The Story And Family Behind Steinway Pianos

This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories. And our next story is about a brand name we all know, Steinway. But a man you don't know, Henry Steinway.

In the end, the story we're about to hear is a story about resiliency and a man's search for freedom. Here's Greg Hengler. As guests dine on succulent roasted fowl and mouthwatering marinated oysters, washing their palates with ice cold champagne, piano music is in the air. The occasion is the opening of the new Steinway factory in New York on April 1st, 1860. A correspondent from a local newspaper declares, It is conceded that the Steinway piano in make, tone, sweetness, precision and durability is the most perfect instrument of that class to be had anywhere in the world. The road to victory began 63 years earlier in Wolfshagen, a small forest hamlet nestled in the slopes of the Upper Harz Mountains in northwest Germany, where Heinrich Steinwig, founder of Steinway and Sons, is born. Church records reveal that the Steinwigs were master charcoal burners.

They lived in the woods and, like most charcoal burners, were regarded with deep suspicion by townspeople who rarely saw them. Steinwig's childhood is marked by many tragedies and twists of fate. At the age of eight, during a harsh winter, his mother and most of his siblings die from exposure. He is orphaned until his father and brothers, once thought to have been killed in action, return from the Napoleonic Wars and claim him.

Then, at 15, he is orphaned once again, penniless and living on the streets. He seeks refuge in the German army. Two years later, he is fighting against Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on June 18th, 1815. Family legend has it that when an advance is made on Napoleon, the charge is signaled by a lone bugler, Heinrich Steinwig. According to this tale, he is awarded a bronze medal for bugling in the face of the enemy. When not heading off to battle, he is in the barracks making mandolins and other instruments and occasionally striking up a tune with the military band. After six years of military service, Steinwig begins an apprenticeship with his church's organ builder. He is also introduced to the piano through his Jewish friend, Karl Brand. Steinwig learns to build a piano by copying brands. As he changes the pipes of church organs, he becomes interested in notes, octaves, and chords. Looking for knowledge, he appears every Friday evening at his church to listen to the organist rehearse for Sunday services.

Every German craftsman in 1835 has to belong to a guild, or what we would call a union. Since Steinwig doesn't have a master craftsman diploma as an instrument maker, he's not allowed to build pianos officially, so he becomes a cabinet maker. But he's still very much interested in building instruments. Here's master piano builder, Chris Mano. He has restored, I think, many instruments. He has seen them, he has compared them, and he has made his own concept, his own piano. At that time, for him, it was better than the instruments he has seen around him.

Apart from being skilled in working with wood and special tools, building a keyboard instrument requires musicality and a complex knowledge of mathematics and physics. But Steinwig relies on intelligence and intuition. The cabinet maker decides to start building forte pianos and courts a woman he falls madly in love with, Juliana Tima, the daughter of a well-established glove maker. For the wedding, Steinwig wants to impress Juliana with a very unusual gift.

Sounds wonderful! In 1835, he gives his bride his first square piano that he designs himself. Here's Heinrich Steinwig's great-great-grandson, Miles Chapin. That is consistent a little bit with this image of a businessman. I mean, if your first product is very complex and technically complicated, you don't want to sell it because it might break, in which case your reputation is ruined before it's even been made. So for him to take his first piano and give it to his wife, I think that's wonderful.

Here, you play this, honey, and tell me if it works. Newlywed and raring to go, Heinrich Steinwig wants to build not only good pianos, but the best pianos in the world. With meticulousness and passion, he begins building his first grand piano in 1836, which he later sells to the Duke of Brunswick for 3,000 marks.

This piano is later named the Kitchen Piano and is now on display at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with the square piano he gave to his wife. I believe he started out as a cabinet maker, but if you think about it from a businessman's point of view, with the amount of labor and the amount of time it takes to make one thing that's this big, okay, if this thing is a chest of drawers, you can sell it for X. But if this thing that you're making is a piano and takes longer to make, you can sell it for five times X, six, ten times X, so that his product could be more valuable to him and his profit margins would be greater. I don't think he was driven musically at all, I don't think he was driven creatively at all, I think he was purely, my take is purely a businessman and he had a product that was a higher value product and he would get a higher profit from it.

