Silently listening, a 150 year old square grand piano hid in the bowels of the Lobero Theatre. It stood in a coffin-shaped box wedge vertically in a corner, without legs, a lid, or a keyboard cover. The once beautiful rosewood case and fine ivory keys identify this ghost as a piano, secreted behind racks of outdated klieg lights and suspended cables on heavy metal bars. Brett Hodges, Lobero historian and board member, pointed out the piano to me. I didn’t see it, and even with a powerful flashlight I only saw rusted, dirty strings and a slight hint of a gold iron harp. The staff with us that day didn’t know it existed.
That Square Grand Piano Listened!
The piano heard every sound in that theater for one hundred years. With good ears, those of us in the Lobero basement might hear the piano vibrating in response to the band rehearsing above on the stage. The piano may still make music of a kind. I struck a key, heard an eerily deep-toned note. Although nobody played it for years, it sings with resonant frequency. Any instrument nearby that plays a certain tone is ‘matched’ by one of these old piano strings, because that string absorbs the energy of the sound, and amplifies its own vibration. The old square grand piano, truncated, rejected, immobile, sang along with the stage performers above for untold years.
I contacted Michael Stinnett, founder and director of Sales and Historical Archives at the Antique Piano Shop, experts in those coffin-shaped old pianos called Square Grands. Stinnett viewed pictures of this instrument’s massive harp, decorative sound vent, and curling enameled flourishes. He said T Gilbert and Company created the piano in Boston at the end of the Civil War. More American square grand pianos were built and sold than any other shape, such as a vertical or a concert grand, until 1880-1890. Then honkytonk upright took the lead. At that time the square grand went out of fashion, seen as a reminder of the Victorian Gilded age.
Years before electrical amplification and player pianos the weighty iron harp of the square grand handled more direct string tension than other model of pianos, which made it louder. Most classical nocturnes and piano concertos were composed on a pianoforte with a tone similar to the 18th and 19th century square grand. For 150 years Europeans and Americans chose them for their front parlors. Like all square grands, the Lobero’s ghostly piano strings run left to right. I viewed it with no small feat of maneuvering. The piano is stored on its side with the keyboard running down the corner of a wall.
Opening Play at the Lobera
With origins as an opera house and premier stage for music, pianos have a long connection with the Lobero. In 1924 the Santa Barbara Community Arts Players performed Beggar on Horseback for the opening of the theater. This play by George S Kaufman and Marc Connelley revolves around a pianist and a piano. The heart of the play involves the young struggling classical pianist and composer Neil McRae. The set consists of his Greenwich Village cold water flat, sparsely furnished with the look of a poor artist’s room on the third floor of a brownstone. Stage directions say “the most luxurious piece of furniture in the room is a grand piano which McRae has hung onto with no little difficultly; it stands well down stage left…down right is the only comfortable piece of furniture, an easy chair, the rear wall holds McRae’s desk and straight stiff backed chairs…”
The Arts Players and director Nina Moise choose this play to open the “new” Lobero on August 4, 1924. Moise came to Santa Barbara by way of Provincetown Players and Hollywood in 1920 to direct plays for the Potter Hotel Theatre. Moise heard of the hit production Beggar on Horseback on Broadway in New York. The Arts Players commissioned her to speak to the play’s owner, Winthrop Ames. She requested that his major Broadway hit be commensurately performed in a community theatre in a small town, Santa Barbara. Beggar on Horseback went on for 223 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre, and then revived seven months later at the Schubert.
A Question
Did Winthrop Ames give the production rights and stage designs to Moise, one of only 18,000 people living in 1924 Santa Barbara, for an amateur performance for a tiny audience at a new theatre? Yes. Ames vacationed in Santa Barbara and loved the place.
This piano, hidden away, never sold, may have been the piano that opened the “new” Lobero in Beggar on Horseback. Piano historian Stinnett described it as a top piano for its day but affordable for a struggling classical pianist like the character McRae in the 1920s. The square piano went out of fashion before 1900 so they quickly became unpopular and inexpensive to acquire. Someone who loved the sound of a large grand piano without the means to purchase a concert grand likely chose a square piano, cheap and plentiful at the time.
An article by Reginald Faletti in our Historical Society’s Noticias in 1965 describes the first production at the Lobero in 1924 in detail. Local artist Robert Wilson Hyde (1875-1951) loaned the Lobero his antiques and fine items from his studio and shop located in the Hill-Carrillo adobe on East Carrillo Street. In the early 1900s Hyde became a major figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement. He co-founded the Community Arts Association and the 1920s Santa Barbara School of the Arts. He became instrumental in the founding of the “new” Lobero in 1924, and acted as set designer. Could the piano have once lived in his antique shop? Did he gift it?
Piano Central to Beggars on Horseback
Stage direction calls for McRae to play for a dream sequence in the play, an exotic pantomime with music composed by McRae. Director Moise was fortunate in her choice of leading men. Young Arthur Bliss, a concert pianist, recently arrived in California from England. Bliss expertly played “A Kiss in Xanadu,” set in an exotic royal bedchamber behind a moonlit balustrade with flowers in the moonlight as a play within the play. Critics at the time thought Bliss an extraordinary talent. The amateur went onto compose music for the Hollywood Bowl in 1950 and received knighthood by the King of England for his contributions to music.
Faletti’s 1965 article about Opening Night August 4, 1924 states that it wasn’t just the repeatedly packed houses for Beggars on Horseback that wowed. The whole ambitious endeavor of building the theater, mounting a Broadway production by small town amateurs, and the support of the local arts community made it a landmark moment. He quotes The Little Theatre Monthly, a magazine printed as a fundraiser for the Lobero, “The play achieved a climax, demonstrating the extraordinary resources of the playhouse, the director, and the actors of the Community Arts Players who are amongst the ablest and most progressive amateur organizations in the country.”
If the Lobero Piano Could Talk
What if we heard that abandoned ghost, the voice of the upended, ravaged piano that sleeps wordlessly in the dark of the haunted basement? It may tell us it witnessed this climatic moment in Santa Barbara history, the opening performance of the Lobero. It certainly sung about it ever since.