The Bösendorfer

The Equal Temperament

Chapter 21: The Bösendorfer

The morning of the last tuning was a Monday, December 23rd, and the rain had stopped during the night and the city was quiet in the way that Portland was quiet before Christmas, the pace slowed, the traffic thinned, the schools closed, the offices emptying, the city settling into the pause between the work of the year and the beginning of the next year, and Clara woke at six-thirty and lay in bed and listened to the quiet and thought about the day.

She rose and showered and dressed and went to the kitchen and made coffee and sat at the table. The fork was on the table where she had left it. The notebook — Yuki's notebook, the new one — was on the table. The lever was in the bag, on the chair by the door. The bag was packed, the tools arranged in their compartments, the felt mutes in the leather pouch, the Korg in its pocket, everything in its place, the tuner's kit organized for the last deployment.

She struck the fork.

A440. In the morning. In the kitchen. In December. The sound was the same sound it had always been, the same pitch, the same partials, the same decay, and Clara listened to it with the attention she had been bringing to the fork for the past three months, the heightened attention of a person who is approaching the end of something and who therefore attends to each instance of the thing with a quality of presence that ordinary instances do not receive, the quality of being fully here, fully now, fully in the moment of the sound.

The fork decayed. The kitchen was silent. Clara finished her coffee and washed the cup and put on her jacket and gathered the bag and went to the car.

She drove north and east, through the quiet streets, through the neighborhoods she knew — the houses on Hawthorne where the Yamaha U1 lived, the church on Alder where the Kawai RX-5 lived, the house on Savier where the Steinway M lived — and each house she passed was a piano she had said goodbye to, a tuning she had completed, a farewell she had performed in silence, and the city was full of these farewells, was littered with them, the pianos in their rooms waiting for the next tuner, the next ear, the next hands, and the next would be Yuki's, and Yuki would arrive in January and begin, and the pianos would accept her the way they had accepted Clara, without preference, without judgment, without the attachment that the tuner felt but that the piano could not feel.

She turned onto Klickitat Street. The Craftsman house was ahead, the dark green paint, the deep porch, the tapered columns, the house that had been Mrs. Ashford's home for forty-six years and the Bösendorfer's home for thirty-seven, and Clara parked in front of the house and turned off the engine and sat in the car for a moment.

The house looked the way it always looked. The porch light was off — it was morning, ten o'clock, the gray December light sufficient — and the garden was dormant, the beds mulched for winter, the yew hedge trimmed by Jorge, the young man whose work Mrs. Ashford criticized with affection. The house was the house. The morning was the morning. Everything was ordinary, except that everything was the last.

Clara got out of the car and gathered her bag and walked up the steps and knocked on the door.

Mrs. Ashford opened it. She was wearing the cardigan and the blouse. Her white hair was pinned up. Her glasses caught the porch light that was not on, caught instead the gray sky, the diffuse December light. Her eyes were sharp and dark and, today, something else — Clara saw it immediately, the way she heard a note immediately, without analysis, without thought — her eyes were prepared. Mrs. Ashford knew what today was. Clara had told her on the phone, a week ago, had said the words — "the December tuning will be the last" — and Mrs. Ashford had been quiet for a long moment and then had said, "Come Monday. Come at ten. I'll have tea."

"Good morning, Mrs. Ashford."

"Good morning, Clara. Come in."

Clara came in. The house smelled of lavender and old paper and tea, the tea already made, the cups set on the kitchen table, the blue willow china, the steam rising from the pot, and the smell was the smell of Mrs. Ashford's house, the smell that Clara had been smelling for twenty-two years, the olfactory signature of this place, this life, this woman, this piano.

"Tea first," Mrs. Ashford said.

"Tea first."

They sat at the kitchen table. Mrs. Ashford poured tea into the translucent cups and they held the cups and drank and did not speak for a while, and the not-speaking was not awkward but necessary, was the silence before the work, the silence that Clara had always observed in this house, the silence that Mrs. Ashford understood and shared, the silence that was respect for what was about to happen.

