Backstage at the high school performing arts center, director and manager Jim Novack, 61, has assembled a horror show of mangled pianos. A gnarly Hammond, salvaged for $50 from a Vineyard basement some years ago, is crammed into the darkened corner, next to an upright from the 1950s, with a missing front rudely exposing the instrument’s strings and hammers. To its right stands an Everett piano, manufactured for institutional use. Its keys stick, sounding flat notes in perpetuity until physically pulled back in to place. Next to the Everett, under a stark strip light, is a beaten-up photocopier. It’s a macabre scene.

On the other side of the stage, Mr. Novack hopes to conjure up this room’s polar counterpart in time for Christmas. By then a Model D concert standard Steinway piano should rest, in its tailored wheel truck, under a padded Mackintosh cover and tucked carefully into a specially-designed, Novack-conceived piano garage.

There are some logistics involved — getting the money transferred in time is one; a municipal organization like the public regional high school cannot just cut a check for the piano. But Mr. Novack hopes that when the all-Island student chorus performs in less than a month, they will be accompanied by the Steinway. He ordered the truck today.

In his decade-long piano quest, finally at its happy conclusion, Mr. Novack has had an unlikely silent partner. Daniel Alisio, who died in 2001 at the age of 98, left money to several Vineyard institutions, including close to $100,000 to the performing arts center.

Although immensely grateful for the contribution, Mr. Novack was puzzled by it, having had no previous dealings with Mr. Alisio. Indeed, the large contribution surprised Islanders who knew Mr. Alisio only as the aging farming enthusiast from the John Hoft farm in West Tisbury.

But Mr. Alisio’s background was significantly more complex — in fact, his employment history reads like a list you might find on the back wall of a career guidance office. Mr. Alisio, who moved to the Island in 1927, was at various times a passionate farmer, a barber, a cranberry picker, a mill worker, a beauty shop manager and fishing boat owner, who also worked in the real state and construction businesses.

One person to whom the donation was not surprising is oral historian Lindsey Lee, who interviewed Mr. Alisio twice for Vineyard Voices. For he was, as she reveals, also a serious music enthusiast.

In the course of her interviews, Ms. Lee also discovered that Mr. Alisio had an early musical career. Born in Rhode Island, Mr. Alisio remembered growing up in a musical environment in his Portuguese and Italian neighborhood of Bristol. As a young adult he joined a band, playing the clarinet. He was taught by a music professor from Milan, Italy and remembers mastering the esoteric and complex solfeggio scale before even picking up an instrument.

“It’s the Italian way of teaching people who are going to make a career of it,” he told Ms. Lee in 1995. “You don’t have an instrument until you can read music.” When he was finally given a clarinet it was an archaic instrument with a different stop system than the American standard. When he later joined the U.S. Marine Corps Band, he was also forced learn the standard clarinet system. Along the way his knowledge and respect for musical theory was cemented.

“Always at the end of an interview or when I’d come by for a visit, he’d make a cup of tea and put a record of an opera on his Victrola [an early 20th century phonograph]. We’d sit and soak in the lovely sounds and he would comment on the movements and the instruments and fill out the experience,” she said. He was an opera aficionado and loved all classical music. “He knew everything,” said Ms. Lee.

“When we got the donation I pledged that it wouldn’t be spent on trifles or ephemera,” recalled Mr. Novack, sitting on a couch in the brightly lit foyer of the arts center this week. “I could have frittered it away on various bits of hardware. But as you saw, I work on them myself.”

Before the interview he was found tinkering with a dimmer component. The company does not provide manuals, hoping that owners will be forced to return it for any repairs. But Mr. Novack, a talented technician, has done his research. Mr. Novack was praised at the high school committee meeting this week by school principal Margaret (Peg) Regan for his ability to single-handedly manage much of the art center’s upkeep — and for his “frugality” (the committee also presented him with a gift on Monday night for his continuing work at the high school).

Over the past decade Mr. Novack, who also manages the finances of the arts center, has repeatedly come in under his annual budget, a rare occurrence in any organization, and one that, according to Mr. Novack has drawn criticism from those who have argued every available penny should be spent. “But when I come to the board with an extra cost, to ask for something which will take us over budget, they know that it has been well considered,” he said.

But back to the pianos. Mr. Novack had been looking for a concert piano with a large enough sound to work in the arts center since he began his tenure in the fall of 1997. He had all but written off as an impossible dream his search for a concert piano capable of filling the auditorium. Concert-grade Steinways are hand-manufactured in New York at great expense. Even used, the pianos are extremely valuable. Transported to venues and private owners across the country or internationally, there are hefty transportation costs attached to buying them second hand. The prospect was prohibitively pricey for the high school. The center has a Baldwin grand piano for performances, but has had to rent pianos in the past at great expense in order to lure concert pianists to the theatre.

Then Mr. Novack, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease three years ago, made a breakthrough at a Parkinson’s support meeting, where he met Charles Blank, an Island piano teacher. “Mr. Blank knew I worked at the center and towards the end of the evening he came over to me and said, ‘Would you be interested in a Steinway?’ ” he recalled. “And I said ‘Oh, boy, would I.’ ”

A Steinway Model-D with a concert standard cabinet like the one in Mr. Blank’s possession retails for over $100,000. Mr. Novack struck a deal with Mr. Blank for $35,000 plus a Steiff piano in the school’s possession in part exchange. Mr. Novack brought around some pianist friends to try out the instrument, had it formally appraised and then took the deal to the high school committee on Monday night.

“I didn’t expect a unanimous vote,” he said of the committee’s decision. “I thought at least one or two would have said, ‘Why do we need to spend so much on this? Is it really necessary?’ ” But Mr. Novack’s case was compelling.

“In 50 years, this piano will still be the centerpiece of the arts center,” he told the committee.

Two days later, standing in the center of the auditorium next to the audio control panel he personally built, he said: “My goal is to support artistic expression to the best of my ability.”

As an investment, the Steinway must be as close to the intention of Mr. Alisio the music lover as any one single thing could be. Though they were not friends and never met to devise the plan — if they could have put their heads together surely this piano, garage and all, would have been their shared brainchild.