Part IThe Story
The piano that came to the White House in January 1903 stood on three gilded eagles. They were carved "half regardant," wings outstretched, each set on a square pedestal draped with laurel. Above them ran a case without moldings, bound by a scroll of red acanthus that linked the arms of the original thirteen states. The arms were displayed on shields of dull maroon, beginning at the right, in the order in which each state had adopted the Federal Constitution. Inside the lid, Thomas Wilmer Dewing had painted America receiving the nine Muses. The whole thing was gold, chosen to match the gilding on the East Room's mirrors and fixtures and the damask of its curtains, because the room had just been renovated along with the new West Wing and the instrument was designed for this one space. It was valued at $15,000. Those who saw it called it "the finest instrument in the country." The number stamped into it was 100,000.
On the afternoon of January 23, President Theodore Roosevelt accepted it. A Steinway gave what the account calls a "felicitous presentation speech." Then a second Steinway sat down at the bench: Charles Herman Steinway, forty-five years old, born on the island of Manhattan and schooled in Berlin. He played a piece the record lists only as Valse Poétique, welcoming the piano to what one writer called its new Executive home.
The record does not say whose waltz it was. Charles composed as an amateur, and one of his pieces, which an English accompanist named Edward Brightwell would record six years later, was titled Madeleine—Valse poétique. If that was the piece, then the first music the White House heard from its new piano was written by the man who had sold it.
That evening was a Friday, and Edith Roosevelt held musicales on Friday nights that winter. On average, 350 people received and accepted the heavy invitations, several pages long. The performers were often pianists and singers brought in by Steinway & Sons. With the gold piano in place, the East Room became a stage for the performing arts, and the tradition of live music in the President's house runs unbroken from that winter. Put less ceremonially, the most important room in America had become a Steinway showroom with a head of state attached. The family had built that kind of room before.
The first piano Steinway & Sons ever sold in America carried the number 483. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg had built 482 instruments in Germany before he crossed the ocean, and he was not about to start counting at one. Number 483 went to a New York family for $500. Number 100,000 went to the President. The fifty years between those two numbers held a change of surname, two brothers dead of disease in the same year, a factory the size of a city block, a company town in Queens, a diary of 2,500 pages, and a debt. Charles was born into the middle of that count. He spent his career keeping it going.
There is a small problem with the account of that January afternoon. The contemporary report calls the speechmaker "Mr. Fred P. Steinway, President of Steinway & Sons" and lists Charles as vice-president. Nearly every later history puts Charles in the president's chair from the end of 1896 until his death in 1919, followed by a Frederick T. Steinway. The discrepancy may be a reporter's slip or a quirk of how the family split up its ceremonial duties. I could not resolve it from the sources at hand. It suits a family whose members kept passing the same names down, the way they passed down tools.
By the Numbers
The Custodian's Ledger
1896–1919Charles H. Steinway's years at the head of Steinway & Sons
100,000Serial number of the gold grand presented to the White House, January 1903
$15,000Reported value of that piano at presentation
1,570Employees of Steinway & Sons, 1914
1904 / 1909Steinway-Häuser opened in Hamburg and Berlin under his leadership
10Of his own compositions recorded for Welte-Mignon in Freiburg, July 1913
17His age when he began a piano-maker's apprenticeship in the family factory, 1874
The Second Charles
The first Charles went ahead of the family.
Before Heinrich Steinweg brought most of his family over in 1850, one son crossed about a year early. According to a trade history the firm's own circle helped write, that son "soon afterward wrote letters back home urging the family to dispose of their belongings and come to America." He was Carl in Seesen and Charles in New York. In the records he appears variously as Charles, Charles G., and, in at least one genealogical list, Charles H., the same initials his son would carry. Born in 1829, he went out first, sized up the country, and wrote home to say it would do.
The family that followed him had already had one founding. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg was born on February 22, 1797, in Wolfshagen, a forest hamlet on the slopes of the Harz. At eight he was an orphan, "thrown upon his own resources," until his father and brothers, believed killed in the wars, came back and claimed him. At fifteen he was orphaned again. He joined the Black Brunswickers, the volunteer corps of Duke Frederick William, against Napoleon, and spent the Hundred Days in garrison. Some accounts put him at Waterloo; the more careful ones do not. He left the service on June 23, 1822, became a carpenter, then apprenticed to an organ builder in Goslar. Guild rules kept him from building instruments in the open, so he built them in his kitchen. In 1835 he gave his bride, Juliane, a square piano as a wedding present. The next year, in the kitchen in Seesen, he finished a grand. That instrument survives, and is still known as the "kitchen piano." In 1839 he took three pianos to the state trade exhibition in Braunschweig and won a gold medal.
After the failed revolutions of 1848, with no future for a man working outside the guilds, he left. His eldest son, Theodor, stayed behind and kept the German business. The others came to New York, where friends told Heinrich that Steinweg would hurt him in trade. He became Henry. It would take the rest of the family until 1864 to formally anglicize the name, and Theodor until he was summoned.
The first workshop of Steinway & Sons was a loft at the back of 85 Varick Street, opened on March 5, 1853. Within a year the firm needed space on Walker Street, and soon after that more space on Walker Street. On April 1, 1860, the family opened a factory on Fourth Avenue, the stretch later called Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets, on the block where the Seagram Building now stands. Guests dined on roasted fowl and marinated oysters and drank cold champagne. The literary, musical, and artistic gentlemen were taken on a ninety-minute tour; women were invited only to the showroom. Three hundred workers would build 1,180 pianos there that year. A private telegraph line connected the factory to the showroom three and a half miles away. Editors from more than sixty newspapers came. One correspondent wrote that there was "no manufactory in the world which combines so perfectly all the elements of creation in so simple working order." R.G. Dun & Co. put the firm's worth at more than $360,000, at a time when the average worker earned $500 a year.
