Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey - Hardcover

Knize, Perri

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743276388 ISBN 13: 9780743276382

Publisher: Scribner, 2008

Synopsis

A fascinating, lyrical memoir about one woman's obsessive search for the perfect piano-and about finding and pursuing passion at any age

How can a particular piano be so seductive that someone would turn her life upside down to answer its call? How does music change human consciousness and transport us to rapture? What makes it beautiful? In this elegantly written and heartfelt account, Perri Knize explores these questions with a music lover's ardor, a poet's inspiration, and a reporter's thirst for knowledge.

The daughter of a professional musician, Knize was raised in a home saturated in classical music, but years have passed since she last played the instrument that mesmerized her most: the piano. Surprised by a sudden, belated realization that she is meant to devote her life to the instrument, she finds a teacher and soon decides to buy a piano of her own.

What begins as a search for a modestly priced upright leads Knize through dozens of piano stores all over the country, and eventually ends in a New York City showroom where she falls madly in love with the sound of a rare and pricey German grand.

"At the touch of the keys, I am swept away by powerful waves of sound," Knize writes. "The middle section is smoky and mysterious, as if rising from the larynx of a great contralto. The treble is bell-like and sparkling, full of color, a shimmering northern lights. A soul seems to reside in the belly of this piano, and it reaches out to touch mine, igniting a spark of desire that quickly catches fire."

The seduction is complete. But the piano far exceeds Knize's budget. After a long and painful dalliance, she refinances her house to purchase the instrument that has transfixed her. The dealer ships it to her home in Montana, and she counts the days until its arrival. When at last she sits down to play, almost delirious with anticipation, the magical sound is gone and the tone is dead and dull. Devastated, she calls in one piano technician after another to "fix" it, but no one can.

So begins the author's epic quest to restore her piano to its rightful sound, and to understand its elusive power. This journey leads her into an international subculture of piano aficionados -- concert artists, passionate amateurs, dealers, technicians, composers, and builders -- intriguing characters all, whose lives have also been transformed by the spell of a piano. Along the way she plays hundreds of pianos, new and vintage, rare and common, always listening for the bewitching tone she once heard from her own grand, a sound she cannot forget.

In New York, she visits the high-strung technician who prepared her piano for the showroom, and learns how a wire tightened just so, or an artfully softened hammer can transform an unremarkable instrument into one that touches listeners to their core. In Germany, she watches the workers who built her piano shape wood, iron, wool, and steel into musical instruments, and learns why each has its own unique voice. In Austria, she hikes the Alps to learn how trees are selected to build pianos, and how they are grown and harvested. With each step of her journey, Knize draws ever-closer to uncovering the reason her piano's sound vanished, how to get it back, and the deeper secret of how music leads us to a direct experience of the nature of reality.

Beautifully composed, passionately performed, Grand Obsession is itself a musical masterpiece.

About this title

Reviews

Reviewed by Eugenia Zukerman

"A soul seems to reside in the belly of this piano, and it reaches out to touch mine, igniting a spark of desire within me that quickly catches fire," writes amateur pianist Perri Knize in Grand Obsession. "This disembodied being is sultry and seductive, as if Marlene Dietrich reincarnated as the soul of this piano, and is using my hands to belt out a torch song. If only I could play this piano every day, I think, I could be the pianist I have always dreamed of becoming."

Knize's dreams were first inspired by her father, a professional clarinetist. "Some people are passionate about music," she writes. "My father was ferocious about it." She studied piano at the Mannes College of Music in New York but went on to other things -- she is currently a reporter specializing in the environment. At the age of 43, she was seized with an overwhelming need to fulfill her musical aspirations.

