An 18-year-old Richard Auber had just begun his music degree with money he borrowed from his parents. “Musicians don’t make money,” his father, an amateur recorder player himself, warned Richard.
Auber played the flute, and some of the most beautiful music he could play was the music of Bach. Auber played the modern flute, that is, the metal one rather than one made of wood. But that early baroque music, when accompanied by piano instead of harpsichord, sounded too heavy and not quite right.“I didn’t even know early music was a thing,” Auber said. This was the late 1970s, and his school certainly had no early music program, whereas today nearly every music conservatory has a department dedicated to early music: baroque, renaissance, medieval. So, Auber borrowed $1,505 more from his parents, bought a harpsichord kit, and built the instrument right there in his dorm room. It was a Zuckermann harpsichord from the company founded by American Wolfgang Zuckermann, the pioneer of build-it-yourself harpsichord kits in the late 1950s.
That harpsichord project sparked an interest in woodworking, and Auber later accepted a year-long fellowship in Paris to learn the craft. He loved it so much that he saved and budgeted and stretched his year-long stay into two. But when he returned to the United States, Auber thought no one would pay him to use his woodworking skills, since they certainly hadn’t in France. So, saddled with student loan debt, Auber took a job on Wall Street, and decided he was going to become a lawyer.
Auber was miserable and starving. He worked as a paralegal at a very big law firm and made close to nothing. In a fit of fantasy, he bought a lottery ticket. “All you need is a dollar and a dream!” said the radio ad that played in his car. He brought the ticket with him to dinner with a friend, who asked what he'd do if he won. The answer just poured out of him: He knew of a harpsichord company in Stonington, Connecticut, and he wanted to run it.
Reflecting on this the next day, Auber thought, “What was I thinking?” His willingness to put all his hard work of preparing for law school aside to work on harpsichords took him by surprise, but that he had that intention to return to the place where he'd bought his harpsichord kit, really stuck with Auber. So, he packed up and moved to Connecticut with his fiancé to a chorus of “you’re crazy!” reactions from his friends. But he found that, after all, he could make more money working with his hands there, than he ever had on Wall Street.
Finding Zuckermann
Despite its appearance, a harpsichord is more like a violin than a piano in many ways: It’s a sensitive string instrument—the strings are plucked, not hit like in a piano—and it requires tuning every time you play. To own a harpsichord, one needs to have some basic know-how to tinker with it, to change a broken string, to repair a key that stops working, and so on.“That’s how the whole harpsichord kit was born, actually,” Auber explained. “Back in the 1950s, Wolfgang Zuckermann was so busy with service calls from customers who had bought one of his harpsichords, and needed help, that he barely had time to build them himself. A guy came in one day and he was really angry. ‘Why isn’t my harpsichord finished?!’ Wolfgang said, here are the parts. I'll give you back some of the money, and you can build it yourself.” Auber knows this because the man who claims to have gotten that first kit, told Auber the story himself.
Harpsichord repairs are easy enough to do yourself if you know how to do it, Auber noted, but there was no YouTube back then. So, Zuckermann decided that if people built the instruments themselves, they would know how to do everything.
Auber remembers, “A customer came to me looking for parts, and he described this instrument to me. I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Really? It says number one?’ I didn’t believe him.” But the customer sent him a picture, and it was indeed No. 1. It was the first kit Zuckermann had ever sold. Auber later purchased this historic instrument from that customer.
Zuckermann eventually hired professionals to do his building, but he didn’t keep his company for long. In the 1960s, he sold it to David Way, who put the company on its current path, and transformed the business into an international one. Way took blueprints of antique harpsichords—various historical models based on good instruments owned by museums—and built harpsichords and kits based on those models. He set up a network of agents, first across the country, then around the world. At one time, he had a manufacturer in Philadelphia who was making hundreds of kits at a time.
Auber ended up working for Way for a very short time, before opting to run his own antique business not far from there. But one morning, Way came to work, had a heart attack, and died. There was no succession plan in place. The company had several unfinished orders, and the building was in a state of disrepair. Auber decided to purchase the company.
Most shops can make one harpsichord per year at max, so it would take a decade to make, hear, and evaluate 10 instruments. “You have to build a lot of instruments before you even know what to listen for,” said Auber, who enjoys working on the actions the most. This constant iteration is what gives the company its expertise.