"I want to tell you something," Mrs. Ashford said.

"Yes."

"When your father first came to tune the piano — in 1988, the year we bought it — I did not know what a tuner was. I knew pianos needed tuning. I did not know what that meant. I thought it meant — adjusting. The way you adjust a radio dial. Turning a knob until the sound was right. I did not understand that it was listening. That the tuner's job was not to adjust but to hear, and that the hearing was the difficult part, not the adjusting."

"Most people don't understand that."

"Your father made me understand. He came to the house and he opened the piano and he struck that fork — your fork, the same fork — and he stood by the piano and he listened with a quality of attention I had never seen in another person. Not heard. Seen. I could see him listening. The way his body changed. The way his head tilted. The way his breath became shallow. He was — he was entering the sound. The way a swimmer enters the water. The whole body immersed."

Clara held her tea and listened to Mrs. Ashford describe Leonard's listening, and the description was accurate, was precise, was the description of a thing that Clara had seen many times, had inherited, had replicated in her own practice, the full-body immersion in the sound that was not a technique but a state, not a method but a condition, the condition of being fully present in the act of hearing.

"He tuned the piano," Mrs. Ashford said. "And when he was finished I sat at the bench and played — the Chopin, the E-flat nocturne, the first piece I play when the piano has been tuned, the piece I use to hear the tuning — and the piano sounded — " Mrs. Ashford paused. She looked at her tea. She looked at the doorway through which the Bösendorfer was visible, the curve of the case, the dark wood. "The piano sounded like itself. Like what it was supposed to sound like. Like the sound I had heard in the shop in San Francisco when Douglas and I first played it, the sound that made us buy it, the sound that made us ship it across the state in a custom crate. Your father returned the piano to its sound. That is what tuning is. Not adjusting. Returning."

"Returning," Clara said, and the word was right, was the word she had not known she needed, the word that described what she had been doing for twenty-eight years — not adjusting pianos but returning them, returning them to themselves, to their own sound, to the sound they were designed to produce, the sound that the maker had intended and that time and use and humidity and temperature had displaced, and the tuner's job was the returning, the correction, the bringing back.

"You have been returning my piano for twenty-two years," Mrs. Ashford said. "And your father for eleven years before that. Thirty-three years of returning. And the piano has been itself for thirty-three years because of the returning. Because someone with the ear — with the attention, the care, the love — came every month and listened and corrected and returned the piano to its sound."

"Yuki will return it," Clara said. "Yuki will take care of the piano."

"I know Yuki will take care of the piano. Yuki has the ear. Yuki has the hands. Yuki played the Barcarolle and the piano sang for her the way it sings for me. Yuki will be good."

"Yes."

Mrs. Ashford set down her cup. "Clara, I am eighty-four years old. I have arthritis in my hands. The Chopin is slower than it used to be. The arpeggios that I could play at sixty, I cannot play at eighty-four. The fast passages are not fast. The loud passages are not loud. The music I make on this piano is not the music I made twenty years ago. It is diminished. It is compromised. It is less."

Clara looked at Mrs. Ashford's hands. The hands that had been playing the Bösendorfer for thirty-seven years. The hands that were thinner now, the knuckles larger, the fingers slightly curved, the arthritis visible in the swelling of the joints, the hands that had once played Chopin's Ballade in G minor at tempo and that now played the nocturnes slowly, carefully, each note a negotiation between the music's demand and the hand's capacity.

"But I play," Mrs. Ashford said. "Every day. I play every day. Not because the playing is what it was. Because the playing is what I have. And what I have is — it is enough. It is the piano and the music and the room and the morning light and the sound, and the sound is not what it was, the playing is not what it was, but the piano is the piano and the music is the music and I am here and I can hear it, and the hearing is — " She stopped. She looked at Clara. "The hearing is diminished too. My hearing. The upper frequencies are gone. The consonants are blurred. The Chopin is softer than it used to be, not because I play softer but because I hear softer. But I hear enough. I hear the melody and the harmony and the bass and the shape of the music, and the shape is enough, and the enough is — is — "

"Is right enough," Clara said.

