an Art Cased Ibach Grand designed for Richard Strauss

Restored, 1907 Ibach Model 2 grand piano with a cherry case in a checkerboard design and inlaid, contrasting squares on the piano lid. Piano music desk is in an openwork dual crisscross design. Piano has square, gate legs with four contrasting black spindles. It is perhaps difficult to comprehend how modern this piano design was for its day. The minimal lines and flat planes lacking carvings or embellishment were forward thinking and prescient of the modern style to come. Designed by Emanuel von Seidl. Piano one of two designed for and offered to Richard Strauss. Ibach made two pianos almost identical in this design except, the other #56279 had low, square piano cheeks Emanuel Seidl (1856 - 1919) was a German architect, interior designer and engineer. He was a proponent of historicism and also favoured Art Nouveau elements. He is considered one of the most important Munich architects of the Luitpold Prince Regent of Bavaria period. Between 1900 and 1918, Seidl was a successful villa architect and was known far beyond the borders of his hometown of Munich. Hedesigned 180 works in and around Munich as well as in the Saxony mountain region, of which about a third are large country houses and villas and of which about 60 are still standing. Examples include the Seidlvilla (also Villa Lauterbacher) on Nikolaiplatz in Munich's Schwabing district and his own villa (Bavariaring 10, Ludwigvorstadt), built in 1897/98. Probably his most important private houses include that of Richard Strauss with its generously glazed bay window and view of the Alps, and the country estate Schloss Wolfsbrunn, located in Stein near Hartenstein on the Zwickauer Mulde, which, according to contemporary opinion, was the last and richest, but also the most purposeful and mature of his buildings for the mining entrepreneur Georg Wolf.