Morning Mix

World-famous pianist’s magnificent, $200,000 piano dropped and destroyed by movers



Angela Hewitt performs on a Fazioli concert grand piano in a 2012 video. (YouTube)

By Meagan Flynn
Feb. 12, 2020 at 6:50 a.m. EST

In a Berlin recording studio, on a grand piano stretching more than nine feet long, Angela Hewitt wrapped up her latest set of Beethoven pieces for a forthcoming CD and headed to the control room to hear from the producer.

The piano was a beauty, with a black finish so shimmering that you could see the strings and hammers reflected in the raised cover. Handmade in Italy, it was outfitted with a rare fourth pedal invented by the piano maker Fazioli, and by some estimates is valued at roughly $200,000.

But as the world-famous pianist from Canada waited for her movers to haul away the hulking instrument, they tiptoed into the control room and told Hewitt they had some difficult news to break.

They had dropped it.

And broke it to the point that the concert grand piano is now unsalvageable, Hewitt said in a Facebook post this week.

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[A fourth pedal] is what made the piano itself unique, with no other like it in the world, a spokeswoman for Fazioli, Elena Turrin, told The Post via email. While Fazioli makes a larger concert grand piano with a fourth pedal, the F308, it had to custom-build the one for Hewitt’s slightly smaller F278 model, placing it where the middle tonal pedal usually goes rather than installing it off to the side. Turrin called it a “delicate, complex and expensive modification.”

“Indeed, her instrument was the only existing one with this peculiarity,” wrote Turrin: “This represents a huge loss for Mrs. Hewitt.”

Terence Lewis, co-owner of London’s Jaques Samuel Pianos and who knows both Hewitt and her piano, told the Guardian that her specific Fazioli piano model is worth about 150,000 pounds, or roughly $194,000, if purchased new. While Hewitt did not disclose who the movers were, Lewis said that she would not have let anyone she didn’t trust move her piano.



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Meagan Flynn is a reporter on The Washington Post's Morning Mix team. She was previously a reporter at the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Press. Follow https://twitter.com/Meagan_Flynn