At that party, the first Charles gave a speech. He praised what he called the "progressive spirit of America" and said it roused in him an irresistible desire to push ahead and come out first in the race for improvements. He was thirty-one. His son Charles Herman was not yet three.
Five years later the father was dead, and so was his brother Henry Jr., the family's first chief technician and, by the account of people who study the instruments closely, the technical father of the modern grand. Both died of disease in 1865. The family wrote to Theodor in Braunschweig and asked him to come. He sold his share of the German firm to his partner Wilhelm Grotrian and two workmen, Adolph Helfferich and H. G. W. Schulz. The business that had been C. F. Theodor Steinweg became, after some intermediate names, Grotrian-Steinweg. Theodor crossed the Atlantic and became Theodore.
So Charles Herman Steinway lost his father at eight, the same age at which his grandfather had once been left alone. The grandfather got his father back. The grandson did not.
A Gymnasium in Berlin, a Bench on Fourth Avenue
He went to school in New York first. Then the family sent him to a Gymnasium in Berlin.
That is a short sentence in the biographical sources, and it is easy to skip. It shouldn't be. Steinway & Sons was then a German company in nearly every sense except its address. The workers on Fourth Avenue were mostly German immigrants, and the official language of the firm was German. The chief technician, his uncle Theodore, kept a house in Braunschweig, crossed the ocean often, and never liked living in America. The family wrote letters across the Atlantic the way other families wrote to the next town over. Sending a fatherless boy back to Berlin for a classical education was not exile. It was an apprenticeship in the other half of the business.
He came back, and in 1874, at seventeen, began training in the family factory as a piano-maker's apprentice, as tradition required. Steinway sons did not start in the office. Sixty-three years later the founder's great-grandson, Henry Z. Steinway, a Harvard history graduate, would still begin in the factory yard as a laborer. He said that working beside skilled craftsmen taught him more than years of extra study would have. The rule held across five generations. You learned the instrument with your hands before you were trusted to sell it.
Charles finished the apprenticeship and moved into sales.
That move defined him. In a family of inventors, he became a seller. The founder built in a kitchen. Theodore filed patents; something over forty-five originate from his work, including the 1871 tubular metal action frame, whose geometry has not changed since (a hammer made today still fits a frame from 1871), and the 1880 rim-bending block, which glued thin sawn strips into a grand's curved case in one operation and made the old, wasteful steam bending obsolete. Henry Jr. had designed scales. Charles did none of this. As far as the record shows, he had a gift for the showroom, a good amateur's touch at the keyboard, and a family name already made famous by others.
In 1876 the firm incorporated, and his uncle William became its first president.
Uncle William's Diary
To understand the man who succeeded William Steinway, you have to understand what Charles was inheriting, and William left an unusually complete record of it.
Wilhelm Steinweg was born in Seesen on March 5, 1835, the fourth son, and spent two years apprenticed in a piano factory before the family emigrated. From the moment he got to America he was the family's public voice. In 1860 he was the speaker who opened the Fourth Avenue factory. After his father's death in 1871 he ran the business in practice and, from 1876, in title. Eight days after the first shots of the Civil War, and three days before his wedding, he started a diary. He kept it almost daily for thirty-six years, in nine volumes and about 2,500 pages. His grandson Henry Z. Steinway gave it to the Smithsonian in 1996.
The diary shows a man who could not leave an idea alone. William built Steinway Hall on East 14th Street between 1864 and 1866 for $200,000. It held the second-largest concert hall in New York and the firm's showrooms, arranged so that a concertgoer could reach the auditorium only by walking through the pianos. Sales rose by more than 400 instruments in 1867. The New York Philharmonic played there for twenty-five years, until Carnegie Hall opened in 1891. Charles Dickens read there. William brought Anton Rubinstein over for 215 concerts in 239 days in 1872 and 1873. Other piano makers presented instruments to pianists. William booked the pianist. That arrangement became the Steinway Artist program.
In 1870 William bought the house and grounds of Benjamin Pike Jr.'s widow in northern Astoria. Around it, across some 440 acres, he built a company town with its own factory, foundry, and sawmill, along with worker housing, a kindergarten, a lending library, a post office, a volunteer fire department, parks, and a trolley line. By one historian's reading of the family papers, the point was to "escape the machinations of the anarchists and socialists" in Manhattan. In 1880 the firm led an industry-wide lockout of New York's piano workers. Later in the decade it hired detectives to spy on its employees, paid police to protect company property and side with management, and evicted strike leaders from company housing.
At the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, Steinway took the two highest awards, with the judges' scores showing 95.5 out of a possible 96. The scores are the problem. James Barron's account says a judge was bribed through an intermediary, the pianist Frederic Boscovitz. Another writer says William's diary admits to paying off judges at trade fairs. Donald W. Fostle, who knows the diary as well as anyone, says the repeated-bribery story is untrue, and that in the one documented case it is unclear whether Steinway was a participant or the target of an extortion attempt. The diary is there for anyone to read. Even with the primary source in hand, the experts disagree.
