Diane Hubbard, 71; helped preserve harpsichord's allure

She married Hubbard and, with no training, shouldered all the parts of his business that did not involve building harpsichords. Meanwhile, she was raising their two daughters and hosting a parade of musicians and instrument makers from around the world who trooped through their Waltham home. Fourteen years later, he died of a heart attack, leaving her a single mother and a woman running a business dominated by men.

“Taking over the company was a monumental job, and I did it for Frank,’’ she said in an interview with Early Music America magazine in 2001. “I don’t want to overestimate my role: Anyone could have done what I did, which was to shuffle papers. Out there in the shop I would have immediately drilled a hole through my own thumb!’’

Ms. Hubbard, who ran the business for about 25 years after her husband’s death and helped ensure the renewed vitality of the harpsichord as a performance instrument, died of cancer Sept. 22 in her Northampton home. She was 71 and formerly lived in Weston.

“She was always there, and she was wonderful, doing all the stuff of life so he could pursue his work,’’ said her daughter Julia of Sag Harbor, N.Y. “My father was an artist and an intellectual, but she just made it all happen.’’

While Ms. Hubbard downplayed the significance of the undertaking she faced after her husband’s death, others saw something noble in the way she persevered.

“As a mother of young children taking the mantle of leadership of Hubbard Harpsichords in 1976, successfully running the most important harpsichord workshop in the profession, preserving the high standards it was famous for, you made it look easy,’’ Sheridan Germann, a music scholar who paints harpsichord soundboards, wrote in a letter to Ms. Hubbard.

“This is unquestionably the stuff of which heroes are made, and you have been regarded as such by everyone I know . . . and you did it all with such grace and good taste. I want you to know that for me you are a model of the ideal professional woman.’’

To hear Ms. Hubbard tell it, her entry into the business side of the harpsichord business was prompted mostly by practicality.

“Frank was, well, hopeless at business, Ms. Hubbard told Early Music America. “Somebody had to take care of it, and that somebody was me.’’

That somebody was not exactly groomed to run an instrument company, however. Ms. Hubbard grew up in Albany, N.Y., where her father was postmaster and her mother, an immigrant with deep affection for the France of her early life, designed hats for the fashionable wives of politicians in the state capital.

Attending St. Agnes School for Girls, Ms. Hubbard took lessons in ballet and horseback riding, and sometimes went out with her mother, the two dressed in matching outfits. After high school, she left the almost European air of her family life and went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

“She comes from a very mother-centered home and goes to Vassar, where she has this very intellectual, very stimulating experience,’’ said her daughter Polly of Roslindale. “She takes it all in and starts studying art history. And she goes immediately into a career, even though in her college class, half of them were married within a year of graduating. My mother was one of those who didn’t.’’

“My graduate work was in pre-Columbian art, and my first job was in New York at the American Federation of Arts, where I was an associate in charge of organizing exhibitions,’’ Ms. Hubbard told Early American Music. “I would look at the objects and create labels, write press releases, and things like that.’’

Out in the professional world, Ms. Hubbard could still appear quite proper, even while visiting ancient ruins in Peru.

“We have a picture of her in Machu Picchu wearing a little kerchief so her hair doesn’t blow and a dress and a purse and white gloves,’’ Julia said.

Ms. Hubbard took a job at the Carpenter Center at Harvard and met Hubbard during an evening of chamber music at the Longy School of Music. Within a year, they were married, hunting for harpsichords in Europe during their honeymoon.

They moved into the gardener’s cottage of a Waltham estate, where their business grew. She was in her late 30s, her two daughters in elementary school, when Mr. Hubbard died in 1976.

“All of a sudden, she’s one of the only women in this industry,’’ Polly said. “I can’t tell you how many concerts and industry events we went to where the only women there were musicians. No women ran a light industry making musical instruments. I’m imagining my mother’s work life every day, working with between eight and 15 men in a shop with machines and work benches. She’s the boss, she’s a woman, and she can’t even find a bathroom in her own shop. She was amazing.’’

For a quarter century, Ms. Hubbard steered her harpsichord business through the sometimes choppy waves of economic downturns and upturns before deciding to sell in late 2000. By then she had remarried, in 1992. Her husband Bernard Fine, known as Bud, set up the company’s website.

“I wanted to leave while I still looked forward to change, which is inevitable,’’ she told Early Music America.

“She was fascinated with other cultures,’’ Julia said. “She told me if she had it all to do over again, she would have studied anthropology.’’

During a life defined by dramatic changes, there were many constants for Ms. Hubbard, among them skiing, tennis, and summer trips to a Maine island where “there are no roads, there are 12 houses, you have a Coleman lantern on the wall, and you wear a lot of sweaters,’’ Polly said.

“She and Bud loved that place,’’ Polly said. “They watched the seals, they watched the sailboats come around the point in the morning, and she painted watercolors. It was a place for her that was involved with nature and decompressing and not thinking about harpsichords.’’

In addition to her husband and two daughters, Ms. Hubbard leaves two brothers, Walter Goetz of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and Paul Goetz of Sarasota, Fla.; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. today in St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Weston.