Quality, Care Were Key to Success for Steinway

NEW YORK —  Like the tiny hammers inside a grand piano, the workrooms at the Steinway & Sons piano factory are seemingly insignificant on their own, but together they create something beautiful.

The warehouse-sized rooms are filled with stacks of unfinished piano skeletons--thick strips of hard maple molded to form the curvaceous outline of a concert grand. Amid the smell of sawdust and varnish, there also are carved wooden legs, massive metal sound boards and, yes, small felt hammers.

About 500 workers, many of whom have worked with Steinway for decades, handcraft 3,100 pianos a year at the factory in the Queens neighborhood, the headquarters and main production center for the world’s premier piano maker.

Techniques haven’t changed much since William Steinway opened the factory in 1876, 23 years after Steinway & Sons went into business. Power tools make sanding, sawing and drilling a lot easier, but otherwise workers proceed pretty much as their 19th century forerunners--slowly and very, very carefully.

From the lumberyard to the tuning room, it takes a full year to make a Steinway.

At that painstaking pace, the company makes just 2,500 grands and 600 uprights a year in New York. A branch factory in Hamburg, Germany, makes 1,300 more pianos.

Japan’s Yamaha makes about 100,000 pianos a year, and Kawai, 60,000 to 70,000.

But the exclusive nature of the Steinway doesn’t hurt business, and the company boasts that nearly 95% of all concert pianists play its brand.

“Steinway is obviously synonymous with piano all over the world,” performer Emanuel Ax said. “I think there’s just for me a better-quality sound and a better-quality feel than any other instrument.”

Some performers choose such brands as Baldwin or the Vienna-made Bosendorfer, but almost all acknowledge Steinway’s impressive sound, said Brian Majeski, editor of The Music Trades magazine.

Steinway workmanship doesn’t come cheap. Prices start at $13,900 for a basic upright and $30,300 for the cheapest baby grand. Special models such as the 9-foot Rhapsody piano, a glossy blue grand, can sell for more than $150,000. A 1880s Steinway was sold at auction in 1997 for $1.2 million, thought to be the highest price ever paid for a piano.

The Steinway & Sons story began in 1850, when Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg--who later changed his name to Henry E. Steinway--immigrated to New York with his family from Seesen, Germany.

Steinway had been a prosperous piano maker at home, and he and his sons, Henry Jr., William and Charles, apprenticed themselves to New York piano manufacturers when they arrived.

By 1853, the family opened its own business, making pianos in a Manhattan loft. They sold 11 their first year. By 1860, Steinway & Sons was the biggest piano maker in New York, said Richard Lieberman, author of “Steinway & Sons.”

What set them apart from the competition?

“From the beginning, Steinway had an obsession with quality,” Lieberman said. “They would go to a party, and the first thing they would do was go to the piano, open it up and see what was inside, see if there was anything they could learn from. They loved pianos.”

The family cultivated relationships with well-known pianists, sponsoring Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein’s only U.S. tour and bringing Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski to play in the United States.

Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff appeared in advertisements for the company in the 1920s. Other Steinway legends included Vladimir Horowitz, who performed from the 1920s to the early ‘50s, and Artur Rubinstein, whose piano genius reached glorious heights in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Business boomed through the early years of the century but sagged during the Depression. During World War II, the company stopped making pianos altogether.

Supplies were scarce, and many employees went off to war, so the company hired women and made wooden glider planes for the Army at its factory.

In Germany, the Nazis ordered the Hamburg factory to make airplane decoys and other supplies; later, it was badly damaged by Allied bombs.

The competition in the United States spread the story that the Steinways were Nazis, and in Germany, a false rumor floated that the family was Jewish.

“So we got it on both ends,” said Henry Z. Steinway, Heinrich’s great-grandson and the last family member to run the company.

Profits were flat through much of the 1950s and ‘60s, and family members began pressuring Steinway, who headed the company for 22 years, to sell. In 1972 he gave in, accepting an offer from CBS.

“It was difficult for many people, especially my mother,” he recalled. “I didn’t know until the last minute whether she was going to vote for it or against it at the stockholders’ meeting. . . . I couldn’t blame her, because she’d watched my father sweat it out through the tough times.”

In 1985, CBS sold Steinway & Sons to a pair of Boston investors, John and Robert Birmingham. The Selmer Co., owned by former Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bankers Dana Messina and Kyle Kirkland, paid $100 million for the company in 1995 and took it public a year later.

Today business is solid. Sales for 1997 and 1998 were expected to show the first significant upturn in 20 years, Majeski said.

Workers say the devotion to quality that made Steinway & Sons famous still prevails.