A Double-Keyboard Steinway Piano

NYT
July 15, 2007
Music
Let’s Play Two: Singular Piano
By JAMES BARRON

THE instrument could stump contestants on “Jeopardy!”: It has 164 keys and four pedals. Oh, and two keyboards.

The correct response is neither “What is an organ?” nor “What is a harpsichord?” No, the answer involves an almost one-of-a-kind piano from the late 1920’s, which Christopher Taylor will play this afternoon at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y. It is the only two-keyboard instrument Steinway ever made, and Mr. Taylor considers it the perfect piano for the piece he will perform there, Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations.

Bach, after all, specified that the “Goldbergs” were to be played on a harpsichord with two manuals, or keyboards, a surprising command from a composer who was seldom so precise about what instruments he wanted his works played on. But Mr. Taylor does not really base his case for using this piano on historical authenticity, for the second keyboard here will not do what a second manual on an organ or a harpsichord would do.

It does not add a new sonority. The double-keyboard piano sounds like a piano, but with fuller chords and denser harmonies. Unlike an organ with additional stops and pipes or a harpsichord with separate strings for the second manual, the double-keyboard piano still has only one set of hammers and strings. And Mr. Taylor still has only 10 fingers.

But the two keyboards, one with the usual 88 notes, the other with only 76, lets him try some intriguing moves. The shorter keyboard plays notes an octave above the ones on the longer keyboard. Pressing a key on the shorter keyboard activates a mechanism inside the piano that pulls down the corresponding key on the lower keyboard, but an octave higher. So, if he keeps both hands on the upper keyboard, the lower one can look like the keyboard of a player piano, with the keys going down by themselves.

And because of the way the keyboards are laid out, one above the other, like a staircase with only two steps, he can extend his reach beyond what is possible on a conventional keyboard. He can cover a two-octave interval by playing, say, a C on the lower keyboard with his thumb and a C on the upper keyboard with his fifth finger. Other big intervals, like twelfths, are not much of a stretch either.

By filling in some notes in the middle, he can get, as he puts it, “a really massive sound, one-handed.” And with help from the fourth pedal, which functions as a coupler that makes it possible to play on the lower keyboard and have the upper keyboard play the same notes an octave higher, he can zip through fast passages with octaves by playing only single notes on one keyboard. The coupler does the rest.

Having explained all that, Mr. Taylor makes his case for playing Bach on this particular piano that has mostly to do with the visual element of the performance. He wants his “Goldbergs” to be watched as well as listened to.

“This is more like what a contemporary of Bach might have seen,” he said, “whereas the stuff that a modern concertgoer sees when the ‘Goldbergs’ are played on a typical piano is very entertaining, seeing all this tangling of the pianist’s hands. But that’s not something that Bach envisioned, and you can’t discount the importance of that visual effect. I think when you see the hands on separate manuals and see them crossing each other that way, it’s easier to perceive what the voices are.” Of course this benefits fewer than half the people in the audience: only those who can actually see the keyboards.

He got his hands on this piano in 2005. It is a tinkerer’s dream, built to specifications worked out by an obscure Hungarian composer turned inventor, Emanuel Moor. He figured out the riot of rods and platforms just behind the keyboards that looks a bit like a sluice gate in a water treatment plant. But the mechanism inside is not the only thing that is different from a conventional piano. Even the keys are different. On Moor’s lower keyboard they have “hummocks”: little cubes that rise from the back of the keys. Moor designed them to make it easier to play on both keyboards at the same time, using the same hand and playing way in, close to the end of the lower-keyboard key. The keys on the upper manual are ordinary flat ivories.

Only about 60 of Moor’s double-keyboard pianos were made, mostly by Bösendorfer. Chickering, Bechstein and others made a few. Mr. Taylor’s piano was made in Steinway’s factory in Hamburg, Germany, for the industrialist Werner von Siemens, who wanted it for a 450-seat “recital salon” he had built in Berlin.

