The Contemplative Eye

Ritual time.

When Melvin Fletcher came round on Monday to tune our piano.

Mel’s a tall, quiet man from an old New England family who stands in front of the instrument, staring into space and tuning entirely by ear. “You’re my only customer who has an Érard,” he said after a while. It’s a French piano, a massively heavy upright from 1926 with a rosewood veneer and ornate inlaid brass logotype. When we moved it from house to house years ago, it took four burly workers to pick it up, and they grunted in surprise at its avoirdupois.

Mel showed me the changes he was making. Each key and hammer mechanism comes complete with multiple screws and pins that can be adjusted to reset the distance of the resting hammer from the wire, the distance to the hammers on either side, the distance the hammer falls back after striking the wire, and more.

The distance the keys travel downward when struck can be adjusted, too, by adding or removing washer-shaped pieces of punched-out paper on a post under each key. Mel removed a handful of these and showed them to me: They were ordinary, old scrap paper from the late 19th and early 20th century, many covered with tiny Victorian handwriting in faded ink, as from an accountant’s ledger.

Mel knows remarkable “lost” things about pianos and their lore, and has tuned and repaired historic instruments from around the world. But he said he didn’t know much about Érards. I printed out for him the Wikipedia’s entry on the company’s founder, Sébastien Érard (born 1752). Sébastien was an instrument maker who worked for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, among others. His innovations led to the modern grand piano and chromatic harp, and his pianos were admired (and owned) by Beethoven, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Verdi. Liszt, the world’s first “superstar” mega-concert pianist, toured with an Érard.

Mel expressed polite puzzlement about the Wikipedia, wondering how an “encyclopedia” could be reliable when it was written by anyone who felt like it. I tried to explain that a given topic—say aluminum bauxite—naturally attracts people who are interested in and informed about such a thing and who successively improve each other’s work, with the result that the quality of many entries creeps upward. But Mel was silent.

“Now Mel,” I said, “wasn’t it you who first told me most of these things about Érards, on earlier visits? Or is your gray matter slipping?”

“It is,” he said. “But gracefully.”

Mel told me he used to believe his great-grandfather Elijah Fletcher was a railroad engineer, i.e., a man who ran locomotives. But then he discovered that Elijah was actually an engineer who designed and built covered bridges for railroad lines (and roads) in northern New England. Mel recently found two, and possibly four, such bridges still standing in New Hampshire.

He also found the original Fletcher homestead, a farm from the mid-18th century, with two well-preserved tombstones in the yard, for a Fletcher father and son with the same first name, each of whom had married women with the same first name.

When he was done, Mel asked shyly for an extra $5 to help defray the cost of gasoline. (He lives inland.) I remarked on the size of his Buick, and he explained that GM is the only maker whose cars are big enough to hold a grand-piano mechanism on the back seat, a convenience in his line of work.

Ritual concluded.

Then, alone in the house, I opened an old fake-book of mine, leafed through the first couple of pages, and played “Abraham, Martin and John.”