Searching for a new instrument along New York's Piano Row -- 58th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue -- Knize finds a German Grotrian grand, complete with the soul that she writes so glowingly about, and it sets her off on a three-year adventure of epic proportions. Refinancing her house to pay for it, she has the Grotrian, which she calls Marlene, shipped to her home in Montana, only to find that "in place of the glorious, pure, pealing clarity and sonority . . . is a hoarse, broken voice. Marlene is gone." Desperate to restore Marlene's sound to its former beauty, Knize consults piano experts and aficionados, piano lovers, piano builders, tuners, technicians. When none of the efforts is curative, she becomes as frantic and determined to find the cause as a mother whose child's illness is deemed undiagnosable. She dives into the subculture of the piano from American designers and dealers to European loggers and builders, traveling from the Bronx to Braunschweig to search for answers.

Knize's passion for her piano is intense, and if it seems excessive, she nonetheless hooks you into her obsession with writing that is lucid yet lyrical, analytical yet deeply affecting. From the opening of her "prelude," you know you're in the hands of an observant naturalist with an artist's sensibility: "Maier Christian sits on a log in the sun, his boots half-buried in slushy snow. . . . Several yards farther down that road, four loggers take their midday nap atop the trunk of a felled giant, warming themselves like a family of painted turtles."

Modesty and self-awareness add to Knize's appeal, as does her desire to be a better pianist: "I want a grander, more ambitious goal, one that better fits my fantasy of possessing an innate, neglected talent that will surge to prominence, overcome all odds and my handicap of a late start, and surprise everyone by achieving greatness." When she talks to a fellow amateur who shares her attraction to the mysteries of music, she wonders, "At midlife we're called by the inexplicable. What is it that calls to us?"

Throughout her journey, Knize introduces us to a fascinating mix of characters, including Carl Demler the piano dealer, Marc Wienert the technician, Uwe Gille the loading dock master, and Martin Walter the bellyman (the person who glues in the sounding board, the sheet of slightly curved wood that will provide amplification for the piano). Knize's description of each person is novelistic and evocative. The bellyman, for example, is "boyish: an adolescent's outsized arms, tousled, dark hair, dimples bedded in a nascent stubble, an air of rebellion. But Martin Walter also carries in his gestures a sense of purpose."

Along with its moving personal narrative, Grand Obsession offers a comprehensive lesson in piano making, piano tuning, piano delivery, piano everything, and it's all fascinating. Did you know that "the fastest-growing group of new piano students is adults over the age of twenty-five" or that "for a mere $4,595, you can record yourself playing a concerto with the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra," or that in 1920 "there were many hundreds of American piano makers. Today, there are only five."

What exactly was Knize looking for? "It did seem that when I was embraced by the shimmering beauty of Marlene, I was taken to a place of inner truth," she writes, "or at least transcendence. When I was not near that, I yearned for it, for something half remembered."

The truth is that a piano's sound changes depending on many factors. "The thousands of moving parts can only sustain correct relationships with each other briefly," Knize explains. "A freshly tuned piano is a golden coach that turns back into a pumpkin with the dawn." In Grand Passion, Perri Knize has written a memoir about passion and ephemerality with lasting elegance and grace.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Embarking on piano lessons in middle age, environmental journalist Knize sets out on an ancillary quest to find the perfect piano on a limited budget. She scours North America's piano outlets, immerses herself in the colorful online subculture of piano aficionados and grows fluent in the language of keyboard connoisseurship (a thin, shrill, brittle treble, she sniffs at a Steinway). Then she falls in love with Marlene, a Grotrian-Steinweg grand with the sultry and seductive tone of Dietrich herself; she's so smitten that she mortgages her house to buy it. Then disaster strikes: when shipped from the New York showroom to her Montana home, the piano sounds weird and echoey, and its glorious treble is dead. Desperate to restore Marlene's voice, Knize mobilizes an army of eccentric piano technicians (these lowly craftsmen emerge as wild-eyed artists in their own right), delves into the subtle intricacies that influence a piano's sound and ponders the haunting evanescence of music. Sometimes the mysticism—music 'is a way of exiting the petty self and entering the Over-soul... [i]t's about existing at a certain vibration' —gets thick enough to cut with a knife. But Knize writes in a wonderfully evocative, lushly romantic style, and music lovers will resonate to her mad pursuit of a gorgeous sound. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743276388
• ISBN 13: 9780743276382
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 371