Jun 11 2007
The Piano Men
I recently finished a book I enjoyed greatly called Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand, by James Barron, which follows the construction of a Steinway Model D concert grand in its eleven-month journey from raw wood and steel to a finished piano. Along the way, Barron talks about the men and women who build these instruments, using methods which have changed remarkably little from when Steinway & Sons began building pianos in New York City in the 1850s.
There are no blueprints for these pianos - the are (mostly) hand-built. Each craftsman learns his job from the one who had the job before him. Some of the workers are recent immigrants, others have fathers and grandfathers who worked for Steinway. The techniques they use they learn by observation, by intuition, and by doing.
When they begin building a particular instrument, no one knows how it will sound. The soul of a piano is its soundboard, five-by-eight slab of planks made from Sitka spruce. The only source of the spruce Steinway uses now is from Alaska and British Columbia. New England, packed with usable spruce after World War I, is logged out. The wood is carefully screened by craftsmen with decades of experience, who select only planks with at least 103 inches of straight, consistent grain, no blemishes, no discoloration. But there is no way to tell how the wood will vibrate when it encased in the piano.
Woven through the book is the story of the family. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg grew up in northwestern Germany and learned the piano-making craft there. Because of wars, political turmoil, and lack of economic opportunity, Heinrich Engelhard, his wife, and several of his sons moved to New York to begin a new life there. They anglicized their names to Steinway, put the whole family to work, and by 1860 had sales of $1 million a year. Heinrich’s son, C. F. Theodore Steinway, who developed much of the piano’s mechanical action and generated many of the family’s patents, hated America so much that in 1884 he returned to Germany and opened a factory in Hamburg. The two factories work closely together to this day.
The Steinwegs moved to New York because of the large German enclave there, which by 1900 was the third-largest German-speaking urban center in the world after Berlin and Vienna. This gave them their own language and their own trusted labor pool. But to be successful they had to sell into the larger English-speaking market. This wasn’t always easy - anti-immigrant feelings are a perennial part of the American landscape. But through perserverance and real knack for self-promotion, the family became a fixture in New York society.
The piano which Barron follows through the factory, serial number K0862, became one the instruments Steinway lends out for recitals, recording sessions, and concerts. Its first public appearance was at a music festival in Kalamazoo. After it returned to New York, it was lost for three weeks. How do you lose a 9′ concert grand? It’s easier than you think.
Steinway has recently branched out into more than pianos - The Steinway Collection offers “Classic Casual Sportsware, available in a vibrant melody of styles and colors, and a select assortment of Golf Accessories”. Perfect for your next golf date with Billy Joel.