"I know a fine way to treat a Steinway", goes Irving Berlin's song "I Love a Piano." By 1915 Berlin didn't need to explain the word Steinway: it had been the preeminent American piano for more than fifty years. After 1860 most pianos were copies of Steinways. Chickering, Weber, Mason & Hamlin, all came and went; Steinway stayed at the top. Steinway & Sons is about the family that manufactured and marketed that instrument.

Starting in 1853, the Steinways saw their piano company through the strains of competition, strikes, and temperamental artists, as well as depressions and wars. Their saga extends from the factory bench to the showroom floor to the concert stage and international trade fairs.

The Steinway story began in Germany in 1835 and went on to span capitalism in America from the days when a weekly wage was $5 to the days when $5 was an hourly wage. The Steinways slogged through the recessions of the 1850s, amassed huge fortunes in the 1880s, were devastated by the financial slump in the late 1890s, recovered with the rest of American business by the turn of the century, and accumulated great wealth before the radio, the phonograph, the automobile, and the Great Depression all but wiped them out. They limped along for the next twenty years and in the 1960s again began to prosper. But when Yamaha captured the world's piano market in the early 1970s, Steinway & Sons' then president, Henry Z. Steinway, decided to sell the company to CBS.

What is astounding is how the Steinways maintained this family business for so long, while all around them privately owned businesses were consolidating into larger stock companies. Few family-owned and operated businesses have lasted long enough to pass to a new generation, yet Steinway persisted under six different family members spanning five generations. This longevity was in large part achieved by having a partnership of an artist and a businessman at the helm. That mix of craft and commerce at the tiller was crucial in establishing the standards and style of Steinway & Sons. Based on a cultural icon, it was not the type of enterprise that could be run by just a merchant or just a maestro. The family was unusually fortunate in having the right mix of skills in generation after generation but ran into trouble when half the mix was missing.

In the 1930s and 1940s responsibility fell solely to an artist with no business sense, who lived more in Steinway's golden past than in its dreadful present. Theodore E. Steinway, grandson of the founder, was forced into the job of president against his will and found himself alone at the top. It was the first time in Steinway's history that the president didn't have a partner. Heinrich Steinway, founder of the company, could not have managed the business without his sons; when William emerged as top man, he called his brother Theodor back from Germany to work with him; after William died, the new president, Charles, consulted daily with his brother Frederick; and when Frederick took over, he had his older cousin Henry Ziegler at his side. But during the Depression and World War II, Theodore had no such support. His older brother Billie was more skilled at making friends and spending money than managing a business, and all Theodore's male cousins and nephews-women were not considered eligible as business partners-were too young. As a result, he made mistakes. He ignored the new, small upright piano market in the 1930s and wasn't astute enough to make money on military contracts during World War II. Lack of collaboration remained a problem into the 1950s and 1960s when his son Henry, who was not an artist but a businessman, ruled the company, again without that other half.

Another reason for Steinway's unusual longevity as a family business in my view is that only twice did a son succeed his father. The presidency usually passed to a talented nephew, brother, or cousin. When the boss died, his eldest son was typically either too young or too incompetent to take over. This meant that the common family business predicament of sons succeeding talented, powerful fathers was circumvented.

But, more than anything, Steinway's resilience was based on the quality of its piano, whose superiority was such that the flow of piano innovations in the late nineteenth century was from New York to Europe. At a time when America was still viewed as a frontier society, better at manufacturing plows than pianos, it was thought, Europeans were shocked to find Steinway & Sons, an American manufacturer, making one of the finest pianos in the world.

The 1850s saw a demand for a more powerful piano as the size of music halls grew to accommodate thousands instead of hundreds of concertgoers. To meet that demand, Steinway, by 1860, was manufacturing a piano with a rich, powerful tone. The volume was increased by introducing new parts, such as a cast-iron plate that could hold the piano wires in tune under tremendous pressure, and by fanning the longer, heavier bass strings out above the treble and middle registers. Henry Steinway, Jr., responsible for these innovations, also added a vibrant soundboard and a more responsive keyboard. These innovations, taken together, were initially called the "Steinway system," but they soon became known simply as the " American systerm"

Steinway continued to make improvements in its piano after 1860. After Henry, Jr., died and Theodor assumed the role of head of Inventions and Construction, there were hundreds of new patents. Americans loved gadgets and new technology, and Steinway catered to that fascination and used new patents to sell its pianos. On the showroom floor it was useful to be able to say: " And this year we have a new and improved action," or "The strings are now divided differently, to provide a fuller sound." Theodor replaced Henry, Jr., as inventor and in Steinway legend is considered the father of the modern Steinway, although that honor more properly belongs to Henry, Jr.

