By Hugh Robertson

In the middle of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall stage, Terry Harper stands alone at the piano, putting the instrument through its final tuning and checks.

The cavernous auditorium is empty; his only audience the production staff scurrying around setting up for this morning’s concert. You have never heard this man play one single note, but he is one of the most important people in the modern history of music in Sydney.

Terry is the Sydney Opera House’s piano tuner, and has quite literally had his hand in almost every concert involving a keyboard to ever take place underneath these famous sails. And not just the gleaming concert grands that you see the likes of Sir Stephen Hough playing in this concert – Terry has been responsible for every piano in the building, in rehearsal rooms for the ballet, for the opera repetiteurs, in the Utzon Room and more besides.

So much goes into preparing a piano for a concert, though it is rarely a matter of pulling the whole thing apart and starting from scratch. Terry sees his job as maintenance more than construction, doing touch-ups and tweaks rather than knock-down rebuilds.

‘If it's a good piano, and you've done your job well, you don't have to do much. The less you pull it around the better. These concert grand pianos are like F1 racing cars – they are driving them to the brink when they play them. They are going to their limits.’

Terry is hanging up his tools in June, bringing to an end a decades-long association between the Sydney Opera House and the Harper family which began when Terry’s father Ron started tuning the pianos here not long after the building opened in 1973.

‘The story goes that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing one morning, and the pianist refused to play on the piano because it hadn’t been tuned properly. Someone at the Opera House knew my dad from a recording studio he used to work at, called the studio and he just happened to be there. Dad got down to the Opera House as soon as he could, sent the Orchestra off for a walk around the Botanic Gardens for an hour or two, and when they came back – with the pianist – the piano was tuned and all was well.

‘And of course, after that, Dad was offered the position to come in and look after the pianos here.’

Ron’s story is typical of his generation: born in Liverpool, England, he first came to Australia as an aircraft mechanic with the Fleet Air Arm of the British Pacific Fleet in the final months of the Second World War. Retraining as a piano tuner upon his return to England, Ron’s memories of Australia were so fond that he emigrated in early 1949 with his wife and young daughter. Terry’s older brother was born two months later – ‘smuggled into the country’, as Terry puts it – before Terry and his twin sister showed up in 1956. and built a house (with his own two hands) in the leafy southern suburb of Mortdale.

Tuning a piano is a unique task, equal parts mechanical and artistic, and Ron lived that particular dichotomy day-in, night-out. Terry describes how Ron, ‘a very good piano player’, would travel all over the city tuning pianos by day, then do the same in the evenings playing gigs with his own band. Terry’s reminiscences are like a whistle-stop tour of Sydney nightlife in years past: Chequers nightclub on Goulburn Street, the Silver Spade Room at the Chevron Hotel in Kings Cross, the Trocadero Ballroom on George Street. Terry recalls nights when he would sing as a boy treble at St. Andrew’s Cathedral School, then Ron would pick him up and go hear the likes of Shirley Bassey, Robert Goulet and Howard Keel. One especially vivid memory of Terry’s is sitting in the back of his father’s car while they drove Cilla Black to her accommodation, the singer and Ron sharing stories of Liverpool in thick Scouse accents.

With this sort of scene typical of his childhood, it was inevitable that Terry would end up in music. Though it might surprise you to learn that he isn’t a very good piano player at all.

‘I tried to learn the piano – It wasn't my instrument,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I cannot play a note on the piano. I can play you some major chords. That’s it.

‘I learned to play the drums. And I did get to the point when I was in my late teens where I could go out and play with Dad’s band. So I did a bit of that until I was 21 or 22.’

Meanwhile, the Sydney Conservatorium had established a piano tuning course the year before he left school, and Terry – unsurprisingly – thought he might give it a go. ‘It was a one-year course and 50 years later, and here I am still doing it.’

When he graduated in 1976, Ron was tuning all of the pianos at the Opera House and brought Terry on to do the fifteen or so rehearsal room pianos around the building. They worked together for two years, not just at the Opera House but also at the ABC’s old studios in Darlinghurst (where Harry Siedler’s famous Horizon building now stands), before Terry moved to London. After ‘sponging off relatives’ for a few months, Terry walked into the Steinway & Sons branch where the wonderfully-named manager Lionel C. Squibb put him through his paces and ultimately offered Terry a job as one of six full-time tuners servicing the Steinways all over London, at the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall , Wigmore Hall, BBC Radio & Television Studios, Abbey Road Studios and many more.

Terry came back to Sydney in the early 1980s, and then in 1986 Ron retired, and Terry has been flying solo ever since.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment to Terry’s diligence and ability is that he can’t recall a single major complaint from any of the hundreds of pianists who have visited over the years – and indeed there are many that Terry has never met. ‘I think that is a good thing, because if they don't need to see me then everything's fine. I’m just in the shadows, in the background, and that's where I like to be.’

Of course, Terry has some great stories after close to 50 years in the business. Vladimir Ashkenazy didn’t like his pianos to be ‘too tight’ and ‘too perfect’, leading to some performances that Terry felt were perhaps slightly out of tune. And he recalls visiting the London home of the great Alfred Brendel to tune the two pianos in his living room – a Bösendorfer concert grand and a Model C Steinway – and as he left Brendel proceeded to pull the piano apart so that he could work on the felt hammers to voice and adjust the tone himself.

But more than anything Terry is a music lover, and one of the great perks of this job has been sneaking into the hall just before the lights go down, listening to his handiwork ringing out into a room packed with 2,500 people hanging on every note.

Terry, from all of us at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, thank you for the music.