Easier to transport, easier to build at home, he could have one at a time going, and that was why he went into it. And what a story you're hearing about the Steinvig family, which would of course become the Steinway family, and Miles Chapman, what a point he made about the reason and what drove Steinway to make pianos, and it wasn't art, it was commerce, it was profit. And so often we share the story of how free enterprise serves the public, and without that profit motive, we may not have had the Steinway expertise and the brilliance of these pianos.

He was driven to not be a cabinet maker, and to make more profit with everything he did, and of course in came the excellence and the mastery and everything else. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of the Steinway family, and the Steinway piano, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns, but we truly can't do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue here on Our American Stories with the life story of Henry Steinway.

And let's return to Greg Hengler and to where we last left off. Heinrich Steinwig's first grand piano is an enormous success. To meet the growing demand, Steinwig decides to train his young boys. Even his five-year-old has to help out in the workshop. His musically talented daughter, Doretta, is only allowed to watch.

The crafts are strictly for men. With the help of his sons, Steinwig can make 10 to 12 instruments a year. Then in 1848, riots engulfed most of Europe because of political instability and economic uncertainty, spawning movements towards socialism. Heinrich's second son, Charles, is on the front lines in the fight for the people's sovereignty against an absolutist prince and the civil liberties for the Christian middle class. The socialist revolution fails to produce a redistribution of wealth, land or power, but it does paralyze businesses throughout Europe, thereby encouraging businessmen like Heinrich Steinwig to consider leaving. Fearing reprisals for their son, Charles leaves Germany and sails to New York City in 1849, where he is to find a safe haven for both himself and for the Steinwig piano business. In June 1849, Charles lands in New York, the heart of professional music making in America and of America's piano industry. The other major piano manufacturing cities are Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia, all centers for German immigrants. Pianos have only been in America since the revolution. Most of them brought in from shipwrecks by pirates as part of their booty. The rest were imported by John Jacob Astor, the German millionaire fur trader who occasionally bartered furs for pianos.

Six weeks after his arrival, Charles writes to his family for the first time, praising the quote progressive spirit of America, unquote. Beloved parents, brothers and sisters, New York seems to be an El Dorado for keyboard instruments. I soon found employment with a piano manufacturer.

It's a pretty well-paying job. The growth of wealth in the United States promises great opportunities for piano manufacturers. You'll hardly believe it, but in nearly every household there's a piano.

Family music is part of daily life here. Be courageous and do not hesitate for too long. Frustrated by an assortment of government regulation, interference and unjust taxes, tens of thousands of Germans leave their homeland and flee to America. Here again is Heinrich Steinweg's great-great grandson, Miles Chapin. It was a time of great political upheaval in Germany, in Europe, all through Europe. It was not a climate conducive to business, and the Steinways, if anything, were businessmen, and Heinrich, if anything, was a businessman. And he lived in this small town in the Harz Mountain region, Sezen, and he made his pianos one by one at home, but to sell them he had to take them places, and to take them places he had to cross borders, and when he crossed borders there were tariffs, there were added costs that weren't going into his pocket, and he was ambitious.

I think he just decided rationally to leave Germany to set up a shop in New York City. On May 28, 1850, the Steinwigs, along with their three daughters and three sons, board the first German ocean liner in Hamburg. On her maiden voyage, the Steinwigs reach New York City in just 30 days.

Their eldest son, Theodor, stays in Germany to run the rest of the company. When the Steinwigs arrive, they face no restrictions, no questions, no Ellis Island, and no Statue of Liberty. They quickly move into a small rented apartment on Hester Street in the middle of a quarter that's known as Little Germany. The Steinwigs' apartment is certainly very different from their spacious home back in Germany. With more than 600,000 German immigrants, New York is a German enclave. By 1860, one out of every four New Yorkers is German-born. Only Berlin and Vienna have more German citizens. These Germans brought with them a classical music culture that didn't exist in America.

