And while Ingo is proud of the current Steinways, he laments there are no longer any of his generation of craftsmen, whose work has been baked into the very piano he is tuning. Steinway, who brought Ingo to this country to ensure the quality of the pianos being constructed in his eponymous New York factory. Watching him work, I can appreciate the ancient art in which he has been trained. I feel the shame of not having continued my lessons as my mother wished. He tells me the action on my piano has become stiff from underuse and urges me to find ways to have the piano played more often. A master of the piano, he works alone, with no apprentice to watch him gently tugging on the tuning wrench to loosen or tighten the strings. He has often been asked to set up programs to train tuners, he says, but nothing has come of it.
Of course, they have to have a basic ear for the sounds, but one does not have to be musical or skilled.” I ask if he has trained successors, and he confesses he has not. As I sit across the living room while he works, I ask Ingo whether he could teach anyone - even me - to tune a piano. He speaks fondly of each of them, though none was able to tune a piano. Ingo has tuned pianos for such luminaries as Arthur Rubinstein, Marian McPartland, George Shearing and Leonard Bernstein. He knows where this piano spent much of its life - “an elderly woman on Park Avenue owned it and I took care of it” - and was pleased when he found a welcoming new home for it. To him, my piano is an old friend, his visits to it like returns to his childhood neighborhood. Perhaps the sheep are different.” I purchased the piano from Ingo several years ago, so he knows it well.
“This is Scottish felt, and for some reason it is no longer available. “The felt in this piano cannot be duplicated today, and it makes a difference in the sound,” Ingo explains.
Ingo tells me that the felt in my 1936 Steinway is the original. His father, who once tuned for Sergei Rachmaninoff in Vienna, trained Ingo rigorously, demanding that his son master the construction of the piano before learning to tune one.
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