William also ran the New York Subway Commission. He started extending his trolley line under the East River, and the tunnels were named for him. The dirt dug out to make them became a small island in the middle of the river. In 1888, through Wilhelm Maybach, he met Gottlieb Daimler, and on September 29 of that year the Daimler Motor Company of New York was founded. The resort he developed at North Beach later became an airport, and the airport became LaGuardia.
His marriage was its own story. In April 1861, in Buffalo, he married Regina Roos. He was twenty-six and she was seventeen, and by the diary's account they were in love. There were six pregnancies, three ending in miscarriage or stillbirth. There were affairs, which the diary records with real anguish. One son was not his. When Regina left in 1876, she took that boy to France. One reviewer of Fostle's history summed up the domestic arrangements in a single clause: William "absolutely dominated the industry while his wife ran off with the coachman and various nephews suffered under his tyrannical sway."
Charles was one of those nephews.
— D. W. Fostle, The Steinway Saga: An American Dynasty, as quoted by musicologist Stuart de OcampoThe genius of Steinways ... ultimately lay in their ability to persuade millions of persons across decades and continents that in this realm of supreme subjectivity, individual variation, incertitude, and ever-changing conditions, there was an absolute best. The assertion, repeated often enough, took on the coloration of fact.
The persuasion worked, and it paid. By the early 1890s, according to Fostle's figures, the family was clearing thirty cents of profit on every dollar of gross revenue. William spent it as fast as it came in. He committed his own fortune to the subway, the trolley, the automobile, and North Beach, and, in one reviewer's words, "borrowed heavily against future earnings." Fostle's 710-page The Steinway Saga is the place to watch the money come in and go back out.
The Inheritance Was a Debt
William Steinway died on November 30, 1896, at sixty-one, and was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery. His nephew Charles took over. He was thirty-nine.
The German sources say plainly that Charles led the firm out of a crisis and into recovery. They do not itemize the crisis, and I won't invent a ledger for them. The outline is clear enough from what came before: a founder-figure who had borrowed against future earnings to build a subway, a car company, and an amusement district, and an estate tangled in all of it.
Some of it came apart fast. William's heirs did not believe in the Daimler venture, and in 1898 they sold their shares to General Electric. The plant became the Daimler Manufacturing Company. Steinway's role in the American automobile ended almost as soon as it began. The connection lasted in one odd way: a century later, the hand-polished wood inside Daimler's top Maybach cars was being made at Steinway's Hamburg factory.
Some of it went to court. On December 21, 1897, a New York special term denied an application by Henry W. T. Steinway, a member of the family, for a peremptory writ of mandamus directed at Charles H. Steinway and others. Henry W. T. appealed. The Appellate Division ruled on July 1, 1898. A writ of mandamus orders an official to do something he has refused to do. In a corporation, petitions like this are usually about books, records, and the right to inspect them. The surviving summary does not tell us what Henry W. T. wanted to see. It does tell us that in his second year in charge, the new head of the firm was being sued by his own family to open something up.
Richard K. Lieberman's history, built on the company and family papers at LaGuardia Community College, names the family's afflictions without softening them: "adultery, alcoholism, emotional depression, and long court battles over money." In re Steinway is one entry in that list. The reviewer of Fostle's book put it more harshly: the Steinway men were "brutal toward any sign of apostasy within the family."
So Charles's job was not to invent anything, or to found anything. It was to hold together what his grandfather had founded and his uncle had overextended. The press of that era seems to have understood this. In 1899, The Music Trade Review ran a headline that read, in full, "Charles H. Stein way Returns." The trade did not need to be told where he had been, or why his coming back counted as news.
The Eagles and the Muses
Go back to the gold piano and look at it as a piece of business.
It was not a donation in the charitable sense. The firm had been making "art case" pianos since 1857, designed by outside artists, and the form peaked in the late nineteenth century: Lawrence Alma-Tadema's ebony grand with ivory and mother-of-pearl inlay, bought by the financier Henry Gurdon Marquand for his Manhattan mansion; commissions for the Herter Brothers; the Tiffanys. These pianos were furniture, sculpture, and advertisements at once. The White House piano, designed by Joseph and Richard Hunt and painted by Dewing, applied that tradition to the most public private house in the country.
Look at what the decoration claims. Thirteen colonies in the order of ratification. Three American eagles carrying the whole instrument. America, painted as a woman, receiving the Muses, the arts of Europe arriving as tribute. And the factory in Queens that built it ran in German.
It would be easy to call this hypocrisy. It is closer to a statement of intent. The Steinways never pretended to be anything but German craftsmen. They insisted that German craftsmanship, moved to New York, had become the American standard. The eagles do not hide where the piano came from. They mark how far it had come.
The White House also became a client in the ongoing way the firm liked best. On February 8, 1904, Isabella Hagner, the Roosevelts' social secretary and the first woman to hold the job, wrote a letter to "Mr. Charles H. Steinway." It sits in the Library of Congress among the Roosevelt papers, catalogued but not transcribed. I don't know what it says. Its existence shows that a year after the presentation, the Executive Mansion's social calendar ran through his office.
The arrangement lasted longer than he did. In 1938 the 100,000th piano was replaced by the 300,000th, whose gilded mahogany legs were carved as eagles by the sculptor Albert Stewart. That one is still in use in the White House. In 2007 Henry Z. Steinway, the founder's great-grandson, received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in a ceremony held in the East Room.