"Yes. Is right enough."

They sat with the tea and the words and the silence and the Bösendorfer visible through the doorway, and Clara felt the tightness in her chest that she had felt before in this house, in this kitchen, in Mrs. Ashford's presence, the tightness that was not pain but the pressure of an emotion that was too large for the body that contained it, and the emotion was — Clara did not name it, because naming would have diminished it, would have reduced the chord to a single note, and the emotion was not a single note but a chord, was multiple feelings sounding simultaneously — gratitude and grief and admiration and love and the particular ache of being understood by someone who understood because they had walked the same road, the road of diminishment, the road of "right enough."

"Let me tune the piano," Clara said.

They went to the living room. The Bösendorfer was waiting, as it always waited, patient and present, the nine feet six inches of Austrian engineering and Alpine spruce occupying the room with the authority of a thing that knew its purpose, and Clara lifted the lid and propped it on the long stick and looked inside for the last time.

The strings. The hammers. The bridges. The soundboard. The plate. The pins. The interior that she had been looking at for twenty-two years, the landscape she knew better than any other landscape, and the looking was not a glance but a gaze, was the long look of a person memorizing a place they will not see again, the eyes tracing the curves of the bass strings and the straight lines of the treble strings and the arc of the bridges and the grain of the soundboard, the eyes storing the image in the visual cortex alongside the sound stored in the auditory cortex, the two memories — sight and sound — creating a composite portrait of the instrument that was richer than either could create alone.

She struck the fork.

The A bloomed in the room. The Bösendorfer's soundboard received the fork's tone and transformed it, gave it the warmth and the fullness and the quality of occupying not just a frequency but a space, the Alpine spruce adding its character to the steel's pitch, the wood and the metal collaborating, and the A filled the living room on Klickitat Street the way it had filled it for thirty-three years, the way it had filled it when Leonard struck it and the way it filled it now when Clara struck it, the sound unchanged by the change in the striker, the reference tone indifferent to the identity of the person who produced it.

Clara set the lever on the A4 pin and tuned the A, bringing the string to 440, matching the fork, the three strings of the unison merging into one, and the unison was clean, was alive, was the sound of three strings in agreement, and Clara moved to the temperament.

She set the temperament with the care she had always brought to this piano, the care that was not labor but devotion. Each interval was set by ear. Each beat rate was confirmed. Each cross-check was performed. The temperament was clean, was smooth, was the grid of equal temperament laid down on the Bösendorfer's strings for the last time by Clara Resnikoff's ear, and the grid was correct, was precise, was the product of twenty-eight years of practice and thirty-six years of Leonard's teaching and the ear that was diminished above 6,000 hertz but that was, in the temperament octave, in the F3-to-F4 range, as precise as it had ever been, as acute, as discriminating, the hearing loss irrelevant here, in the heart of the piano, in the center of the craft.

She tuned the octaves downward, into the bass. The Bösendorfer's bass, which was the finest bass Clara had ever heard, the extra nine keys extending the range below the standard piano, the sub-contra notes that were more vibration than pitch, and Clara tuned these notes with the knowledge of twenty-two years of listening to this bass, tuned them to the positions that she knew — from experience, from memory, from the stored data of hundreds of previous tunings — produced the cleanest octaves, the richest sound, the deepest resonance, and the bass came into tune under her hands, each note settling into its place, each string accepting the correction, the piano returning to its sound.

She tuned upward from the temperament, through the mid-range, and the octaves were clean, each one set and confirmed, the ear hearing the beats and eliminating them, the sound becoming still at each octave, and Clara worked with a fluency that was — she noticed it, felt it — with a fluency that was heightened, that was more than usual, as though the knowledge that this was the last tuning had unlocked a reserve of attention, a depth of listening, that ordinary tunings did not access, and the heightened attention produced a heightened quality, each octave cleaner than clean, each interval more precisely tempered than precisely tempered, the tuning approaching a quality that Clara had not achieved in months, the quality that she called "alive," the quality that went beyond correctness to something that was — she did not have a word — that was the tuning at its best, the sound at its most itself, the piano returned not merely to the correct frequencies but to its own voice.

