires the utmost patience and a fine ear. A tuning metre is used to set the concert pitch – after that, Ms Schmidt must be all ears. “Mastering the process,” she explains, “takes a lot of practice. When I began my apprenticeship I spent three hours every day doing just one thing: tuning, tuning, tuning.”
Next up: the hammer heads. These are the little “mallets” that actually strike the piano strings. It is vital that they are properly fitted. Deviations of a tenth of a millimetre in their angulation, spacing, or height can detract considerably from the tonality of a concert piano. Following this, Schmidt attends to the piano’s intonation, adjusting the hammers repeatedly until the instrument finds its true voice. Each of the piano’s eighty-eight Australian merino wool-tipped hammer heads must be tuned for this. To do so, Schmidt pricks at the felt-tipped heads with an intonation needle, altering their shape, density and elasticity until their timbre and volume are in perfect harmony. An art form, intonation is all but inexplicable. Each and every hammer head has its own inner life and character. “You have to sense it,” Katrin Schmidt remarks on what is perhaps the most sacred moment in the construction of a concert piano. To give a piano its proper voice is to breathe life into the instrument. A craft and a calling of its own. And a feast for the ears