Just by accident Wolfgang started his first piano master class for medical doctors. Last year the director of the "maritim-Staatsbadhotel Bad Salzuflen" asked him if he could make some lectures about music themes for the "Senior Academy" during a week of their meeting. He agreed but said to the director that he would like to do more than only make a lecture for a single hour a day. He would like to do a piano master class.

Though this would be a bit to expensive for music students in this luxury hotel. After some discussion they decided to try medical doctors who would be able to afford this. A lot of them are music amateurs and like to play the piano. There are even a bunch of doctors'  orchestras. But they did not know of any kind of piano courses for medical doctors.

The "Deutsches Ärzteblatt" (German Doctors Journal, official medium for all doctors) helped us and put a little article mentioning this course. Right away 15 doctors called directly from their office and seven booked the course! They were telling more or less the same story: They had played piano very much before their medical studies. Then they were very busy for the exams and to setup their jobs and neglected their hobby over the years. Now everything was running fine they urgently felt the need to take-up the hobby again, and this offer just came right for them!

One colleague brought even his daughter with him. After this resonance Wolfgang asked several times at my factory in Vienna, if he could get the Boesendorfer SE computer piano for teaching (that time of the first course he did not know me, yet). And really: the 275 SE was deviated on his tour from a television session in Bremen to his next appointment to work a bit in Bad Salzuflen.

Wolfgang's intention was not only to teach with it but also demonstrate it to the owner of the maritim group to buy it for use with the "Mobile Unit" for all hotels. Though this idea was not supported by him and he did not even have a look at it.

The piano technician Martin Müller who was specialized for this computer piano came directly from Vienna -his room was generously payed by the hotel director- and the course could begin.

The recital for the Senior Academy with Wolfgang was directly recorded by the 275 SE and later edited for his first Compact Disc.

This most modern way to produce a piano solo CD works only with a sophisticated instrument like the Boesendorfer SE. It measures the speed of the keys and hammers life during the recital 800 times per second and the dynamic range in over 1.000 degrees. Against this the normal MIDI formate looks weak with dynamic range of only 128 though it has other advantages. With MIDI you really are aware of some loss in the dynamic quality of playback since the human ear can distinguish about 300 dynamic degrees. This is not sufficient for a CD production. But the SE series with its IBM software is unique in its quality as well for its computer part as for its piano part!

So in a first session you have the live recital during which the piano sounds with his natural sound and the movements of the keys and hammers are recorded without influencing the play of the pianist at all. For him it is like sitting at a normal concert grand piano.

In a second session this recording can be listened to even slowly (without transposing the sound like in a tape recording played slowly) and where you find a disturbing note it can be edited without making a "cut" like in tape recordings. You just cancel the false note and insert the correct note at the same place so that the original live flow of the music is not at all interrupted.

You could assumethat it is possible to insert a whole music piece perfectly by hand. This is not so, because it sounds too synthetic. It has been tried. Resume: live is live. The biological irregularities of a pianist cannot be copied. So the editing of the recording just makes sense to correct the little mistakes to get a version good enough to multiply on a CD.

Only in the third session you put a microphone in front of the piano. It had recorded not the sound but the movement of the keys and the hammers. Then they had been edited. Now the piano replays this software file using little magnets, "solenoids", under the keys pushing them exactly in the same speed as the pianist had done during the recital.

By doing this the sound itself is being newly created by the piano! So it is an original acoustical sound. This way of reproduction cannot be compared at all with any other way of super-loudspeaker reproduction!

Also there are no disturbing sounds reproduced like the mourning of the pianist or some coughing of the audience. During the third session with the pure audio recording no audience is present and even no pianist. The keys of the piano move all alone.

This way the recording is an optimal compromize between a simple live recording with all disturbances and imperfections and a "synthetic" studio recording with many cuts which interrupt the live-stream of the music.

You can say: "There have to be only live recordings". O.K., but who plays so perfectly that an uncorrected live recording may be sufficient for publication? Who thinks so naturalistic should not even use recording media at all but always go to the recitals in person.

Who accepts recordings should be aware of the great advantages of a live recording which has been edited through the computer software without interrupting the live stream.

(CD "Klavierabend ?! with Wolfgang Ellenberger" CCC911, label ClassiCulturCentrum)

The piano course

So during these 10 days Wolfgang really had a lot to do:

that was a series of 16 hours of work for him, but the output was very good, too.

The participants did not only play the piano but some of them could draw very well. At the closing evening they gave Wolfgang a very original tiny little booklet with cartoons about the topics of the piano course.

"Bebildertes Handbuch zur Ellenberger-Methode" (ISBN 3-929056-0-3, Verlag ClassiCulturCentrum).

Half a year after this course the most "professional" participant was urging Wolfgang to go on doing such courses. Wolfgang just read of the opening of a new music center "ars musica aub" half an hour south from Wuerzburg by car and visited that place together with that participant Dr.med. Johannes Kommoss from Winterbach (near Stuttgart). Their goal was very clear: The costs for the course should be reduced a lot.

The visit was very successful, they made some calculation models and the second course could be offered at a much more favourable price for full pension, fee and tax for full three days. The participants would arrive on Thursday evening for a relaxed warm up and travel back home on Sunday afternoon. Everybody would have his 45 minutes lesson each day.

Johannes was scheduled to cooperate as an assistant. He did not expect Wolfgang to be so fast with his mailing and found too late that he had an important family festivity the same days. That's why he only came as assistant for the third course.

Well, now I tell you about the second course, the premiere in Aub. We arrive on the beautiful market place of the town which is in fact only a village. But because of its good position on the main trading routes of the earlier history it had got the right to be called "town of Aub". Right beside the fountain there is house number three which had been a restaurant with facilities to feed and host horses at the time of their use as transport media.

This house had to be restored "from scratch". Thanks to the initiative of a young school teacher and his architect friend the restoration was done with a genial concept: The historic substance was left as it was as much as possible (including not horizontal floors and not vertical walls) and the necessary supporting elements like columns of metal were left visible to the eye. A very nice optic between historic and modern, between function and estetical aspects.

As I said that looked nice but had one disadvantage. The door was very low and I could not get through it on top of pianoplan! So they pulled me down on the ground and then pianoplan made my tractor and pulled me inside on my slide over a ramp. Then I was put on my feet in the foyer.

For three days I was played nearly without interruption. Just the teaching took 11 lessons. In the evening the young architect Felix played his double bass together with the Jazz pianist Christoph Wuensch for a real hot Jazz session. Christoph was cooperating with Wolfgang also offering teaching in improvisation. The participants could distribute their lessons over the teachers as they liked.

Through this Wolfgang could make a short trip to Frankfurt on Saturday morning and play on a medical congress of the Christophorous house. Pure stress for him! Thursday afternoon transporting me, opening evening, Friday 11 hours of teaching, in the evening visit of a concert in Wuerzburg, drive to Frankfurt and sleep there, congress event until noon, and in the afternoon again teaching in Aub followed by the final recital of the participants. More teaching on Sunday morning from 6.30 until 16.00 with a short break for lunch and loading me on the van........