Word: tuners
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That was in 1917. Young Avner Carmi went on to become a piano tuner (he worked for the late great Artur Schnabel, among others), and when his travels took him to Italy in the '30s, he tried to carry out his grandfather's wish. The famous piano was there, all right. It had been built around 1800 in Turin by piano-makers named Marchisio and a woodcarver named Ferri. Decades later, the city council of Siena had presented it to Crown Prince Umberto (later King Umberto I) as a wedding present. It seemed within Carmi's reach...
...found it, tried to use it as a hive. A chicken farmer tried to use it as an incubator, a butcher as a meat safe. Finally it was cast out into the street as useless. There Avner Carmi-by now out of the service and once more a piano tuner-again found what he called "my plaster piano pal." When he saw that the insides had been ripped out with only the sounding board left, he sadly decided to abandon...
...Piano Tuner Carmi is now devoting his whole life to his beloved little piano, has nearly finished a book about it and has arranged for seven more records, each devoted to a different musical period, from Bach to Debussy. He knows the piano's story is not yet done, but he has amply fulfilled his grandfather's mission...
...first guest was the sugar-coated Pianist Liberace, who 1) mooned interminably through Debussy's Clair de Lune and grinned ecstatically through a Latin rhythm piece, 2) cavorted with Skelton in a dance number, and 3) played straight man when Skelton came to call as a treblesome piano tuner. Item: Liberace, in his famed toothpasty smile, showed portraits of his four greatest inspirations - "Bach, Beethoven, Paderewski . . . and my dentist...
...amateur's troubles: for the debut he rented a piano he particularly liked, but he broke a string at rehearsal and had to use an instrument with a brassier tone; then he found that the tuner had cleaned the keyboard and left it so slippery he had to claw at the keys to keep his fingers from skidding. Things went better last week (he warned the management not to clean the keys), but his powerful performance knocked all the A strings out of tune early in the program...