Music, art and passion
Luigi Borgato’s history is a beautiful one, made of passion and recklessness too, a history of great love for his work, precisely chosen during his youth, chased and improved during the years with unique perseverance and dedication.
Luigi Borgato was born in Padua and now lives in Vicenza; when he was a little boy he got interested in playing the piano, but mainly in the mechanisms behind the instrument: this is the most fascinating part for him. Building a piano becomes some kind of a mission but the path is not that easy; although the piano was invented in Italy (by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698) our country does not have a piano-making tradition.
Borgato then starts writing to all major European producers to look for a school, a course, someone able to teach him how to build a piano, an extremely precise and difficult artisanal work, an art craft to be precise.
Finally, he gets a positive answer from Bechstein, a Berlin-based piano manufacturer company, inviting him to take a closer look to their work; in two days Borgato is in Berlin, he does not waste time and goes there with his girlfriend. He spends five years between Berlin, Nuremberg and Stuttgart to learn and understand how to build a piano and where to get everything needed to do so.
Borgato learns how to do the job, reaching an incredible level never seen before and based on the mixture of traditional and innovative elements, making him a great artist: he builds a concert grand piano providing the upper register of the keyboard with four strings struck per note (44 keys): it is the Borgato L 282, whose patent got registered in 1991. In 2000, he created the Doppio Borgato L 282 – P 398, made of two overlapped concert grand pianos. After ten years of experiments, studies and researches, the Gran Prix 333 was born, an exceptional 3.33 meters long piano, far bigger than the average 2.70-2.80 meters. It has become the longest piano on earth.
“Sometimes life puts us in front of unknown crossroads and then makes them belong to us”, said Borgato to Il Sole 24 Ore. I think internal strength and limitless passion are definitely needed to dismantle traditional career paths and to reach excellence.
