The New World – Steinway & Sons | The Old World – Grotrian-Steinweg | Workshop and Production

“[…] how often it would be better if instead, citizens would take a bed to their country houses, so that many people could have their peace and quiet. But no, a piano has to be taken with, as if they wanted to convert nature into music!“

(Quoted from Franz Edler von Gernerth: Musikalische Daguerrotypen, in: Allgemeine Wiener Musik Zeitung, Vienna 1844 (4th year no. 153), p. 609)

The piano was one of the most common musical instruments in the 19th century. There was hardly a middle-class home without a grand piano, a table piano or an upright piano. In the course of industrialization, which increasingly provided a certain prosperity for some, the demand for pianos rose continuously. 

Steinway & Sons in New York and Grotrian-Steinweg in Braunschweig both profited from these developments. Both companies converted their workshops into modern, mechanized factories in the course of the 19th/20th century. Today, computer-controlled machines perform planing, milling and drilling with the utmost precision. Nevertheless, piano making at Steinway & Sons and Grotrian-Steinweg is still primarily and explicitly a craft: It is the people, the employees of the companies, who select and test the material, namely the wood, for construction, who assemble the more than 12,000 individual parts that make up a grand piano for example, as well as regulating the mechanics, tuning and intonating the instrument – processes that even today hardly any machine can perform with the same quality.