Here's Kathleen Hulser from the New York Historical Society speaking to us on St. Mark's Place just between Second and Third Avenues. On this street, you could see how busy and productive Germans were when they got to America. There would be pretzel sellers along the street, people selling cabbage, women selling clothes, and the Germans were really good at founding their own groups. They liked to get together and do things together, so they had Turnführhein, a club for men. They had their beer gardens where the whole family would go, and they had things like a gun club, which you can see right on this street.

It's still here. The gun club, the Schutzengesellschaft, is something that was not just about shooting targets. It was also about men enjoying each other's company and drinking beer. The Steinvigs don't go into business right away. Instead, they decide to work for others until they get their feet on the ground and learn some English and New York methods. Heinrich and his sons select the best New York piano makers to work for so they can learn the latest and finest techniques.

But three years after their arrival, an economic depression hits New York. Heinrich's sons are unemployed, and he's earning a very low day's pay as an employed piano maker. In these times of instability, Heinrich quits his job and opens his own piano workshop with his sons. They no longer have very much to lose, but with this move, they now have the potential to achieve a lot. To help with sales, business friends advise the Steinvigs to Americanize their name, and so Heinrich Steinwig becomes Henry Steinwig. A humble attic on Verick Street just below Canal Street on the west side of Manhattan becomes their very first company headquarters.

On March 5, 1853, with only a verbal contract and a capital investment of just $6,000, Steinwig & Sons is founded. It is a good time to be in the piano business. Musical life in America is flourishing, and the piano is at the center of the increasing interest in music. Most piano pupils are women, other instruments being seen as detracting from feminine attractiveness. The cello demands that a woman spread her legs, and the harp ruins her posture. But at the piano, she can sit demurely with her feet together.

Even courtship increasingly takes place at the keyboard. From the beginning, the women were there to support the men, assist the men, cook the food for her, clean up after the men, but it was a man's business. Doretta, one of the daughters of the original Steinways, she gave piano lessons, but I don't think she ever worked for the company. I don't think she was ever a salaried employee of Steinwig & Sons. She probably owned a few shares in the company herself, but she didn't work there. Now, my mother was the Steinway in the family, and she had four older brothers who she watched one by one go off and work at the family business. So naturally, when she came of age, she asked her father, when do I start in the family business? And the story goes that he brought her to the piano and said, come here, open the piano, read me what it says in the piano, Steinway & Sons. Please, don't embarrass me. There's no women at Steinway & Sons. Even my secretary is a man. Close the lid of the piano.

Forget it. Here's Andy Horbachevsky, vice president of Steinway & Sons New York. What was amazing to me is that in the 10 years from 1853 to 1860, when they started the factory, the very big factory on Park Avenue here, they went from scratch to building the most grand pianos of any other piano manufacturers.

And I think that's a credit to not only the excellent design and craftsmanship, but there were tremendous, I think, businessmen and marketers and salesmen. And what a story this is, the Steinwigs becoming the Steinways. It's a classic immigrant story. There were no restrictions here in America.

There were no questions. Henry Steinway, the family story, continues here on Our American Stories. And we continue here with Our American Stories and with the story of Henry Steinway.

Let's return to Greg Hengler and pick up where we left off. Each Steinway & Sons grand piano is handcrafted and comprises 12,000 individual parts assembled by as many as 450 people. The process takes over a year to complete. Although it's always the same construction plans and materials, no two pianos ever sound alike. Steinway grand pianos all have their own individual sound and personality. Here's Lang Lang, who is considered by many to be one of the finest concert pianists of all time. Lang compares the best pianos to great actors for their ability to convey extremes of emotion and attitude.

