Forwarded Message:

• From: twp@panix.com             To: ALL                       Orig: MBNET
 Subj: The Steinway Saga         Area: 0-sic.makers.piano      Date: 07/07/95
 =============================================================================
•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.

•--¶
--¶
Tom Parsons     | If a person never contradicts himself,¶
DTL             |   it must be that he says nothing.¶
                |                       --Miguel de Unamuno