GG Becker

Marcel Becker spent fifty years building concert instruments, ten thousand pipes to an organ and every one voiced by hand until it sang exactly in tune. He plays the opening he was taught at nineteen. He also knows, in detail and to the decimal, that it is the second-best answer, having read the modern work carefully and agreed with all of it, and he has no intention whatever of changing, because the man who taught it to him is in it. He is slow, exacting and courteous, holds a structure long after it has stopped earning its keep, and treats a long match as one more patient piece of craft.