It was the flamboyant pianism in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, he says, that originally drew him to the instrument. I had a great privilege to go to both Steinway factories in New York and in Hamburg. And it's a big monster, right? I mean, it's huge. But when they started working, almost like you found that they're working on a Swiss watch. It's so detailed, everything's so precise, like they're making a Maolin or making some smaller item, not like you wouldn't imagine when you go to the factory. That's the factory of producing a piano, such a big monster. And that precise work really transferred to the sound. There is a unique person in Steinway's factory, the one who makes the final tuning for all pianos before delivery. With an expert touch, he can quickly discern the questionable keys and makes chalk marks.

Then he patiently adjusts the hammers to achieve the perfect string strokes. Because of his acute gift, he is known as Steinway's ear. Walter Boot is the heart and soul of Steinway & Sons and has been working in the piano factory in New York for over 50 years. Not a single Steinway piano leaves the building until it satisfies his absolute hearing.

Here's Walter Boot, Andy Horbachevsky, and Miles Chapin. My job is to even out the tone. I get the piano, the piano is all done, ready to go to somebody's house. And I fine tune it. I listen to it, I play it, I make it, all the time, even, so I'm happy with it.

When I'm happy with it, I know you're going to be happy with it. I love working with Steinway. Steinway gave my whole life. I'm the oldest working person in the factory right now.

They call me Uncle Wally because I worked here so long. When the piano comes here, it looks like a piano. When it leaves, it sounds like a piano. Do I put the love into the piano?

Mozart, Rachmaninoff. We go through multiple tunings, multiple regulations, multiple voicings, so it is really a circle of refinement. We're constantly trying to get that last ounce of tone out of it. We will baby that hammer.

We will pull out as much as we can. In the early days, Henry Jr. was the mastermind. C.F. Theodore Steinway was back in Germany, and he was still making pianos, and he was working on his pianos, and there's a correspondence back and forth between Brunswick and New York, and they were trying out different ideas. But Henry Jr. was really the one here who was getting the patents and really making the advances from an engineering perspective. If there was any single patent that made the most difference, it would be the overstrung one-piece cast iron frame. That's what differentiated the Steinway piano in its day. It was the first piano company to bring a grand piano with a one-piece cast iron frame to market successfully. They first showed it in 1867 in Paris, and pretty much you can measure the history of the piano from the time running up to that point and the time running away from that point. Because today you can't buy a piano that doesn't have a one-piece cast iron overstrung frame. But before that time, there were none, and they were the first, and they had a patent on it. Together with his sons, Henry Steinway's credo is the same as ever, to build the best pianos in the world. You see pictures of him, and there's only a couple of them, and he was ramrod straight and his fists jammed into his pocket and the set of his jaw just like this. He was very determined, determined to make a successful company, to make a success of his life in the United States, to give his children a better life than he had.

I think it's that classic American story. The Steinway's future depends first on skill, then on national recognition to boost sales. The company founder has an ingenious idea. He realizes that the renowned pianists and composers of the time are the ideal advertisers for Steinway and Sons, so he signs the acclaimed artist exclusively to Steinway. They are not bashful. They are not afraid to tell us if something is not 100 percent with the piano itself. I think we are very lucky to have this very good feedback information coming back to us from this very valuable part of our customer base, the concert artist. Here's Steinway historian Cornelia Polin. People said that if people like that play on them, then this instrument must be of high quality.

They asked for recommendations from the aristocracy, such as the Queen of Spain, the Sultan of Turkey, the King of Sweden, and used these recommendations for advertising purposes, too. They then built the Steinway Hall. Here in the Steinway Hall is where concerts took place.

When you wanted to go to the concert hall, you had to walk through the exhibition rooms. And so, naturally, they did even more advertising for the pianos with that. The New York Times wrote at the time, the Steinways can be proud that they own the most magnificent piano business in the whole world.

