MAKERS
One occasionally comes across stories based on the successive owners of a single instrument – E. Annie Proulx’s novel Accordion Crimes or the film The Red Violin, for example. (Such anthology-type stories are called ‘tales of circulation’ if you’re interested.) But I can’t discover one about a piano. If you can enlighten me, I’d love to hear.
The nearest we have, as far as I can tell, is Paul Kildea’s 2019 factual book, Chopin’s Piano. Kildea, a musician who was for a brief time the artistic director of the Wigmore Hall in London, takes the ‘successive owner’ idea and applies it to a very specific keyboard. In this case it is a rather substandard Majorcan upright of six-and-a-half octaves, made by a man called Bauza, which Chopin hired for a while in 1838 when he was living in Majorca with George Sand. The instrument’s main claim to fame is that he composed some of the 24 Préludes while using it.
It turns out that there isn’t terribly much to say about this particular piano for the first 70 years of its life. It remained in Majorca until 1913, when the Polish pianist and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska managed to buy it. She packed it off to her home in Berlin, and the photographs she took there are the only images we now have of it.
