The workshop occupies the rear of a Hinterhof off Hermannstraße in Berlin Neukölln, behind a bakery, a Späti, and a fabric shop that sells thread by the metre. The address is not on a sign. Sigrid Vohwinkel prefers it that way.
She has been restoring pianos in the courtyard for nineteen years. Before that, she worked for Steinway in Hamburg for eleven years, and before that she trained at the Oscar Walcker Schule in Ludwigsburg, where she earned her Klavierbauer qualification in 1988.
On the Saturday in question — the eleventh of April, mild and grey — she is finishing a 1908 Blüthner upright that came in from a private buyer in Dresden in November 2024. The job has taken seventeen months.
The piano belonged originally to a Dresden cantor named Adelbert Linke, who bought it new from a dealer on Wilsdruffer Straße in March 1908. It survived the firebombing of February 1945 in a basement two blocks from the Frauenkirche, which Vohwinkel knows because the family kept the receipt and a typed letter from the cantor's widow dated 1947.
The papers are pinned to a corkboard above her workbench. She does not consider this sentimental. She says provenance helps her make decisions about how far to take a restoration — how much to repair, how much to preserve as evidence of use.
The Blüthner is the model Concert 6, an upright with a Patent Aliquot fourth string above each note in the upper two octaves, a Blüthner trademark since 1873. The aliquots had snapped on forty-two notes when the piano arrived.
Vohwinkel has restrung the entire instrument. The new strings are German-drawn from Röslau, a supplier she has used since 1991. She tunes the new strings up gradually over five passes across three weeks to let the iron frame settle without shock.
The hammers are the original 1908 set, recovered with new felt from Wurzen Filz. She did not replace the hammer shanks, which are German maple in good condition. She tells the buyer this in writing because the cost difference is substantial and clients often want to know.
Refelting is the slow work. Each of the eighty-eight hammers is removed from its shank, the old felt is pared off with a scalpel, the new felt is glued and clamped, and the head is reshaped with a sanding block while the glue cures.
She uses hide glue, which she warms in a small electric pot beside her bench. The glue smells faintly of barn. It is reversible, which matters, because the restoration she does today may need to be undone in eighty years by someone who has not yet been born.
On Saturday morning she is regulating the action — the geometry of the mechanism that translates a key press into a hammer strike. Regulation has thirty-six adjustment points per note, and on a Concert 6 the action is a single removable unit she lifts out and sets on a wooden frame she built in 2003.
The frame stands upright at the back of the workshop, lit by a fluorescent tube fitted with a daylight bulb. Vohwinkel works in a leather apron she has owned since her Walcker days, with brass pencils in the chest pocket and a notebook in the hip pocket.
She talks to herself in low German while she works. Not constantly. Just the occasional muttered phrase when a part resists. She switches to Hochdeutsch when she takes phone calls, which she does standing up at a black rotary telephone mounted to the wall by the door.
The phone rings twice during the morning. Once is a client in Charlottenburg whose Bechstein needs a tuning. She offers him a slot in June. Once is the bakery owner asking whether she can keep an eye on his keys while he runs to the bank.
By noon she has regulated the bass octaves. The middle and treble will take the afternoon. She breaks for lunch at a Turkish café three doors down and eats a lentil soup and a piece of bread, alone, at a small table by the window.
She returns to the workshop at one. The Blüthner action is where she left it. She works the rest of the afternoon at a quiet pace, checking each note's key dip, let-off, drop, and aftertouch, and writing pencil marks on the action rail at any spot that needs follow-up.
The hammer-line — the geometric line along which all the hammer heads should sit when the keys are at rest — is checked with a long steel rule and her eye. She has corrected sixteen heads by the end of the day, sanding microns at a time, which is the kind of work that does not photograph well.
At six in the evening she puts the action back into the piano, slides the cheek blocks into place, and plays a single C-major scale up four octaves. The tone is not yet what it will be — voicing comes last, after the felt has compressed into the strings over the first month of play — but the action is even.
The buyer is collecting the piano in two weeks. He has hired a removals firm from Dresden that specialises in pianos, and Vohwinkel has corresponded with their lead packer twice already to discuss the routing of the freight elevator.
She locks the workshop at six-thirty and walks home along Weichselstraße. The bakery is closed. The fabric shop is closing. The Späti is, as always, open. She buys a bottle of mineral water and walks the rest of the way without hurry.