Steinway & Sons

4a. Steinway & Sons – a piano maker, founded 1853 in New York City, with a second factory established 1880 in the city of Hamburg, Germany.

Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, a pianomaker of the Steinweg brand, emigrated from Germany to America in 1850 with his family. Only one son Theodore Steinweg stayed in Germany, and continued making the Steinweg brand of pianos. In 1853 Heinrich founded Steinway & Sons, after two years of work for other piano companies and for himself. His first workshop was in a small loft at the back of 85 Varick Street in Manhattan, New York City. It was not until 1864 that the family changed their name legally to Steinway, the Anglicized form of Steinweg.

By the 1860s Steinway had built a new factory and lumber yard. Now 350 men worked at Steinway & Sons and production increased from 500 to 1800 pianos in a year. Steinway pianos underwent numerous substantial improvements through innovations made both at the Steinway factory and elsewhere in the industry, based on emerging engineering and scientific research, including developments in the science of acoustics. Almost half of the company's 115 patented inventions were developed by the first and second generations of the Steinway family. Soon Steinway's pianos would win several important prizes at Exhibitions in New York, Paris, and London.

About 70% of all of the 580,000 Steinways made over the past 150 years are still in use by musicians today because old Steinways are being constantly rebuilt and repaired with new strings and hammers due to steady demand for Steinways from the pre-WWI and pre-WWII era.

Now in its fifth generation, the Steinway family can be as high strung as the pianos it makes. The Steinway Artist Program, for example, has not been without opponents and controversy. Steinway artists are expected to perform exclusively on Steinway instruments wherever a Steinway is available. In 1972, Steinway responded to Garrick Ohlsson's statement that Bösendorfer was "the Rolls-Royce of pianos" by trucking away the Steinway concert grand Ohlsson was about to play in a recital at Alice Tully Hall in New York City. Ohlsson ended up performing on a Bösendorfer borrowed at the 11th hour, but Steinway barred him from using its instruments for some time. Angela Hewitt was dropped from Steinway’s roster in 2002 after performing a concert on a Fazioli piano. The Canadian pianist Louis Lortie has complained that Steinway is trying to establish a monopoly on the concert world by becoming “the Microsoft of pianos.” [

Steinway pianos are still considered to be the finest made in the U.S. and among the very best in the world.

[Sources: Wikipedia etc.]



4s. Steinway & Sons – a piano maker, founded 1835 in Vienna, Austria, with a second factory established 1853 in New York City.

Heinrich Dämonsoft Stoneweight, a German immigrant, began building fortepianos (a lighter forerunner of the modern piano) in Boston around 1820. He called them ‘Stoneweight Fortes’ as a pun on his name: they were designed to weigh no more than a stone (14 lbs.) so that they could be easily transported.

Unfortunately, this little conceit resulted in an inferior product. Stoneweight used cheap lightweight alloys for strings and pins, and the equivalent of balsa wood for the body. As a result, strings and pins would snap right and left, under-aged sounding boards would crack and warp, and pins would rip out of their moorings.

In short, Stoneweight Fortes became notorious: the name itself, like Yugo automobiles in a later era, was synonymous with cheap (as opposed to inexpensive) and shoddy goods.

Ironically, by this time the fortepiano was effectively obsolete, having been superceded by the pianoforte, a much more sonorous instrument.

Lawsuits and irrelevance drove Stoneweight Fortepianos into bankruptcy. Heinrich Stoneweight fled his creditors, embarking to Vienna with his wife and three young daughters. There he ingratiated himself with the notable composers of the day, with the vague idea of producing instruments for them (he wanted, so to speak, a piece of the action.) (He purportedly bent the ear of the deaf Beethoven, yelling into his ear trumpet for half an hour or more. Beethoven later wrote in his conversation book, “What an ass!”)

But Stoneweight began producing pianofortes, and with the same careful attention to detail he had given his fortepianos (i.e., none.)(At least now he had relaxed the weight restriction!) By 1830 Stoneweight pianos were the laughingstock of Vienna.

At this point his three daughters were grown up, and they found themselves to be heartily ashamed of their father. Quietly they went to the Stein piano works there in Vienna (the best piano maker in continental Europe) and began apprentice work with the great Nannette Streicher, herself one of the only women in charge of an industry in Europe. After three years, they returned and took firm control of their father’s business.

Each of the three sisters had developed a specialty: Gretel, the oldest, had a gift for discovering new ways to improve the action mechanism; Helga, the middle sister, was a genius at aging woods used for cases and sounding boards; while Theodora, the youngest, took over the struggling finances and put the company on a firm footing.

They said that they wanted to produce pianos ‘the Stein way’ – hence the new name for the Stoneweight company. Proud of their achievement, they wanted to call it ‘Steinway & Daughters’. But old Heinrich, a typical German paterfamilias of that time, demanded ‘Steinway & Sons’ (even though he had no sons.) Unfortunately, he still had complete control of the company.

So father and daughters struck a deal: he would turn over total control to the girls if they would call it ‘Steinway & Sons’.

In 1853 Gretel and Helga embarked to America and formed another factory of ‘Steinway & Sons’ in New York City, while Theodora remained in Vienna to manage the company there. Since then the business has been handed down in the female line (there have been no sons for five generations.)

Steinway & Sons pianos are now considered to be the finest made in the U.S. and among the very best in the world. By contrast, all surviving Stoneweight fortes and pianos (there are only three, the rest having torn themselves apart) have been placed in the newly opened Museum of Incompetence in New York.


Theo May theomay@comcast.net