Name/Title
Steinway Grand PianoDescription
The Steinway Grand Piano in the Big House at Malabar Farm was manufactured in 1939. Louis Bromfield presented it to his wife, Mary, when they moved into the house in late 1940.Context
Steinway, also known as Steinway and Sons, is an American manufacturer of pianos. Headquartered in New York City, the company also manufactures pianos in Hamburg, Germany. The company was founded in 1853 in New York City by German immigrant Henry E. Steinway and his sons.
Heinrich (Henry) Englehard Steinway was born in 1797 in the town of Wolfshagen im Harz in what was then known as The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Heinrich worked as a carpenter and for an organ maker before building his first piano in 1835. In 1836, he made his first grand piano in his kitchen. Now called the Steinway "Kitchen Piano," it is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Germany's increasingly unstable political climate motivated Steinway and his five sons to emigrate to the United States in 1850. Father and sons worked for other piano companies until the family opened its own piano manufacturing business, Steinway and Sons, in 1853.
Henry E. Steinway died in 1871. In the fall of 2013, the investment firm Paulson and Company purchased all of Steinway and Sons for $500 million.
The O. S. Kelly Foundry of Springfield, Ohio, was founded in 1890. Since 1938 it has made all of the plates for Steinway pianos, 4,000 a year! These cast iron plates are the heart of the piano holding the steel piano wires with 40,000 pounds of tension. Today a new Concert Grand Piano will cost you $142,500. In 2001 Steinway purchased O. S. Kelly Foundry as it was the only foundry in the United States that still was casting plates for pianos.
- Research and text by Thomas Bachelder of the Malabar Farm Foundation