Houses on the Elbe and the Spree
In 1880 William and Theodore opened the Hamburg factory on the Schanzenstraße in St. Pauli. They chose Hamburg because it was a free city and a port, because European import duties were punishing, and because building in Germany kept them close to the most advanced piano-making industry in the world. Theodore ran it. It was part factory and part laboratory: much of the precision cutting and drilling equipment later installed in New York was tried in Hamburg first. The two plants traded patents and techniques across the ocean, and they still do. The old letters carried sketches. The younger brothers in New York often took Theodore's drawings to the U.S. Patent Office and filed on them. As the eldest, Theodore addressed William in letters and telegrams as "Young man, do this, leave that ..."
Theodore died in Braunschweig on March 26, 1889. He had gone back to the city he preferred, and he left his collection of instruments to its museum. Grotrian-Steinweg, the firm built on his old business, was still in Braunschweig and still making very good pianos. For a while there were two premium German makers carrying the Steinweg name, and one of them was not Steinway.
London had a Steinway Hall on Wigmore Street from 1875. In 1890 Queen Victoria granted the firm its first royal warrant. Other courts followed: Italy, Norway, Persia, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey. These were the kinds of customers who bought pianos to match their furniture.
Charles's contribution to all this was retail. In 1904 he opened a Steinway-Haus in Hamburg. In 1909 he opened another in Berlin. Both were exclusive showrooms with recital rooms, smaller versions of what William had built on 14th Street, placed in the two German cities the family knew best. The Hamburg house brought the product back to the city where it was built. The Berlin house brought it to the city where Charles had gone to school. By the 1900s, one British trade directory notes, Steinway had established itself in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg.
Uncle Theodore never liked living in America. His nephew seems not to have needed to choose. The German sources say he grew up in both countries and felt bound to both, and to Berlin in particular. Among the waltzes he wrote is one called Die Spreekönigin, "The Queen of the Spree," named for the river that runs through Berlin. It was written by a New York piano maker whose father had gone ahead to America and written home to say it would do.
The Paper Hands
The most forward-looking thing Charles did was let a machine into the piano.
The player piano was the sound technology of the time, and the high end of it was the reproducing piano, which recorded a performer's playing in detail and played it back on a real instrument. The leading German name was M. Welte & Söhne of Freiburg, whose Welte-Mignon system rolls are still studied by people who care how pianists of the period actually played. Steinway became one of Welte's main piano partners. Around 1914 the firm introduced the Steinway-Welte reproducing instrument, which the trade press described simply as a machine that "reproduces the playing of famous artists." Steinway also built instruments around Duo-Art and Ampico. A Duo-Art roll of Harold Bauer playing Saint-Saëns, recorded on a 1920 Steinway, survives, and you can still hear the instrument under Bauer's hands. Another word for that is a phonograph that the piano maker got to sell.
In a firm whose whole claim was the irreplaceable hand of the craftsman and the artist, this was not an obvious move. A piano that plays itself could easily cheapen the brand. Charles seems to have seen it the other way. A reproducing Steinway sold the artist, the instrument, and the house all at once. It carried Rubinstein's and Paderewski's world into a parlor where no one could play. The 1914 figures suggest a firm doing well: 1,570 employees, and more than half of the output grands. Through the 1920s, in the years just after him, the company sold up to 6,000 pianos a year.
Welte did him a personal honor in return. In July 1913, Charles went to Freiburg and recorded ten of his own compositions for the Welte-Mignon system, which Welte then published. Die Spreekönigin is among his surviving works. He played into a German machine, in a German city, a waltz named for a German river. The machine punched his touch into a roll of paper, the speed of each note and the weight of each chord recorded as holes.
He was fifty-six. War came thirteen months later.
A century on, the firm returned to the same idea. In 2015 Steinway introduced Spirio, a high-resolution player system bought in 2014 from the engineer Wayne Stahnke, who had built similar systems for Yamaha and Bösendorfer. It is called "non-parasitic," meaning its equipment does not change the sound or feel of the instrument. In the recording version introduced in 2018, more than twenty gray-scale optical sensors behind the keyboard measure hammer speed at more than a thousand levels of sensitivity, 800 times a second. By 2024 the Spirio library held more than 4,000 recordings. It is the 1913 roll with better resolution.
The company's record with technology was not spotless. In 1962 the New York factory replaced cloth bushings in the grand action with Teflon. Teflon was cheaper, more consistent from batch to batch, and unaffected by humidity. The trouble was that the wood around it was affected by humidity, and the actions became too tight or too loose with the weather and began to click. The Teflon was dropped in 1983, and existing pianos were refitted with cloth. Hamburg never adopted it. The Welte and Spirio experiments succeeded because they sat beside the instrument. The Teflon experiment failed because it went inside.
Fourteenth Street to Fifty-Seventh
In July 1916, Musical America reported that Steinway Hall would move from its old home on 14th Street to a new site at 109–113 West Fifty-seventh Street. A reporter went to see the old hall before the move.
The story belongs to two people. One is Charles H. Steinway, "president of Steinway & Sons," who remembered the hall's opening in 1866, when he was nine, and Rubinstein's debut six years later, when he was fifteen, and who told "a multitude of anecdotes narrated in his comprehensive diary." The phrasing doesn't settle whether the diary was his or William's. Either way, the family that wrote everything down was again reading from what it had written.
