GRAND OBSESSION

Marc Wienert appears at my door at eight o'clock on a wintry March morning.
He is a fine-boned man, about five foot six, with a mass of thinning, reddish curls pulled tightly back into a ponytail. His sparkly blue eyes are small and hooded, like a turtle's, and framed by thick, half-rimmed glasses. His mouth is pursed like a rosebud, his chin recedes into a short, flaccid neck. Though a blizzard is raging outside, he is dressed in only a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black leather sneakers. The clothes accentuate the pastiness of his soft, expressive face. His long, white arms hang at his sides; one pale hand grips a black faux alligator kit bag, like a doctor's bag.

"You are here so early! What time did you leave Bozeman?" I say as he stomps the snow off his sneakers and enters the house. He does not appear to be at all cold. "Can I make you some coffee?"

"I've been drinking this on the drive over," he says. He holds up a small Nalgene bottle, the kind you take camping, half-filled with dark liquid. Though we've only talked on the phone once, I immediately recognize the voicer's edgy tenor, suffused with emotion and manic energy. He dangles the bottle from his blue-white fingers and shakes it until it froths. "Espresso. I sip this all day every day. It's my fuel. I've been taking sips since I left Bozeman at four o'clock this morning."

I gasp. From tracking his flight I know it arrived from New York at one o'clock this morning.

"It's okay," he says. "This is a normal workday for me. I would have been here earlier but I had to rent a car. Mine can't handle this weather." He gestures to the window, where fat snowflakes drop furiously from the sky.

This is a piano technician's visit of epic proportions. A nerdy, bantamweight superhero—I want to call him Technician Man—has just crossed my threshold, come to save my piano. The whole scenario is operatic. I look at him in wonder. Why is he making this trip? Why didn't he say he's too busy, or the drive is too dangerous?

Marc says he owes Carl Demler, the owner of Beethoven Pianos and my piano dealer, a favor. Carl sent Marc's wife, Connie, to a homeopathic doctor last year and her cancer went into remission. "I wouldn't make this trip for anyone else."

I offer him breakfast, but this he also declines. "Let's get started," he says. His tone is brash; he exudes a punishing intensity. "I have to be back in Bozeman tonight."

Marlene is wearing the garnet-colored paisley shawl my mother-in-law gave me for a piano-warming present. I uncover her, revealing the immaculate black polish finish. As I fold back the front lid, Marc peers at the brass hinge closely, then points to its tiny screws.

"See that?"

I look, and see the grooves in the screw heads are very slightly bent. The damage is almost invisible. I would never have noticed it on my own.

"Whoever tightened those screws? Don't ever let them touch your piano ever again." He sounds angry.

Marc removes the music desk and sets it across the arms of an overstuffed chair. I lift the piano's wing so it rests on the longest prop stick. Marc raises the fallboard and plays octaves, fifths, fourths, a run, and a piece I do not recognize that covers the keyboard. Then he plays some strange chords—"Tenths and seventeenths," he says. "It seems like it's in pretty good tune, for a machine tuning."

How does he know the last tuner used a machine?

"A piano tuning is a myriad of tiny little lies brought together into one great big lie of being in tune," Marc says. "I don't want to diss machine tuners, but a tuner connected to the vibrational reality of the piano who is willing to tell an artistic lie ends up with a better tuning than someone who uses a machine."

Seeing my clueless look, he moves on. "Now tell me what your problems are with the piano."

"It isn't like the piano I played in the showroom," I begin. I feel a bit desperate as I explain, like a patient being interviewed by yet another doctor, a patient who has suffered too long with mysterious symptoms a dozen experts have failed to diagnose. "The action is noisy, the treble is weak and wooden sounding. The tenor and bass have buzzing notes. The bass lacks the full, resonant power it had. The treble lacks sustain. Repetition is poor."

I give Marc the detailed notes I made on exactly which notes have problems. A3 through F#4 have a metallic buzz and a nasal tone. Eb5 has odd overtones. F5 to Bb6 are thin and weak. When I play these notes the action makes a "pocking" noise. From the fifth octave up, the piano has lost its sustaining, bell-like qualities. The sixth octave is harsh and brittle. Only the notes B5 through D5 sound good, have a clear tone and good sustain.

"Uh-huh," Marc says, sitting on the concert artist's bench, turned halfway toward me, reading my notes. He hands the papers back to me. "Now how would you describe what you heard in the showroom? How was it different?"

"Oh!" I exclaim, animated by the memory. "It was a warm, sweet, singing, dark, rich, resonant, complex tone," I tell him. "The action felt like it played itself. The treble was incredibly full, rich, deep, and singing. Yes, a singing tone. It had clarity, roundness, projection. It was lush and clear."

"You are describing what Carl and I call a 'rounded, creamy' tone," Marc says, with evident satisfaction. "Carl isn't like most other dealers. Most of them want you to make the piano quite bright and brash, because that gets a customer's attention. Carl and I like a creamy tone, and he doesn't tell me what to do, he just says, 'Make it as beautiful as you can possibly make it.' That's one reason I like working for Carl.

"Let's get a fresh tuning on here and then see what we have." He opens the doctor's bag and unrolls a brown canvas filled with tools. Out comes his tuning hammer, a bent metal lever with a socket on one end and a burnished cherry-wood handle on the other. I offer to leave Marc to his work, but he encourages me to stay. "I can watch TV while tuning a piano, it doesn't affect my ability to tune to have a conversation at all."

Then he proceeds to prove it by talking a blue streak for the next forty minutes, his arms and hands working swiftly and automatically all the while, as if his mouth is not even connected to the same body.

Most of what is wrong with my piano, Marc asserts, is that it is out of tune. But, I protest, the piano has been tuned. "Many, many times when people think they have a voicing issue, really all it is is a tuning issue," says Marc. Voicing is manipulating the felt of the hammers. Tuning is adjusting the tension of the strings. Each affects the other.

He finishes the tuning, and I sit down to play. The tuning is nice, but I hear the same dullness in the treble. Marc decides to use chemicals on the hammers to harden them. "I really should let these chemicals set for a couple of days, and then come back to do my needling, but if I go out to lunch for a few hours and then come back, it should be good enough."

From his doctor's bag he produces a small clear plastic bottle with a syringe. He shakes it vigorously. "My chemicals," he says. "You probably don't want to be around to smell these. This is the reason piano tuners are so crazy." He lets out a wild cackle at his own joke. He does look a bit like a mad scientist, holding the bottle up and examining its contents.

The Voicer - Continued