The American edition of the book is as follows =
THE IMMORTAL PIANO BY AVNER AND HANNAH CARMI
New York, Crown Publishers, Inc. 286 pp. @ 1960 by Avner and
Hannah Carmi. LoC Cat Card # : 59-14034.
The subtitle "The True Story of a Quest" appears only on the cover,
inside and out.
Crown's address was then 419 Park Avenue South, New York 16, N. Y.
There are many in-text photos, especially of the case carvings.
The book's prologue states that the Piano was used at a 1951
concert at the home of Mr. & Mrs. Felix, Ahad Haam St., Tel-Aviv,
played by Prod. Lazare Levy, for the Society 0f Friends of the Siena
Pianoforte. The concert was to be recorded.
A performance had also been broadcast for the benefit of Israeli
hospital.
The book may be seen at Vernacular Music Research, Philadelphia PA.
Thornton Hagert
On Nov 30, 2009, at 3:29 PM, Ernst Lumpe wrote:
> Years ago I assembled what appeared to me the complete series of
> Counterpoint/Esoteric Lps featuring the Siena Pianoforte. There
> were six
> albums:
>
> Esoteric ESP-3000, 1955
> Charles Rosen plays 6 Sonatas by Scarlatti and Mozart's Sonata K. 333
>
> Esoteric ESP-3001, 1956
> Anatole Kitain plays works by Bach in arrangements of Busoni, Hess
> and Petri
>
> Esoteric ESP-3002, 1956
> Marisa Regules plays works by Albéniz, Mompou, Turina and Villa-Lobos
>
> Esoteric ESP-3003, 1956
> Marisa Regules plays works by Debussy
>
> Esoteric ESP-3004, 1956
> Kathryn Deguire plays works by Mozart
>
> Esoteric ESP-3005, 1956
> Grace Castagnetta "Christmas on the Siena pianoforte" (well-known
> xmas songs
> and hymns in her own improvisations).
>
> That Mr. Drori mentions Glenn Gould as one of the pianists who
> recorded on
> this instrument puzzles me. I have never seen such recordings
> released. Yet,
> that does not mean they don't exist, of course.
>
> I also have the book he mentions, released two times over here in
> German
> translation under the title "Das unsterbliche Klavier". The first
> one in
> 1965, Heimeran-Verlag, the second in 1985, Urachhaus-Verlag. The
> original
> American edition is said to have been published in 1960 as "The
> Immortal
> Piano". A publishing house is not mentioned, only the 1960
> copyright by
> Avner and Hannah Carmi. I have kept an article which was published
> in 1996
> in the German weekly journal Der Spiegel. At that time Carmi was dead
> already and the piano was owned by his daughter Smira Borochowicz
> (68) who
> was about to put it on auction. It seems that someone in Japan had
> shown an
> interest in it, as the article closes with the following lines: "The
> prospect that the holy wood from Solomon's Temple should now pass from
> Jewish into Japanese hands does not bother her: "What matters most
> is that
> it's gone finally!"
>
> Reading the book I cannot help believing it is spinning an
> entertaining yarn
> with a couple of hairraising moments (e. g. Liszt discovering the
> piano in
> Italy and playing on it the first version of his "La campanella"; or
> Rommel's troups in Africa getting hold of it somehow and misusing
> it as a
> "beer organ", only to be followed by the British capturing it after
> the
> battle of El Alamein, the instrument now being covered with plaster
> which
> made the British believe at first they had gotten some German
> secret weapon;
> Carmi finally found it when
> he rumaged around in a depository of the British mandatory forces
> near Tel
> Aviv in 1947, and more of that kind of revelations). The book's
> subtitle
> ("The adventurous and honest story of the long-forgotten and
> resurfaced
> Siena Pianoforte" - my re-translation of the German subtitle)
> sounds more
> like a fairy tale.
>
> EL
>
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