Piano’s Sound Rated 24 Karat

This is the tale of a 24-karat gold Steinway that would make Liberace drool.

First thought: Why?

Second thought: Spectacky!

Third thought: Vegas?

But no, its new home--unless you want to buy it, of course--is in industrial Signal Hill. It sits in a tidy store with classic European pianos, in a neighborhood of new industrial offices and old, dingy upholstery shops.

There, lifelong piano tuner Heriberto Lurgenstein and his partner are the keepers of the $1.2-million piano, commissioned in 1903 to mark Steinway & Sons’ 50th anniversary. A second piano, also gilt but boasting portraits of patriots from the original 13 Colonies, is owned by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

In bright light, the Signal Hill instrument can make you squint.

“I wouldn’t want it in my own house,” Lurgenstein admits.

With the lights dimmed, and its life story told, the piano’s charm grows.

When the ivory keys create music, the deep, gorgeous sound is intoxicating. Even one-handed “Heart and Soul” sounds good on this piano. One theory is that gold leaf mixed into the varnish is the instrument’s secret to an almost organ-like amplification.

“It’s not a piano,” said a professional jazz pianist who works for a Steinway competitor. “It’s an orchestra.”

The life of this oddball piano and the caretakers who owned it along its unlikely path to Signal Hill are marvels of a bygone time, when craftsmen spent years on instruments and the piano was the heart of many a family parlor.

The instrument’s genealogy has been researched from Steinway to its present owner, who entrusted it to Lurgenstein, his friend of 30 years. And the history that follows is offered by Lurgenstein, an Argentine who immigrated in 1965 to Michigan and has rebuilt, restored and retuned pianos for major stage venues and the likes of Arthur Rubenstein and Victor Borge.

When the two special pianos were created, their bodies were gilded in 24-karat gold, their ornately carved legs in 22-karat. One was to be sold, the other presented to the White House as a gift to the country.

They were designed by the head of Steinway’s art case department, Joseph Burr Tiffany, a distant cousin of the famous Tiffany & Co. founder. Two famous Parisian woodcarvers were summoned to the Steinway factory on New York’s Long Island to build the mahogany pianos.

The first owner of the one now with Lurgenstein was a prominent New York banker, William Frederick Stafford, who lived in the Plaza Hotel. He died there in 1918, and his estate returned the piano to the Steinway company.

That year, Benjamin Sawtelle Hanchett, builder of the Grand Rapids, Holland & Lake Michigan Railway and a University of Michigan regent, bought the gold piano for his 16-year-old daughter, and it remained in the Hanchett family until an estate sale in the early 1980s.

A Detroit piano company owner, George Michalski, purchased the instrument, and its rejuvenation began. The legs had been deeply battered by household vacuum cleaners, the finish cracked. Improper cleaning had literally wiped away much of the gold. Layers of an ugly, oxidized paint had been used to cover much of the damage, and it had to be stripped.

Over 14 years, the internal parts of the instrument were restored. More recently, according to a cover story in the Piano Technicians Journal, the refinishing of the piano’s exterior commenced. The work was done by Glen Hart, who wrote the story about his gilding work. “The methods used,” he said, “were the true gilding methods of centuries past.”

A water gilding technique was employed on the intricately carved legs of the piano. Sheets of 24-karat gold were cut into 60,000 individual pieces for the finish on the piano case, Hart said. In all, he said, the process took 16 months. Then the instrument’s owner came to realize he had no market for it in Michigan.

So he got his good friend Lurgenstein to take custody. Even that was a major undertaking. No trucking firm would move the piano, unwilling to accept liability for an irreplaceable instrument. Lurgenstein had to fetch it himself.

He returned with the piano on a Wednesday in December. Initially, Lurgenstein said, the thought was that it would get white-glove treatment with a velvet rope perimeter. That Sunday, a piano recital for a music teacher was hosted at the store, European Pianocraft. As he began moving the gold piano out of the showroom to make way for the 8- to 10-year-old students, Lurgenstein had a change of heart.

“It is meant to be played,” he said.

And thus, the initially daunted children performed their recitals on a gold piano, and never sounded so good.

No Buyers Lined Up Yet

It is hard to imagine the furnishings today that would hold their own beside this piano, but the store has received a few calls. Any offers yet?

“Ha, ha, ha,” said store co-owner Bob Ransom. “Not yet. We had some calls from the ad in the Pasadena Showcase home brochure. A woman called yesterday asking about it. Said she lived in the Bohemian community in the Bel-Air canyons.”

Music teachers and pianists have ogled the instrument since it arrived in Signal Hill.

“This piano is extraordinary,” raved Wini Jackson, a 58-year-old gospel pianist from the South who visits the Pianocraft store regularly.

“The gold was put there, I think, to beckon you to the piano. But it’s the mixture of the history of the piano and the sound, which has a very distinctive gut sound that makes it ring true to a time before.

“It’s like this jewel that’s been lost,” she added, “and now it’s found.”