W. Heebner, 84; Revived Music of Piano Greats

Walter Heebner, a veteran record producer who gave new life to a series of unique early 20th-century piano-roll recordings that captured the nuances of original performances by Paderewski, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel and other legendary pianists and composers, has died. He was 84.

Heebner, a Studio City resident who also produced western bandleader Spade Cooley’s popular show on KTLA-TV in the early 1950s, died of cancer Feb. 10 in Burbank.

As a versatile recording director for RCA Victor and Capitol in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Heebner produced artists such as Leopold Stokowsky and Spike Jones. He also recorded Mario Lanza, Tony Martin, Andre Previn, Jascha Heifetz, Frank Sinatra, Shirley Temple, Tommy Dorsey, Roy Rogers, the Count Basie Orchestra, Desi Arnaz and many others.

But it was his transferring to stereo analog the master tapes of some 500 vintage classical music piano rolls of 1905-20--”The Welte Legacy of Piano Treasures”--in the 1960s that Heebner considered his major artistic contribution to music.

Imagine sitting in the room listening to Debussy playing Debussy or Ravel playing Ravel. That’s what it was like listening to Welte piano rolls played by a Vorsetzer, a squat, 700-pound machine with 88 felt-covered, human-sized “fingers” and felt-covered “feet.”

Literally translated from the German as a “before-sitter,” the Vorsetzer would be placed in front of a grand piano and, guided by electronic impulses, play the piano rolls. But unlike player pianos, which roll out only note for note, a Vorsetzer played back the music with the same emotion, dynamics and shading of the artist who originally played it.

That was made possible by the first step in the recording system perfected in 1904 by Edwin Welte of the German firm M. Welte & Sohne.

The great pianists Welte invited to play sat at a special grand piano equipped with carbon rods that extended downward from each key. When the keys were struck, the rods dipped into a trough of mercury and completed an electric circuit that controlled the pressure of an inked rubber wheel turning against a roll of thin paper.

If the pianist struck a key softly, the wheel marked the paper faintly. If a key was struck forcefully, the rod sank deeper into the mercury and intensified the current.

When the rolls were played back on a piano by the companion Vorsetzer machine, listeners not only heard the music but the personality of the original performance. Indeed, when the widow of Italian virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni heard one of the Welte rolls a few months after her husband’s death, she is said to have run from the music salon screaming, “Ferruccio! Ferruccio!”

Before phonographs supplanted the demand for Welte’s Vorsetzer, he had recorded performances of more than 100 pianists and composers.

By World War II, however, the Welte legacy was largely forgotten. But in 1948, an American named Richard Simonton acquired a set of master rolls that had been hidden in a cave during the war.

Early attempts to make modern recordings of the Welte rolls never quite met contemporary sound standards. Then, in 1962, Simonton turned the historic rolls over to Heebner.

Heebner played the rolls back on a modern Steinway--the same concert grand piano used in recording sessions by Arthur Rubenstein--in an acoustically ideal studio with seven sensitive microphones. The resulting sound was better than even Welte could have imagined.

“Those recordings are every bit as good as they might have been had the masters themselves been around to play for the Stereo Age,” Time magazine wrote in 1963.

“I remember we’d be sitting in the recording studio and you’d swear it was a human being in there playing,” recalled Heebner’s daughter Mary.

Heebner produced more than 50 Welte piano roll albums, which were released through his Recorded Treasures company.

Born in Wissinoming, Pa., in 1917, Heebner began studying the saxophone and voice at age 9. By 13, he was donning a tuxedo and playing in a ballroom orchestra three nights a week.

He graduated with honors from Temple University in 1938 and studied pre-law at the University of Pennsylvania. But he had continued playing music throughout school, and music won out over a career in law.

In 1940, while continuing to play clarinet and saxophone in various society orchestras, he landed a job in sales at RCA Victor in New York. While in the Army during World War II, he produced V-Disc recordings in New York for the armed services. And after the war, he returned to RCA, which sent him to Hollywood as its Artist and Repertoire director.

He left RCA in 1950 to produce “The Spade Cooley Show,” which was broadcast live from a ballroom on the Santa Monica Pier. But after three years, he missed the recording business and returned to New York, where he started Capitol Records’ Custom Division.

In 1955, he created a Q-Music Library for Capitol, an eight-hour repertoire of musical cues that is still in use today in radio, television and film.

Heebner also wrote the words and music for 20 songs, including “Purple Islands” and “Eternally,” which were recorded in the ‘50s.

In addition to his daughter Mary of Santa Barbara, Heebner is survived by his wife of 52 years, Claire; three other daughters, Dorothy Patrick of Chatsworth, Lesa Heebner of Del Mar and Toni Heebner of Sherman Oaks; and four grandchildren.