But Moor had other fans. Alfred Cortot performed on Moor’s double-keyboard pianos, and Ravel was quoted as saying, “I am now hearing my composition for the first time as I intended it should sound.” The influential critic and editor Donald Tovey gave Moor’s design his blessing in 1922 and was still raving about it when he wrote the entry on the piano in the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years later.

Initially, every piano manufacturer in the United States and Europe rejected Moor’s double-keyboard design, saying that it would be impossible to manufacture. So Moor made a prototype on his own, with help from a carpenter or two. The major piano companies eventually made Moor’s piano, but only in very limited numbers.

That — and Moor’s widow, Winifred Christie Moor, who continued to play the two-manual pianos long after Moor’s death in 1931 — was enough to make the design popular among pianists like Gunnar Johansen, who became an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1939. The Moor bug bit Johansen hard: he had two double-keyboard instruments, a Bösendorfer and the Steinway.

But when Mr. Taylor tried the piano in 2005, 14 years after Johansen’s death, he had to figure out which keyboard to play with which hand. This was complicated by coordination problems: the top keyboard is stiffer than the lower one.

“It took me a while to realize that the default would be to have the left hand on the upper keyboard and the right hand on the lower,” he said, “so I experimented. I wasn’t sure what was going to work. Because the upper keyboard is so much stiffer, it seemed to me it might be a good strategy to use my right hand up there. As it turns out, I do make use of that option once in Variation 20 in the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, where there’s this particularly nasty passagework in the left hand. I bring the left hand down, and to avoid tangles I take the right hand up.”

The Wisconsin piano was unusual for Steinway in that the sluice-gate mechanism was the work of an outsider, Moor. But Steinway had had a push from another of Moor’s fans, Wilhelm Backhaus, who wrote Moor in 1928 that he had talked up “the epoch-making importance” of Moor’s invention when he met a Steinway executive in Cologne.

Still, Steinway made only the one piano. Herbert A. Shead, a Moor disciple, reported in his book about Moor that Steinway had asked about making two more but Moor never answered Steinway’s letter.

Bösendorfer made more Moor pianos. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has one that was a favorite of Emanuel Winternitz, the curator of musical instruments from 1949 to 1973. J. Kenneth Moore, a student of Winternitz’s who has the job now, remembers when the Bösendorfer had pride of place in Winternitz’s office. It has since been relegated to a warehouse on the Upper East Side. “I saw where Winternitz said: ‘I don’t understand why this technology didn’t catch on. It expands the tonality of the instrument,’ ” Mr. Moore said.

The Wisconsin piano survived World War II in Europe and was then shipped to New York, where it languished at Steinway’s factory until Johansen heard about it. Then, in 2005, officials at the university called Steinway to discuss having Moor’s sluice-gate mechanism rebuilt. Eventually they sent the “action stack” — the keys and hammers, which slide out of a piano as a single unit — to Steinway’s factory in Astoria, Queens.

There it prompted the same question that dogged Moor: Why? “Everyone has enough problems with 88 keys,” said Michael Megaloudis, a manager at Steinway.

Rebuilding the piano was a challenge because Steinway had made only the one Moor piano. Any schematic drawings were presumably lost when Steinway’s Hamburg plants were bombed in World War II.

The job of figuring out how the Moor action functioned fell to Edward Carrasco, a worker at the factory in Queens. “We had to start from scratch,” he said. “When I took this thing apart, I took pictures, and I made sure I saved everything. I put the springs in plastic bags.”

Some of the springs were broken, and he could not simply reach into the parts bin. “We had to order special wire to make new springs,” he said. He also had to install custom-made pins for the keys to bounce up and down on.

Wisconsin sent the rest of the Moor piano — the long black case with the cast-iron plate, the soundboard and the strings — east a few months ago. It filled the space beside Mr. Carrasco’s workbench as he made more adjustments.

Then, in anticipation of the Caramoor concert, Mr. Taylor and the director of the music school at Wisconsin, John Wm. Schaffer, flew to New York in April to see how Mr. Carrasco was doing. Mr. Taylor plunged into the “Goldbergs” and seemed pleased.

“This piano,” he said, “is one of those ideas someone had to think of eventually.”

M&C NOTE: video available at original story site.