Today, over 95 percent of the world's finest pianists prefer Steinway pianos for their concerts. At 67, Henry Steinway has fulfilled all his dreams, reputation, wealth, and fame. But then, tragedy strikes. On March 11, 1865, Henry Jr. dies of consumption at the age of just 35. Then, just days later, Henry's other son Charles dies of typhoid fever while visiting his brother in Germany. It must have been devastating to Henry Steinway. I mean, to lose not only one son, but two sons. I mean, of course, that was an era where people died more easily.

You didn't live as long and children died. But it was very, very difficult for him, especially being an immigrant. I mean, his whole family, he brought with him.

They were here. And when it's diminished by two, well, he did have the one son back in Germany. But when it's diminished the number that are in New York by two, that was when they wanted to bring C.F. Theodore over to strengthen the family. It is William's job now to keep the family business running. He writes to his brother Theodore in Germany that they desperately need him in New York. Theodore leaves his successful business in Germany, and three weeks later he arrives in New York. Brothers William and Theodore form the perfect company management. Theodore invents groundbreaking features for grand piano mechanisms, and William knows how to sell them.

Their success starts spiraling. And what a story. And it's so hard to comprehend losing two sons in such a short period of time, especially with a family business, one with real specific knowledge and drive. When we come back, we'll continue with the story of Henry Steinway. And we return to the final installment of this remarkable life story, this quintessential American story. And we heard in the beginning fleeing Germany because of so many restrictions and coming to America to just do well, do what the Steinways do, make a great product. And now Greg Hengler with the final part of the story of Henry Steinway. Here again is Henry Steinway's great-great-grandson, Miles Chapin. The skill set, the way that the talents of the sons meshed is really what made the difference. Because on the one hand you had CF Theodore Steinway engineering the piano differently, but then on the other hand you had his brother William Steinway who was changing the way you sold pianos, changing the marketing of pianos.

And so when you had a company that had a demonstrably finer product coupled with a CEO, a corporate officer who knew how to sell that product and was innovative in the ways he was selling that product, boom, it came together and it just made a sum greater than the sum of the parts. Then, in 1863, those parts were attacked by the Manhattan Workers Union strikes, disrupting Steinway piano production. When the Furniture Makers Union decided to target the piano industry, Steinway was the biggest, had the most prominent name and they decided to target Steinway and Sons. At that time he had a country house out here in Bowery Bay in Queens and I think he had a revelation one day. He said, wait a minute, New York's over there, I have a house here, here's all this land, the water, the ocean is right there, I can bring my war materials in here, I can move my factory here. And I think he deliberately set about doing that, buying the acreage out here, moving the company out piece by piece, digging the tunnel underneath the East River, you know, the Steinway Tunnel was the first tunnel under the East River. I took it this morning when I took the subway into Manhattan, the number seven train goes through the William Steinway Tunnel. To get the workers out of the social unrest and union riots in Manhattan, Steinway has his Steinway Village built in Astoria, Queens. And he built gymnasiums, libraries, churches, housing for his workers and a lot of it is still there. You can see on the streets, you know, the streets have been renamed, you know, 30th Avenue, 31st Street, but you can go to some of the housing that was the factory housing and you can see chiseled on stone on the side of the building.

It's called the Wertstrasse, Friedrichstrasse, and that was the name that William Steinway had for his original city. Then, in 1880, Theodore returns to Germany in order to open and operate a second factory in Hamburg. Since then, they've split the global market into two parts.

Here again is Andy Horbachevsky, Vice President of Steinway & Sons New York. We're one company, but we do manufacture in two plants, here in New York and one in Hamburg, Germany, and there are subtle differences. Certainly a little in terms of just the finish and the high gloss versus the satin look, but there are also some tonal differences and from our perspective as a global company, we like the choice. There are artists that prefer the New York instrument in Europe and vice versa, that in North America here, some prefer the Hamburg.

To us, we think that offering a choice is good and we will not change that in the future. When the United States enters into World War II, Steinway & Sons are no longer able to build pianos. The pianos were not deemed strategic materials during World War II in the United States. However, some of the things that go into making the piano were deemed strategic materials.