The other is Nahum Stetson, who had joined the firm exactly forty years earlier, in 1876, and who had bought his own Steinway in 1868. He had taken lessons from William Mason, whose studio was, as Stetson put it, "upstairs." He brought out a bound volume of programs from the hall's tenth season, 1876–77. Theodore Thomas conducted six symphony concerts. Saint-Saëns's Phaéton got its first New York hearing on October 9. Leopold Damrosch's Oratorio Society gave its first concert, Elijah, on November 8. The Funeral March from Götterdämmerung was played, marked "first time," on November 11. The Russian pianist Annette Essipoff made her debut on November 14 and gave her seventeenth recital in the same hall a month later. Lillian Norton, later Lillian Nordica, sang at one of them. Mark Twain gave humorous recitations. Stetson remembered paying for many concerts when "admission was one dollar, and secured seats a dollar and a half."
— Nahum Stetson, Steinway & Sons, to Musical America, July 22, 1916Although I have no definite recollection of the artists that I heard in Steinway Hall before 1876 with the exception of Rubinstein, I do remember paying for many a concert in the old hall when "admission was one dollar, and secured seats a dollar and a half."
The 57th Street hall did not open in 1916. The new Steinway Hall on West 57th Street opened in 1925. Charles had been dead for six years.
The firm sold that building in 2013 for $46 million, moved out at the end of 2014, and opened another Steinway Hall on Sixth Avenue in 2016. Each move followed William's original design: walk through the pianos to reach the music.
An Ambulance Corps, a Red Cross Nurse, a Waltz for Berlin
In the summer of 1917, a few months after the United States declared war on Germany, The Music Trade Review ran a short item headlined "Steinway Family Do Their 'Bit.'"
"For true patriotism and loyalty to 'Uncle Sam,'" it began, "there is probably no family in this country which is more entitled to recognition than the Steinway family." Six great-grandsons of the founder had volunteered. One was Charles's son, the copy torn away from his first name in the digitized page, who had joined the U.S. Ambulance Corps. A Ziegler was in the Aviation Corps, a von Bernuth in the Navy. One Vietor was in the cavalry after months on the Mexican border; another Vietor was in the Aviation Corps. A Cassebeer was a captain in the Medical Corps. Marie Louise Steinway, daughter of Charles A. Steinway (yet another Charles), was a Red Cross nurse and might leave for France soon. Mrs. Frederick Steinway and Mrs. Henry Ziegler were both described as active in Red Cross work, "sparing no effort."
Nobody in 1917 had to explain why a family with names like Ziegler, von Bernuth, Vietor, and Cassebeer needed to show its loyalty in a trade paper. Everyone understood. The founder had served in a German duke's volunteer corps against a French emperor. His son Albert had been a colonel of New York volunteers in the Civil War. Now his great-grandsons were in American uniforms, driving ambulances, flying, and riding, against the country where the family had built pianos in a kitchen. And the firm still owned a factory in Hamburg.
The sources I have do not say what happened to the Hamburg plant during the First World War, and I won't guess. The record for the Second is clearer and grimmer. The New York factory built wooden gliders for the Allies and 2,436 "Victory Verticals," small olive-drab, gray, or blue uprights light enough for four men to lift, some meant to be dropped by parachute. In Hamburg, American-owned, no more than a hundred pianos a year left the factory, the lumber yard's dried wood was requisitioned for war production, and Allied bombs nearly destroyed the building. Marshall Plan money helped rebuild it. Lieberman's history puts it in one line: Steinway factories ended up supplying both sides.
Charles did not live to see that. He died in New York on October 31, 1919, eleven months after the Armistice, at sixty-two. Frederick T. Steinway succeeded him. Theodore E. Steinway, William's son, followed. Henry Z., Theodore's son, born in a New York apartment building that stood where the original factory had been, became president in the mid-1950s and was the last Steinway to hold the job. In 1972, after a long strike, years of financial strain, heavy legal costs, and what the record calls "a lack of business interest among some of the Steinway family members," the family sold the firm to CBS. Next to it in the CBS portfolio were Fender guitars, Rhodes electric pianos, and the New York Yankees.
Henry Z. stayed on, signing limited-edition pianos until he died on September 18, 2008, at ninety-three. He was the last family member to work in the factory he had first entered as a yard laborer. By then the company had passed from CBS to a group of Boston investors, to a public company that traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker LVB, for Ludwig van Beethoven, and finally to John Paulson's hedge fund, which paid $512 million in 2013. Paulson had outbid Kohlberg's $438 million. The 600,000th Steinway, finished in 2015, took 6,000 hours over four years and was priced at $2.4 million.
None of those owners could have bought a Steinway who could do what Charles had done in the East Room in 1903: sit down at the instrument his family had built and play it as one of them.
He left no memoir and, as far as the available record shows, no well-known quotations. What his grandfather built, his uncles invented, and his uncle William wrote down in 2,500 pages, Charles kept in balance and handed on. The firm's most important rooms became showrooms on his watch, in Washington, Hamburg, and Berlin. Whatever voice of his survives is on paper of another kind.
Somewhere there is a roll from Freiburg, punched in July 1913, of Die Spreekönigin. Thread it into a reproducing Steinway, start the pump, and the keys go down one after another in the order and with the weight his hands gave them, a waltz for a Berlin river played on a New York piano, with nobody sitting at the bench.
Part IIThe Playbook
Charles H. Steinway's career teaches what founders rarely have to learn: how to inherit. He invented no mechanism and founded no institution. He took over a company whose founder was dead, whose great inventor was dead, and whose great promoter had just died leaving debts, a lawsuit from inside the family, and a stake in an automobile company nobody wanted. He held his post for twenty-three years through a family feud, a European expansion, a new technology, and a world war against the country his family came from. The principles below come from that tenure and from the system he inherited and passed on. They are written for operators who are running something they did not start.
