Out of the Past

As a small boy in Seattle, Richard C. Simonton listened in awe to the music that came out of the big Welte pipe organ that one of the town's rich men had imported from Germany. The organ was equipped to play music from perforated paper rolls, and Dick Simonton vowed that when he was grown up he would own one too. That time eventually came, but Simonton, by then 30 and a Los Angeles dispenser of Muzak, had to wait until the end of World War II to write to Germany for Welte's wondrous music rolls. The answer he got from the Welte Co. in 1948 sent him packing off to Germany himself.

The Welte factory in Freiburg had been completely bombed out, wrote elderly Edwin Welte, a member of the manufacturing family. There were few organ player rolls left. But he had hidden some rolls of a different kind in the Black Forest when the bombing had begun. The catalogue of recording artists that Welte sent along was enough to make any recording executive jump a groove.

By 1904 the Welte Co. had perfected an electrical machine which recorded the piano in a new way. Rolls were lined and printed with electrically conductive ink instead of being perforated like ordinary player-piano rolls. A companion machine was placed in front of the keyboard and a battery of 88 felt-padded mechanical fingers fitted over the keys, playing the music back with all the expression and personality of the original performer. There was Debussy playing some of his Preludes and his Children's Corner Suite; Saint-Saens, Faure, Grieg, Scriabin, Falla, Granados, Richard Strauss and Mahler performing their own compositions on the piano. There were kings of the keyboard--DePachmann, Leschetizky, Busoni, D'Albert and famed Conductor-Pianist Arthur Nikisch --playing Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, and their own works.

The rolls were still in good condition; the problem was how to re-record them. Columbia was eager to try and, with the help of a Welte engineer, managed to rig up the huge original Rube Goldbergian player so the rolls could be played back. Simonton and a French engineer recorded the music on tape.

By last week Columbia had released the results: a set of five LP records labeled "Great Masters of the Keyboard." Faithfully rerecorded, they sometimes had a slightly hurdy-gurdy sound, but were still so clear that teachers, students and today's virtuosos could hear with what touches and tempos the old boys did it.

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