Wolfgang Zuckermann
Harpsichord builder, bibliophile, expert on London stable blocks and champion of Buy Nothing Day
WOLFGANG ZUCKERMANN, who has died aged 96, was a harpsichord maker in America, a bookstore owner in France, the co-author of a delightful book on the stable blocks of London, and a social and environmental activist who championed the annual International Buy Nothing Day.
His harpsichord “kits”, designed to meet demand for affordable replicas of the 16th-century keyboard instrument, might have made him the Ikea of the early music world, but they also provided hours of entertainment for Americans raised on homemade kites and model aeroplane kits.
Drawn by a post-war revival in harpsichord music, Zuckermann had tried to buy an instrument but found it to be prohibitively expensive. In 1955 he started making his own, studying old drawings and examining instruments that had been sent from Europe to the US. Eventually he rented a loft space in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, and hired a cabinet maker.
The pair were soon producing three instruments a month, but struggled to keep pace with demand. Zuckermann, described as a “greying tinkerer”, hit on the idea of creating harpsichord “kits” that retailed for $150, a fraction of the price of full models. They were cheap to ship around the country and came with a thick instruction book. By 1969 he claimed to have sold 8,000 kits, including variations such as clavichords and spinets.
Having fled 1930s Germany, Zuckermann was dismayed when his adopted homeland became the aggressor in Vietnam. He sold up and, “running away from America”, bought Stafford Barton, a 40-room manor house in Devon, parts of which date back to the 15th century, where he lived alone.
He became involved in local craft enterprises, wrote a column called “Sympathetic Variations” for The Harpsichord magazine and described for New Yorkers his experiences of North Devon. “If it weren’t for the stringent entrance requirements and the weather, this place would be overrun with Americans,” he observed in The Village Voice, adding wryly: “The British themselves don’t appreciate the finer points of living in England.”
Wolfgang Joachim Zuckermann was one of three brothers born in Berlin on October 11 1922 into a Jewish, stringquartet-playing family; he was the cellist. In 1938 they left for New York, where his father ran a leather factory and Wolfgang anglicised his name to Wallace, or Wally.
Taking American citizenship, he served in the US army and studied English and psychology at Queens College, New York. He worked as a child psychologist while pursuing postgraduate studies, but by 1951 was spending most of his time buying and selling old pianos, soon moving into harpsichords. In July 1963 he founded the Sundance Festival of the Chamber Arts in rural Pennsylvania, designing a 425-seat amphitheatre with a canvas roof for inclement weather.
He also bought Caffe Cino, an off-off-broadway theatre that had fallen on hard times. Unknown to Zuckermann, its former owners had limped on, unlicensed, by paying off the police. He was reluctant to follow suit and before long had amassed 1,250 violations. One play contained a 10-year-old boy in the cast and the word “motherf---er” in the script, while in the audience lurked two police officers disguised as hippies. When the curtain came down Zuckermann was arrested for corrupting the child’s morals. The charge was dismissed, but not before he had spent a night in jail.
Zuckermann, who in 1967 had sponsored the Angry Arts week and sat on the steps of the Pentagon, was passionate in his opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam. Sensing in his arrest echoes of the fascism he had known 30 years earlier, he sold the business and left the US for good, pausing only to publish The Modern Harpsichord (1969), which was said to have been banned in Germany because of its criticism of modern German builders.
Having settled in the South-west, Zuckermann reverted to the name Wolfgang. But despite “[playing] chamber music and tennis with the local gentry”, he quickly tired of rural England. Missing city life he moved to London, where he was dismayed that planners had their eyes on demolishing many of the 500 former stable blocks. His book The Mews of London (1982), written with Barbara Rosen and subtitled “a guide to the hidden byways of London’s past”, aimed to show how they formed an integral part of the city environment.
He also studied mobility, transport and technology, pulling together his thoughts in End of the Road (1991), a children’s book called Family Mouse Behind the Wheel (1992), and Alice in Underland (2000). “It is no doubt ironic that the motor car, superstar of the capitalist system, expects to live rent free,” he once declared in a discussion about parking charges and their impact on consumers. He collaborated with Eric Britton, the political scientist, to create a “consumer holiday” that involves taking a day off from fuelling capitalism. They became aware of a similar event in Canada and merged to create International Buy Nothing Day, which this year is on November 23.
By the late 1980s Zuckermann was making his living writing research papers for The Commons, a policy research group in Paris. He moved to France in 1994 and set up Librairie Shakespeare, an English-language bookshop and arts centre inside the medieval city walls of Avignon, where he was known for his afternoon tea served with home-made scones. One visitor described Zuckermann’s shop as “a bibliophile’s paradise”. He retired in 2012, although the shop continues as Camili Books and Tea, while Zuckermann Harpsichords continues to supply kits from a workshop in Connecticut.
Wolfgang Zuckermann, who enjoyed the company of younger women, was married and divorced at least three times. He is survived by a nephew in California.