When Ignazio died, Falcone, barely 17, returned to Somerville to help the family. Overconfident of his abilities, he bought a battered piano and had it craned up to their second-floor apartment. "That piano needed a lot of work," he says. "I tried to repair it myself and made a mess out of it." Falcone had a gift for the work, though, and he started repairing and rebuilding pianos at various shops around Boston. He was soon hired by The Boston Conservatory of Music to maintain all of its pianos. In the evening, Falcone also serviced a growing private clientele. "I would pick out names from the telephone book," he says. "I'd say, 'Hello, it's time for your piano tuning.' And many of them would say, 'But I don't have a piano.' Then I'd say, 'Oh, sorry, wrong number.' But, of course, some did."
In 1971, after an Army tour of duty in Vietnam, Falcone came home again with roughly $13,000 saved from his pay and opened New England Piano & Organ Co., a small retail store on Main Street in Waltham, Mass. If he was an exceptional piano technician, Falcone turned out to be no less skilled at business. Only five years later, he was selling pianos and organs from seven locations throughout New England with a payroll of 45 employees and revenues of about $2 million. "I was doing very well," he says, "but I didn't like it. You get large, you get more people, more headaches, and your goals get confused." Even when a group of investors tempted him with untold riches if he agreed to expand his stores into a national chain, Falcone was not only unmoved but almost revolted by the image of what he regarded as "a McDonalds kind of thing." Besides, Falcone, who had by now repaired or rebuilt at least one model of every important piano in the world, had already decided to create a new grand piano that would be better, and less expensive, than any then produced in Europe or the United States.
So began a four-year period of research and development, which Falcone estimates cost him roughly $400,000. To finance the project, Falcone sold off each of his retail stores to the store managers, retaining only the store in Woburn as a base of operations. Various makes of pianos were still sold from the showroom in the front half of the building, while the rear was filled with the tools and machines of the piano-maker's trade. Gradually, Falcone mastered the details of manufacturing -- where to buy woods, and castings, and parts for the key-board action. And to see how it all fit together, he traveled to Braunsweig, West Germany, for a careful tour of the plant where the highly respected Grotrian piano was made. Finally, in the summer of 1982, Falcone completed the first piano to accurately transcribe his vision of design, tone, and responsiveness. And as news of the new piano spread, concert artists began visiting Falcone's shop to try it out.
One of the first was Leonard Shure, a well-known concert and recording artist, who was so impressed with the instrument that he chose to play Brahms's Piano Concerto in B-flat on a Falcone grand in concert with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. It was the first time one of the pianos had ever appeared with a major orchestra -- an historic moment not lost on conductor Benjamin Zander, who, during rehearsals at the New England Conservatory of Music, put a sign in the lobby urging students to "come hear a new piano." On the night of Shure's performance, Falcone sat in the audience, transfixed. "It was the thrill of my life," he says. "Oh, boy, did he sound great."
From that day, nearly every time a Falcone piano was used in a concert, a fresh batch of orders would arrive at the ever more cramped shop in Woburn. It was clear Falcone had reached a decision point. He had no doubt that he could indeed build the best piano in the world if he continued to build so few. But he wanted something more: he wanted to set a new industry standard. And to do that he had to become more than a small craft shop, more than a piano boutique. If he ever expected to capture the world's leading players, he had to offer service and availability as well as quality.
The decision to expand could hardly have come at a more troubled time for the U.S. piano industry. Between 1978 and 1985, the number of pianos sold in the United States each year dropped from 282,000 to 151,000. During the same period, exports declined from 19,000 to 4,000, while imports, mostly Japanese and Korean, more than doubled -- from 28,000 to 57,000. In other words, American manufacturers were losing market share even as the market was shrinking.
"Two things happened in parallel," explains Dennis Houlihan, of Jordan Kitt's Music Inc., one of the largest retail piano chains in the country. "U.S. manufacturers -- without naming names -- did not pay good enough attention to quality. At the same time, foreign price-value relationships improved."
As established manufacturers began closing their doors, other reasons were cited for the impoverishment of U.S. piano making. Unionization, high interest rates and the high prices of raw materials, a strong market for used pianos, and the decline in the number of children at the peak piano-lesson ages -- each of these, no doubt, made its own contribution. But some observers see a more subtle, but ultimately more profound, influence at work -- the break in a piano-making tradition that dates to 1687.
That year, harpsichord maker Bartolomeo di Francesco Cristofori answered the door of his shop in Padua, Italy, to find Prince Ferdinand di Medici, son of the grand duke Cosimo III. The prince, an accomplished harpsichordist, convinced Cristofori to come to the court at Florence and enrich both their lives. The royal patronage so pleased Cristofori that he soon invented the first piano, a modified harpsichord in which a row of small hammers struck the strings from below, as opposed to earlier forms in which the strings were plucked by quills. Cristofori's instrument was particularly responsive to variations in the pianist's touch and could produce both soft and loud sounds. Soon it became known as the "piano e forte," meaning soft and loud, a term that was later shortened to "pianoforte," and finally to "piano."
In addition to his technical breakthrough, Cristofori also established a tradition in piano manufacture that implied a special relationship between a single craftsman and the instrument itself, suggesting that only the close and continuing personal involvement of the creator could ensure the extraordinarily high quality of a product whose ultimate goal is great art. During the centuries that followed, this essential relationship characterized piano manufacture throughout the world, reaching its highest and most effective expression in the mid-nineteenth century, in the United States, with such names as Jonas Chickering, D. H. Baldwin, Henry Mason, Emmons Hamlin, and, of course, Henry Engelhardt Steinway. But today, with the noteworthy exception of Santi Falcone, those highly personalized bonds between a piano and its creator are only memories.
