加拿大著名的海资曼钢琴公司

海资曼钢琴

一位大师的回归
加拿大著名的海资曼钢琴公司
国家邮报，1999年6月
      仔细看，你仍然可以看到在多伦多皇后区和央街拐角处半个街区外一栋优雅的八层楼建筑的南墙上，褪色的字母拼写着“Heintzman and Co.”。从1911年到1971年，“Heintzman Hall”是这个国家有史以来最负盛名的钢琴制造商的辉煌时间，在20世纪20年代初，这样的制造商不少于28家。在那些日子里，客厅里没有钢琴，房子就不是家，海资曼通过18家分店和13家分销商的网络满足了人们对乐器的需求。
      如今，海资曼钢琴起源于1860年的钢琴，据说塞奥多·海资曼在多伦多的厨房里独自组装了一架钢琴乐器，钢琴在全国各地的学校、音乐学院和家庭中随处可见。许多建筑已经被毁坏了几十年，有些是被忽视的传家宝，但是，经受了多年考验的海资曼钢琴没有屈服于干燥的空气或湿度，也没有几十次调音损坏，证明了乐器的品质名誉：它们的部件和声音都是最高质量的，可以说，伟大的海资曼钢琴立式琴是世界上最好的。当该公司于1986年停产时，作为加拿大最后一家关闭工厂的公司之一，结束了一个时代。
      因此，当你走进一家当地的音乐商店，发现金灿灿的“海资曼”(Heintzman)标识从闪闪发光的乌木色立式钢琴，钢琴在地板上站立时，你会感到惊讶。尽管对于钢琴在温尼伯的进口商凯西·席普曼(Casey Siepman)来说，利用海资曼的遗产是一种很好的营销意识。
      “这是一个伟大的旧名字，我想如果我能取这个名字，把它放在一架像海资曼曾经那样的钢琴上，那么也许我们可以做点什么，”他指着从捷克共和国进口的钢琴说。
海资曼钢琴公司成立
      当塞奥多·海资曼于1860年抵达多伦多时，他带来了他在家乡柏林当学徒时磨练出来的技能。六年后成立的Heintzman and Co，从一开始就取得了成功，但推动公司发展的是儿子乔治。传说，为了获得公众关注，他于1887年乘坐第一列横贯大陆的客运列车前往温哥华。1888年，乔治坚持将钢琴运往英国伦敦的印度和殖民地博览会，维多利亚女王对这种产品可能来自殖民地表示惊讶。到1890年，Heintzman and Co.已成为多伦多最大的制造公司之一，在该市西区的一家工厂雇佣了200名工匠，每年生产1000架钢琴。
      1911年，海资曼大厅（Heintzman Hall）的大门打开，早期宣传称之为“大英帝国最美丽的仓库”。铜门、雄伟的大理石楼梯、柱子、彩色玻璃窗、东方地毯和盆栽蕨类植物，这座建筑体现了海资曼这个名字所代表的所有尊严和精致。
      但海资曼大厅的奢华是由当时最好的橱柜制造商和技术人员制作的数百块最优质的抛光木材制成的。格伦·古尔德（Glenn Gould）在六楼艺术家室的九英尺大钢琴上练习。奥斯卡·彼得森偶尔会在展厅的地板上即兴表演。
      凡尔纳·埃德奎斯特(Verne Edquist)谈海资曼钢琴
      凡尔纳·埃德奎斯特(Verne Edquist)是上世纪五六十年代海资曼钢琴部的首席调音师、调音师和副经理，他自己也算是一个传奇人物。他也是格伦·古尔德(Glenn Gould)的技师，也是这位挑剔的钢琴家在录音过程中的第二对耳朵。
      埃德奎斯特说，“我认为已经来到了加拿大钢琴工业的辉煌，有了海资曼立式钢琴。”他自己的正牌是20年代末的。它是一种基本的主要力量，是为了抵御全国各地学校和音乐学院音乐学生的冲击而建造的。当从乐器的上音域引出一系列和弦时，圆润的、教堂般的钟声，它们似乎奇迹般地悬在半空中。
      海资曼的声音并非偶然。凡尔纳·埃德奎斯特(Verne Edquist)说，音板角落的圆形声学边缘“被科学地放置以产生最大的共振”。格拉夫桥于1873年获得专利。一个凸起的杆穿过乐器铸铁框架的上八度音阶，它的小孔引导着绷紧的高音琴弦。“能量进入了这里，”Edquist说，“声音会在沉重的铸铁中产生共鸣。”他指着连接在毛毡锤上的木柄。“你看到两边是怎么剃的了吗?”他们减少了质量，因为你不想让一个又大又笨重的锤子砸在弦上。”
结束的开始
      经济萧条使公司遭受重创。1934年，大英帝国最美丽的仓库里只生产了200架钢琴，冰箱和炉子也加入了库存。政府签订的为望远镜和炸弹瞄准器制造盒子的合同帮助公司度过了难关，但在50年代初，电视的新奇给公司带来了进一步的困难。然而，到十年中期，海资曼钢琴的年产量达到了每年1000架左右，这可能是受到钢琴家利伯拉斯(Liberace)惊人的知名度的推动。但这与20年代初的鼎盛时期相比仍有很大差距，当时约有3000人离开工厂。
      最大的打击发生在60年代。海资曼钢琴当时的副总裁比尔·海资曼解释说，在本世纪初，雅马哈每年生产5万架钢琴，到1967年是这一数字的两倍，因为日本劳动力更便宜，生产技术更高效。“他们正在生产一款好产品。我们和其他几家剩下的钢琴制造商都被淹没了。”