Copper, for instance. All the copper in the United States was going into the war effort, so the piano makers were not allowed to use copper. The wood that they had at the factory, some of it was used for rifle stocks, things like that. The government at one point was suggesting that Steinway make coffins.

I think my grandfather, who had four sons in the war, decided he didn't want to make coffins. They did make glider airplanes for the war effort. They did make about 2,000 pianos for the war effort. Small olive drab government issue piano, the ODGI piano, which I love, came in a little packing crate, had some music, a set of tuning tools.

They shipped them all over the world. The 150-year-old company produces about 2,000 handmade 9-foot concert grand pianos a year, compared with the approximately 100 a day by other companies. These magnificent instruments do not come cheap. One is shown in the Steinway showroom in New York on West 57th Street with a price tag of $103,000. No wonder a prospective buyer is very particular in choosing a specific piano.

Each handmade instrument has its own personality. The limited production hinges a lot on the brand's severe selection standards for timber. After all, 85% of the Steinway piano is made from wood. Precious timbers from all over the world are neatly stacked in Steinway's warehouses, and there they spend two years in their natural drying process before the next step. Space between them ensures good air circulation and the pliability of wood. After the drying process, only 50-60% pass the rigorous quality checks to become piano parts. As the soundboard is the central part of a piano, the design and the selection of the materials for it must be meticulous. The artisans select the finest North American spruce. Spruce has the desired regular grain to ensure a smooth resonance.

Only 5-10% of the timber from one tree can be used for the handmade soundboard by the experienced artisans. Australian concert pianist Piers Lane has specially flown to Hamburg to choose three concert grands for his hometown, Sydney. Which works as well. There's a singing sound with quality. Now it'd be interesting to compare that with the one down the end, say.

Piers is attended to by Steinway & Sons sales consultant Garrett Glauner, who jots down notes while following Piers around a brightly lit showroom filled with Steinway grand pianos. We start with the same thing. I don't feel it's got the same fineness of quality as the other one in the tone, but let's try some Mozart. I don't feel it's got the same depth of character as the other one. The other one's got more core to the sound.

I want to compare that now with the first one. After a sound test marathon of six and a half hours, the pianist makes his selections. It's interesting because it makes me play it in a slightly different way, this piano.

How do you feel, Garrett? The middle one is a kind of a mix. Oh, it's true. If I should use the term noblesse, I would find it most in this one because there's some extra glimpse on each note. I think it has a beautiful cantabile. I like the balance of the piano. It feels even across the whole range.

But at the same time, it has the classical transparency as well in the texture. Periodically, there has been in the history of the piano, the death bell has been summoned or been struck. You know what happened in the 1920s when player pianos started and when radio came on? People said, oh, well, nobody will listen to pianos anymore. After World War II, with hi-fi and television, people said, oh, people won't have pianos anymore. In the 50s, with electric pianos and Hammond organs, oh, no, people will never need pianos anymore. Didn't happen then.

Hasn't happened now. And still people are improving, tinkering, as you say, a little bit with the piano, just trying to find small improvements to it. But there's nothing that can replace it. Nothing can replace the sound of a grand piano, well played. After 75 years, in 1871, an unusual life journey comes to an end. A journey that took the orphan from the Harz Mountains in Germany to the highest highs of music in America.

Courage, perseverance and family were his strengths. After 150 plus years of turmoil, feuds, depressions, wars, competition from the Far East, nothing has silenced the Steinway sound, even if what Steinway is now selling is its past rather than any technical innovation. A New York Times reporter referred to the Steinway factory as a resilient treasure in a city that wonders whether it has lost its soul. With his Steinway and Sons piano, Henry Steinway has made himself immortal. I'm Greg Hingler and this is Our American Stories. And great job as always, Greg. Henry Steinway, his story here on Our American Stories.