Finish and writing behaviour of the Filarmonica
The Filarmonica is a piston filler made of dark brown celluloid in the style of the 1930s, shot through with gold-shimmering lines. The material is more scratch-resistant and more durable than other natural resins and produces a warm feel in the hand that can scarcely be achieved with modern materials. Rings and clip are gold-plated to match the colour; the five cap bands stand for the lines of a sheet of music. On the barrel stands the lettering Filarmonica in calligraphy, whose F is repeated in the nib. In size the pen corresponds to roughly a Meisterstück 146 LeGrand, but weighs considerably less.
The special feature is the doubly slit music nib in 18-carat gold. It is 1.2 millimetres wide, and the tip is ground sharp and flat as on a stub nib, which produces a narrow upstroke and a very broad downstroke. The ink flow sets in richly at the lightest pressure, so that the pen is always ready to write and allows the line width and the amount of ink to be varied through pressure. Held like a fountain pen with an M nib, it scratches audibly; turned slightly, that is, in the position for an OM nib, it glides across the paper without skipping. With less opaque inks the differences in pressure stand out particularly clearly. On request, a normal OMAS gold nib can be fitted instead of the music nib.
Source: Newsletter 1/2005, February 2005 · Original issue as PDF ›
How the Filarmonica music nib edition came about
The Filarmonica is an Italian fountain pen edition of German origin: it was designed in Hamburg. The project began in March 2004 with the question of whether a music nib could still be manufactured at all. Only after the Heidelberg nib maker Peter Bock had signalled a cautious yes was the edition pursued in earnest. The fountain pen has been on the market since the beginning of December 2004; distribution to the German and Dutch specialist trade runs through the OMAS importer.
The edition size is 300 examples. The edition is dedicated to, and inspired by, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie on Kaispeicher A in the Hafencity. First prototypes were shown publicly while development was still under way, so that suggestions from other collectors could still feed into the design phase - an unusual approach for an edition of this kind.
Source: Newsletter 1/2005, February 2005 · Original issue as PDF ›