In Utah, pianos are like basketball hoops — everybody's got one. Utah has more pianos per capita than any other state. It has the highest ratio of piano technicians and dealers, and is still home to one manufacturer.
It also has the most students per capita, even though most of them quit, ultimately breaking the heart as well as that famed feeble bargain of the exasperated parent: "You can quit when you can play every song in the hymnbook."
So, not unlike those hooped monuments to a passed-over dream in thousands of driveways, many pianos just sit in living rooms, heirlooms in waiting, collecting a lot more dust than interest from the passers-by.
"I can't really explain Utah's thing for pianos, but obviously I'm glad they have it," says Rick Baldassin, president of Baldassin Performance Pianos in North Salt Lake and the Utah Symphony's piano technician. Baldassin guesses that pianos represent people's desire to connect to their pioneer heritage and to a noble method of making music.
Hannes M. Schimmel-Vogel believes people like having a piano around, played or not, because it feels good to have the most widely used instrument of all time in the next room. "And pianos were there when music came to be," Schimmel-Vogel says.
He's philosophical about the good old piano nowadays as the new president-in-training of arguably the best old piano manufacturer in the world. Schimmel is the only German piano company still owned and operated by the original founding family, now in its fourth generation.
His livelihood and that of the 226 employees at Schimmel Pianos in Braunschweig, Germany, depend on him finding a place for the piano in the future. Schimmel-Vogel, 31, was in North Salt Lake last week visiting Baldassin, his friend and only Utah dealer. Schimmel-Vogel is an exporter and businessman by training. He married into the family, is unabashedly not musical and has had to learn to appreciate the piano and how difficult they are to make. He spends half of every day, starting at 6:45 a.m., working in the factory. "They think it's important I learn everything I can about what goes into making our pianos."
What goes into a Schimmel piano is good enough that they are often cited as the best piano most people never heard of. "Schimmel has higher-quality materials, design and workmanship than many other well-known brands that cost a lot more," says Baldassin, who lists Schimmel first in a group of brands named on his business cards. The Piano Book, a kind of Consumer Reports on pianos by Larry Fine, states that Schimmel regularly receives more rave reviews from players than any other brand.
Pianos for four of the past six Gina Bachauer Young Artists International Piano Competitions held here have been supplied by Schimmel. One of their famous clear acrylic grands resides in The Roof restaurant in the Joseph Smith Building. But does a small, 116-year-old company relying on a 400-year-old contraption of strung wire and felt hammers teeter-tottering on little sticks of wood really have a future, especially now that computer programs digitally mimic Schimmels and every other real piano for a fraction of the price of a real one? (Schimmels run from $12,000 to over $60,000.) Digital pianos don't cost $200 to move, and they never go out of tune.
"I've had to ask myself, 'Can this really keep going?' But I think even if digital pianos are the size of a Walkman, plenty of people will still want the real thing," he says. "People thought at one time that synthesizers were going to take over, but the fact is no matter how good the technology gets the best they can hope for is to sound like a real piano. And nothing will ever completely copy hammers hitting strings and the overtones interacting. It's all those little nuances that can't be copied but I'm pretty sure will always be appreciated."
The company has about 60 dealers in the United States and about 200 worldwide. It just introduced a 5-foot, 7-inch piano, their version of a baby grand. They annually produce about 3,000 uprights, or "verticals" as Schimmel-Vogel calls them, and about 800 grands. Most pianos take between eight months and a year to build. Uprights list for between $12,000 and $15,000; grands from $33,000 to about $60,000. In piano making, despite each one having about 10,000 precision parts, "so much of what it's about can't be measured," he says. "The perfect piano has yet to be built and probably never will be. But we will keep trying to capture what you might call the soul of the piano. It's difficult to describe or measure, but it's definitely not something you can fake."
E-MAIL: jthalman@desnews.com