      1962年，公司搬迁到位于安大略省汉诺威的一家最先进的工厂，简化了生产流程，但由于年长、经验丰富的技术人员不愿搬迁，公司付出了高昂的代价。结果，标准下滑到了央街修理部的技术人员不得不“抢救一些从汉诺威运来的钢琴”的地步，正如一位前员工所说。我们不得不打电话告诉他们，到处都有零件不见了。质量控制消失了。”
      70年代，金融问题变得至关重要。海资曼大厅被出售，搬一个远离市中心的大理石工厂，厂区足够用作办公空间和生产三角钢琴。零售连锁店随后被出售。比尔·海资曼(Bill Heintzman)在1964年接管了另一家钢琴公司sherlockmanning，他试图通过将两家公司合并为海资曼有限公司(Heintzman Ltd)，为濒临破产的家族企业注入活力。三年来，他尽了最大努力。但海资曼说，当他接手时，公司实际上已经破产了。1981年，它被卖给了斯克拉-佩普勒家具公司(Sklar-Peppler)，这家公司坚持经营了5年，后来退出了钢琴业务。
      剩余的海资曼钢琴和商标被出售给了The Music Stand，这是一家当时在安大略省经营的连锁零售店。当该公司开始将劣质的韩国和美国钢琴运往该国时，却只是在上面贴上了Heintzmman的铭牌，一名联邦法院法官裁定反对这种做法，称“这显然是一种蓄意的企图……掩盖来源发生变化的事实。”Heintzman这个名字似乎终于走到了尽头            
Heintxman这个名字的使用。
新海资曼
      但大约两年前，西普曼复活了它。他说，如果他有机会进入一个极其困难的市场，海资曼这个名字是必不可少的。西普曼解释说：“如果一架不是来自东方的好钢琴要被引入这个国家，那么它几乎必须是一架海资曼钢琴。”。
     海资曼钢琴确实吸引了人们的注意——甚至可能是一种怀旧的痛苦。当你读到那些把它们和钢琴联系在一起的小册子时，这种痛苦变得更加强烈，因为你“记得在你长大的时候”，“你认识的大多数人都有一架海资曼钢琴”。这可能是在一个有争议的领域，尽管Siepman和Remenyi House of Music的工作人员强调要将这些乐器与多伦多西区生产的库存乐器区分开来。Remenyi 音乐之家的钢琴在当地销售。
     但是，它们是好钢琴吗？多伦多地区的独立钢琴技师Paul Gilchrist认为他们是。吉尔克里斯特说：“我认为，它们是过去40年来用海资曼名字制作的最好的钢琴。它们精确、整洁，结构看起来很好，有实心枫桥和实心云杉板。即使是木纹方向也能给它们带来最大的强度。”
     Gilchrist说，立式钢琴主要来自捷克共和国，而三角钢琴的大部分来自韩国的Young Chang工厂，该工厂长期以来一直为欧美公司生产钢琴。西普曼向捷克共和国的一家公司寻求钢琴生产，因为尽管工艺与德国的高标准相当，但劳动力成本较低。吉尔克里斯特说，捷克的手工艺品以及德国雷纳的生产，给钢琴增添了更多的欧洲“味道”
他说：“亚洲人倾向于选择坚硬、致密的琴槌，而欧洲人则倾向于选择弹性更强、更柔软的琴槌。”总的来说，钢琴的亮度和击打性比亚洲的钢琴略低，更“古典”。
因此，西普曼去了捷克共和国的一家公司，他说，尽管工艺与德国的高标准相当，但劳动力成本较低。
Gilchrist说，最终的结果是一种“高级”工具。海资曼的名字，似乎将在一架好钢琴上经久不衰。

原文如下：
The Return of a Grand Master
A Look at Canada’s Storied Heintzman Piano Company
National Post, June 1999
Look carefully and you can still see the faded letters that spell “Heintzman and Co.” on the south wall of an elegant, eight-story building half a block up from the corner of Toronto’s Queen and Yonge. From 1911 until 1971, “Heintzman Hall” was the nerve centre of what had been the most prestigious of all the piano manufacturers that this country ever produced – and there were no fewer than 28 of them in the early 1920s. Those were the days when a house wasn’t a home without a piano in the parlour, and Heintzman met the demand for instruments with a network of 18 branch stores and 13 distributors coast-to-coast.