She reached C6. She reached C7. She entered the territory where her hearing was compromised, and she leaned close — closer than she had ever leaned on this piano, her ear inches from the strings, her head inside the case — and she struck C-sharp 7 and C-sharp 6 together and listened.

She heard something. She heard — not the beats, not the countable pulsing that she used to hear, but a quality, a texture, a presence or absence of rightness in the interval, and the quality told her — not through counting, not through measurement, but through the accumulated knowledge of twenty-two years of listening to this specific piano's upper treble — the quality told her that the octave was slightly wide, that the C-sharp 7 was a fraction sharp, and she adjusted, brought the pin down by — she could not measure it, could not quantify it in cents — by a fraction, and struck the notes again, and the quality changed, shifted, became — she listened — became right. Or more right. Or right enough.

She continued up. D7. E7. F7. Each note struck and listened to and adjusted, not by the method she had used for twenty-eight years — the method of hearing beats, counting them, comparing them to the targets — but by a different method, a method that was not measurement but judgment, not counting but feeling, not the ear alone but the ear plus the memory plus the knowledge plus the twenty-two years of this specific piano, and the method was imprecise, was approximate, was not what Clara would have accepted from herself a year ago, but the method was what she had, and she used it, and the top octave came into tune under this method, came into tune in a way that was — Clara checked with the Korg, note by note, and the Korg showed —

C-sharp 7. Correct. D7. Plus one cent. E7. Correct. F7. Correct. G7. Correct. A7. Minus one cent. B7. Correct. C8. Correct.

Two notes off by one cent each. One cent. The smallest deviation the Korg could display. The smallest deviation any ear could reliably hear. The top octave was, within the Korg's resolution, correct.

Clara stared at the Korg's display. She had tuned the top octave by ear — by ear and by knowledge, by perception and by memory — and the tuning was correct. Not perfect — two notes off by one cent — but correct. Within tolerance. Within the range that any tuner would accept. Within the range that the Bösendorfer deserved.

She put the Korg away. She tuned the unisons, working through the entire piano, every note, every three-string and two-string and single-string unison, and the unisons were alive, were the sound of strings in agreement, the sound of the Bösendorfer's voice restored, returned, brought back to itself.

She finished. She set the lever on the rim and stood and stepped back from the piano and looked at it — the open lid, the strings, the hammers, the soundboard, the interior she had been looking at for twenty-two years — and she closed the lid, slowly, the lid descending on its hinges, the interior disappearing from view, the strings hidden, the hammers hidden, the soundboard hidden, the piano sealed, closed, complete.

She put the lever in the bag. She put the mutes in the pouch. She put the Korg in its pocket. She zipped the bag and set it on the bench by the door.

Mrs. Ashford was in her chair by the window. She had been there through the entire tuning, silent, reading or not reading the book in her lap, and now she rose and walked to the piano and sat on the bench.

She opened the fallboard.

She placed her hands on the keys. The ivory. The smooth, slightly yellow surface that her fingers had been pressing for thirty-seven years.

She played the Nocturne in E-flat major. Opus 9, number 2. The most famous of the nocturnes. The one that everyone knew. The one that began with a melody so simple and so beautiful that it seemed impossible that anyone could have written it.

She played it slowly. More slowly than Chopin marked it. More slowly than any pianist would play it in a concert. Each note given its full weight. Each phrase given its full duration. The arthritis in her hands visible in the care of the fingering, the deliberation of the touch, the negotiation between the music's demand and the body's capacity.

The Bösendorfer sang.

The sound filled the room. The sound filled Clara. The bass was warm, the mid-range clear, the treble present — not as bright as a younger ear would have heard it, not as shimmering, but present, audible, part of the sound, part of the music — and the nocturne unfolded in the living room on Klickitat Street in the gray December light, and Clara stood by the door with her bag at her feet and listened.

