Music: Family Pride

The first Steinway piano took eleven years to build; it was just a sideline for Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, cabinetmaker in the German town of Seesen after the Napoleonic wars. But it turned out to be the best piano in Seesen. Heinrich Steinweg and his sons gave up cabinetmaking and decided to make the best pianos in the world.

Since then, a distinguished company of piano players, from Paderewski and Rachmaninoff to Fats Waller and Jimmy Durante, have hailed their decision. In Carnegie Hall this week, an S.R.O. crowd met to hail some more. On stage stood ten Steinway concert grands, and to their keyboards came squads of concert pianists (among them: Alexander Brailowsky, Robert Casadesus) to crash out in triumphant unison The Star-Spangled Banner, Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major, and The Stars and Stripes Forever. It was the most emphatic way anybody could think of to celebrate the zooth anniversary of the U.S. House of Steinway.

Double Tension. Founder Heinrich and four sons moved to New York a little more than a century ago, changed Steinweg to Steinway, and set out to win a U.S. reputation. A second-generation Steinway was responsible for some 45 pioneering patents, some of them so revolutionary that one of his pianos caused almost riotous excitement at the Paris exposition of 1867. The Steinway’s most important innovation: the combination in a grand piano of a rigid cast-iron frame with “overstringing.” The first permitted near doubling of string-tension. The second carried the treble strings diagonally across the center of the soundboard, which then amplified them as much as it did the long bass strings. The resulting increase in strength and power made the Steinway a world standard.

In the mid-30’s came faster key action and a “diaphragmatic” soundboard that gave small pianos greater tonal volume. Later improvements have given much attention to cabinetry: this week Steinway unveils a new home-size grand with severely simplified lines, to match the simplicity of the latest modern furniture.

Production Policy. From the day old Heinrich set his sons to work, a Steinway has always stood at-the company’s helm, with one or more others ready to replace him: all the men of the family are raised to the business, beginning with the requirement that every Steinway boy must take piano lessons. Steinway presidents do not retire. Four of the five top executives since 1853 have died in the job, and their successors were quietly chosen at family councils. Today there are seven Steinways of the third, fourth and fifth generations in various departments, led by Theodore E. Steinway, 70, president since 1927.

Last year, the company estimates, 90% of all U.S. concert performances were played on Steinways, and this is the sort of success the firm lives for. It does not trouble them that the total production of Steinways is only about 3,200 a year (half of them grands, the rest uprights and spinets), or some 2% of U.S. output.* The company long ago decided to concentrate in the prestige market, set out to persuade artists to play and endorse its product, built the first Steinway Hall to help the scheme along.

What’s in a Name. Today, if Young Pianist Mary B. wants to play a Steinway at her Town Hall debut, she makes an appointment a few weeks ahead, goes to Manhattan’s present Steinway Hall. She is escorted into the grey brick basement filled with 9-ft., ebony-colored concert grands, and allowed to pick and choose. She tries one after the other until she finds the one in which tone and key action suit her best. The piano is hers to use; all she must pay is transportation to and from the concert hall. The same goes for a Rubinstein or a Brailowsky. Furthermore, in hundreds of cities around the world, Steinway dealers keep grands on hand for touring performers.

Steinway prices run high. A new baby grand costs about $2,585, and a concert grand $6.900. One reason for the high cost is that it takes nine months to turn out a Steinway grand, and nobody in the family sees any way to hurry things up. Once, in the ’20’s, a dealer did come in with an unacceptable scheme to cut prices. President Frederick T. Steinway heard him out, then told him that such a plan would involve a delay. Why? Because, said the president, “it will take some time to remove the name Steinway from the keyboard.”

-Most popular home piano in the country is a thriftily priced Wurlitzer spinet. The Aeoli an American combine, which produces the famed Mason & Hamlin, Chickering and Knabe pianos, and Baldwin, whose grands are favor ites of such concert artists as Walter Gieseking, Claudio Arrau and Jose Iturbi, also outsell Steinway by a wide margin.