The Steinway Saga
By Tom Parsons, forwarded by Terry Smythe
Forwarded Message:
From: twp@panix.com To: ALL Orig: MBNET
Subj: The Steinway Saga Area: 0-sic.makers.piano Date: 07/07/95
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Review: D. W. Fostle, _The Steinway Saga_. New York: Scribner, 1995;
ISBN 0-684-19318-3.
This book traces the history of the Steinweg/Steinway family from its roots in the Harz Mountains of Germany until to-day. It also touches, inevitably, on the piano, but the emphasis throughout is on the family.
Nineteenth- & early twentieth-century New York was full of piano makers, many of whom built fine pianos. It's clear from this book how Steinway managed to lead the pack: cutting-edge technology & shrewd marketing. They copied the iron plate from Babcock; they took the double-escapement action from Erard; they developed the overstrung bass & the one-piece laminated rim themselves. But those are only the high spots; Steinway technology, well protected by patents, went into every part of the piano.
Marketing was based on prizes at exhibitions & on endorsement by leading artists. Prizes awarded both in Europe & the United States counted for a lot, & the competing builders rarely came out of these competitions with clean hands. The Steinways made sure they got the bulk of the highest awards. With the kind of piano they were building, I would surmise that they would have gotten the gold medal in any fair competition, but the competitions were rarely fair, as Fostle describes, &, he tells us, the Steinways got their hands as dirty as anyone else in trying to hold their own.
We must all be familiar with endorsements by concert artists; this practice went back to 1854. They supplied pianos & tuners to the leading performers until well into this century. Fostle somehow passes over one of their finest publicity coups, when they flew a piano to Arthur Rubinstein by helicopter when his regular Steinway was tied up by a dock strike in South America. The practice of putting a large Steinway decal on the rim of the piano, where the audience couldn't miss it, may be a relatively recent practice; Fostle doesn't mention it.
The prizes & endorsements were exploited in their advertisements. Fostle provides a fascinating analysis of their advertising strategy. Their slogan, "The Instrument of the Immortals," goes back at least as far as 1919. The combinations of technology and promotion enabled the Steinways to price their pianos at the top of the market &, incidentally, enabled them to pay their craftsmen top dollar for their work.
The history of the product appears to be one brilliant success after an- other. The family history was quite different. Fostle records squabbles, scandals, divorces, early deaths, & heavy drinking. Some of the original designers, he says, were hearing-impaired. Twenty years after their arrival in New York as immigrants, they were rich. William Steinway (1835- 1896) lived as a rich man but overextended himself with his investments in Astoria real estate & various other ventures; he died in debt. By the time you have read about the family's many tribulations & internal divisions, you wonder how the Steinway name ever survived.
The history ends, as any piano history must, on a melancholy note. The history of the piano in this century is largely a history of falling sales, first, as radio, the phonograph, & television displaced the piano as the center of the home, second, as the culture itself gradually turned away from the piano, & third as electronic substitutes became available. Competition from the Japanese did further harm after World War II. Steinway's share of this diminishing market fell. The history of the sales, first to CBS & then to a holding company known as Steinway Musical Properties, makes sad reading.
I wondered, reading this, whether the piano is destined to go the way of the harpsichord. It is ironic that the technology of the piano peaked just as the primacy of the piano, for music, began to wane. Piano music is still written, but it no longer seems to be the center of gravity of the fine-music world to-day. I hope I will be proved wrong in this surmise. Curiously, harpsichord technology peaked (IMHO) with the work of Pascal Taskin, who appears to have put as much careful thought into every aspect of the instrument as the Steinways were to do a century & a half later--& Taskin flourished after all the important composers for the harpsichord had died--unless you think the likes of Armand-Louis Couperin important.
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Tom Parsons | If a person never contradicts himself,
DTL | it must be that he says nothing.
| --Miguel de Unamuno |
(Message sent Sat 8 Jul 1995, 23:33:19 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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