Bechstein has adopted a similar division of his work. He has two factories, the one in the suburbs, for the preparation of the parts and the drying of the wood, the other in the town for the fitting together of the pieces. This latter is in close connection with the shop. Karl Bechstein, like Steinway, began in the fifties on a very small scale, and in 1860 founded his great house in Johannisstrasse. In 1880 he acquired the first portion of the suburban estate, on which to-day four factories stand. The victorious brilliancy of modern ingenuity is to be seen in the whole establishment. The probation through which the wood has to pass in the yards, then in the dry-rooms, in the store-cellars, and finally when sized in the store-houses of the factories, before it can be used, is a grand guarantee of its suitability. Two important rooms are devoted to steam-power. The one is the planing-room, where sides and lid are planed together by machines of such extraordinary power that the shavings hum about under centrifugal force, and are carried off by an exhaust apparatus. The other is the foundry, where all the metal work is carried on, from the boring of the cast frame to the preparation of the screws. Next, in the upper storeys, in the more distant factories, begins the process of fitting the piano together from the rough parts. The action is provided by a separate factory, the Nürnberg wires are spun, the walls of the grand pianos are glued together in from twelve to twenty thicknesses, the frame is bronzed, the wood inlaid, the ornaments put on, every tiny screw, every spindle is touched up with rare attention, till the instrument gains its speech, and is tested, for the last refinements, in separate rooms. Since the completion of the last building, they reckon on a yearly output of not less than three thousand five hundred pianos, on which eight hundred workers are employed. The proportion of grands to cottages is as three to four, a proof of the enormous popularity of the cottage, for which as a piece of furniture it is so easy to find room, but which, even in its best specimens, can never give to the musician the fulness of tone and the resonance of a grand. The demand for Bechsteins is greater than their factories can meet. It is remarkable that half of them go to England and the English colonies through the London branches; while Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, and South America, share the other half. In a business of such magnitude it is no mere ostentation to record these figures, which simply supply the necessary statistics of the general trade.
Upright Hammerclavier (pianoforte), Italian, beginning of 19th century. Two pedals, one to raise the dampers, the other a “jalousie schwellung” (i.e. Venetian shutters, like an organ swell or the harmonium “forte” action). Richly inlaid. Engraved crowns on the fronts of the keys. De Wit collection.
Bechstein Cottage Piano, “English style.”
So long as the piano was merely an instrument for more or less gifted musicians, it was unnecessary to consider the question which to-day, when it has become a general means of social pleasure, stands in the foreground—namely its treatment as a piece of furniture. The “square” instrument has only certain parts, particularly the lower extremities, in which the style of the time could be expressed. The legs and the feet were, in the time of the Ruckers, baroque; as in the time of the Streichers they adopted the style of the Empire, and in our day that of the Renaissance. The rest of the body was fixed in its main lines by the given natural forms; and has altered very little in architectural relations in the course of centuries. The piano was in the fortunate position, even in the times when as yet little attention was paid to constructive logic, of being a construction, which, from its very aim, gained the most beautiful form. With its gracefully-bending walls, and its natural and yet characteristic shape, the grand piano, in many furnishing schemes of the insipid fifties or the glaring eighties, in many a jerry-built and cheaply appointed house, stood as the single solid and carefully wrought article in the place. The cottage, on the other hand, which too often is meant to be nothing but a piece of furniture, and which with its encasing wood-walls offers only too much opportunity to fashionable taste, has sunk deep into the domestic style, and even to-day has hardly freed itself from these false influences. It would seem that the cottage piano was invented in 1739 by the priest Don Domenico of Mela in Gagliano. Only at the commencement of this century did it begin to spread on this side of the Alps. It offered a grand field for dubious artistic experiments. Now it was treated merely as a sideboard, now as an Egyptian pyramid, now as an altar with figurative paintings, now as the corpus vile for all kinds of marqueterie-experiments. I know only one cottage piano that expresses its essence in characteristic style, and develops its form without grimaces: this is the “English” type, plain and unadorned, introduced into the trade by Bechstein, a principal feature of which is that the legs are continued above the keyboard in a very graceful style, as candle-brackets.