Dan Morgenstern is a man of contradictions – he plays the flute but builds harpsichords; he made his living running the family electrical-component company but studied music in college; and while the harpsichord epitomizes the Baroque period of music, he prefers modern composers.
The stories behind all those contradictions hail back to his paternal grandparents.
“My grandfather was a White Russian peasant orphan from Belarus,” he said. “My grandmother was from Bialystok, which is in Poland. She wanted her children to have everything she didn’t, – culture, art, music, the finer things in life.”
The Morgenstern matriarch succeeded. Her children all embraced the arts. Son Elliott, Dan Morgenstern’s father, played the French horn and earned a performance certificate from the Eastman School of Music before advancing to The Juilliard School, one of the most prominent music schools in the country.
“They graduated around 100, and my dad was one of about three to get the certificate,” Morgenstern said.
But the globe was deep in World War II, so Elliott joined the military, assigned to the Army Air Corps Band, where he wrote arrangements for the Glenn Miller Band, and met his future wife, Ruth Schapira, at a USO dance. After the war, many of Elliott’s Army friends went to play for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.
The Morgensterns returned to Cleveland, where Elliott put his engineering skills to work at the family business, Electroline. Dan Morgenstern’s uncle, Joseph Morgenstern, also an engineer working in the family company, played the cello and owned the first harpsichord the budding musician ever saw, in the 1950s, before they enjoyed a resurgence.
The Elliott Morgensterns became regular attendees at the Cleveland Orchestra, where he played, and gained fame for their parties, “where the women would cook up a storm, and the men would play their instruments,” Dan Morgenstern said.
The Met came to Cleveland once a year while on tour, where the Morgensterns threw memorable parties for Elliott’s old friends. The connection with the prominent opera company continued into Daniel Morgenstern’s generation, as his harpsichords have been used in Met performances.
“When I was about 10, my dad smuggled me backstage at the Metropolitan Opera,” Dan said, eyes alight at the memory. “We sat behind the timpani and watched “La Bohème.” When snow fell on the stage during the third act, it was magic. I was smitten with the opera. It really is the greatest show on earth.”
That was a big year for his musical development.
“When I was 10 or 11, my dad took me to Severance Hall (in Cleveland), to see Jean-Pierre Rampal, one of the most famous flutists of all time, and Robert Veyron-Lacroix on the harpsichord,” Dan, who had just started flute lessons, said. “I was smitten with both the flute and the harpsichord.”
That was fortunate. His keyboard skills were never to rise above the basic, due to an unfortunate incident years earlier.
“I bit my piano teacher when I was 5,” he said. “She was bawling me out and telling me to practice more. That was the end of my piano lessons.”
Morgenstern married a beautiful soprano, Polly, from Maine, while both were undergraduates at Eastman. After graduation, the young couple moved to Boston, where Morgenstern served as the business manager of Grammy-winning Boston Baroque, taught flute lessons, took auditions and went back to school, earning his master’s degree from the Boston Conservatory. Polly worked as the assistant registrar at the conservatory and sang.
“A typical musician’s life,” Morgenstern said. “Working multiple jobs to be in music.”
And he built his first harpsichord, ordered as a kit from the Whole Earth Catalogue. Polly is quick to point out he bought the kit with the money his father was going to use to buy her a piano as a graduation gift. He built it twice, taking it apart and rebuilding it to get the details right. Morgenstern also met Frank Hubbard, a leader in the restoration of historic methods of harpsichord building, and became a member of the Boston Woodworking Collective, improving his building skills.
The tally of harpsichords built is at 12, if the first one gets credit for the rebuild.
One of the auditions took in the early 1970s, and led to the Morgensterns moving to Israel for a year. Morgenstern was named the first principal flute with the Jerusalem Symphony while the sitting principal went on sabbatical. Because Israel’s currency wasn’t exchangeable at that time, the couple came home with a Persian rug given them by the orchestra as part of his salary.
In 1972, at the age of 59, Elliott Morgenstern died of leukemia. The younger Morgensterns moved to Cleveland to work with his mother in managing the family business, making Dan the third generation at the Electroline helm. Over the next 25 years, the business increased six-fold, he said.
“I ran it like a chamber ensemble,” he said, “where everybody was an artist, a virtuoso, cooperating and listening to each other.”
In 1997, the family sold Electroline.
“It took three years to transition to come here,” he said. “I worked as the managing director of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, which exclusively played new music. I love all the composers too much to choose a favorite, , which is amazing after I spent so much time with the Baroque. I was happy to help Arthur (Post, former music director of the San Juan Symphony) with his adventures in contemporary music.”
The couple continues to spend several weeks each year sailing in Maine, where they visit son, Michael Elliott Morgenstern, and his family. Their daughter, Julia Morgenstern Hefner, and her family live in Vallecito. The musical talent in the family continues, with two granddaughters who love music and dance.
Moving to La Plata County gave them new ways to be involved in music and allowed Dan Morgenstern to get back to building harpsichords.
“We brought the kids to visit the (national) parks in Southeast Utah, went skiing in Telluride and at Purgatory, and stayed at the Rochester Hotel,” Dan Morgenstern said. “We walked to Seasons (Rotisserie & Grill) for dinner, and Polly and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is it.’”
They moved here in 2000, where both have been involved with the San Juan Symphony and other musical events. And if you see a harpsichord on stage at concert, go up and check it out afterward.
It might just be a Dan Morgenstern original.
abutler@durangoherald.com
What is a harpsichord?
Dan Morgenstern doesn’t just enjoy building harpsichords – he has two close to completion and two ensconced in his home in Ticolote northeast of Elmore’s Corner – his brain harbors a treasure trove of knowledge about the instrument.
“I call it the Baroque home entertainment center because that’s what it was,” he said. “They were called virginals because young ladies were expected to learn how to play them as part of their finishing. They started in Italy, like everything else in the Renaissance.”
Harpsichords come in different sizes, scales and tones. Morgenstern is finishing building a muselaar, a Flemish-Dutch design that makes up about 80 percent of harpsichords, and a virginal, the English version. Like all harpsichords, they pluck the strings, albeit in different places along the string, as opposed to the piano, which has a hammer that strikes the string.
The harpsichord was a prominent instrument throughout Europe in its heyday.
“The harpsichord was the instrument played in Russia during Peter the Great’s reign, in the Age of Versailles while Louis XIV was in power,” Morgenstern said. “It was popular in Elizabethan England. Frederick the Great of Prussia, a flutist who unified Germany, played accompanied by Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, on the harpsichord.”
Harpsichords don’t just produce music, they are canvases for works of art. The two harpsichords Morgenstern is currently building feature recreations of historic paintings by his aunt, Esther Morgenstern Gilman. The muselaar showcases a group of young women playing a variety of instruments including a harpsichord, the virginal contains a scene of the “bourgeois” strolling in St. James Park in London.
The French double manual harpsichord in his living room, the instrument Morgenstern calls his magnum opus, features the Morgensterns’ son, Michael, as a cherub, the smaller has daughter, Julia, in a similar pose.
While the piano, credited to Bartolomeo Cristofori, was invented in the early 1700s, it did not instantly replace the harpsichord.
“It took 70 to 100 years,” Morgenstern said. “Part of that is the slowness of communication and transportation. And it took time to evolve. The piano of Mozart and Beethoven bears little resemblance in quality of sound and volume to pianos today.”
The harpsichord experienced a resurgence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, being used not only to play music originally composed for it, but inspiring modern composers to incorporate it in their pieces.
abutler@durangoherald.com