Today, Heintzman pianos – at least, those whose pedigree dates back to 1860 when Theodore Heintzman is said to have single-handedly assembled an instrument in his Toronto kitchen – are readily found in schools, conservatories and homes throughout the country. Many have been battered about for decades. Some are neglected family heirlooms, receiving about as much attention as the eight-track tape deck packed away in the basement. But the Heintzmans that have weathered the years – that have not succumbed to dry air or humidity or dozens of missed tunings – provide proof of the instruments’ reputation: that their components and sound were of the highest quality, and that the great Heintzman uprights were, arguably, the best produced anywhere. When the company closed its factory doors for good in 1986, one of the last in Canada’s industry to do so, it pretty much ended an era.
So it comes as a surprise to walk into a local music store and discover the golden “Heintzman” stencil staring out off the fallboard of shiny, new, ebony uprights and grands. Although for Casey Siepman, the pianos’ Winnipeg importer, it’s simply good marketing sense to draw on the Heintzman legacy.
“It was a great old name, and I thought if I could take that name, and put it on a piano worthy of what a Heintzman used to be, then maybe we can make something of this,” he says, pointing to the pianos he is importing from the Czech Republic.
The Heintzman Piano Company Beginnings
When Theodore Heintzman arrived in Toronto in 1860, he brought with him the old-world skills he had honed while apprenticing in his native Berlin. Heintzman and Co., incorporated six years later, was a success from the start, but it was son George who was the driving force behind the company’s growth. Legend has it that, to garner publicity, he rode the cow-catcher on the first transcontinental passenger train to Vancouver in 1887. And in 1888, George insisted on shipping pianos to the Indian and Colonial exposition in London, England, where Queen Victoria expressed amazement that such a product could come from the colonies. By 1890, Heintzman and Co. was one of the largest manufacturing firms in Toronto, employing 200 craftsmen and producing 1,000 pianos a year from a factory in the city’s west end.
In 1911, the doors opened to Heintzman Hall, home to what the early publicity dubbed “the most beautiful warerooms in the British Empire”. With brass doors, a majestic, marble staircase that would have been the envy of Norma Desmond, pillars, stained glass windows, Oriental rugs, and potted ferns, the building embodied all the dignity and refinement that the name Heintzman had come to represent.
But all of Heintzman Hall’s opulence was just a backdrop for its raison d’etre: the hundreds of grands and uprights of the finest polished woods, crafted by the best cabinet makers and technicians of the day. Glenn Gould practised on the nine-foot grand in the sixth floor artist’s room. Oscar Peterson occasionally dropped in for an impromptu performance on the showroom floor.
Verne Edquist on Heintzman Pianos
Verne Edquist, head tuner, tone regulator, and assistant manager of the grand piano department at Heintzman in the ’50s and ’60s, is somewhat of a legend himself. He was also Glenn Gould’s technician, and the fastidious pianist’s second set of ears during recording sessions.
“I think”, says Edquist, “that you’ve come to the holy grail of the Canadian piano industry with the Heintzman upright.” His own upright dates from the late ’20s. A basic, workhorse model, it was built to weather the onslaught of music students in schools and conservatories across the country. And when Edquist draws a series of chords from the instrument’s upper register – round, rich, cathedral-like chimes – they seem to hang, miraculously, in mid-air.
