Restoration of a Hagen, part 1

Recently we started restoring the piano that has been on our want-to-restore-list for a few years: The Hagen 1810. A beautiful instrument, very well built and in a very nice eleborate case, mahagony with bronze decorations and caryatid legs.

If a piano looks so well built, then: who exactly was W. Hagen?

We couldn't find anything about him, and - besides that - a date on the name board is very very unusual in Vienna.

At the start of taking it apart, we took the bronze decorations and the nameboard of the wrestplank, and immediately found an answer to the first question: the ivory-looking name plate turned out to be plastic.....

Feeling happy that the (strange) name was a fake, we started wondering and fantasized about who did make it. Some details are very Johann Fritz-like but some aren't.....

The soundboard carries a little medal-looking thing which unfortunately was about unreadable. But, after having made photos of the medal and enlarged them, we were able to decifre a lot of it and actually found who made it!

To be continued...