“One of my guys is over 70,” Auber said. “He’s in better health than I am, and he has no intention to retire. But the other day, he was videotaping and taking pictures of his work, and he was like ‘this is going to be for the next guy.’’’ And there certainly will be a next guy.
Early music saw a slow and sleepy resurgence in America in the 1950s, thanks in part to Zuckermann, and it has since become mainstream among classical music lovers, as many share anecdotally—largely among younger players and concertgoers. “Right now, the only limitation is the number of parts we can make,” Auber said.
He has a team of about a dozen people, mostly longtime employees, and a successful internship program that passes on the knowledge. Auber has ongoing efforts to locate and procure Zuckermann harpsichords, because many of those early harpsichords are no longer playable, and can end up being thrown away.
He said, “The phone rings all the time and we get these stories: ‘Oh, my father built this harpsichord for my mother, and we grew up with it, and the sound of harpsichord was always part of my life. Now my parents are gone, and I still have the harpsichord, and I would like to make it play again. Can you still send me strings?’” Other times these people want to donate the instrument back, and Auber puts those unplayable instruments to good use, letting interns try their hand at a repair.
“I was corresponding today with customers who are like 30 years old, and there are a lot of them,” Auber said. And there are kids, Auber added, like the 16-year-old in California who had ordered one of their clavichord kits. Afterwards, his mother wrote Auber to say how meaningful the project had been to him during the pandemic. Auber said, “He did such an amazing job, and it was such a growth opportunity and salvation for him, that she wanted to get him another harpsichord kit for Christmas, which she did, and he’s now finishing that.”
A colleague of Auber’s in California actually met that young man recently and called Auber to tell him what a brilliant young man he was, and what immaculate work he did. “You ask me why I do this; well, that’s why,” Auber explained.
Starry Night Epiphany
Owning a harpsichord shop, Auber had put playing the flute on the back burner for many years, with the strange fear that he would lose credibility in the eyes of his early music colleagues if he played this modern instrument. But no longer. “So recently, I’ve actually been saying that I decided to come out as a modern flute player,” Auber said. It happened after a fall down a flight of stairs a few years ago.Auber had been taking medication for high blood pressure that had a side effect of sleepwalking, which he hadn’t known about until one night when he got up and walked right off the staircase—waking up to unbelievable pain. “I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed, laying on the ground. I could not move, but I was in incredible pain. And my life was flashing before my eyes. I thought I was going to be in my warm, comfy bed. It was my birthday!”
The ambulance came, and it took hours to put a brace around Auber’s neck and carry him out of the house. “I remember I was lying on the stretcher, bumping along the driveway, and I was looking at the stars in the sky. It was a beautiful, clear night, and I was thinking, ‘My life is over. I’m going to be like Christopher Reeve.’” At that moment, his first thought was how sorry he was that he couldn’t play the flute anymore. At the time, he hadn’t been playing the flute for about a decade.
It was hours more before Auber learned that he wasn’t in fact paralyzed. Instead, what he had suffered was severe whiplash. By morning, he could walk just fine; but for a while, his arms would not extend fully, “like T-rex,” he said.
Nine months later, Auber was at the family Christmas party, thinking back to his regrets during the night of his accident. He took out his flute, found a quiet corner in an empty room, and started playing Christmas carols. “I have a big family,” he said. “It’s like 22 of us when we’re all together; and one by one, all of the people came into the room when I was playing and started singing along with me. And it just really touched me.”
He thought, “You know, it’s a shame that I’m not playing. I always, from when I was young, had this belief that my music has somehow had this power to heal people and to bring joy to people, and sometimes, you don’t even know that it happened.” So, Auber just decided that he was not going to lose that.
He plays often nowadays, and says, “I play better than I ever played before.” He still hasn’t picked up a baroque flute, because between his harpsichord business, antique business, and a small farm, there are only so many hours in the day. But he has let go of the fears he had, and as a result, he has made various breakthroughs in his music. And of course, he still plays Bach.
Bach’s melodies can be so hauntingly beautiful, Auber says, and to be able to play them on the flute is like singing. “It’s like being able to sing music that you would never be able to sing with your voice. There are times when I’ve been playing, and I have tears streaming down my own cheeks while I’m playing, because it is so incredibly beautiful. There’s not too many people that do that for me. There’s a sublime quality to his music that really goes right to the soul, like you’re in communication with Eternal God or Creator or some fundamental goodness and beauty in the universe.”
