I was at a party hosted by a friend and met a man named James Colias. An interesting career, he has had. For twenty-five years, he worked for Victor Borge.

Which reminds me: Could Victor Borge have a career today? Could Peter Schickele (if he were just starting out)? Their acts depended on a general knowledge of music.

In any event, Jim Colias worked for the Great Dane for all those years. Before that, he worked for another great Dane, the pianist Gunnar Johansen. Before he was Johansen’s assistant, Jim was his student, at the University of Wisconsin.

I knew another student of Johansen’s: the late composer and pianist Lee Hoiby.

Gunnar Johansen, by the way, should not be confused with Grant Johannesen. I always have to pause to think who’s who. Gunnar Johansen was born in Copenhagen in 1906; Grant Johannesen was a Mormon from Salt Lake, born in 1921. He specialized in the French repertoire.

Incidentally, both Johansen and Johannesen studied with Egon Petri, the great Dutch-German pianist who had studied with Busoni. But I don’t want to confuse you. Back to Jim Colias.

He told me about a piano, now on sale at Klavierhaus in New York. It was owned by Johansen. And it has a double keyboard. This is the kind of piano invented by Emanuel Moor, a Hungarian who lived from 1863 to 1931. A Moor piano can do a number of tricks and has a number of effects. If you would like to see it explained, and demonstrated, try this video from Christopher Taylor, a pianist and teacher at Johansen’s old haunt: the University of Wisconsin.

Taylor says, among other things, that a Moor piano lets you play “the world’s easiest octaves.”

Over the years, many pianists have played and praised the Moor pianos. Among them are Cortot, Backhaus, and Sandor. Ravel was delighted with what a Moor could do with his music. But the pianos never really caught on.

Gunnar Johansen, in fact, had two of them in his studio. One was made by Bösendorfer, the other by Steinway. It’s the Bösendorfer that’s on sale in New York. And I will tell you how Johansen got it.

It was given to him—flat given to him—by Anna Clark. Who was she? The widow of William A. Clark. Who was he? One of the richest men in America, a copper baron who lived from 1839 to 1925. In the course of his extraordinary career, he bought himself a Senate seat (from Montana).

Clark had two wives, the first of whom, Kate, died in 1893. They had seven children. One of them was William A. Clark Jr., who would found the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The second wife—and future widow—was Anna. When they married, the groom was sixty-two, the bride twenty-three. They would have two children, the second of whom was Huguette, who became a famous recluse and died in 2011. She was 104.

Pause to consider something: a man who was born in 1839 had a daughter who lived until 2011. (For the New York Times obit of Huguette—an amazing article—go here.)

Anna Clark was a lover of music and a patroness of it. One day in 1947, Gunnar Johansen gave a recital in her home—on Fifth Avenue in New York. Afterward, she told him about a queer piano she owned: one with a double keyboard. Would he like to see it? Would he like to play it? Would he like to have it?

Yes. So off it went to Wisconsin.

Johansen recorded the complete keyboard works of Bach, and he used the Bösendorfer-Moor on many of those recordings. Next time you have a spare hour and ten minutes or so, try the Goldberg Variations, here.

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