Get me Gerhartz!
Jasper Rees meets the German who keeps the giants of piano - from Lang Lang to Alfred Brendel to Mitsuko Uchida - playing in tune
Jasper Rees
The Guardian, Monday 23 February 2009
Article history
Is this the most powerful man in classical music? Master piano tuner Ulrich Gerhartz at work. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian
It's amazingly easy to disembowel a grand piano. With little more than a flick of his wrists, the blocks are removed from either end of the keyboard and the entire intestinal mechanism - keys and the hammers they are attached to - comes neatly away.
I'm watching this happen on stage at London's Barbican Hall. In front of me is Ulrich Gerhartz, a wiry man in a trim blue apron in whose lap a keyboard now heavily rests. Around us are three pianos with their lids gaping open, each one a £100,000 Steinway concert grand model D.
In an all but invisible way, Gerhartz is probably the single most important figure in the entire piano world, at least to pianists and to concert halls. He's just back from Melbourne, where he set up two concert grands in a new venue. Stored in his mobile phone, he has the numbers of just about every top piano player on the planet. "And their agents," he adds. When Alfred Brendel went on his farewell tour last year, he took Gerhartz with him. When Lang Lang lands in London in April and needs his Steinway set up to extract his trademark maximum-impact sound, who's he going to call? You guessed it. And in the last few weeks at the Barbican, this discreet figure in artisan fatigues has worked with Mitsuko Uchida, Evgeny Kissin, Imogen Cooper, Murray Perahia and Maria João Pires.
But back to the innards. With one hand, Gerhartz has isolated a particular hammer. With the other, he is brushing a clear liquid on to its green felt coating. "There was one note here, an F sharp, that wasn't bright enough," he says. "So I used a mixture of collodium and ether to bring the note out. You apply it right on the nose of the hammer and it stretches the felt, so it makes it slightly harder and gives it a bit more tension." This gives the note more attack and brightness - but the process is not yet finished. From his array of little instruments balanced on the strip of wood above the keyboard, Gerhartz chooses a small screwdriver-shaped device, attached to what looks like a hypodermic dart, and starts pricking the felt of the F sharp hammer nose once, twice, several times.
To call this man a piano-tuner would be to sell him a tad short. Gerhartz, Steinway's director of concert and artist services, is a master piano-tuner, maybe even a maestro. And tuning is not nearly as simple as it sounds. US orchestras specifically request a pitch of 440Hz for an A, while European ones generally go for 441. There is one horror story (from before Gerhartz's time, he quickly says). The Russian pianist Mikhail Rudy once requested a last-minute change of Steinway for a Prom. The Proms schedule is so tight that the windows for technicians are tiny. Somehow, no one noticed that the new piano was pitched at 440 while the orchestra, for some reason, played at 444. They noticed in the concert though. "It was awful," says Gerhartz. "Everybody could hear it. It made the newspapers."
Preparing a concert grand for performance is quite a task. Every note has to pull its weight, every hammer, every string, every key. This is why, when Gerhartz gets under the bonnet of a piano, he might not come up for air for an hour and a half. There is regulating, voicing and balancing between bass and treble to do. His fingers trickle neurotically up and down the keyboard playing chromatic scales. Anyone else would be doing this to hone technique. But Gerhartz is hunting for bum notes. When he finds something, he takes a stick of chalk - which has its own smart golden holder - and deftly marks the wood above the offending key.
Unsurprisingly, Gerhartz, who trained at Steinway's Hamburg factory, comes across as highly meticulous and methodical. I watch as he picks up, for the umpteen-thousandth time in his 20-year career, a short stick and begins to take measurements from inside the piano. "It's a blow gauge," he says, of this instrument designed to read the distance between hammer and string. "The hammer has a certain distance to accelerate before it hits. That has a big impact on the depth of touch - how far you push the key down in order to get the hammer to the string."
Depth of touch is all-important. Some pianists like the piano to be set up so that all they have to do is tickle the key and a note sounds. Others opt for resistance. Do preferences divide up on gender lines? "You could say a female pianist would like a lighter piano, although not all of them," says Gerhartz. "The keyboard I prepared for Mitsuko would probably be slightly too light for Imogen, so Imogen would find it hard to control."
The lightest touch of them all, although obviously before Gerhartz's time, was Vladimir Horowitz. Gerhartz is sometimes asked to set up a piano just as the Kiev-born maestro preferred it - in the delusional belief that it'll make someone sound like him. "Horowitz made an amazing sound with a very, very light, shallow keyboard with a very, very, very bright tone. He could control it and he created his colours with it. But if you gave a piano like that to Alfred Brendel, it would be unplayable for him. Unthinkable!"
And then each piano has its own personality, which gradually emerges in the first year or two of its performing life. It is Gerhartz's job to steer a pianist in the direction of the right instrument. The piano before him is an 099 (naming pianos is not one of Steinway's fortes). This, he says, "has always been a very strident concerto piano", while its younger stablemate, the 826, has "a tone with a lot of depth and brightness - but not brittle metallic brightness".
Steinway has an unchallenged monopoly in the concert hall. Unlike violins, however, Steinways have a brief lifespan, akin to that of a sports star. "To project sound well, with a nice musical tone, you need the pianos to be young," says Gerhartz. At Bridgewater Hall, in Manchester, the youngest is one year old, while the oldest is 12. Now confined to an orchestral role, the latter will soon be put out to grass. "It's like a high-performance athlete who eats the right thing, trains every day, is totally focused on performing," says Gerhartz. "As soon as their training regime goes and they have a normal life, they change." They get fat? "I didn't want to put it like that."
Gerhartz is ever the diplomat. But if anything in the highly strung world of solo performance tries his patience, it's younger pianists: "The problem is they don't learn how to work with a technician. A lot of them grow up in such a bubble of how wonderful they are and they just think, 'A piano-tuner is trade and I'm too good for them.' But it's all about the partnership. Pianists who don't talk to me won't get any service because I don't know what they want."
And talk to him all the leading ones do. His next set of conversations will be with Joanna MacGregor, Richard Goode, Nelson Goerner, Wayne Marshall and Barry Douglas - all of whom are performing this week at Bridgewater Hall's 2009 piano festival.
As he prepares all these pianos in all these empty concert halls, do Gerhartz's fingers never succumb to wanderlust? Do they not ache to explore a prelude, strike up a sonata? He looks sheepish at the very idea. "Not really, no. That's not my job. I come very much from the craft side. I can play a bit, yes. But I'm not a pianist by any means." And with that he gets back under the bonnet, looking for bum notes.
• Bridgewater Hall's Piano 2009 festival runs from Thursday to Sunday. Steinway pianos will be available to play in the foyer. Gerhartz appears on stage in conversation on Saturday at 6pm.
Is this the most powerful man in classical music?
