The Weight of a Piano

The Weight of a Piano is written by Chris Cander.  This is a simple tale of a piano that leaves Russia in 1961 and is found residing in Bakersfield, CA in 2012.

We meet Katya, a young girl growing up in Soviet Russia.  her father is a piano tuner by trade and takes his eight year old daughter along while he tunes an old man's piano.  When the man dies he leaves the piano to Katya.  She learns to play and becomes a concert pianist.  Playing the piano is her greatest joy and helps her survive growing up in Soviet ruled Russia. When she marries Mikhail and has a young son, the family decides, during the refusnik period, to leave Russia and emigrate to the United States for a better life.  In the effort to leave the country the piano is sold with a promise of its return someday in the United States.  Katya is devastated without her piano.  Life is not as easy in America as Mikhail assumed it would be.

The author interperses Clara Lundy's 2012 life story into the piano's journey.  Clara is an unhappy twenty something, working for her uncle in a garage maintaining automobiles.   Her father gave a piano when she was twelve to take lessons on.  Soon after receiving the gift her parents die.  She has never learned to play but she has dragged the piano with her during many moves as the only memory of her parents.  Now after a recent break up with the current boyfriend and another apartment change, she breaks her arm while moving the piano and decides to list it on Ebay for sale.  Though she immediately regrets her decision and tries to take down the ad, the person who is interested in buying the piano is relentless and will not take no for an answer.

Greg is a photographer who wants to photograph the piano in Death Valley and other locations around Las Vegas.  They agree on a loan of the piano and it turns out, of course, that they will both follow the piano through the desert.

The "weight" of the piano has so many meanings.  The actual physical weight of a piano.  The emotional weight of a gift from a parent, especially one is no longer with us.  The weight of a gift that you never feel you have lived up to.  The weight of love you feel unworthy of .  The weight of trying to make sense of different relationships.  This piano represents so many different issues and the balance of the piano's weight on the precipice is what keeps each of these characters caught in their complicated emotional lives.

Cander uses the music and photography to show creative passion and illustrate how an object can become the focal point of a lifelong struggle.  The Weight of a Piano is ultimately about how we reconcile the present with the past, and in doing so we must sometimes let go of our idealized sense of both.