This Bösendorfer Model 225 belonged to an orchestra conductor — the Maestro — who had recently inherited it. It was a very, very special instrument to him, and his young children played it too. The Maestro spent long private hours at the keyboard, going over scores, hearing an orchestra in his mind while his fingers found the lines on the page. Later, when he lifted a baton in front of the orchestra and the hall went still, the piano at home had already had a humble but important part to play.
It is easy to forget, until a piano is suddenly in danger, how much music means to us. It is one of the oldest things families share. It gives form to nearly every emotion a person can feel: joy and sorrow, tenderness and struggle, celebration and the long ordinary hours in between. Words often fail at those thresholds; music does not. A piano in a living room is not merely furniture. It is a place where those feelings can be shaped, heard, and, for a little while, held.
The Model 225 is a 7′5″ grand, built in Austria. Bösendorfer makes only about 300 instruments a year, and each one can take the company’s artisans up to a year to complete. These are uncommon pianos. The Model 225 has 92 keys — four more bass notes than a standard piano, reaching down to the Subcontra F. Its larger sibling, the Imperial 290, has 97 keys, nine extra, a full eight octaves. The extra bass does more than add a few low notes. It deepens the instrument’s color, and it is one of the things that make a Bösendorfer sound like itself.
In 2023, while the family was away, a pipe burst in the ceiling directly above the piano.
A Night of Water
Water ran down onto the instrument. There was standing water around it, and water on the lid, the harp, the soundboard, and the strings. A disaster, and a heartbreak. A piano is mostly wood, felt, iron, and steel, all of it fitted to close tolerances. Standing water can stain, swell, rust, and loosen what is meant to stay tight. You look at a soaked grand and the questions come quickly. Can it be restored? Is it ruined? Is there hidden damage the eye cannot see?
The sooner such an instrument can be opened and assessed, the better the chances of bringing it back. The Bösendorfer came to our shop and gallery in Lafayette, Colorado, so we could find out.
As the piano left for the shop, one imagines the living room it had occupied. A grand piano, even when no one is playing, silently anchors a room with its presence. Take it away, and the space can feel strangely empty — a stretch of floor that seems too open, a silence that is not quite peace. There is a particular pathos in a musician’s home without a piano. The house still stands, and life goes on in it, but the instrument that belonged at its center is gone, and with it the ready possibility of sound. Until it returns, the room keeps a kind of waiting in it. For anyone who lives by music, that absence is not a small thing. The place where one sat down to play is, for a time, only a space.
In our shop we see many instruments, but a water-damaged Bösendorfer of this size asks for a particular kind of patience. The first work is simply to look — carefully, without hurry — and to decide what the water has actually done, and what may be hiding where the eye cannot easily go.
When we lifted the lid, the signs of the leak were clear. Water had marked the bronze-colored harp — the cast-iron plate that carries the tension of the strings. Marks like these, often near the hitch pins, are typical of water that has sat or run across the plate. The strings had rusted. The pedals and casters had sat in the water. The soundboard and the bridges had been reached as well.
None of this meant the piano was beyond help. It did mean the work had to be thorough: not a wipe-down, but a restoration of every part the water had actually touched, and of the parts that had to come off so we could do that work properly.
In the Shop
We began with the things that had stood in the water. We gently polished the oxidation and the water damage from the pedals, working until the metal came clean again, and we polished and restored the casters. These are modest parts, close to the floor, easy to overlook in the presence of a golden plate and a long spruce soundboard. They had sat in the wet, and they deserved the same care as everything above them. The brightwork, including the gold lettering on the fallboard, would be brought back to a high shine as the work went on.
Then we turned to the heart of the instrument. We carefully cleaned the water damage from the harp and the soundboard. The soundboard is the thin wooden panel under the strings that gives the piano its voice; the bridges carry the vibration of the strings into that board. Water can stain the wood, swell it, and loosen glue joints. The harp can be marked and corroded. Cleaning is only the beginning. Then comes the slower work of polishing, until the plate and the board are clean and even again, and the bronze of the harp begins to look like itself.
To do that work properly, the strings had to come off.
