Janis FontaineSteinway’s new store features a recital hall open to music students.
Steinway & Sons has opened a showroom on South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach that is a prototype for its expansion.
The legendary American company builds pianos that many consider the finest in the world. The new Steinway Piano Gallery, a factory-owned showroom, is on the corner of Dixie and Dyer Road, just a block south of Belvedere Road. It’s one of about 20 company-owned retail locations in the United States.
The 4,700-square-foot showroom showcases Steinway pianos from concert grands to uprights, including Steinway’s game-changing player piano.
The gallery also features a 60-seat recital hall.
The factory-owned store is a prototype for the company. “About 20 years ago, Steinway made a decision that they wanted to create factory-owned stores,” said Joseph Toscano, manager of the West Palm showroom. “They looked for areas that would be a good investment and that would be good for the community.” West Palm was a good fit.
Another advantage is that John Paulson, the founder of the private equity firm that acquired Steinway & Sons in 2013, lives and works in Palm Beach.
When Steinway & Sons prepared to remodel the property, they called Toscano at his home in North Texas. He packed his bags and found an apartment in West Palm Beach.
He started connecting with local piano teachers. “We like to be a center of influence when it comes to music and teachers,” he said. He speaks to a handful of teachers every day, “just to see how they’re doing,” and to let them know Steinway has a recital hall they can use for free.
“Being a teacher is not easy. They have a lot of obstacles, and one of them is access to a hall,” Toscano said. “We don’t charge because we want to be good community representatives.”
What makes a Steinway a Steinway
It takes 12 months and 12,000 parts to create a Steinway grand piano. A team of craftsmen – as many as 200 – creates the instrument, which is 80%wood.
But no ivory. In the mid-1950s, Steinway replaced ivory keys with high-quality plastic. Today, the keytops use a synthetic material called ivorite which can mimic the look, feel and acoustic properties of ivory.
The wooden soundboard, often called the soul of the instrument, is sustainably sourced from Sitka spruce from Alaska. The tree takes 100 years to reach maturity, and the wood, once harvested, takes at least a year to age.
The rim, which determines the piano’s size and shape and must withstand tremendous pressure, is made of 12 to 14 laminated layers of hard rock maple from the Pacific Northwest, bent by hand.
Buyers can choose piano finishes from a range of colorful enamels to the vibrant Padauk model crafted from wood harvested from Central and West Africa.
Its vivid orange-red color and open grain make it a stunning piece of furniture even if you never played a note. “Look at the beautiful veneering. It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours to do that,” Toscano said.
“The Steinway is the Rolls-Royce,” said Tim Brumfield, St. Gregory Episcopal Church’s director of music ministries, an organist and pianist. “Steinway has always been and is still what people consider the benchmark. The company has been able to retain outstanding quality for well over a century. When you compare Steinway to other instruments, you know it’s going to be superior.
“Yet every one is different. Because they’re all handmade, each piano has its own character and its own personality. Because it’s made out of organic materials, each one is unique,” Brumfield said.
A next-level player piano
Steinway makes about a thousand pianos each year in its New York factory using techniques developed over two centuries. But that old-world craftsmanship didn’t prevent the company from embracing technology when it was ready.
Spirio is Steinway’s high-resolution player piano system. It comes loaded with about 5,000 performances by some of the world’s most accomplished pianists, from Yuja Wang to Glenn Gould to Duke Ellington to Sergei Rachmaninoff. Or you can record yourself.
This isn’t Grampa’s player piano. That clunky thing reproduced a rough approximation of a performance using pneumatics. Spirio captures a performer’s hammer velocity and pedal position, replicating the nuances.
“They wanted a system that worked just like a human being sitting there,” Toscano said. “Music starts in your heart, it goes to your brain, and then it goes to your fingers which touch the keys. What Spirio is recording isn’t the audio. It’s recording the touch.”
Brumfield agrees. “You think that you’re hearing a recording, but you’re not. You’re hearing the actual music from the piano.”
With a new feature called SpirioCast, a simulcast of a performance by pianist Lang Lang in Japan can be played on a Steinway at home. “All you have to do is touch a button,” Toscano said.
