Publisher Description

Now available in paperback, the critically acclaimed, "lyrical, analytical, yet deeply affecting" (The Washington Post) memoir about one woman's obsessive search for the perfect piano—and about finding and pursuing passion at any age.

The daughter of a pro- fessional musician, Perri Knize was raised in a home saturated in classical music, but it wasn't until adulthood that she returned to the one instrument that mesmerized her most: the piano. When, in her forties, Perri decides to buy a piano of her own, she begins by searching for a modestly priced upright, but falls madly, illogically, in love with a rare German grand she discovers in a New York showroom. After a long dalliance, Knize refinances her house to purchase her piano and has the instrument shipped to Montana. But when it arrives, the magical sound that enthralled her is gone, and the tone is dead and dull. One piano tuner after another arrives to fix it, but no one can.

Knize sets out on an epic journey to restore the instrument to its rightful sound and to understand its elusive power. This quest leads her into an international subculture of piano aficionados, all intriguing and eccentric characters—concert artists, dealers, technicians, composers, designers, and builders—whose lives have been transformed by the spell of a piano. She even hikes into the Austrian Alps to learn how the special trees used to build her piano are grown and harvested.

Beautifully composed, passionately told, Grand Obsession is itself a musical masterpiece—and will resonate with anyone who has ever experienced deeply passionate desire.

Review

"Knize...explores the nature of music and its ability to touch us."

-- The Los Angeles Times
"...a memoir about passion and ephemerality with lasting elegance and grace."

-- Washington Post
"Reading this book, you want to go out...and learn the piano, or at least visit a shop and stroke one."

-- The New York Times Book Review
"For me, Grand Obsession was intimately powerful: It changed the way I look at the world."

-- The Missoula Independent
"[Written] in a wonderfully evocative, lushly romantic style...music lovers will resonate to...[Knize's]...pursuit of a gorgeous sound."

-- Publishers Weekly
"A well-written, heartfelt, classy paean to a singular instrument."

-- Kirkus Reviews
"I was hooked from the first page....this book travels beyond the sphere of mere music."

-- The Buffalo News
"Knize has crafted a poetic tribute to the piano...Warmly recommended for all collections."

-- Library Journal

Review Quote

"[Written] in a wonderfully evocative, lushly romantic style...music lovers will resonate to...[Knize's]...pursuit of a gorgeous sound."--Publishers Weekly

Excerpt from Book

Grand Obsession 1 Epiphany In the autumn of my forty-third year, I remembered, quite unexpectedly, that I was meant to be a pianist. I was alone in my car, on my way to spend a weekend with friends. I fumbled through a box of cassette tapes I kept on the front passenger seat and found one my brother gave me: pianist Arthur Rubinstein performing Chopin waltzes. This might make a good soundtrack for the trip, I thought, and I pushed the cassette into the tape deck. From the opening notes of Opus 18--quick, percussive repetitions of B-flat--the car seemed to rock in sympathy to the driving three-quarter-time beat, taken at a wildly joyous tempo. Rubinstein''s complete freedom within the music astonished me, and his abandonment to it was contagious--the music seemed to enter my pulse and carbonate my blood. Meanwhile, through the windshield, Montana''s luminous Indian summer performed a fitting accompaniment: a sapphire sky hung behind the Elkhorn Mountains, where tawny grasses gleamed in the lowering sun. Quaking aspen lined the banks of the Boulder River; their burnished leaves turned up their bellies to the wind and trembled in unison, a ribbon of gold threading its way up the valley. I found myself gripping the steering wheel, as if I were hanging on for the ride, gripped myself by a piano-induced rapture that was as sweet as it was searing. This is all that I want to do with my life. These words arose as if from nowhere in my mind, astonishing me. This is all that I want to do with my life. They hit with the force of an inner directive that cannot be questioned. They arose again and again, as if rising on the swells of the music itself. The beauty of the day intensified the heartbreak: I felt as if I''d missed an urgent and critical appointment that could never be rescheduled. I had reached my own autumn, and the leaves would soon fall. How then could I devote my life to the piano? I recognized this inner voice--it was that of the child I had been, eight years old and asking for piano lessons that were not forthcoming. * * * "Which instrument will you choose?" my father asked one spring evening. He peered at me from beneath his knotted brow, heavy with an ever-present intensity that always suggested an impending storm. That day my third-grade class had attended a presentation of all the band and orchestra instruments; they were available to rent for school music lessons in the coming fall. Some people are passionate about music. My father was ferocious about it. Until I came along, he was a professional musician. In the 1940s, he played first clarinet with the Denver, Columbus, Chicago Civic, and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo orchestras. During the war years, while undergoing army intelligence training at Yale, he studied with the great German neoclassicist composer Paul Hindemith, and dreamed of becoming a conductor. In the early 1950s, at the end of his still-youthful music career, he played first clarinet in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and with the Metropolitan Quintet. Though he gave up professional performing at the age of thirty-five for a more lucrative career as a design manager at a stereo company, his life and our home remained saturated in music. When I was a child, his love of music penetrated my every cell and pore. Each night I fell asleep listening to the sonorous sounds of his clarinet as he accompanied recordings of his favorite works. A clarinet was never just a clarinet to me, and never will be: it is the sound of my father''s voice. There is no time I can remember when he was not training me to have a musician''s ear. I had my own high-fidelity component system before I was two, and my own collection of classic children''s records: The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Sa

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