Henry Engelhard Steinway, a German immigrant, founded Steinway & Sons in 1853, in a loft located at 85 Varick Street in New York City. Within a decade, Steinway pianos were winning major awards and finding themselves in high demand. By 1900, factories in New York and Hamburg, Germany were producing 3,500 hand-crafted pianos per year, roughly the same number being made today. Then, as now, each Steinway grand piano took a year to build, and it involved the work of many skilled craftspeople.
Several decades ago, John H. Steinway (the great-grandson of Henry E. Steinway) narrated an audio tour of the New York factory, where he described the generations-old process of making a Steinway grand piano.
In 2011 Ben Niles, the producer behind the documentary film Note by Note, synced the audio tour with present-day footage of the Steinway factory, giving us a glimpse of what goes into making the piano played by Arthur Rubinstein in the vintage footage below. Here Rubinstein plays an excerpt from “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” by Sergei Rachmaninoff.
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Thank you for the information that it has been founded in 1853. I had no idea that it is in the music industry that long! My mom has been gifted with an old grand piano by our great-grandfather, she’s so lucky! peabodyspiano.com/grand.html