Cecilia playing her armonica at home; she has
to keep looking at her armonica as she plays

It was opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, on September 24, and opening night for Cecilia, who played the armonica in the Met Opera’s new production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The armonica, also known as the glass harmonica, was invented by Benjamin Franklin, and is known for its delicate, otherworldly sound.

In Donizetti’s original conception, this sound was to be associated with Lucia’s arias and the “mad scene.” By the time of the opera’s premiere, however (in 1835), Donizetti, for whatever reason, had replaced the armonica in his score with the flute. The Met Opera’s decision to follow Donizetti’s original conception by using the armonica excited a great deal of interest, and put the spotlight on Cecilia, a pianist who plays the celesta, or celeste, in the Met Opera Orchestra and the piano when the Orchestra is on tour.

Cecilia was interviewed backstage, along with other notables, during the dress rehearsal for Lucia by Fred Childs, of “Performance Today,” heard on public radio, and also interviewed by the music critic Anthony Tommasini for an article about the production in The New York Times. She was seen on the wide screen when the opening performance of Lucia was shown outside to a large audience on Lincoln Plaza.

So what, exactly is an armonica?

For that matter, what, exactly is a celesta? The celesta looks like an upright piano, but its keys are connected to hammers that strike on a graduated set of metal plates, usually steel, instead of strings. Its soft timbre gave rise to its name; “celeste” is French for “heavenly.”

Cecilia can look up while playing her harmonium
(a reed pipe organ) in her music room at home

Back to the armonica. Its name derives from the Italian word “armonica,” or “harmony.” It is also known as the glass armonica, or glass harmonica, because glass is used to produce its sound, in a manner similar in principle to the way you can produce a tone by running a moistened finger around the rim of a wine glass. In the period in which Benjamin Franklin was a colonial agent in Europe (1757-1766), amateur musicians would provide a popular form of entertainment by playing melodies with sets of glasses (one glass, one tone, so glasses of different sizes – or containing different amounts of liquid – are required).

Franklin refined the concept and invented the armonica in 1761. He took wine glasses of varying sizes, removed the stems, drilled through the bottoms, and corked the holes. He then mounted the glasses, or bowls, onto a horizontal spindle that was rotated by a flywheel over a foot pedal. Cecilia's armonica uses a motor and batteries. Keeping the bowls rotating by use of the foot treadle, the musician plays the instrument by touching moistened fingers to the edges of the rotating bowls. Cecilia notes that you can play faster on wine glasses, because they are anchored down, and you can cut the tone short, but the tones produced by an armonica ring longer and have an over-ring.

Cecilia has found playing the armonica trickier than playing the piano. She can play the piano almost blindfolded, Cecilia says, but when she’s playing the armonica, she must always keep her eyes on the glass bowls, since she can’t identify the notes just by feeling the bowls' surfaces. This means that at the Met Opera, after watching the conductor, James Levine, for the start of her music, she cannot keep looking back and forth between the conductor and her instrument. She just has to play her cards, or her bowls, right.

"The piano is me," says Cecelia, who plays it
with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra on tour

Cecilia first got interested in the armonica in 1990 when she was at her vacation house in Massachusetts and she heard about the armonica on a program from Boston on CBS TV. Six months before she had played the celesta in a Mozart quintet that included a part for the armonica. (The most famous of the composers who have written for the armonica, in addition to Mozart – and Donizetti – are Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Saint-Saens.)

Cecilia remembers the program well. It was called “Our Town,” and on the program Cecilia heard about a master glass blower named Gerhard Finkenbeiner, of Waltham, Massachusetts, who was making armonicas. She went to see him and bought one. Gerhard Finkenbeiner died in 1999, and although his business continues to make armonicas, Cecilia is very, very careful with hers, just in case.

Cecilia’s armonica has 37 crystal bowls (the first one that she bought from Mr. Finkenbeiner had 27), with clear and gold bands and graduated in size - the smaller the bowl, the higher the note - and it is a striking sight. The bands on the bowls of Franklin’s armonica were the colors of the rainbow, but with white bands for what would be the black keys on a keyboard.

She had to make three attempts, Cecilia says, before she could get a sound from her armonica. She had no teacher; she just had to “figure it out,” and at age 67 she embarked on her second, additional, career. Now she is one of only about 14 musicians worldwide who perform on the armonica. She has also developed a scholarly interest in the instrument and the music written for it, as well as in Ben Franklin the musician. This while continuing her first career as an associate member, since 1972, of the Met Opera Orchestra.

“The piano,” says Cecilia, “is me.” She studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and she has played it with the Met Opera Orchestra on tours in Japan (two), Europe (four) and the United States (two). On one of those tours, to the Music Festivals in Weisbaden, Salzburg, Lucerne and Baden-Baden, Cecilia pursued her scholarly interest in the armonica by making an appointment with the librarian of the Mozart museum in Salzburg, to see manuscripts of music written by Mozart for the armonica. Cecilia was able to see, and hold in her (gloved) hands, the original manuscript of 13 measures of an unfinished Fantasie-Quintet with a part for the armonica. She was so moved by this brush with history that she wept.

Cecilia was a concert pianist going around the country under the auspices of a concert management organization when she met and married her late husband, in 1950. They had a son and a daughter, and Cecilia has a grown granddaughter. Her children did not play the piano - Cecilia says that with the raft of students she had, they couldn’t get near it.

Up to the time of Hurricane Katrina, Cecilia gave concerts in Florida for about five years with her brother, Raymond Gniewek (pronounced gnyeh-vek), who was concertmaster of the Met Opera Orchestra for 43 years. Their parents did not have musical careers of this sort, although her father did play the violin some in vaudeville, in Detroit. Cecilia was born in Detroit, in 1923, but has lived most of her life on Long Island, New York. She lives now in Merrick, Long Island, where she is an enthusiastic gardener and collector of things blue.

For more about Cecilia’s programs and performances, and about the armonica, Ben Franklin, and Cecilia herself, visit her website at www.gigmasters.com/armonica/index.asp.

From May 2008: CECILIA BRAUER

Cecilia playing her armonica durng a talk in the
Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center, NYC

The Spotlight in our December 2007 issue was on Cecilia Brauer, who opened with the Metropolitan Opera this past December. She provided the ghostly sound of the armonica for Natalie Dessay's arias in Lucia di Lammermoor. Cecilia repeated that performance when Lucia returned to the Met in March of this year.

Cecilia has continued to give presentations on Ben Franklin and the armonica all over the New York City metropolitan area and beyond. This past April, she spoke about Ben Franklin and his armonica and played some selections for an audience at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan.

Cecilia took a great many questions from the audience at that presentation, and it was clear that she was pleased that several of them came from a youngster. Cecilia does her best not only to acquaint young audiences with the instrument that Ben Franklin invented but to inspire enthusiasm in them for Franklin's genius.

You can find out more about Cecilia on her website - click on www.gigmasters.com/armonica/index.asp.

– Jan Oser

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