There is a handsome 1925 building on New York`s 57th Street, across from Carnegie Hall, two blocks from Central Park, that would delight any architect. Inside is a fine collection of paintings, many coveted by museum curators. The cases of autographed documents would fetch a fortune at an auction house.
Yet it is the drab low-ceilinged off-white basement that visitors want to see.
The basement of the headquarters of Steinway & Sons, whose family members over the years acquired an impressive collection of music-related art, contains a sea of pianos-18 black 9-foot-long concert grands, nestling Yin-and-Yang-like from wall to wall.
The ones with a mirrorlike black finish are made in Hamburg, Germany;
they have high-gloss lacquer. Most have a softer glow and are made in the Steinway factory in the New York City borough of Queens.
These pianos are not for sale. They are too special. These are the pianos that are lent to the world`s greatest pianists to play in the New York area. Any day of the week you might find John Browning, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Jeffery Siegel, Daniel Barenboim, Claudio Arrau or Michel Legrand playing in the basement. Rudolph Serkin and others who have to avoid overly ardent fans slip into the basement`s back door on 58th Street, just next to the Harley Windsor Hotel, and sit down at a piano. New Age artist George Winston is familiar face there.
A few times a week, pianists quietly stop by to pick the piano they want to play and have it trucked to one of the area`s concert halls. In New York and elsewhere, the pianos are available to ”Steinway Artists,” those soloists chosen by the company and who promise to play only Steinways in public. In other cities, choices are limited to one or two concert grands.
The pianists must pay for the cost of transport and tuning. Steinway artists are not paid by the company, but they use the pianos rent-free.
In the basement, the pianists listen for tone and play for touch. One gleaming concert grand might sound better to a soloist scheduled to play in the recently rehabbed, richly plastered Carnegie Hall; others might be better suited to the modern Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center; another will be better for Mozart than for Bruckner.
”We recommend choosing a month before a concert,” said Richard Probst. He is director of the company`s concert and artists` department and is responsible for working with the more than 900 pianists who perform in public exclusively on Steinway pianos.
On a recent day, Alexander Paley, a young Russian Jew who had left the Soviet Union only four days before, sat down at a piano. He played with a Russian flair, what Probst likes to call ”a Russian gypsy heart.”
”You`ll be hearing about him,” Probst said, sounding like someone who had stumbled on gold.
Probst recalled one day at Carnegie Hall when different pianists tried out the same piano that had been delivered there by Steinway.
”It was the same hall, same temperature, and I was in the same seat, row W, where the critics sit,” Probst recalled. ”But it sounded like different pianos each time each man played. When Horacio Gutierrez played the middle movement from a Mozart concerto, the piano had the fullest round tones. Then John Browning sat down to play Samuel Barber`s `Sonata,` and I would swear it was a different piano.”
Upstairs at Steinway, cases contain letters from pianists and composers. One was signed by Thomas A. Edison. The inventive genius wrote, ”I have decided to keep your grand piano. For some reason, unknown to me, it gives better results than any so far tried. Please send bill with lowest price.”
This is a festive summer for Steinway. Its factory recently completed its 500,000th piano.
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The piano itself will tour the world. The sleek, rather modern-looking concert grand is made of rare East Indian ebony and dyed Swiss pear ebony, trimmed in bubinga, with bits of brass and Gaboon ebony. Probst estimated that the piano is worth half a million dollars.
The signatures of more than 900 Steinway artists are engraved in the piano`s wood.
The 300,000th piano made by the company was given to the White House in 1938 and was accepted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is the piano in the East Room of the White House and often is seen on live concerts broadcast on public television. Steinway No. 100,000 was presented to Franklin Roosevelt`s cousin Theodore and is in the Smithsonian Institution.
The company was founded in 1853 by Heinrich Engelhard Steinway, an immigrant from Seesen, Germany. When he arrived in New York in 1850, he changed his name from Steinweg. By the time he formed the partnership with his sons in 1853 in a loft on Varick Street, he had made 482 pianos in New York and in Germany.
The first piano made under the company`s new name was No. 483. A family named Griswold bought it for $500; today it is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That piano is quite different from those sold today. More than 100 innovations were patented by Steinway, his sons, grandsons and employees, many applying the acoustical theories of the 19th Century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz.
When the company was formed, New York was home to 162 piano manufacturers. Even Steinway never boasted that his company made the best instrument among those 162 manufacturers. But the company launched a brilliant marketing strategy.
Nine years later, they came up with a gimmick: They built their own 2,000-seat concert hall on New York`s then-fashionable 14th Street. To get to the concerts, the patrons had to step down from their carriages and walk through a showroom of handsome Steinways. And the great pianists who came to New York to play at this the city`s grandest concert hall played on Steinways. The Steinway family managed the careers of many great pianists. They brought Anton Rubinstein to the U.S. in 1872. They sponsored appearances by Ignace Paderewski. The Steinway piano became linked with the best pianists. The Steinway Concert Hall remained open until 1890.
Later other Steinway dealers nationwide began to offer to transport their well-tuned concert Steinway to visiting artists. And now, more than 400 pianos are in the concert piano ”bank” at dealers worldwide and at the 57th Street headquarters.
Steinway eventually established a branch of Steinway & Sons in Hamburg, Germany. But even some Europeans perfer American Steinways; in the highly subjective world of grand pianos, it is said that the American versions have a more mellow sound, the German ones a more brilliant one, according to Steinway spokesman Leo Spellman. King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II, gave John Steinway, a great-grandson of the founder, the right to be the only American to display the elaborate heraldic device ”By Appointment to the King.” It hangs in a hall in the New York office.
At the time of that appointment, just after World War II, John Steinway was the company`s marketing director. He and other members of the family sold the company in 1972 to CBS Inc.
Three years ago, the company was sold to Steinway Musical Properties of Newton, Mass., a holding company formed to acquire several musical companies being divested by CBS. It is owned by John and Robert Birmingham and has no ties to the original Steinway family. John Steinway now makes appearances as a company consultant to talk about the pianos.
As he puffed on a thick cigar, Steinway boasted recently about the company`s slowness, that it had taken 135 years make 500,000 pianos. Some mass-production companies make 200,000 pianos in one year, he said. Steinway makes only about 6,000 a year, 3,000 each in New York and Hamburg, Steinway said-and the best of them end up in the basement, never offered for sale.