Music: Steinway Hall

Before a great company of notables the new Steinway Hall, Manhattan, was opened last week. Willem Mengelberg conducted 35 Philharmonic players through the tonal roast beef of Beethoven’s “Dedication of the House”; Josef Hofmann exquisitely played his own “Sanctuary” (composed under the name of Dvorsky); millions listened on the radio. Among the guests, with bustling pride, moved four gentlemen who have made their money in the piano business—Henry, Theodore, William, Frederick Steinway (TIME, June 29), grandsons of the original Heinrich Steinweg.

Will it be possible for the next three generations of Steinways to make such a fortune in the piano business as the last three? A flying hint from here and there has lately indicated that the prestige of the pianoforte is failing. Last month, for instance, one Hugh Blaker wrote a letter to the London Spectator: “Sir, If it is correct that the popularity of the piano is declining, it will be the greatest stimulus to the appreciation of pure music since the Seventeenth Century. Almost all the vulgarity and over-cleverness of modern musical expression can be traced to the universal cult of the piano; this mechanical pattering . . . a hopeless jumble of misdirected energy. . . . There is nothing more laughable than to read a modern explanatory concert program . . . debasement in musical taste mainly due to the popularity of the piano. . . . I am, Sir, etc. . . .”