Art Nouveau pianos

Pianos from the Belle Epoque *, or Art Nouveau pianos, are usually pianos from the period from 1900 to 1914.
These high-quality pianos, if they come from German production, have now reached an age of around 100 years. This is the real limit of durability. These pianos can only be put back into a playable state with great effort. What enchants us about these pianos is the wonderful sound that these instruments were able to produce. The so-called soundboard is primarily responsible for this. It is produced with high quality pianos made from European mountain spruce, which grows at altitudes of over 800 meters. Due to their slow growth, these trees have particularly dense annual rings, which gives this wood its exceptional vibration properties. However, such a tree takes around 300 years to have the necessary properties that it can be used as soundboard wood. The wood quality is absolutely dependent on the climatic conditions under which it grows. Trees that experienced particularly strong changes between summer and winter developed particularly robustly and are therefore extremely capable of vibrating. That is why pianos from the Belle Epoque have a very special soundboard, because these pianos, which were built about 100 years ago, are made of wood, the trees of which grew in the so-called Little Ice Age.
Temperature history of the past 1000 years, reconstructed from various sources. The red line marks the reconstructed course in the northern hemisphere. The black rise on the right is measured by instrument. ** ** The Little Ice Age is an earth cooling that occurred worldwide with regional and temporal foci and is proven for Europe, later also for North America, Russia and China and now even in the polar ice cores. During this time, very cold, long winters and rainy, cool summers often occurred. In the 15th century, the Baltic Sea completely froze at least twice. In the middle of the 17th century and also up to the middle of the 19th century, the glaciers penetrated twice in the Alps and destroyed farms and villages. Glacier growth during the so-called "Little Ice Age" was the strongest since the last long-lasting icing of the current ice age. The canals in the Netherlands were frozen over for a long time every winter, in London a “frost annual market” took place several times on the frozen Thames. In winter 1780, New York Harbor could be safely crossed on ice. The ice sometimes remained on the Great Lakes in North America until June. ** Source: Wikipedia
new spruce wood
Fichtenholz von 1740
Spruce wood from 1740
Unfortunately, such valuable woods are no longer available to us today. For this reason, these pianos from the Belle Epoque are an almost priceless supplier of raw materials. If you look at the changes in the aged wood under the scanning electron microscope, you can easily understand what gives these pianos their extraordinarily beautiful sound. Therefore, there is only one solution that is acceptable to us for pianos from this era: No "general overhaul"! We will completely rebuild these instruments for you. We disassemble these instruments into all their individual parts. The tonewood is then dried in a controlled manner in the drying chamber so that we can completely rebuild the piano from these components. The soundboard is newly glued and stripped so that the soundboard arch, which is so important for the good sound, can be restored. Then the soundboard is given a new coat of paint to protect it from moisture and other environmental influences.
restaurierter Resonanzboden
restored soundboard
By the way, such soundboard wood is much less prone to cracking than new ones. Because these woods were not artificially dried in a rapid process, as is customary today in industrial piano construction - they were naturally air-dried for many years and could therefore relieve any tension that could lead to cracks. Likewise, the newly created soundboard arch will last longer than that of a new soundboard, whose wood has been artificially dried. It should be noted that a large part of the cheaper new pianos only have a veneered soundboard (no solid wood). These layer-glued soundboards are built on the plywood principle, which you can also hear. The cast frame is checked for cracks and repainted. The cast frame is not a wearing part. Cracks in the cast frame only occur due to design errors, casting errors or due to massive violence. It can therefore be assumed that a cast frame that does not tear within a year will not do so later if it is not subjected to massive violence. After casting, new cast frames still have great tension in the material, which is caused by the different material thicknesses and the resulting rapid cooling. Therefore, the cast frames must be annealed after casting and stored for at least 6 months so that these tensions are largely relieved. The reed block (usually made of solid beech) is checked for cracks. If it shows cracks, it will be renewed. Cracks in the reed block usually only occur if the reed block wood has not been dried long enough, so that due to the residual moisture in the wood, tensions developed, which then led to the formation of cracks. An approximately 100-year-old crack-free tuning stick will almost certainly no longer tear; the strings and tuning pegs will be replaced by new ones. Likewise, all wear parts (hammer heads, damper felts, axles and springs) are replaced in the mechanics, so that the instrument has the life expectancy of a high-quality new piano afterwards. But in the end we benefit from the quality of this high-quality old soundboard wood, which due to its age and its different climate history (significantly colder winter) has much better vibration properties than new soundboard wood. The quality of these pianos rewards the great effort that we put into this. Even if it were easier to sell cheap new pianos.
Pianos from the Belle Epoque Good pianos reach an age of 70 to 100 years. This means that the physical limit of durability is reached even with very good pianos. Each individual string generates a tensile load of around 700 Newtons (this corresponds to approx. 70 kg), so that the total tensile loads of all strings is over 16 tons (16,000 kg). This tensile load is held by the static friction resistance of the tuning pegs against the tuning stick (see sketch).
Saitenzuglast
Saitenzuglast
The resultant of this tensile load also affects the curvature of the soundboard, which is lost over time, depending on the quality of the soundboard wood. If this curvature is no longer present, then a relatively large amount of energy runs into the floor bearings. This energy is lost to us as sound energy, because there the soundboard is firmly connected to the rest and can therefore no longer vibrate the soundboard wood there. It affects the energy balance roughly like heating with the windows half open. Our model for an effective use of the energy entered via the keystroke is once again nature. When the beach runs flat, we observe that the waves become smaller towards the shore, which is caused by the concave shape of the lake bed. We achieve the same effect through the convex curvature of the soundboard. The energy that flows into the soundboard is negligibly small, so that the majority of our input impact energy is used for sound generation.
Resonanzboden im Querschnitt
Soundboard in cross section (the dimensions are examples)
It goes without saying that the ravages of time on mechanics with its many moving parts have done the rest, of course.
Undamping mechanism from Renner
* (Belle Époque [bɛleˈpɔk] (French for "beautiful epoch") is the term for a period of around 30 years around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, mainly in Europe. The exact date is not binding is called the period from 1884 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) Source: Wikipedia
**ReconstructionsThe reconstructions used, in order from oldest to most recent publication are:(dark blue 1000-1991): P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett, and S.F.B. Tett (1998). "High-resolution Palaeoclimatic Records for the last Millennium: Interpretation, Integration and Comparison with General Circulation Model Control-run Temperatures". The Holocene 8: 455-471.(blue 1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophysical Research Letters 26 (6): 759-762.(light blue 1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). "Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction". Ambio. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). "Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years". Science 289: 270-277.(lightest blue 1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). "Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network". J. Geophys. Res. 106: 2929-2941.(light green 831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). "Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability". Science 295 (5563): 2250-2253.(yellow 200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). "Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia". Geophysical Research Letters 30 (15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.(orange 200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). "Climate Over Past Millennia". Reviews of Geophysics 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143(red-orange 1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). "Merging Information from Different Resources for New Insights into Climate Change in the Past and Future". Geophys. Res Lett. 31: L13205. doi:10.1029/2004GL019781(red 1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). "Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data". Nature 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265(dark red 1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). "Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records". Science 308: 675-677. doi:10.1126/science.1107046(black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.Documentation for the most recent update of the CRU/Hadley instrumental data set appears in: P.D. Jones and A. Moberg (2003). "Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001". Journal of Climate 16: 206-223.
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