In the twentieth century, innovations took the form of new models, new manufacturing procedures, and new glues and lacquer finishes. The other major change was that in the 1930s, for the first time, people outside the Steinway family were involved in creating the new technology. Until then, all drawings remained in rough form and were the sole possession of the chief engineer- Henry, Jr., Theodore Steinway, and then his nephew Henry Ziegler. But when Ziegler died and his post went to Paul Bilhuber, the tradition of family secrets ended.

In a family business the story does not stop at the factory gate. Life at home is not separate from work. The Steinway family had all the trappings of upper-class Victorian life-a patriarch, inherited wealth, and ownership of the means of production. But the Steinways' lives did not always conform to our notions of Victorian mores. In addition to some remarkable sexual liaisons, we find novel survival strategies on the part of those attempting to escape a family tradition riddled with addictions to both work and whiskey. William Steinway's first wife, Regina, seems to have slept with almost every man she met in order to assuage her loneliness and compensate for marriage to a workaholic husband; William's nephew, Henry W. T. Steinway, engaged in a decade of court battles, starting in the 1890s, to free himself from his authoritarian uncle, whom Henry claimed was bilking the business of vast amounts of money; William's brother, Theodor, in the 1850s, and his grandson Teed, almost a century later, tried putting as many miles as they could between themselves and the Steinways to save their sanity.

Steinway & Sons is also the story of a search for freedom. In 1850 the family abandoned its homeland and sailed for America. These were people with money, skills, a home, and a business, not potato famine Irish who had no option but to leave. The wealthy Steinways left because they wanted to. In Germany they were stifled by trade barriers, a restrictive economy, disruptive riots, and the failed 1848 revolution which paralyzed commerce. They settled in New York City and within three years were making their own pianos again in the unfettered American economy.

But they also faced hard times in America, and, confronted by strikes and increasing labor costs, the founder's eldest son, Theodor, pioneered move back to Europe. The first step back to the Old World was the opening of Steinway Hall in London in 1875. This was a showroom for the New York factory and a way into the British market. By the 1880s it had also become a showroom for pianos manufactured in Germany, in Hamburg.

The purpose of manufacturing presence in Hamburg was to exploit the cheaper labor force there. In 1880 the daily wage in Hamburg was less than that in New York. The Outcome was that William and his brother Theodor were managing two businesses, 4,000 miles apart, at a time when communication was limited to letters, which took three weeks to cross the Atlantic, or cryptic telegrams sent via the recently laid transatlantic cable. This Sort of arrangement was popular in the American colonial period: placing a brother in New York, another brother in Hamburg, and perhaps a trusted cousin in London, and in time a nephew in Berlin.

The Hamburg Steinway evolved into a different kind of instrument from the New York Steinway. Initially, Hamburg did not manufacture its own piano; it was for the most part an assembly plant for parts shipped from New York (rims, plates, actions, and keys), although some parts were made locally. But in 1907 German tariffs on metal parts made it more economical for Hamburg to buy its plates locally. This marked a turning point for the Hamburg operation, and by World War I there were two separate Steinway factories, one in America, the other in Europe. During the 1920s the question was asked-and is still posed today-as to which piano was better, the New York or the Hamburg version. The answer has always depended on whom you ask.

One consequence of operating in both New York and Hamburg was that when Germany and America went to war, Steinway had one foot in each camp. Though Steinway & Sons was an American company, it was allowed to stay in business in Germany, once the family had proved that it wasn't Jewish. Both factories contributed to the war effort, Hamburg manufacturing bunk beds and rifle stocks for the German military, New York providing gliders, a few coffins, and an occasional upright for the United States military.

