Ivory trades

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank
T E Carhart
Chatto & Windus, £15.99, 242pp
Buy it at BOL

Picture the scene had Carhart taken his proposal to the more ruthlessly commercial kind of publisher. "Well, I want to write a book about how I hung around in Paris, and got friendly with a piano restorer," mumbles the author uncertainly. "Then I buy a piano from him, start playing again myself after 20 years, and think quite a lot about pianos." The publisher fixes him with a disbelieving stare. "And that's a book? Where's the drama? Where's the story arc? Now if you'd transported a piano to Siberia on a sled pulled by husky dogs, I'd be interested..."

But Carhart's Francophile paean to the piano somehow got published in this form after all. The author, a freelance writer living in Paris, becomes fascinated by the piano shop in his quartier. He wanders in and enquires politely where he might buy a little second-hand upright. But nothing is so simple with the French. The owner, Luc Desforges, ums and aahs: such things are very difficult. He will keep an eye out, but he cannot promise anything.

Once Carhart has an introduction from an existing client, though, he is trusted, and allowed into the hallowed inner sanctum of Luc's atelier, a goldmine of gorgeous old pianos in every state of disassembly: Erards, Pleyels, Steinways, Bösendorfers. He begins to drop by regularly: Luc explains to him the arcane workings of the instrument, enthuses over beautiful new arrivals, mourns pianos that have seen their last working days.

The worst fate for a piano, thinks Luc, is to be acquired as a trophy, a mere slab of wealth-sucking furniture, by a person of no music. "It's like a great conversationalist who is put in solitary confinement," says Luc of such an unfortunate instrument. Far better that it should be played to death - exhausted and broken-backed, like the string of pianos that Beethoven left behind him all over Europe. They were honoured by his passionate destruction.

The piano is a paradox: a percussion instrument that is repeatedly asked to do what it cannot, to sing. The music critic Charles Rosen recently caused much displeasure among musicians in America by pointing out the obvious truth that a pianist has no means at all to control the piano's "tone": she can only hit the keys with greater or lesser force, play concurrent notes more or less legato, and work the pedals at more or less appropriate moments. All the arm-waving and torso-screwing in the world, by your standard melodramatic soloist, cannot alter this simple mechanical fact.

Carhart's brief anatomy of the innards of the piano - its musculoskeletal structure of wood, iron and wire - confirms this, although he fails to pursue the interesting areas of psychoacoustic discussion suggested by his findings. When critics enthuse over a pianist's "tone", for example, they are confusing tone, which the musician cannot alter, with relative volume changes among notes in complex polyphonic music. A pianist with exquisite touch - with unusually precise control over the force that each of his fingers exerts - may make countless such subtle gradations and thus give the illusion of more "colourful" playing.

Yet it is the glory of the piano that, to us, it does sing. The persistence of sound in consciousness allows us to hear what we want, and need, to hear: a succession of ever-decaying notes transformed into a single, fluid line.

This book is also a hymn to a vanishing age of artisanship. Modern mass-produced pianos - the Steinways, the Yamahas - are fabulous, powerful instruments, but they simply don't have the character of pianos made in the old ways. Only Fazioli, whose Italian headquarters Carhart visits (the journey's rather obvious motive as research for the book jars with the pleasant "found" atmosphere of the rest), keeps the handmade tradition alive, making possibly the world's best instruments at $100,000 a go. Carhart falls in love with the Fazioli he plays, and leaves bearing a piece of wood signed by Signor Fazioli himself.

It is a sweet moment that sums up the book's tone. In the end, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is an amateur's work, both in that it is written out of love, and also in that it is content to stroke the lacquered surface of its subject without delving too deeply into it. But it is a charming companion: a cool, autumnal breeze of a book.