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Emil Schnittker was as careful and correct in his own way as Noah Webster was with words, and yet it always rankled Emil a little that he couldn’t pass himself off as a pianist. Webster defined a pianist as a skilled or professional performer on the piano, and certainly this was an apt description of Emil Schnittker at work. Not even the great Paderewski had attacked the piano with more passion and precision than Schnittker. But the refreshing thing about genius is that it is individual, and the Pole and the American had their differences.



Ignace was famous and performed before large audiences around the world. Emil had to be content with anonymity and empty halls in St. Louis. Paderewski displayed his virtuosity in the usual manner, sitting before the keyboard pounding away. Schnittker, on the other hand, was always somewhere inside the piano, tool in hand, pursuing Plutarch’s edict that “Music, to create harmony, must investigate discord.”



Now this was no comedown, not necessarily a separation of the mechanic from the artist. Emil knew pianists who were mechanical in their playing, and he knew tuners who were artiste at their tuning. Besides, play-era, no matter how accomplished, were notorious for their ignorance of the inner workings of a piano, while tuners, at least the best ones, were sensitive and knowledgeable about the whole instrument. It seemed to Emil that the appellative “pianist” connoted a cozier identity with the instrument than most players could claim. Why not call them “piano players” and the tuners “pianists?” He often put this to his wife as a joke, for she was a pianist and a teacher, a graduate of the Strasbourg Conservatory, but Mabel seldom saw the humor in it. She knew her heavy-headed German husband too well.

Emil had always been a serious man, as scholarly and reverent with life as he was with music. At home he nurtured flowers and children, kept his carpenter tools as clean and oiled as his tuning tools, and passed many an evening with his great sad face buried in old German testaments. He loved to translate, and during World War II had been an official translator for the government.

But Emil was happiest when he was tuning a piano. The great stringed box was to him a cathedral, the high church of musical instruments, and he approached its repair and tuning as a priest the altar. He not only knew the instrument, the mechanics of its construction and the physics of its sounds, but he knew its history and its soul, its technical evolution, its artistic progression at the hands of composers and performers.



It is not surprising then, that Emil Schnittker tended to be condescending toward anyone who suggested he tune anything less than a grand. The popular spinet he condemned as a damned “cut-down,” and for this reason he confined his work to institutions, to schools and churches which kept the grander instruments. Emil’s arrogance reminded Mabel of Beethoven. Once, when one of the great violinists of the day complained that Beethoven was writing music too difficult to play, the composer had shouted, “Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose?”



One day, in Emil’s 65th year, the post-war Office of Price Stabilization in St. Louis summoned him to appear before an examiner. The examiner wanted to know why Emil wasn’t posting his prices.

“I am an out-tuner,” Emil replied. “I don’t keep a shop with a window to hang my prices in. I am like a doctor who makes house calls.”

Well then, the examiner replied, Emil would have to post his prices on a cardboard and hang it on whatever piano he was tuning.

Emil was incensed at such a suggestion. He always quoted his price – $8 for a routine tuning, more for complications – but he saw no need to make of himself a walking advertis-ment. He broke off the interview and stormed out of the federal building. His last words to the examiner were, “I don’t like people and I don’t like pianos. I am going where they aren’t.”

And he did.

He kissed off St. Louis and retreated to Arkansas, where he and Mabel holed up on a small farm.

Mabel was not happy. She had no piano students to teach and no children underfoot. Theirs were grown now and gone. And Emil, for all his resolve, spent more time on the piano than he did on the plow. He couldn’t stay away from it. He set his heart and his head to devising a new tuning system, and for six years he did not look up until he had it all charted out. “This is as close as I can come,” he said at last, “to within one septillion of accuracy.” That is roughly equivalent to writing on the head of a pin. A septillion is 1 followed by 24 zeroes.

The girls were in Dallas, Mabel wanted to move here. Emil agreed to visit first, to test the water. He was 71, and during the long layoff from tuning he had developed a slight palsy in his hands, but he still thought he could try out his new system and make a little money too.

His first day in Dallas, Emil walked over to First Baptist downtown and asked the musical director if they were in the market for a piano tuner.

“Are you Baptist?” the man asked.

“No,” Emil replied.

After an awkward silence, Emil thanked the man and left.

He walked down Ross Avenue to a Catholic church and rang the rectory. A priest appeared in the doorway and Emil made his pitch. When he finished, the priest wagged a finger in his face and declared, “Sir, you look like the fellow who stuffed rags in my organ.”

