Steinway and Sons [Paperback]

Dr. Richard K. Lieberman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1997

The Steinway - once called the "instrument of the immortals" - is considered by many as more than the pre-eminent American piano. It is also a symbol of "Old World" craftsmanship combined with American capitalism, of technological innovation, and of remarkable family management. This study tells the story of the Steinway piano company and the people behind it. Based on the archive of Steinway business and family papers at LaGuardia Community College in New York, as well as on interviews with family members and company employees in the United States, Germany and England, the book describes the making and marketing of an American cultural icon. Founded in New York in 1853 by a German immigrant, the Steinway company quickly rose to prominence on the strength of the distinctive "Steinway sound". For five generations Steinways steered their company in the face of domestic and foreign competition, bitter labour disputes, temperamental musicians, a fluctuating economy, and wars. Members of the Gilded Age elite, the family also contended with adultery, alcoholism, emotional depression and long court battles over money. Lieberman discusses the company town the Steinways built in Queens in the 1870s, to "escape the machinations of the anarchists and socialists" in the city; the decision to manufacture in both New York and Hamburg, which led to Steinway factories supplying both sides in World War II; the improvements in piano technology that made the Steinway the envy of other piano makers; the company's creative marketing techniques, such as booking celebrated European pianists into American concert halls; the competition from the Japanese-owned Yamaha company; and the sale of the financially troubled company to CBS in 1972. Weaving together themes from social, music, business, labour and immigrant history, and illustrated with pictures from the Steinway archive, this text aims to cast light on American cultural history and on a family enterprise.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From 1853 until 1972, when their company was sold to CBS, successive generations of Steinways produced the instrument that became synonymous with the word piano. Drawing on the collection of Steinway papers at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, Lieberman, professor of history at New York City's LaGuardia Community College, tells the story of this dynasty of strong-willed businessmen who set out to make the world's best piano, learned to market it brilliantly and built an empire in spite of financial setbacks, labor disputes and family feuds. After the death in 1896 of William Steinway, who led the company through its most prosperous period, the legacy became increasingly difficult to maintain. The account of the long struggle waged by William's son Theodore, who headed the company from 1927 to 1955, to keep Steinway going in spite of the Depression, labor disputes, WWII and competition from upright pianos is especially sad. Finally, unable to withstand competition from foreign piano makers, Theodore's son Henry sold the company. Lieberman's lucid book, based on different material than was D.W. Fostle's The Steinway Saga, published earlier this year, is equally absorbing. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg founded Steinway & Sons in 1853 to build grand pianos with superior sound and action. The company's story is that of four generations of a large family, labor and management relations, marketing, and general economic conditions. Until 1972, the firm's presidents and key men were Steinway family members, most of whom had a better knack for making high-quality pianos than for running a profitable business. Accordingly, management sought good craftsmen but paid the lowest wages they could, which led to many strikes. Additionally, the Steinways saw their market as grand pianos and resisted making instruments the working classes could afford; so during recessions, profits and capital dried up. Fifth company president Henry Z. Steinway tired of running the company in the face of vigorous competition from Yamaha and sold out to CBS but remains as company historian and endorser of the pianos. Essentially, Lieberman gives us the history of one family--with its share of scandals, dissidents, and incompetents--who stood for quality but ran a business for profits at the expense of workers. Alan Hirsch --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 23, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300068506
• ISBN-13: 978-0300068504
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #790,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on Steinway's history and its pianos, September 6, 2000

By 

Ed Ting (Amherst, NH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Steinway and Sons (Paperback)

Lieberman is the director of the archives that house the Steinway collection, and writes as a knowledgeable insider. The history of the family and its pianos is told, from its beginnings in Germany, up through the sale to CBS and the Birminghams (the sale to the Selmer Company in 1995 happened after the publication of the book.) As a bonus, there's a great history of Yamaha pianos and its fierce competition with Steinway. It's well-written and there are numerous photos.

This is great reading, and a wonderful resouce for anyone interested in music or pianos.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Steinwway & Sons is a superb family and social history., March 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Steinway and Sons (Paperback)

Steinway & Sons is a rich, absorbing history of a business dynasty that stayed vital over six generations. Lieberman astutely analyzes the twin forces of creativity and hard-nosed business sense that made and sustained Steinway's preeminence as the concert piano of choice. This richly anecdotal book does not shy away from the dark side of the family's history-- its contempt for the piano workers, its unthinking patriarchy, even its active cultivation of the Nazis in Germany during World War II. (In America Steinway emphasized its patriotism by draping its conert hall with American flags and publicizing the Steinway sons who were serving in the American armed forces.) In this balanced account, Lieberman takes pains to catalogue the family's numerous contributions to the conert piano's evolution, as well as its unceasing promotion of the finest artists. The Steinways' mixture of creative technical innovation, fine musical taste and ruthless business practices makes them a family of particular fascination. Lieberman brings the various figures, strong and weak and flawed, to vibrant life.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars State of the Art, December 2, 2011

By 

Elizabeth Wallace "artist/illustrator" (Framingham, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Steinway and Sons (Paperback)

Steinway & Sons, by Richard K. Lieberman, is considered to be the ultimate treatise on the history of the Steinway piano at M. Steinert & Sons of Boston. (Lest there be any confusion, M. Steinert & Sons was a piano manufacturer in its own right before the Great Depression of 1929, retaining its name now as the oldest piano dealership in the nation.) Lieberman's book is suggested reading at every Steinway dealership in the world, and although I've been tuning and teaching for over 30 years, I just now decided to sit down and read this book that was released sixteen years ago. But what of that, as the story begins 214 years ago?