The principles
- 1.Treat succession as a turnaround, not a coronation.
- 2.Route the customer's most important room through your showroom.
- 3.Make the milestone the marketing.
- 4.Put retail where the factory already is.
- 5.Run the company in two languages.
- 6.Adopt the threatening technology beside the product, never inside it.
- 7.Make exclusivity something the best people pay for.
- 8.Defend the name harder than the patent.
- 9.Let the hands learn before the mouth sells.
- 10.Buy inputs when they are available, not when you need them.
- 11.Repeat the claim until it hardens, but keep the evidence behind it.
- 12.Prove belonging in the currency your market recognizes.
Principle 1
Treat succession as a turnaround, not a coronation
Charles took over on November 30, 1896, from an uncle who had cleared thirty cents on the dollar in the early 1890s and then borrowed heavily against future earnings to fund a subway, a trolley line, an automobile company, and a resort. Inside two years the family had sold the Daimler stake to General Electric and Charles was a named respondent in a relative's mandamus petition. The German record says he steered the firm out of a crisis. That outcome required giving up the grand gesture. He started no subway and no car company. He tied the firm back to its core product and opened showrooms.
The common mistake for successors to a visionary is to think they must out-vision him. Usually the opposite is called for. A charismatic founder-operator leaves commitments that only made sense while he was alive to push them. The successor's first job is triage: decide which of the predecessor's bets are part of the business and which were part of the man.
The family's later history shows what happens when no one does this. By 1972, the record lists a long strike, years of financial strain, legal bills, and family members who had lost interest, and the firm went to CBS. Each successor inherits all of that or none of it.
Tactic: In your first ninety days as a successor, list every commitment your predecessor made and mark each one "core business" or "personal conviction," then wind down the second column without public drama.
Principle 2
Route the customer's most important room through your showroom
William designed Steinway Hall so that concertgoers had to walk through the pianos to reach the auditorium, and sales rose by more than 400 instruments in 1867. Charles applied the same layout to the Executive Mansion. The 100,000th piano was designed for the East Room, gilded to match its mirrors, and accompanied by performers Steinway brought in for Edith Roosevelt's Friday musicales, which drew an average of 350 guests. A year later the President's social secretary was writing to him directly.
The idea is not product placement. It is to become part of the setting where the customer's important moments happen. Placement can be removed. Setting is hard to change. The White House replaced its Steinway in 1938 with another Steinway, and that one is still in use.
The modern versions are the All-Steinway Schools and exclusive competitions. More than 200 conservatories keep at least 90 percent Steinway-designed pianos and buy them at full price. Oberlin has been all-Steinway since 1877. The Cincinnati College-Conservatory placed one order for 165 instruments worth $4.1 million. Each school is a showroom the customer paid to build.
Tactic: Find the one room where your customer's identity is on display, then make your product part of that room's design rather than an item delivered into it.
Principle 3
Make the milestone the marketing
The first Steinway & Sons piano was numbered 483, so that the firm's count started with the founder's German output. That choice made the serial number part of the story. The 100,000th went to the White House. The 300,000th replaced it. The 500,000th, designed by Wendell Castle in 1988, carried the names of the 832 pianists and 90 ensembles on the Steinway Artist roster. The 600,000th sold for $2.4 million.
A production count is an operations metric. Steinway turned it into a public calendar of events. Each round number gave the firm an object to make, a recipient to choose, and a reason for the press to write. The milestone becomes the advertisement, and the advertisement becomes a historical artifact.
This only works if the numbering is continuous and honest. A brand that resets or inflates its counts loses the effect. Fostle documents that Steinway's nineteenth-century rivals accused it of inflated production figures. The later milestones held up because the numbers kept checking out.
Tactic: Pick the operating metric your company will still be counting in fifty years, and decide now what you will build, and for whom, when it reaches its next round number.
Principle 4
Put retail where the factory already is
The 1880 Hamburg factory solved a supply problem: tariffs, freight, and access to German expertise. It did not solve demand. Charles's Steinway-Häuser, in Hamburg in 1904 and Berlin in 1909, did. The firm had been making pianos in Germany for a generation. Charles gave German buyers places to experience them that matched what New Yorkers had on 14th Street.
Companies with local manufacturing often assume local presence follows. It doesn't. A factory tells the government you are there. A showroom tells the customer. Companies that build abroad and sell through intermediaries end up as suppliers in that market rather than brands.
H
Building the Transatlantic System
Manufacturing came first; Charles completed the retail half.
1853
Steinway & Sons founded at 85 Varick Street, Manhattan.
1866
Steinway Hall opens on East 14th Street; concertgoers enter through the showroom.
1875
London Steinway Hall opens on Wigmore Street.
1880
Hamburg factory opens on the Schanzenstraße in St. Pauli.
1890
First royal warrant, from Queen Victoria.
1896
Charles H. Steinway succeeds William.
1904
Steinway-Haus opens in Hamburg.
1909
Steinway-Haus opens in Berlin.
1925
Steinway Hall on West 57th Street opens, six years after his death.
Tactic: For every market where you manufacture, ask whether a customer there could walk into a room that is entirely yours; if not, you have a plant there but not a business.