Emil shrank back.

He went to his daughter’s house and told Mabel that Dallas was not for him. They returned to St. Louis.

But blood will win out. Shortly they moved here for good, renting a little house out in Northwest Dallas.

In spite of his age, Emil wanted to get back into harness again, to work. Johann Sebastian Bach had worked right on up to the day he died, on the “Art of the Fugue.” Surely Emil could tune some pianos.

During certain week nights, he had heard a choir practising in a nearby church, so one evening Emil walked into the church. The choir was in full throat, the director before them. Emil made his way down the aisle. At the break he would ask the director if they needed a piano tuner. Suddenly the director turned around. He silenced the choir, pointed a stern finger at Emil and shouted, “You, sir, out, out!”

Emil couldn’t believe it.

He stumbled home in a rage and collapsed. Never again, he swore, never again.

And for years he held to it.

He buried himself in grandchildren and old German bibles. Mabel went blind and he cared for her. They would sit for hours in the evenings, Beethoven and Brahms booming in his head, Chopin and Mozart dancing happily in hers.

Mabel had a sense of humor. Once in a while she would come up with something like, “You know, Emil, an octave is a brazen-sounding thing.”

At last Emil could stand it no longer. He was 83 years old. He could not die without leaving a single testament to his tuning in Dallas. Mabel had had an operation and was seeing better. He could leave her for a few hours at a time.

He went to his closet and got out his tuning tools. He turned the hammer in his shaking hands and smiled. He had had it since 1910. Now, 63 years later, he would retire it with one grand, sacramental tuning, his own version of Brahms’ Rhapsody in E-Flat Major. He took his tool box and went outside and down the street, knocking on doors.

At last a lady let him in.

It was one of those puny “cut-downs” with a blond cabinet, but Emil was in no position to be picky. He fell to his work with total absorption.

After a couple of hours, the woman of the house wanted to know what was wrong.

“What do you mean?” Emil said.

“Why are you taking so long?” she asked. “The men from Whittle only took 20 minutes.”



Emil explained that a piano had 228 wires to tune to precise pitch, and that no tuner worthy of the name could do a proper job in 20 minutes. He, Emil Schnittker, required at least two to three hours.



That seemed to satisfy the woman for a while, but after a time she began to press him again. She had errands to run and he was holding her up. Besides, her husband was coming home shortly and he wouldn’t like Emil hanging around so long.

This made Emil nervous and caused his hands to shake worse than usual, but he forced himself to put her out of his mind. He would take 12 hours if the piano required it. After all, it was his signature, his farewell.

He had already laid the bearings. Now he began tuning by octaves above and below the bearings. The table of frequencies that he had figured out in Arkansas marched through his mind and he thought fondly of that old Greek, Pythagoras, and of how their tone formulas dovetailed. Mathematicians and musicians were brothers, even across the centuries. Emil loved the Greeks and their contribution to music, and he said so to the woman when she came into the room again. Did she know, he went on, that our diatonic scale, major and minor, was a gift of the Greeks?

No, she said, she didn’t know that and she didn’t care. She just wanted him to pack up his tools and leave. She would pay him and he could go.

“I’m just starting on the remaining strings,” Emil explained. “Let me get each unison right and I’ll be through.”

She consented, and when Emil finished, she tried the keyboard, and to his astonishment, gave him a sour look.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“It doesn’t sound right,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like my brother’s guitar.”

“It shouldn’t,” Emil replied. “A piano is not a guitar.”

The woman began hurrying him out. Emil tried to exit with as much dignity as he could muster, explaining between the piano and the door the principle of piano tuning. Most people didn’t understand that the piano does not permit an accurate tuning of the diatonic scale, that what a tuner does is mis-tune slightly, that he allows a distortion here and there, a compromise, so as to achieve what is known in the trade as “equal temperament.” None of this made any impression at all on the woman. Emil could see that as she closed the door in his face.

In times past he had felt full and complete after a tuning, but now he experienced none of that. He limped home a wreck.

But not defeated. He opened a trunk and took out his tone chart and began to go over the tedious calculations. When Mabel found him, he was bent over a cardboard, grumbling to himself and printing, with brutal, angry strokes, the same six words over and over: “A piano is not a guitar. A piano is not a guitar. A piano is not a guitar.”