There is a particular quiet that settles over a grand once its strings are gone. Without them, the piano cannot sing. The plate and the soundboard are still there, suddenly open, almost unfinished, exposed in a way they are never meant to stay — but the voice is gone. What remains is a silence at the heart of the instrument, a waiting silence, until the strings are made and hung again. One by one, we took off all 240 strings, first from each tuning pin, then from the hitch pin at the rear. On a Bösendorfer, every string has its own hitch pin, and each hitch coil is wrapped by hand — a different arrangement from a Steinway, where one wire often forms two strings. Then we backed each tuning pin carefully out of the pinblock. A piano can only stay in tune if those pins hold tight, and water can rust them and affect how firmly they sit.
We lifted out the damaged string felts, carefully and without hurry. Those felts cushion and quiet parts of the scale. Once they have been wet they can stay compressed, stain, or begin to deteriorate, and they no longer do their job. Then the agraffes came out — the small brass fittings in the plate that each string passes through. Water can tarnish and corrode that brass. Taking them out, finishing them properly, and putting them back protects them and keeps the string spacing and height as they should be.
With the piano open, we cleaned and restored the lacquer on the open-faced pinblock. Each agraffe was cleaned and polished, then protected from future oxidation with a high-gloss clear-coat lacquer. It is small work, held in the hand, and it is easy to rush. We did not rush it. The entire restoration asked for the same things at every step: attention to detail, care, respect for the instrument, and unhurried craftsmanship.
String by String
Then the work of putting the piano back together began. We reinstalled the agraffes one by one and carefully aligned them. We dressed the harp with new string felts. And then we began the long, quiet work of making and hanging the strings.
For each treble string, we selected the right gauge, wrapped the hitch-pin coil by hand, placed the string in the piano, attached it to its hitch pin and its tuning pin, and coiled it around the tuning pin exactly three times. The copper-wound bass strings went in as well, their windings catching the light as they were brought up over the plate. There is no hurry in this. A Bösendorfer is strung one string at a time, each with its own hitch, and the work has a rhythm you can feel in the hands: choose, wrap, place, coil, and go on to the next, until the harp is dressed again from the deep bass to the top of the scale.
When all the strings were in place, we carefully lifted and snugged each coil on its tuning pin and tightened the becket — the short end of the wire where it enters the pin. Both of these help the piano hold its tuning and settle as quickly as possible. At the other end, we snugged each hitch-pin coil gently down onto the harp with a small brass tool, so the coil would sit fast.
We reinstalled the dampers over the strings, and calibrated each one to lift at just the right instant as the damper pedal is depressed. Then came the tunings: not one, but several, bringing the strings gradually up to A440. You cannot put all of that load on a harp at once and expect the piano to be quiet. The tension has to come up in stages, so the instrument can settle, until the harp is carrying roughly twenty tons — on the order of 40,000 pounds — the load a concert grand’s strings exert when they are at pitch. In the unisons, we carefully leveled each set of strings so that the hammer would strike them together, in the same instant, and no string would speak out of phase with the others.
The cabinet needed the same patience. We cleaned and removed the water soiling from the case, then polished the finish until the high-gloss surface recovered its hard shine. The brightwork, too, came back. The Bösendorfer lettering, which had gone dull and tarnished, shone again.
Music Again in the House
And then the piano went home.
There was music again in the house. The room could be itself again: not empty, but held by an instrument ready to give form to whatever might be felt there. The Maestro’s piano was back in the living room, the centerpiece it had been — a beloved friend, and a partner in rehearsal once more. When the work was complete, the owner said it looked better than ever — like a brand-new Bösendorfer.
That is the quiet hope in work like this: not that a disaster can be undone, exactly, but that a treasured instrument can be brought back, with enough care, to the room where it belongs. The Maestro may again sit down with a score. His children may again find their way to the keys, and find adventure in distant musical lands. And when he later lifts a baton in front of the orchestra, the piano at home will have had, once more, its humble and important part to play.
Learn More
You can read the full, detailed account of this restoration, with more photographs, in our case study of a water-damaged Bösendorfer Model 225. If a pipe bursts, a roof leaks, or water reaches your piano in some other way, our guide to fire, water, and smoke damage walks through the first steps, and we are here to help.
We restore pianos in our Lafayette shop, and we work with owners nearby and across the country who ship instruments to us. Call (303) 521-3722 or contact us to talk about your piano.
— Trevor Nelson, Registered Piano Technician, Renaissance Piano Service
