Word: steinway
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Since then, a distinguished company of piano players, from Paderewski and Rachmaninoff to Fats Waller and Jimmy Durante, have hailed their decision. In Carnegie Hall this week, an S.R.O. crowd met to hail some more. On stage stood ten Steinway concert grands, and to their keyboards came squads of concert pianists (among them: Alexander Brailowsky, Robert Casadesus) to crash out in triumphant unison The Star-Spangled Banner, Chopin's Polonaise in A Major, and The Stars and Stripes Forever. It was the most emphatic way anybody could think of to celebrate the zooth anniversary of the U.S. House...
Double Tension. Founder Heinrich and four sons moved to New York a little more than a century ago, changed Steinweg to Steinway, and set out to win a U.S. reputation. A second-generation Steinway was responsible for some 45 pioneering patents, some of them so revolutionary that one of his pianos caused almost riotous excitement at the Paris exposition of 1867. The Steinway's most important innovation: the combination in a grand piano of a rigid cast-iron frame with "overstringing." The first permitted near doubling of string-tension. The second carried the treble strings diagonally across the center...
...came faster key action and a "diaphragmatic" soundboard that gave small pianos greater tonal volume. Later improvements have given much attention to cabinetry: this week Steinway unveils a new home-size grand with severely simplified lines, to match the simplicity of the latest modern furniture...
Production Policy. From the day old Heinrich set his sons to work, a Steinway has always stood at-the company's helm, with one or more others ready to replace him: all the men of the family are raised to the business, beginning with the requirement that every Steinway boy must take piano lessons. Steinway presidents do not retire. Four of the five top executives since 1853 have died in the job, and their successors were quietly chosen at family councils. Today there are seven Steinways of the third, fourth and fifth generations in various departments, led by Theodore...
Last year, the company estimates, 90% of all U.S. concert performances were played on Steinways, and this is the sort of success the firm lives for. It does not trouble them that the total production of Steinways is only about 3,200 a year (half of them grands, the rest uprights and spinets), or some 2% of U.S. output.* The company long ago decided to concentrate in the prestige market, set out to persuade artists to play and endorse its product, built the first Steinway Hall to help the scheme along...