City shoulders the load as harpmaker for world

Nov. 24--In a dim warehouse on the city's West Side, ragged bundles of German beech and splintery Midwestern maple quietly await their metamorphosis.

The hunks of raw wood are ugly now. But months in the hands of master builders will mold them into instruments of musical elegance.

Chicago, the city of heavy industry, is also, as it turns out, the world capital of harpmaking.

Lyon & Healy Harps, on Ogden Avenue, is the foremost producer of concert harps. It is also where the modern harp was invented in 1889 and the hub from where it has spread in the last century to concert halls from Taipei to Topeka, Cape Town to Cleveland.

And in Chicago, there's no season like the holidays to hear and embrace those harps' gossamer sounds.

Take a break Friday from holiday shopping and have tea at the Drake Hotel, and you will hear a Lyon & Healy harp. You can hear two at the Lyric Opera's production "Romeo and Juliet," and two more when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays Mahler's 7th Symphony.

Lyon & Healys are the gold standard for concert harpists, said Liz Cifani, principal harpist for the Lyric, and local representative of the Chicago chapter of The American Harp Society. She has four.

"The craftsmanship is fantastic," said Cifani, describing their sound as characteristically bright and full--hence their appeal. "You have to do your best to cut through the orchestra," she explained.

The worst of them are flawless, say the company's marketers. Beginning pedal harps start at $9,950. For a concert grand, add $10,000 more. The Prince William used by the Chicago Symphony's Sarah Bullen is worth the price of a nicer BMW coupe.

For $179,000, one could buy a one-bedroom pied-a-terre on North Lake Shore Drive with a view of Belmont Harbor. For the same price, it could be furnished with a Lyon & Healy Louis XV Special, and nothing else.

An American success story

The pedal harp was born in France and patented by Sebastian Erard in 1810. It was embraced by European romanticism and surged over the Atlantic only to suffer in the American cultural wilderness.

The ocean crossing was bad enough, but North America's weather extremes posed a still harsher challenge for the harps.

So many were repaired by Patrick J. Healy and George W. Lyon--young Boston instrument dealers who had come to Chicago in 1864--that they decided to build their own. The first took 10 years and was finished in 1889.

Lyon and Healy replaced fragile French plaster parts with rugged wood construction--a decided advantage--and Chicago harps quickly supplanted their dainty European cousins. From then on, their evolution came largely at the hands of Chicago harpmakers.

Because harpists wanted to travel, materials grew sturdier. As people grew taller, harps grew larger. While concert halls grew, harps grew louder. City noise intruded on the halls, the harps grew louder still in a co-evolution still proceeding, said Steve Fritzmann, a master harpmaker and Lyon & Healy's national sales manager.

In the 21st Century, lasers cut harp parts, brass plates are stamped by computer-guided machines, and power tools do the roughest, earliest work on them. But the heart of the harp remains the same as in the first Lyon & Healy instruments.

It is wood chosen for strength and resonance, and perfection supplied by human hands. A modern harp's 1,400 moving pieces are glued, clamped, spun, trimmed, bent, rasped, sanded, fit, finished, gilded, assembled, strung and tuned--all by hand.

At Lyon & Healy, 129 people do this. They tried using machines to assemble parts once, Fritzmann said. The process failed.

It is easy to imagine why they tried. Harps hide far more moving parts than meet the eye.

Every last detail

For 18 years, Maria Valadez has worked assembling the harps' invisible metal musculature, fitting long strings of moving joints into the harp's neck, each built by dozens of workers to smoothly convert a harpist's pedal movements into a command for a harp to switch keys.

Sandwiching the workings between curving brass plates one day this week, Valadez tightened dozens of tiny black screws to finish one assembly--only to find a scratch on one brass plate. It had taken a day to assemble this single package of moving parts.

She reversed direction, taking it apart just as slowly. A tiny wrench to loosen each screw, a screwdriver to continue the work. A day to build. A day to undo. The complexity is hidden, but demanding. It is everywhere, even in the sturdiest pieces.

The entire body of a harp wants to implode. When tightened, the 47 strings of a concert harp create 2,000 pounds of tension between the neck and body, the 80-pound instrument straining against a ton of potential energy eager to destroy it.

To resist the forces as it was improved, the body of the modern harp underwent a vivid evolution. It had to grow a skeleton.

Upstairs from the drama playing out on Valadez's desk, another worker picks up a block, measures and marks it into a thin, 4-inch piece, then sands it to size on a motorized belt. When the worker finishes, he has created the backing for a rib.

The four aluminum ribs hidden inside each harp make it exceptionally strong. They permit a thinner spruce body, which reverberates more, and thus is louder.

When finished, workers hang the bodies like sides of beef from overhead hooks. Others bring feminine curves out of blocky columns turning on lathes. On the third floor, master woodcarvers peck like birds at the designs on columns and bases.

The flurry results in dozens of wood pieces that arc and reverberate, support and interlock.

Over 25 years of assembling and improving what by now look like rough harps, master harpmaker Teddy Wiktorzak has learned to stand while he works, to see the full harp even as he does detailed work.

He has learned to put a bright light so close to his hands that he can feel the heat--the better to bring forth the shadows of imperfections. He drags picks through grooves to make them starker.

In his hands, the separate parts have been fitted into a single harp. They are sprayed with finish and reassembled, gilded by women in a corner workshop and then strung, tuned and readied for sale.

When finished, the harps stand in ranks in a fifth-floor showroom. On days when buyers visit, salesmen roll the best into an adjoining chamber music hall.

That afternoon, three Style 30 harps basked in the hall's soft stage lighting, the Chicago skyline a backdrop in the windows.

You just know when it's right

Uncertainty gripped Maryanne Meyer. Her father, along with a harpist friend and 150 empty chairs, watched her circle the black concert harps as creaking floorboards echoed with each hesitant step.

She had come from Pennsylvania to buy a second instrument. Her guests, who had come from Indiana, waited expectantly as she approached each harp.

Thin fingers found the chords, playing a simple I-IV-V-I chord progression at first. They moved through each octave, the chords twinkling in the highs and thrumming in the lows. "The Style 30s always sound great in the bass," Meyer said. She was still unsure.

Her father, Lynn, was about to unload $21,500 before taxes, and tried to tell jokes to Fritzmann. But the jokes were short, always interrupted by the harps' music. In his daughter's hands, the harps commanded attention, and Lynn Meyer's eyes welled with pride.

As her confidence grew, Maryanne Meyer sat behind the middle harp more often. Her hands rolled pentatonic scales up all the octaves, then stung the air with a few minor chords that struck like hammer blows.

"Pretty. What a big sound," said Julia Richardson, the harpist helping Meyer.

Meyer's fingers danced through the diminished scales of French composer Marcel Tournier. The sound pushed through the chamber and seemed to dance in the chest, fluttering there to build into emotion.

The beauty now clear, the feeling overwhelmed Meyer, who stopped playing and giggled.

She had found her harp.

jjanega@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune

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