Harpsichord after Andreas Ruckers, Antwerp 1638, built by Adlam Burnett, 1983.
Inscribed on the nameboard of an ottavino spinet (a small tabletop, or even laptop, harpsichord) dated 1710 and now in the Russell Collection of musical instruments at the University of Edinburgh, runs the motto: “Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly). Nothing is known about the builder, one Petrus Orlandus, although reigning scholarly opinion holds that this Pietro Orlando came from Palermo, the length of Italy (and across the Strait of Messina) from the Val di Fiemme in the mountains of Northern Italy where the spruce soundboard may well have come from. Perhaps the preciousness of the natural material elicited, even if indirectly, the maker’s expression of the resonant truth—and abiding guilt—that a living thing had had to die so that his creation could spring to sounding life.
“Messiah” violin by Antonio Stradivari, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.
Some keyboard instrument builders of the present day, such as the Fazioli piano makers and Bizzi harpsichords) tout the quality of their materials, boasting that their soundboards, the essential element of resonance, are carefully sourced from the Val di Fiemme, rebranded in their advertising copy as the Stradivarius Valley. The prospective buyer dreams that her harpsichord or piano will sing like “The Messiah,” the sobriquet of one of the master violin makers most famous, and perhaps most valuable products, now in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. There this “as new” instrument spends its time in a climate-controlled glass case, visible but silent.
The motto of the Russell Collection ottavino truncates a couplet associated with the 16th-century luthier Kaspar Tieffenbrucker, who was born in from Füssen southern Bavaria in the in the northern shadow of the Alps, 170 miles away from the Val di Fiemme: “Viva fui in sylvis: sum dura occisa securi. Dum vixi tacui: mortua dulce cano” (I was alive in the woods: I was cut down by the hard axe. While living I was silent; dead, I sing sweetly.) (The term “luthier” refers not just to lute makers, as one might initially think, but to skilled craftspeople building stringed musical instruments.)
Tieffenbrucker’s name served as a prop for spuriously “ancient” (but masterfully made) violins counterfeited in the shop of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (who, not coincidentally, once owned the Stradivarius “Messiah”) in 19th-century Paris. Tieffenbrucker didn’t even make violins, but mostly guitars, lutes and viols. But they were of wood too, and Tieffenbrucker’s expiatory Latin lines artfully acknowledged the violence that is often hidden behind beauty.
Gasparo Duiffopruggar (aka, Kaspar Tieffenbrucker), engraving by Pierre Woeiriot (1532-1599).
In 2014 Aaron Allen, a scholar helping to shape the subfield of what has come to be known as eco-musicology, published “Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s violins and the musical trees of the Paneveggio.” The article told a heartening, yet admonitory tale of the power of art and careful stewardship of natural resources to hold off the insatiable human desire for wood. The value of violins trumped the rabid demand for planks and masts for the vast Venetian navy being built a hundred miles southwest of the spruce forests on the Adriatic coast. The “Stradivarius” Valley is now in the Parco Naturale di Paneveggio, some hundred miles northeast of Cremona, the birthplace of the violin and also once part of the Venetian Empire.
Cremonese violins are much smaller than Venetian war galleys. Now, a more recent musical technology requires the harvest of the descendants of the trees used by Stradivari.
The Fazioli company makes concert grand pianos that are the battleships of concert stages and billionaires’ drawing rooms. The family business originally produced upscale office furniture from exotic woods—teak, mahogany, rosewood—but turned to piano-making in 1981 under the leadership of Paolo Fazioli. He is a mechanical engineer but was also trained as a pianist and composer. The firm now makes the most expensive pianos in the world. The price-tag on their 10-foot concert grand approaches $300,000. About 170 pianos of various sizes (all large) are now produced in the Fazioli factory in Sacile, a town halfway between the Val di Fiemme and Venice. With an engineer in the driver’s seat of the firm, it’s not surprising that these instruments handle like Formula 1 race cars—light to the touch and super responsive.
The cast-iron frame was the crucial design and manufacture innovation that allowed the 19th-century piano to increase in power so as to be heard in ever larger concert halls and against ever larger orchestral numbers arrayed for the concerto showpieces of the Romantic repertoire. The German word for this construction is Vollpanzerplatte—full armor plate. “Panzer” conjures images of a battle-ready tank. Without the metal plate, the inexorable force of the high-tension wires would accordion the piano into a heap of splinters.
Buttressed by these armaments is the fine- and straight-grained soundboard from the Val di Fiemme. Fazioli draws on the mystique of Stradivarius and the “Forest of Violins” in the marketing of their pianos.
I have played a Fazioli piano in a San Francisco mansion where the instrument stretches out grandly in the living room. Behind it, a picture window delivers a view of the Gold Gate Bridge so close you feel that if the seven-octave expanse of the keyboard added just a few more notes below its allotment of 88 that the extra keys would rest on the span’s towers so that the piano’s hammers would strike the vertical cables and sound them like strings.
Inside, the massive case is veneered in blond maple that contrasts the with brooding, yet brilliant exterior. To open the piano, one props up the lid on its stick and is amazed that the giant, thin wing does not bow or warp. The visual impression becomes one of interior lightness, sound escaping the forces of gravity that the sheer size and weight of the instrument cannot physically defy.
The action—the ingenious mechanism of wooden (and increasingly, carbon fiber) batons, springs and pins that translates the motion of the fingers to the felt-covered hammers—is exceedingly user-friendly: responsive not only to caresses, but also tothe blows of pianistic heavyweights. The instrument is shaped like the lift-giving limb of a bird. Again, the German word for the grand piano is illuminating—Flügel (wing). Maybe one is meant to feel more like a jet pilot than a race driver, flying above the world firing off missiles of art. The biggest Fazioli model is the F-308, which sounds to me like an American fighter plane of the future.
I found the Fazioli all too perfect: too engineered, the sound lacking in grain, the touch wanting of texture. The piano I’ve played hovering above the Golden Gate is more musical machine than musical instrument.
The Fazioli website trumpets the manufacturer’s commitment to sustainability. The company offers other veneers than just ebony, the default-setting for formal venues: after black on a dealer’s drop-down menu, one can choose blue, macassar, pyramid mahogany, red, tamo, or white. Logged, often illegally in Indonesia, macassar is a threatened species.
The 170 pianos made annually by Fazioli count as a whole fleet of giant crafts launched every year. With respect to the materials sourced from the Val di Fiemme nearer the Fazioli factory than those far-off forests of macassar and mahogany, not every red spruce yields soundboard-quality wood. The vast majority of trees felled there go to other purposes. A true accounting of the environmental impact of piano production has yet to be made on this region. Against stiff competition from luxurious, but still cheaper Steinways made in the U. S. A. and Germany, Yamahas from Japan and a host of newer companies, Fazioli has penetrated the global market, exporting its instrument to places as far as you can get from the source of their soundboards.
Nor has the musical mileage put on these pianos by wealthy buyers been measured. These pianos are prestige objects that come from wood that did not sing when alive and is, I suspect, mostly mute now as furniture, even though the most tuneful wood in the world was killed—by the chainsaw not the hard axe—to make them.
Next week: Musical Instruments, Extreme Weather and Material Acknowledgments.
