Piano Man

IN JANUARY 1983, IN A SMALL WOOD-working shop behind a retail music store in Woburn, Mass., Santi Falcone founded the Falcone Piano Co. and set out to make the "best piano in the world." Imagine, then, Falcone's excitement only a few years later when Rudolf Serkin dropped by the shop to try out the new instrument. Serkin says he went to Woburn to encourage "an amateur" and remembers playing for about half an hour to a small and appreciative audience. When he was finished, according to some of those present, the maestro rose from his chair, clasped Falcone's face in his hands, and said, "Mr. Falcone, you are the artist."

Some time afterward, Leif Bakland, a 33-year-old dentist from Newburyport, Mass., made his way to Falcone's shop and was also impressed by the sound of the instrument he heard and played -- so taken, in fact, that he would eventually secure a second mortgage on his house to finance a new $23,750 Falcone grand.

Falcone, who appreciates a sale as much as anybody, naturally was delighted by Bakland's visit. But he was also frustrated. For in the business of selling pianos, as in selling basketball sneakers and tennis rackets, real industry status comes from big-name endorsements. And Leif Bakland is hardly what you'd call a big name. With his year and a half of piano lessons, Bakland is to Serkin as "Chopsticks" is to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Yet at this point in the company's growth, someone like Bakland was far more likely to play a Falcone than Serkin. And further, in what may have been the most disconcerting irony, Falcone had to reconcile himself to the fact that his problem was not, in its largest part, related to the quality of his product. Even if it could somehow be objectively determined that the Falcone was, in fact, the best piano in the world, famous artists still might not adopt it as their instrument of choice.

In this respect, Falcone finds himself trapped in one of the most common catch-22s known to entrepreneurs: you can't get bigger because you're not big enough. Consider, as a generic example, a start-up that develops an innovative computer and is soon presented with the opportunity to bid on a large order. This order could provide the infant computer company with the resources necessary to make further break-throughs and garner additional market share, but the order must be turned down because the company's support staff is too small to service the account. By default, the order goes to IBM, and the company continues to toil along within the confines of its narrow market niche.

Falcone's particular case works in much the same way. In the United States, the market for concert pianos can be summed up in two words: Steinway and Baldwin. As "Steinway artists" or "Baldwin artists," name performers agree to use one brand of piano exclusively, in return for the commercial use of their names and a promise from the manufacturer that there will be a piano available and properly tuned wherever and whenever they play. To the working artist always defending a career against the vagaries of life on the road, the security and convenience of such a relationship is considerable. But it is a relationship that is exceedingly difficult and expensive for Santi Falcone to duplicate.

Today, the 42-year-old Falcone ponders this dilemma in a brick, six-story converted furniture factory on an obscure back street in Haverhill, Mass. Here, Falcone and 60 employees craft -- by hand, slowly, and exceedingly carefully -- three sizes of grand pianos. In effect, each one is virtually custom made for a narrow market that includes professional musicians, music schools, and other organizations and individuals devoted to piano and willing to pay $17,850 for the six-foot one-inch model, $23,750 for the seven-foot four-inch grand, and $31,900 for a spectacular nine-foot concert grand. Although only 100 pianos have been produced since the company was founded, volume has since expanded with the move to the larger, more efficient Haverhill building last summer. Currently, Falcone and his crew are working their way through a six-month backlog of orders at the rate of 7 pianos per month. And although the company continues to lose money, Falcone expects to hit an annual production level of between 850 and 1,000 pianos by 1990, a $20-million business that he figures will throw off $6 million in profits.

Still, between now and 1990, between the thought and the act, falls the catch-22, in which Falcone must contend with the intransigence of a market "owned" by two quality competitors whose long tradition of service and worldwide network of dealers have given them a tight grip on the customers he needs most. "You know," Falcone says wistfully, "if Rudolf Serkin would adopt my piano, that would put this company into another era entirely."

Predictably, a man who sets out to build the best piano in the world is not easily put off by a mere marketing challenge. Among the pressures Falcone brings to bear on what appears to be an immovable object is the seemingly irresistible force of what can only be called destiny. If ever there were a man born to make pianos, it has to be Santi Falcone.

When he was 14 years old, Santi Falcone and his family emigrated to Somerville, Mass., from Mazzarino, a small town in the Caltanissetta province of central Sicily. In his own recollections of his youth, one feature occurs repeatedly -- music. His father, Ignazio, a diesel-engine mechanic, was given to celebrating his various joys with spontaneous outbreaks of song in an untutored but memorable tenor voice. Opera was his particular passion and frequently young Falcone borrowed records from the local library to feed his father's delight.

"He would play them," Falcone says, "and he would say, 'Santi, Santi, come here and listen how beautiful.' You could say we learned about music together." Every Easter Sunday, their dining-room table set with the traditional Sicilian meal of roast baby lamb annointed with spices and cheese, the elder Falcone would put the opera Cavalleria Rusticana on the record player, and he and his son together would sing its verses for the rest of the family.

After his son finished junior high school, Ignazio decided that the boy's voice was good enough to merit formal training and sent him overseas to the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, in Rome. There, one afternoon Falcone wandered into one of the school's recital halls and watched an elderly piano tuner at work. Whatever plans he had had for a singing career suddenly seemed irrelevant as he now felt the first pull of his true calling. Occasionally, the tuner would drop a tool and could only find it again with unusual difficulty. Falcone held back until he realized that the man was blind. Soon Falcone became the man's apprentice, and the love of the instrument would bind the craftsman and his young student. "The piano absolutely fascinated me," Falcone recalls. "I didn't know how anybody could ever make such a complicated instrument."