The Steinways were as creative at marketing their pianos as they were at making them. In the nineteenth century their strategy was to win fame through medals at fairs, artists' endorsements, and managing their own concert hall. Before Sol Hurok, before Arthur Judson, and long before David Merrick, William Steinway managed celebrated European pianists like Anton Rubinstein and Ignace Paderewski, booked all their concerts in the United States, made their travel arrangements, and guaranteed a minimum income for their national tours. William Steinway was Mr. Music in America. By bringing Rubinstein and, later, Paderewski to small towns across the country, he delivered piano recitals to people who lived in regions barren of classical music. William Steinway did for classical piano music what P. T. Barnum did for the circus. He put it within reach of most Americans. In so doing, he played a significant role in shaping nineteenth-century musical consciousness. Of course, it was all calculated to help piano sales. William knew that if Rubinstein and Paderewski became superstars, more people would want to buy pianos, and that if those celebrities played Steinways, then that would be the piano people would want.

By the 1920s, demand had shifted to the player piano, the phonograph, and the radio. People wanted machines that would generate their music instantly and effortlessly. In those roaring twenties when standards were ambivalent, Steinway decided to sell itself as protector of Victorian values, tradition, and stability. The Steinway piano was marketed as art in the age of machines. With the help of a young copywriter at N. W. Ayer, Raymond Rubicam (who went on to become a founding partner of the public-relations giant Young & Rubicam), Steinway became the "instrument of the immortals," the piano used by the divine artists of the past. Steinway pianos were sold as the real thing, the original, in a world that, more and more, was settling for imitations. The claim was always that "this year's Steinway is the best ever made." It answered the question that was-and still is-on many consumers' minds: "Is the Steinway made today as good as the one made in the past?" The answer was always that it was better. Nothing symbolized this more than the new Steinway Hall on West 57th Street, a palace for the venerated Steinway piano.

If the piano was the "instrument of the immortals" to the public, to the men in the factory making it, it was at the root of a constant battle against wage cuts, long hours, and total control over their work. The 1870s saw the beginning of a move to Queens, in an attempt to keep workers and the factory away from "red hot strikers" in New York City (the city included Manhattan and the south Bronx only at that time). Management hoped to have more control over the workers' daily lives this way and built a village around the factory, selling lots on some of the 400 acres Steinway owned in western Queens. This was a company town akin to the textile towns and the paper mill villages in New England.

At this time the Steinways were undisguisedly contemptuous of their employees. During a strike in 1864 Henry, J r., referred to his 400 workers as "swine," telling his brothers to fire them all and not to worry because another 400 swine were ready to take their place. In other strikes police were paid by Steinway to contain the workers, protect company property, and put strikers in jail. Striking men who rented homes from Steinway or were paying off mortgages were dispossessed. Tensions ran high, and during one strike William's life was even threatened. This was not a story of one big happy family. Many workers opted to move on. Being able to say that they had worked for Steinway was a credential that could command a high wage on the outside and was a useful reference for starting one's own shop.

In 1937 the workers formed a factory-wide union and two years later joined the national United Furniture Workers' union, CIO. This was when all shreds of paternalism-company picnics, orchestral concerts at lunchtime, and home mortgages-ended. The strikes continued, but because of close collaboration between Henry z. Steinway, president of the company from 1955 to 1972, and the union business agent, James Cerofeci, they were limited to an average of two weeks, and the resulting raises were nickels and dimes at a time when Steinway & Sons was making millions. Workers struggling to make ends meet either quit or took a second job. The turnover during the 1960s was 40 percent. Worker loyalty and continuity were traded off for short-term profits.

Customer attitudes changed too. By the late 1960s, technology had come to be regarded with suspicion. What people were now asking was not what was new about the piano being shown them, but whether it was the traditional Steinway. As a result, patents are no longer used to sell Steinway pianos, and the recent marketing plan calls for a limited number of new instruments, based on nineteenth-century models.

Yet, despite labor turmoil, family feuds, depressions, wars, competition from the Far East, and people increasingly wanting their music from records, cassettes, and compact discs, nothing has silenced the Steinway sound, even if what Steinway is now selling is its past rather than any technical innovations. Francis x. Clines, a New York Times reporter with a sensitive grasp of city life, as recently as 16 October 1994, referred to the Steinway factory as "a resilient treasure in a city that wonders whether it has lost its soul." Steinway & Sons is about what underlies that resiliency.