arts and entertainment Robot Pianist Back At Work

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30451, 27 May 1964, Page 13

arts and entertainment Robot Pianist Back At Work

A Venezuelan woman known as the “Valkyrie of the keyboard” who played a concert for Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1863 is one of the 21 turn-of-the-century pianists whose playing was recorded in 1963 by the use of the most elaborate player-piano invented. The pianist was Teresa Carreno and she recorded her playing in 1906 on the piano of a German inventor named Edwin Welte. She was one of the many pianists who flocked to the Rhine castle where Welte had his recording apparatus. They stayed as guests and played on impulse. Welte had taken the effort and unease out of the piano-roll recording and the results were superior to any other method. in ordinary player-pianos, the keys had to work levers and bellows, which stiffened

the action and distracted the artists.

Welte used electrical contacts to code the information. When a key was struck an electrical circuit was completed and the exact force and duration of the stroke—nearly every subtley of the pianists’ expression—was sicnailed. “Epoch-Making” The famous conductor, Arthur Nikish, called the de-epoch-making. He said: The reproduction of the pieces played by an artist on the apparatus is in every respect (whether it concerns technique or musical and poetical elements) such a wonderfully natural one, that it is difficult to believe that the artist bimslf is not present and performing personally.” The young Beethoven scholar, Artur Schnabel, said: “Instead of all traces of his art disappearing with the last note played, the pianist has now the consoling certainty that this performance will survive him.” Other artists were equally awed and fascinated by the machine, and talked about it, especially to each other. Welte soon had all the candidates for immortality that he could handle

No player could reproduce these extraordinary rolls adequately so Welte invented a machine that could. It was not a piano at all, but a robot pianist, huge, oblong and equipped with felt-covered fingers. It could be rolled on casters in front of a piano—any piano—and play it He called it a Vorsetzer, a “sitter-in-front" Perfectionist Dream But the Welte constructions did not conquer the musical world. They were not Intended to. They were not commercial, being fantastically costly and in need of continual expert maintenance. They were a perfectionist inventor’s dream made real. Few were made and, after World War I, none. The legend lived through, and intrigued enthusiasts in the field. A Californian radio executive named Richard C. Simonton decided in the late 1940’s to see if he could find some of the fabled Welte piano rolls. He found a collection hidden in a barn in the Black Forest. He tried recording them on the spot, using Welte’s own Vorsetzer and locally borrowed recording equipment. The resulting records were bad, but promising. Later Simonton smuggled some mas-

ter rolls to the American zone for another attempt. A German recording company made an attempt of its own and in 1958, soon after Welte’s death in his eighties, issued some 25 lOin LP’s from Welte’s piano rolls. Surviving Vorsetzer Simonton met a Texas geologist named Kenneth Caswell who had patiently rebuilt one of the few surviving Vorsetzers. They found a recording executive willing to take the risk, and with the best Steinway they could find —one reserved for Anton Rubenstein for his West Coast concerts—began taping. Reservations The release of the first three LP’s containiing 21 pianists, in the United States and Britain gained only reserved acclaim from the critics. One said the piano rolls were to be distrusted and to be approached with great caution. Some hanky-panky could be accomplished—technicians could raise and lower, perforations to equalise a pianist's' scale or to correct wrong notes. There were also handicaps. Dynamics were restricted and pedal effects were rudimentary and there was a limit to the subtlety of touch. In many cases, however, the rolls are the only documentation of the performers in question. They give the scholar and musician an index of style and illustrate a nine-

teenth century school of music to which the modern precept of fidelity to the printed note was unknown. First Broadcasts On Thursday evening at 6.55, 3YC will begin the first of a series of six broadcasts from these recordings. Teresa Carreno will be heard playing Liszt’s- Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 and Chopin’s Nocturne in G Major, and Josef Hofman will be heard playing Mendelssohn’s Andate and Rondo Capriccioso. Carreno (1853-1912) was known as the "Valkyrie of the keyboard” for the verve and vigour of her playing.' She was the daughter of a Venezuelan Minister of Finance who was her first teacher. The family moved to New York when she was eight so that she might have better musical opportunities. ■ Her sponsor was Louis Gottschalk, the first world-renown American virtuoso and composer. A few years after her debut in 1862 she went to Europe. Too Young To Play Hofman (1876-1957) was bom in Poland and began to study the piano at 34. He made his debut at six and was called in his seventh year “a musical phenomenon” by Anton His first American concert tour in 1887 was stopped after 40 concerts by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. A benefactor supported the family and enabled Josef to study. At 16 he was launched on his career again.