11/14/2022 0 Comments Tor house visiting hours![]() ![]() “Jeffers was so well-known in the ‘30s and ‘40s that a great many famous people came to visit him, and we know that some of them played the piano: people like (composers) George and Ira Gershwin, Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, and (photographer) Ansel Adams.” When Robinson Jeffers became famous, his circle of friends expanded to celebrities of the day, Ruchowitz-Roberts says. Special, too, was the knowledge that Una’s piano held the DNA of some very famous people. It was a very singular experience for me, and it really grew on me a lot.” “I particularly felt it in the late afternoons and the evenings, when the sunsets were just spectacular, and at night, with the low lights and the quiet. It’s still there in the walls,” says Brown, who majored in Religious Studies at UC Santa Cruz. “After a few days I could really feel the presence of Robinson Jeffers and his family. He did all of the work at the Tor House, which soon felt like a spiritual experience in itself, he says. He thoroughly cleaned its sound board and plate, carrying away buckets of dirty water in the process. Over a two-month period, he replaced virtually everything inside the piano - the strings and the pegs that hold them, the dampers, and the hammers - ordering the parts from multiple sources. “Even though it was horrendously out of tune, it still sounded very good, very strong.” “That’s really the core of the piano, and this instrument had tremendous heart,” he says. Its sound board was in near-perfect condition. Things would have started breaking really quickly.”Īt the same time, Brown says the instrument was in remarkable condition. It still played, but it hadn’t been tuned in decades, and the strings were so rusted, and the hammers were so worn down, that it wasn’t possible to tune it. “The piano had been there by the ocean since the early 1900s and the corrosive salt had pretty much eaten away everything that was metal. “It was quite a sight,” Brown says with a laugh. The challenge that awaited the veteran piano technician was both daunting and exciting, in equal parts. ![]() “But we know there had been no restoration since that time.”īrown was thrilled to be hired after Paula Karman, wife of Tor House board member and Jeffers scholar Jim Karman, agreed to underwrite the restoration of the instrument at a cost of $9,000. We actually have a photograph of Una giving a house concert, with Teddie playing his cello,” says Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, vice president of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and a docent at the historic home. “The piano has probably been at the Tor House since 1919. Jeffers helped carry the 610-pound piano into the parlor with assistance from the Wermuth Moving Company. Remarkably, Teddie remained friendly with both his ex-wife and Jeffers and, in fact, gave Una the Steinway. The next day she married their friend and neighbor, Robinson Jeffers. His romance with Una faded, and their marriage was dissolved after 12 years on August 1, 1913. (He later designed and built Carmel’s original Golden Bough Playhouse). Kuster was a musician himself : He had been first cellist for the Los Angeles Symphony, an orchestra he co-founded. ![]() Its original buyer is believed to have been Edward “Teddie” Kuster, who purchased the instrument for his wife, Una, a classically trained pianist. Brown, of Santa Cruz, had spent the previous two months restoring the interior parts of the Steinway grand piano to its former glory - the condition it was in when the company shipped it to a dealer in San Francisco in 1904. ![]()
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