Principle 5
Run the company in two languages
The Fourth Avenue factory worked in German. Theodore sent sketches from Braunschweig, and his brothers filed them at the U.S. Patent Office. Hamburg tested machinery before New York installed it, and the two plants still trade parts and methods. Charles, schooled in Berlin and apprenticed in Manhattan, could act as a native in both places.
This went beyond sentiment. Two plants that compare notes have a built-in check. The Teflon case shows it: New York adopted Teflon bushings in 1962 and dropped them in 1983, and Hamburg never used them. Larry Fine, a technician and longtime reviewer, has consistently rated Hamburg pianos higher, even after New York's 2010 process improvements, which he was invited to inspect. Competition between sister plants raised standards at both.
Being fully at home in two cultures is a hiring and succession asset most firms overlook. Charles could run the business on both sides of the ocean because he had grown up on both.
Tactic: Give your second site real authority to refuse changes the first site adopts, and promote leaders who have worked natively in both.
Principle 6
Adopt the threatening technology beside the product, never inside it
A self-playing piano looked like a threat to the idea of the irreplaceable hand. Charles partnered with Welte instead, launched the Steinway-Welte reproducing instrument, and recorded his own compositions in Freiburg. In 2015 the firm did it again with Spirio, whose selling point is that it is "non-parasitic" and does not change the instrument's sound or feel.
Compare the Teflon bushings, which went inside the action, ran into the behavior of wood, and took twenty-one years to remove. The rule that follows: new technology can surround the core product and add to its value. It should not replace the materials that make the product what it is.
T
Technology Bets: Beside vs. Inside
Steinway's record on new technology splits along one line.
| Bet | Where it sat | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Welte, Duo-Art, Ampico reproducing systems (1910s–20s) | Beside the action | Scaled |
| Teflon "Permafree" bushings (1962–1983) | Inside the action | Reversed |
| Spirio high-resolution player (2015– ) | Beside the action | Scaled |
| Daimler engines in Astoria (1888–1898) | Outside the business entirely | Sold off |
Tactic: Before adopting any new technology, ask whether it changes what the customer touches; if it does, make it earn its place through long testing at a second site.
Principle 7
Make exclusivity something the best people pay for
Steinway Artists, about 2,000 of them by 2018, are not paid. Each owns a Steinway, and each pays Steinway to prepare and deliver loaned instruments. The management scholar David Liebeskind calls it "one of the only pure product endorsements programs." The price of the designation is exclusivity. Artur Schnabel stayed away from America from 1923 to 1930 rather than give up his Bechstein in Europe. In 1972 the firm took a piano away from Garrick Ohlsson's Alice Tully Hall recital after he called Bösendorfer "the Rolls-Royce of pianos." Angela Hewitt and Louis Lortie were dropped after playing Faziolis. Lortie called Steinway "the Microsoft of pianos."
These are real costs: alienated artists, damaging press, and the criticism that the company's dominance has made concert sound uniform. The upside is a roster whose loyalty means something because it is not paid for. A paid endorsement says the artist was paid. An unpaid exclusive one says the artist chose. This was not always true. The musicologist Stuart de Ocampo stresses that in the nineteenth century Steinway "aggressively sought out and paid (in various forms) for artist endorsements," and Liszt endorsed seven makers at the same time. The firm moved from paying to selecting once its position could support it.
Tactic: Once your brand can carry it, stop paying for endorsements and start charging for affiliation, and accept that you will lose some prominent names.
Principle 8
Defend the name harder than the patent
Steinway holds 139 piano patents, and the early ones, the overstrung scale, the duplex scale, and the rim-bending block, became industry standards. Standards spread, and competitors used them. What Steinway pursued most aggressively was the name. In the late 1960s it countersued Grotrian-Steinweg, the Braunschweig firm descended from Theodore's own business, over the use of "Steinweg." It won on appeal in 1975, and the case established "initial interest confusion" in trademark law: a lesser brand cannot borrow attention from a stronger one's reputation, even briefly.
Patents expire and good engineering gets copied. A name, defended consistently, does neither. The family that dropped Steinweg to sell to Americans later went to court to stop a German firm from using Steinweg in America.
Defending the name has a less admirable side. The firm received the sostenuto-pedal patent in 1874 even though M. Waldo Hanchett of Syracuse had filed for a similar device five months earlier. Intellectual property was a contested field for the family from the start.
Tactic: Spend your legal budget first on keeping your name unambiguous in the customer's mind, and only then on defending specific inventions.
Principle 9
Let the hands learn before the mouth sells
Charles apprenticed as a piano maker at seventeen before he went into sales. Henry Z. Steinway, with a Harvard history degree, started in the factory yard in 1937 and later said working with craftsmen taught him more than extra years of study would have. This rule ran through five generations of a family that otherwise argued about nearly everything.
A salesman who has built the product sells it differently. He knows which claims are true and which are puffery, and in a market as subjective as this one, he can tell the two apart. He also earns credibility with the craftsmen, and a family firm runs on that credibility.
The rule ended when the family stopped producing heirs willing to follow it. The 1972 sale cites, among other causes, "a lack of business interest among some of the Steinway family members." The apprenticeship tradition survived longer than the willingness to take it up.
Tactic: Require every future commercial leader to spend real time on the production floor before taking a customer-facing job, and treat refusal as information about their fit.