Spirio was designed to be a teaching tool, Toscano said, as it provides feedback a student can’t get any other way.
With all this innovation, it’s not always easy selling the best pianos in the world to the world’s best piano players.
“They are artistic off the charts, and we have to keep up with their skill. One artist might want his piano to be mellow and easy to play, where a jazz artist would want a bright piano and a hard action. We deal with the best artists in the world, and they can be finicky, and we need to be able to make them very, very happy.”
Many artists insist on Steinway pianos for performances. Toscano says he sold two Steinways to Glazer Hall in Palm Beach.
Although Steinway doesn’t publish a price guide, experts say that the least expensive – a new Steinway Model S, a “baby grand” in the standard ebony finish – will cost more than $90,000.
A Steinway-designed Boston or Essex piano (both manufactured in Asia) are more affordable options sold in the new Steinway showroom, though neither is technically a Steinway & Sons piano.
And the name still means something, even though the company isn’t family-owned any longer.
Steinway & Sons remained in the family’s hands until 1972, when media and entertainment giant CBS Inc. bought it and made it part of its musical instruments division along with Fender, Rogers Organs and Electro Music.
CBS kept the company until 1985 when it sold its musical instruments division to three American businessmen including John P. Birmingham and his brother Robert Birmingham for $50 million. The new holding company traded under the name Steinway Musical Properties.
Ten years later, they sold Steinway Musical Properties for $100 million to musical instrument producer Selmer Co. The company renamed it Steinway Musical Instruments. Reports said the merger made Selmer the largest musical instrument producer in the United States, with annual sales of nearly $250 million.
In 2013, Paulson’s Palm Beach-based private equity firm, Paulson & Co., acquired Steinway Musical Instruments for an estimated $512 million.
The company is privately held so its value can only be estimated, but according to RocketReach.co, a sales intelligence platform, the annual revenue of Steinway & Sons is estimated at $538.4 million.
Not bad for a little store on Dixie Highway.
A brief history of Henry E. Steinway
1797: Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg is born in Germany. He is destined to be a carpenter, but what he loves is making musical instruments. He starts by making a few guitars and then a zither, a laptop string instrument with a metal frame somewhat like a piano.
1814: Steinweg joins the Schwarze Schar, the volunteer corps of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and fights against Napoleon.
1822: Steinweg leaves the service, finds work as a carpenter and apprentices with an organ maker. He falls in love with the organ and begins playing in church.
1823: Steinweg begins repairing pianos from his home.
1825: Steinweg marries Julianne Thiemer. They have 10 children together.
1835: Steinweg builds his first square piano* as an anniversary gift for his wife.
1836: Steinweg builds his first grand piano* in his kitchen and establishes a small workshop. He wins awards for his craftsmanship and his reputation grows. Assisted by his sons, he is able to increase production, and he builds more than 480 pianos over the next 15 years.
1850: Because of the political unrest of the late 1840s, Steinweg and his family, except for his oldest son Christian (Theodore), who stays behind to run the company in Germany, emigrate to the United States.
1851: To support the family, Steinweg takes a job as a carpenter and soundboard maker earning about $1 a day working six days a week. At home, he experiments.
1853: Steinweg founds his company using the name Steinway in a loft in Lower Manhattan, New York City. He sells the first piano he makes for $500. The first year, he makes 12 pianos.
1855: The company earns its first gold medal at the American Institute Fair in New York for excellence in piano manufacturing.
1857: Steinweg gets the first of 139 U.S. patents. The most important are the overstrung bass strings in 1859, which improved tonal richness and note sustainability; the duplex scale in 1872; the tapered soundboard in 1936; and the Spirio Player Piano in 2015.
1863-64: Steinweg becomes an American citizen, anglicizes the family name to Steinway and changes his first name to Henry. Despite that, Henry E. Steinway never learns to speak English.
1866: Steinway & Sons opens the first Steinway Hall on 14th Street. With a main auditorium of 2,000 seats, it houses the New York Philharmonic until Carnegie Hall opens in 1891.
1870: Steinway & Sons opens the Astoria plant in Queens, New York, where it still builds pianos today.
1871: Henry E. Steinway dies at age 73 from natural causes.
*Both pianos are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
