NEW YORK, NY.- Franz Mohr, who in his 24 years as chief concert technician for Steinway & Sons brought a musician’s mindset to the mechanics of important pianos and the care of those who played them, died March 28 at his home in Lynbrook, New York, on Long Island, where he lived. He was 94.
His son Michael, director of restoration and customer services at Steinway, confirmed the death.
“I play more in Carnegie Hall than anybody else,” Mohr said in 1990, “but I have no audience.”
Sometimes a string would snap or a pedal would need adjusting during a concert, and he would step into the spotlight for a moment. But he did much of his work alone, on that famous stage and others around the world. He might have been mistaken for a pianist trying out a 9-foot grand for a recital — until he reached for his tools and began making minute adjustments, giving a tuning pin a tiny twist or a hammer a slight shave.
For years, he went where the pianists went. When Vladimir Horowitz went to Russia in the 1980s, Mohr traveled with him, as did Horowitz’s favorite Steinway. Mohr made house calls at the White House when Van Cliburn played for President Gerald Ford in 1975, and again in 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev was in Washington for arms control talks with President Ronald Reagan.
Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, wanted Cliburn to play one of the pieces that had made him famous — Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 — but there was no orchestra. Instead, Cliburn played some Chopin and, as an encore, played and sang the Russian melody “Moscow Nights.”
“I was amazed that Van Cliburn, on the spur of the moment, remembered not only the music but all the words,” Mohr recalled in his memoir, “My Life with the Great Pianists,” written with Edith Schaeffer (1992). “The Russians just melted.”
He also attended to performers’ personal pianos. Pianist Gary Graffman, whose apartment is less than a block from the old location of Steinway’s showroom in New York's Manhattan borough, and Mohr’s home base, on West 57th Street, recalled that Mohr would come right over when a problem presented itself.
“If he came because I broke strings, he would replace the strings,” Graffman said. But if more extensive work was needed — if Graffman’s almost constant practicing had worn down the hammers and new hammers had to be installed, for example — “he would take out the insides of the piano and carry it half a block to the Steinway basement. He would work on it and carry it back.” (The unit Mohr lifted out and took down the street is known as the key and action assembly, a bewildering combination of all 88 keys and the parts that respond to a pianist’s touch, driving the hammers to the strings.)
Franz Mohr was born in Nörvenich, Germany, on Sept. 17, 1927, the son of Jakob Mohr, a postal worker, and Christina (Stork) Mohr. The family moved to nearby Düren when he was a child; in 1944, when he was a teenager, he survived an air raid.
His interest in music began not with pianos but with the viola and the violin. He studied at academies in Cologne and Detmold, Germany, and, in his 20s, played guitar and mandolin in German dance bands.
He was playing Dixieland music one night when he spotted a woman on the dance floor. “I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her and said to my friends, ‘That is the girl I’m going to marry,’” he recalled in his memoir. Her name was Elisabeth Zillikens, and they married in 1954. Besides his son Michael, she survives him, as does a daughter, Ellen; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 2019.
Tendinitis forced Mohr to give up performing when he was in his 20s, his son said, and he turned to pianos, answering a want ad from piano manufacturer Ibach that led to an apprenticeship. Another advertisement, in 1962, sent him to the United States.
It said that Steinway was looking for piano technicians — in New York. A devout churchgoer, he had made a connection with a German-speaking Baptist church in the city's Queens borough that showed him the ad. He contacted Steinway and was soon hired as an assistant to William Hupfer, the company’s chief concert technician.
Before long, he was tuning for stars like famously eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who came to New York to make recordings. (In Toronto, Gould relied on another tuner, Verne Edquist, who died in 2020.)
Mohr not only worked on the piano at the recording studio, he also rode around New York with Gould. “He loved Lincoln Town Cars,” Mohr wrote in his memoir. “That is all he would drive. He once said to me: ‘Franz, I found out that next year’s model will be 2 inches shorter. So, you know what I did? I bought two Town Cars this year.”
He succeeded Hupfer as Steinway’s chief concert technician in 1968. The job made him the keeper of the fleet of pianos that performers could try out before a concert in Steinway’s West 57th Street basement. They could choose the one they were most comfortable with, but there were pianos that were off limits — Horowitz’s favorite, for example.
Sometimes, maybe with a wink, Mohr would let pianists try it out.
“He’d regulate Horowitz’s piano to make it feather-light and capable of an enormous range of sound,” pianist Misha Dichter recalled. “When I’d see Franz in the Steinway basement, I’d ask to try that piano when it was parked in a corner. He’d conspiratorially look over his shoulder and then give me the OK. It was like starting up a Lamborghini.”
Mohr, who retired in 1992, said in 1990 that the first time he tuned Arthur Rubinstein’s piano, before a recital at Yale, he cleaned the keys. Then he proudly told Rubinstein what he had done.
“Young man,” Rubinstein told him as they stood in the wings with the audience already in their seats, “you didn’t know, but nobody ever cleans the keys for me. It makes them too slippery.”
Mohr had to find something to gum up the keys and find it fast, before the lights went down. The stickiest thing he could get his hands on backstage was hair spray. “I went pssst up, pssst down,” he said. “The audience laughed. But he loved it.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