She heard the tuning. She heard the temperament she had set, the fifths and the thirds and the fourths, the grid of equal temperament supporting the Chopin, the compromise enabling the beauty, the impurity serving the music. She heard the octaves, clean, matched, the stretch correct, the bass deep, the treble clear. She heard the unisons, alive, the three strings sounding as one, the piano's voice full and dimensional and warm.

She heard Mrs. Ashford. She heard the eighty-four-year-old hands, the slow tempo, the careful articulation, the music made by a woman who could no longer play what she once could but who played what she could with a quality that was not diminished but concentrated, not less but distilled, the music reduced to its essence, the melody and the harmony and the bass, the shape of the music without the ornamentation that speed provided, the core of the music exposed by the slowness the way the grain of wood is exposed by sanding.

She heard the room. The acoustics of the living room on Klickitat Street, the reverb of the plaster walls and the hardwood floor and the leaded glass windows, the sound returning from the surfaces and mixing with the direct sound from the piano, the room adding its character to the music, the room that had been hearing this piano for thirty-seven years and that had, perhaps, been shaped by the hearing, the plaster and the wood absorbing the sound and reflecting it and being, over the decades, subtly changed by it, the way a river is subtly changed by the water that flows through it.

She heard the silence between the notes. The rests. The breaths. The moments where the music paused and the piano's resonance sustained and the room held the sound and the sound decayed and the silence arrived and the silence was beautiful, was as beautiful as the notes, was part of the music, was the space between the sounds that gave the sounds their shape.

Mrs. Ashford played the nocturne to the end. The final notes, the gentle resolution, the cadence in E-flat major, the last chord sustained by the pedal, the sound decaying through the room, softer and softer, the chord becoming a whisper, the whisper becoming a memory, the memory becoming silence.

Mrs. Ashford lifted her hands from the keys.

"It sounds right," she said.

"It sounds right," Clara said.

Mrs. Ashford closed the fallboard. She stood from the bench. She walked to Clara, who was standing by the door, and she took Clara's hand in both of her hands — small hands, thin, the knuckles swollen, the fingers curved — and she held Clara's hand and looked at Clara and said, "Thank you. For the piano. For the returning. For twenty-two years."

Clara looked at Mrs. Ashford. Eighty-four years old. Five feet and one inch. The eyes sharp and dark and, today, bright with something that was not tears but was adjacent to tears, was the pressure that preceded tears, the fullness that preceded the spilling.

"Thank you for the piano," Clara said. "For letting me tune it. For letting me hear it. It's the best piano in Portland."

"I know it is," Mrs. Ashford said, and the words were not pride but agreement, the agreement of a person who had known for thirty-seven years what Clara had known for twenty-two, the shared knowledge, the shared conviction, the unison.

Mrs. Ashford released Clara's hand. Clara picked up the bag and opened the door and stepped onto the porch and turned back.

The Bösendorfer was visible through the doorway, the closed lid, the dark wood, the curve of the case, the piano in the room, the room in the house, the house on Klickitat Street, and Mrs. Ashford was standing in the living room beside the piano with her hand on the rim, the way Clara had put her hand on the Steinway's rim, the gesture of connection, of contact, of the hand recognizing the surface it knew.

"Goodbye, Mrs. Ashford."

"Goodbye, Clara."

Clara walked down the steps and along the path and through the gate and to the car. She put the bag in the back seat. She got in the car. She started the engine.

She did not drive immediately. She sat in the car in front of the house on Klickitat Street and looked at the house and the porch and the windows and the garden and the yew hedge, and she listened to the silence that was not silence but the ambient sound of the neighborhood — the rain that was beginning again, the distant traffic, a dog barking somewhere on the next block — and in the silence she heard, or imagined she heard, or remembered hearing, the Bösendorfer, the Chopin, the E-flat nocturne, the melody, the sound traveling through the walls of the house and across the porch and through the rain to the car where Clara sat with her hands on the steering wheel and the fork in her pocket.

She drove home.