The book is exceptionally well written and chock full of facts and historical information. It should be required reading in our history classes, for it covers the Napoleonic Wars of the early 1800's, the Civil War of 1861-65, WWI, riots, strikes, the Spanish Influenza of 1918, the formation of unions in the 1940's, WWII and the role a Steinway member had in each event; not to mention the living conditions and economic swings of the times.

Steinway's history begins in 1797 with the birth of Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, ultimately the sole survivor of fourteen children. We are brought back to a time when Germany was divided into thirty-eight states, each with its own government, legal codes, weights, measures and currencies. Torn by wars and revolution, the now successful piano maker decides, at the age of fifty-three, to take his wife and five children and emigrate to New York. (One son, Theodore, remains behind.) With no English language skills, they begin working in a piano factory in New York City where German is spoken--incidentally, German is the main language spoken in all piano factories of the time, and it is to the Germans that we owe thanks for bringing the piano and its wealth of music to the United States.

Three years later (1853) Heinrich and his four sons open their own factory, Americanize their name to Steinway and begin their journey as Steinway & Sons. It is interesting to note that the two sons, Charles and Henry Jr., are those primarily responsible for the patents and innovations that gave birth to the piano we know today: innovations that helped Steinway & Sons win every prize of the 19th Century when exhibitions and fairs featured major inventions of the Industrial Revolution. However, with the death of these young men in 1865 (ages thirty-five and thirty-six) it is William Steinway who takes the reins as he begins to create a publicity campaign by paying European artists to tour the country and make the name Steinway & Sons a household word. He coaxes brother Theodore over from Germany and opens showrooms in London, Berlin and Hamburg. Theodore is responsible for the invention of the rim-bending press, which gives the modern grand piano its continuous bent rim, but William perpetrates the illusion that it is the living Steinways that are responsible for every patent as "dead Steinways would have no allure." William is a powerful public figure at every level as he sings his way through New York Society, creates Steinway Village (to have complete control of his workers), roads, schools, amusement parks, train routes, plans the modern subway system, encourages Daimler to build his new invention--the motorized "riding car" in the Steinway Factory. (William Steinway is the first American to ride a motorized vehicle in the streets of New York.)

With the death of William in 1896 of typhus, the torch passes to the son of his late brother, Charles H. who harvests the fruits of the labor of those who have passed away in what are known as the Golden Years of Steinway & Sons. He dies, tragically, of the influenza virus in 1919. His brother Frederick follows for another eight years, but it is Theodore, son of William Steinway, who inherits the heavy crown as Steinway faces the Great Depression and heads into WWII. He is passionate about music, memorizing Wagner operas and attenting performances at the MET regularly. He is ultimately overwhelmed by insurmountable obstacles, Theodore ultimately finds solace with his companion of choice: gin. When Theodore passes away at the age of seventy-four, the responsibility shifts to his son Henry Z. Steinway--(who, by the way, just left us two years ago at the age of ninety-three and was the last president of Steinway & Sons).

Theodore is not a musician, nor does he have much appreciation of the arts. He is a Harvard Graduate businessman set on making Steinway & Sons financially solvent by tightening the belt, consolidating the Ditmar and Riker factories and in 1958 selling Steinway Hall to Manhattan Life Insurance Co., (while still maintaining the showroom). In 1955 he decides to stop using ivories. This is not due to any humanitarian bent on his part or the fact that from 1860-1930 up to 100,000 elephants were killed each year for their tusks (one tusk made fifty keyboards), but because of the labor-intensive task of preparing the ivory's consistency of color and use (ivory importation into the US remained legal until 1985).

According to Lieberman, Steinway & Sons began to use TFE-fluorcarbon resin in 1957 (The DuPont product known as Teflon), to replace the traditional wool felt cloth used in the action's 1,130 movable parts known as "bushings." This decision was made to compensate for the low quality of post-war felts, and, it was hoped, would resolve the problem of sticking in humid weather and looseness in dry weather. Unfortunately the organic material--wood--which was married to the Teflon bushings did not remain static during changes in humidity and the sluggishness in summer and clacking in the winter proved to be a curse that plagued the American Steinway piano for over twenty years. Although encouraged to follow suit, we learn that the Hamburg factory never made its own parts but bought (and still buys) ready-made action parts from Renner, which never adopted the Teflon idea. (Perhaps why the Hamburg Steinway holds an untarnished reputation.)

But it is Japan and the Yamaha piano that strike fear in the heart of Henry Z. Steinway as Yamaha seeps into America as the white man seeped into the territory of the Native American Indian. With American pumping aid back into the Japanese economy after WWII, they were actually enabling Japan to invade our musical economy as they produced as many pianos in one week as it took Steinway to produce in one year--with a labor force that earned $1 to an American's $5. In 1967 Yamaha ousted the Knabe as the piano of the Metropolitan Opera by giving the house $10,000 and forty new pianos every year.

By the late 1960's Henry begins to drink and fears that Steinway will bring him to the same end that it brought his father. And although it has been rumored in the piano world that no Steinway family member was interested in carrying on the family tradition, we learn that this is false; Henry's sister Betty has two sons, Theodore and Simon, who are anxious to follow in their forefathers' footsteps but, alas, their last name is not Steinway, it is Chapin and their enthusiasm is squelched. Steinway is sold to CBS Musical Instrument Division in 1972, who then turned it over to the Birmingham brothers in 1985--whose contribution is the creation of a modestly priced piano to compete with the Yamaha, and named it after their hometown of Boston. They, in turn, sold Steinway to the Selmer Company ten years later and Steinway is now publicly traded, in unison with Selmer's clarinets and saxophones, under the umbrella of LVB (Ludwig Van Beethoven).

P.S. In 2002 Steinway introduced the Essex piano--a modestly priced instrument with 26 of Steinway's unique design features.