In 1835, Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg built the first square piano in Germany. After leaving the country and landing in New York, he changed his named to Henry Steinway and set about revolutionzing the business with the company Steinway and Sons in 1853.
That legacy ended on Friday with the passing of his great-grandson Henry Z. Steinway, the last of the line to run the family business.
Henry Z. Steinway sold the piano legend to CBS in 1977, who thensold it to an investor consortium called Steinway Musical PropertiesInc. who, in turn, merged with Selmer Company, acquired flutemanufacturer Kluge, bought keyboard builder Kluge and eventually formedSteinway Musical Instruments. The company is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the acronym LVB, for Ludwig Van Beethoven.
Plenty of Beethoven's classics have been played on Steinways fromone end of Earth to the other. The instrument was also a favorite oftitans like Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninoff and ArturRubinstein. By the new millennium, Steinway had made over 500,000
pianos and registered over 115 patents.
In 2007, the U.S. government presented Henry Z. Steinway with theNational Medal of Arts. With his passing, the legacy of HeinrichEngelhard Steinweg comes to a storied close.
Photo: Wikipedia