Principle 10
Buy inputs when they are available, not when you need them
Steinway keeps lumber yards at both factories, aging wood for nine months to five years. Less than half of it ends up in a piano, and more than seventy percent of the walnut is rejected. Its stated policy is to buy wood when it is available, not when it is needed. In the late 1990s it bought its keyboard supplier, Kluge of Wuppertal, and its plate foundry, O.S. Kelly of Springfield, Ohio. In 2019 it bought Louis Renner, the action and hammer maker.
When the scarce input is time, measured in seasoned wood, dried rims, and trained hands, the cheapest supply is the one you secured years before you needed it. Wartime showed the risk of going without it. Late in the Second World War, the Hamburg factory had to surrender all its prepared wood. A just-in-time supply chain cannot hold a five-year buffer, and a business whose quality depends on that buffer cannot run without one.
Tactic: Identify the input that takes the longest to mature, and build inventory or acquire the supplier before any shortage forces your hand.
Principle 11
Repeat the claim until it hardens, but keep the evidence behind it
Fostle argues that the Steinways' real achievement was persuading the world that, in a field of "supreme subjectivity," there was "an absolute best," and that "the assertion, repeated often enough, took on the coloration of fact." The nineteenth-century record is not clean: disputed judging at the 1876 Centennial, accusations of inflated figures, and a competitor's charge of "fraudulent puffing humbug."
De Ocampo, while endorsing Fostle's argument, adds that real innovations "carved out a unique sound for the Steinway pianos in the mid-nineteenth century," and that exhibition medals, thirty-five between 1855 and 1862, then the Paris grand gold medal in 1867, came first. The claim held because there was substance under it. Persuasion multiplied a real product. It did not substitute for one. More than 80 percent of the high-end grand market still belongs to the firm.
S
Three Generations, Three Jobs
Each Steinway leader's role in the firm's long argument.
| Leader | Role | Signature act |
|---|---|---|
| Henry E. (1797–1871) | Maker | Kitchen grand, 1836; numbered the first American piano 483 |
| C. F. Theodore (1825–1889) | Inventor | Tubular action frame, 1871; rim-bending block, 1880 |
| William (1835–1896) | Promoter | Steinway Hall; Rubinstein's 215 concerts in 239 days |
| Charles H. (1857–1919) | Custodian | White House piano; Steinway-Häuser; Welte partnership |
Tactic: Pick the one claim you want customers to believe and repeat it for decades, but for every repetition put an investment behind it that would hold up to an expert's inspection.
Principle 12
Prove belonging in the currency your market recognizes
The gold piano carried eagles and the arms of the thirteen colonies. In 1917 the family announced in the trade press that its sons were in the ambulance corps, the aviation corps, the navy, and the cavalry. A German-built instrument in a German-speaking company made itself American through actions that Americans recognized as American: a gift to the President, national symbols, sons in uniform.
Charles meanwhile wrote a waltz for Berlin and opened showrooms there. He never chose one identity and gave up the other. In each market he expressed belonging in that market's terms. An outsider brand does not become an insider by hiding where it came from. It does so by showing loyalty in the place's own symbols, persistently, at the moments that matter, while keeping its origins.
The cost of getting this wrong is not abstract. It shows up as lost customers, suspicion, and, in wartime, requisitioned stock and bombed factories.
Tactic: For each market you serve, find the act that local customers read as loyalty, and perform it publicly at the moments of greatest national feeling, without disowning where you came from.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
Charles H. Steinway left almost no public statements behind. The Steinway story is mostly told in other people's words: the artists who endorsed the pianos, the rivals who resented them, and the historians who argued over their reputation.
— Franz Liszt, letter to Steinway & Sons, 1883The new Steinway grand is a glorious masterpiece in power, sonority, singing quality, and perfect harmonic effects, affording delight even to my old piano-weary fingers.
— Stuart de Ocampo, review of Fostle and Lieberman, American Music, 1997That Steinway aggressively sought out and paid (in various forms) for artist endorsements must be stressed in order to combat an idealistic notion that the greatest flocked to Steinway simply because it was the best.
— Artur Schnabel, My Life and MusicThey insisted that I play on Steinway exclusively, everywhere in the world, otherwise they would not give me their pianos in the United States. That is the reason why from 1923 until 1930 I did not return to America.
— C. F. Theodore Steinway, habitual opening of letters and telegrams to his younger brother WilliamYoung man, do this, leave that...
— David Liebeskind, 'The Keys to Success,' Stern Business, 2003[The Steinway Artist program] is one of the only pure product endorsements programs, as no artist is paid to play on or endorse a Steinway piano.
For the documentary record behind these voices, Lieberman's Steinway & Sons, drawn from the family and company archive at LaGuardia Community College, is the most complete account.
Maxims
- Succession is triage. The heir's first job is to separate the predecessor's business from the predecessor's convictions.
- The best showroom is the customer's own room. Make your product part of the setting where your customer's important moments happen.
- Count in public. A serial number carried forward for a century is a calendar of marketing events.
- A factory is presence for the state; a showroom is presence for the customer. Build both in every market that matters.
- Two plants make two critics. A sister site with authority to say no will catch the mistakes the first site makes.
- Put new technology beside the product, not inside it. What surrounds the core adds value; what replaces the core risks it.
- Charge for affiliation, don't pay for it. An unpaid exclusive endorsement means more than a paid one, and costs you some famous names.
- Patents expire; names don't. Spend the most on keeping your name unambiguous.
- The hands learn before the mouth sells. People who have built the product know which claims are true.
- Belong in the local idiom without disowning your origins. Eagles in Washington, a waltz for the Spree in Berlin, and no need to choose between them.
