FREEPORT, Maine — The piano that inspired the concertos of Mozart, the child prodigy, or Beethoven’s sonatas was not the 9-foot-long, 1,000-pound black piano associated with modern-day virtuosos.
“Within human memory, the piano has been a very stable, unchanging instrument,” said Rod Regier, owner of the R.J. Regier Workshop in Freeport, a reclaimed country barn where the former town councilor builds and repairs harpsichords and early pianos.
“It is easy to overlook that there was a point at which keyboard instruments were new,” Regier said. “The current manifestation is a result of a series of patents and manufacturing processes that were developed some time around the American Civil War.”
A modern Steinway or Chickering — often heard during classical music concerts and over public radio airwaves — is nearly identical to the ones produced by manufacturers more than 100 years ago, according to Regier.
“But here we’re dealing with earlier incarnations of keyboard instruments, and those are very different instruments,” he said.
The earliest records of keyboard instruments — instruments with strings that are controlled by keys — date back to the 16th century and the emergence of the harpsichord, Regier said.
On a recent Friday, no harpsichords were underway at the workshop, but there were diverse reproductions of wooden-framed pianos that developmentally spanned the later years of Mozart and Haydn to the golden days of Beethoven and Schumann.
“Harpsichord strings are actually plucked rather than struck with a hammer,” Regier said. “There are mechanisms called jacks at the back of the keys. When you press the key, the jack goes up and a tiny sliver of crow quill on the jack plucks the string as it passes.”
One of the key distinctions between a harpsichord and piano, Regier said, is that a harpsichord cannot be played loudly or softly. The plucking mechanism of a harpsichord exerts the same force regardless of the force exerted by a player in striking a key.
“A really good harpsichord player or composer will imply soft and loud by playing one note at a time or fistfulls of notes,” Regier said. “You can change the volume by the way you play. But from a purely mechanical standpoint, you can’t make a harpsichord play softer and louder.”
However, this sound dynamic changed around the year 1700 in Florence at the court of the Medici family.
“A visitor described an instrument called a fortepiano: ‘Forte’ means loud, and ‘piano’ means soft,” Regier said. “Bartolomeo Cristofori was the inventor, and some of his instruments still exist. I’ve seen them in museums in Berlin, Leipzig. One was on loan to the Smithsonian a few years ago.
“They are pretty remarkable instruments,” he said. “In a way, they were just as imaginative as early people dealing with computers. They were just so different from what had preceded them.”
The harpsichord and piano co-existed for about a century, Regier said. But by 1800, right after the American Revolution, harpsichord manufacturing fell into decline as musicians became fascinated with the flexibility of the piano’s touch dynamics.
“Bach, late in his life, played some pianos, but they were not central at all to his compositional life,” Regier said. “The piano was central to Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart. They would have known harpsichords, but these early Viennese composers were the ones who invented piano music, and the world is more wonderful because of that.”
However, it took a while for composers and players to develop a style idiomatic to the new fortepiano, Regier said, and the piano continued to change as design flaws were worked out during their lifespans.
“This is what the instrument was in Vienna around 1825 to 1835,” Regier said, delicately edging a still-under-construction soundboard into an intricately patterned American black walnut frame.
“The significance of this time period is that Beethoven and Schubert, who had just died, knew this kind of instrument,” Regier said. “Chopin had just traveled through Vienna on his way to Paris and had played instruments like this. Robert Schumann and the virtuosa Clara Wieck were married in 1840 and were given an instrument almost like this for a wedding present.
“Mozart never knew an instrument like this one. He died,” Regier said.
“This is a Mozart and Haydn piano,” he said, striding over to a smaller piano with no visible foot pedals. He lifted the cover to reveal a keyboard with black natural and white sharp keys.
“This is what the piano was in 1790, by the end of Mozart’s life. It’s what the piano was when Beethoven was young,” Regier said.
“Pedaling is central to modern pianists’ technique, but it hasn’t always been,” Regier said. He noted that even most early pianos used dampers to stop sound. But on the earliest models, the device used to lift the dampers was a hand stop.
“You’d have to pull the hand stop out and play and push it back in again, so you couldn’t really incorporate it into playing very much,” Regier said. “This instrument does have dampers,” he said of the Mozart-era model, “but there are knee levers that operate it.
“Having one of these instruments makes them rethink how you pedal some of this early work,” he said. “If you play one of these instruments for an hour, you realize that knee levers are pretty uncomfortable because you can’t really move around, you have to stay in this position.”
Half of Regier’s customers are individuals, he said, and half are institutions, such as the Banff Center near Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his circa 1830 Viennese model piano will be headed when it is completed. Regier pianos also can be found at Bates College in Lewiston, California Polytechnic Institute in California and at Cornell University in New York, among others.
“Most of the people that I am selling to now are very good pianists or piano departments, and these early pianos have become a part of their pedagogy, as kind of a musical laboratory,” Regier said. “The point is not to pretend that everything you do with a modern piano sounds like an early piano. Playing one of these instruments forces someone who is perceptive to rethink how they are playing early piano works.”
Each piano takes approximately one year to construct, he said, and generally range in price between $40,000 and $55,000.
“There’re a lot of parts and there’s a lot of glue,” Regier said.
And all the parts, aside from some metal parts that can be ordered out, are created in the shop or handmade specifically for Regier by other artisans.
Each key is composed of several materials, such as cow bone and felt, and various types of wood, including ebony, pear, spruce, ash, lime, maple and more, each used for their distinct characteristics to serve different purposes.
“The fun element for anyone working in a shop with musical instruments is they’re expensive, but they’re also a piece of furniture,” Regier said. “The people who buy them expect them to be something other than just black.
“Unlike furniture through, when you make a chair, there is the chair and the purpose is to sit in it,” Regier said. “When you make musical instruments, the instruments are not the finished object by themselves. They are a tool for someone else to use.”
Rod Regier, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate with a degree in civil engineering, has been making harpsichords and early pianos full time since 1978. He moved to Freeport with his wife, Shirley Mathews, a retired harpsichordist, in 1979.
For more information about the R.J. Regier Workshop, visit rjregierfortepianos.com.