The Heintzman sound was no accident. The circular, acoustic rim in the corners of the soundboard, says Edquist, “was scientifically placed to give maximum resonance.” The Agraffe bridge was patented in 1873. A raised bar running across the upper octaves of the instrument’s cast iron frame, its tiny holes guide the taut, treble strings. “The energy went into this bar,” says Edquist, “and the tone would resonate in the heavy cast iron.” He points out the wooden shanks attached to the felt hammers. “You see how these are shaved on the sides? They cut down the mass because you don’t want a great big clunky hammer hitting the string.” Even today’s better grands don’t get it right, says Edquist. “Too much clunk and not enough tone.”
The Beginning of the End
The depression hit the company hard. With only 200 pianos produced in 1934, the most beautiful warerooms in the British Empire saw fridges and stoves added to their inventory. Government contracts to build boxes for telescopes and bomb sights helped get the company through the War, but the novelty of television brought further hardship in the early ’50s. By mid-decade, though, Heintzman piano production – fueled perhaps by pianist Liberace’s spectacular popularity ­­­– was up to about 1,000 annually. But it was still a far cry from the heyday of the early ’20s, when roughly 3,000 left the factory per year.
The big blow came in the ’60s. At the  beginning of the decade, Yamaha was putting out 50,000 pianos a year – and twice that by 1967 – because of cheaper Japanese labour and more efficient production techniques, explains Bill Heintzman, a Heintzman vice president at the time. “And they were making a good product. We, along with a few other remaining piano makers, got swamped.”
The move to a state-of-the-art factory in Hanover, Ontario, in 1962, streamlined production, but cost the company dearly when the older, experienced technicians wouldn’t relocate. As a result, standards slipped to the point where technicians in the Yonge Street repair division, as one former employee says, had to “salvage some of the pianos coming from Hanover. We had to call and say there were parts missing here and there. Quality control was gone.”
In the ’70s, the financial problems became critical. Heintzman Hall was abandoned; an old marble factory, far from the downtown hub, would suffice for office space and grand piano production. The retail chain was sold next. Bill Heintzman, who, in 1964, had taken over another piano firm, Sherlock-Manning, tried to breathe life into the failing family business by merging the two companies under the name Heintzman Ltd. He gave it his best shot for three years. But when he took over, says Heintzman, the company, in effect, was bankrupt. In 1981, it was sold to the Sklar-Peppler furniture company, which hung in for five years before bailing out of the piano business.
The remaining Heintzman inventory and trademarks were sold to The Music Stand, a chain of retail stores then operating in Ontario. When that company started shipping inferior South Korean and American pianos into the country, only to slap Heintzman nameplates on them, a Federal Court judge ruled against the practice, stating that “there was clearly a deliberate attempt . . . to camouflage the fact that a change of source had occurred.” It finally seemed like the end of the line for the Heintzman name.
The New Heintzmans
But about two years ago, Siepman resurrected it. He says the Heintzman name was essential if he had any chance of breaking into an extremely difficult market. “If a good piano was going to be introduced into this country that wasn’t from the Orient, then it pretty much had to be a Heintzman piano,” Siepman explains.
His pianos do attract attention – perhaps even a pang of nostalgia. It’s a pang that becomes more acute upon reading the brochures associating them with the pianos that you “remember when you were growing up,” when “most of the people you knew had a Heintzman piano.” This may be treading on questionable territory, though Siepman, and the staff at Remenyi House of Music, where the pianos are sold locally, make a point of distinguishing these instruments from the stock spawned in Toronto’s west end.
But, are they good pianos? Paul Gilchrist, an independent piano technician in the Toronto area, thinks they are. “I think,” says Gilchrist, “they’re the best pianos made with the Heintzman name on them in the last 40 years. They’re precise, they’re neat, and the construction looks good, with solid maple bridges and solid spruce boards. Even the wood grain orientation gives them maximum strength.”
The upright comes mostly from the Czech Republic, while much of the grand, says Gilchrist, originates in Korea’s Young Chang factory, which has long been making pianos for European and American companies. Siepman looked to a company in the Czech Republic for the pianos’ scales – the design and plan that outline the interplay of the instrument’s different parts – because the craftmanship, although comparable to Germany’s high standards, comes at a lower labour cost. Gilchrist says that the Czech handiwork, as well as the German Renner action, gives the pianos a more European “flavour.”
“Asians tend to go for a hard, dense hammer,” he says, “while Europeans go for a slightly more resilient, softer hammer.” The piano, in general, is slightly less bright and aggressive than its Asian counterpart – more “classical”.
So Siepman went to a company in the Czech Republic, where he says craftsmanship, though comparable to Germany’s high standards, comes at a lower labour cost.
And the end result, says Gilchrist, is a “premium” instrument. The Heintzman name, it seems, shall endure on a fine piano.