In the early 19th century, back in the days of Romanticism and Classicism, Vienna was the centre of the music world. And this is just where the company founder learned his trade seven generations ago, with a master from whom Beethoven ordered his piano. Sauter is thus anything but an ordinary company; rather, it is the oldest existing piano manufacturer in the world. Despite consistent high quality, the competition from the Far East at some point became a constant menace. The best way for the company to distinguish itself on the market was then to do nothing less than rethink piano design from the ground up. It was high time anyway to give the grand piano a look more in keeping with the contemporary aesthetic. Few had dared as yet to venture onto this hallowed ground, with the exception of Luigi Colani and his typically eccentric model (for Schimmel). The one chosen to take up the challenge was Peter Maly, who at the end of the 1990s created the grand piano Vivace (k p.528). He devised a new and subtle flow of line, with truncated radii replacing the traditional curves. A row of stainless steel intarsia squares accents the new line given this king of all instruments. The following model, Ambiente, then broke several of what used to be considered hard and fast rules of the metier. Conspicuous here is the wide arc of the lid, which, instead of forming the usual “S” now describes a parabolic curve. The novel silhouette takes its impact to a great extent from the integration of the feet in an enclosing apron formed by a chrome profile set at some distance from the body. What Maly achieved in the luxury segment was echoed by Reiner Moll in the compact class. In his model Vision shadow grooves running all around the perimeter bring the clean-lined box form to the fore. Maly subsequently managed to create nothing less than a modern icon with his upright piano Pure. Its name says it all. In the good German design tradition, this piano is all about avoiding anything extraneous and thinking carefully about the positioning of all of the some 8,000 parts. Design plus state-of-the-art technology while renouncing all electronics. This is the formula the Swabian manufacturer applied to attain its USP, transporting this resonant object in our domestic environment into the design here- andnow.