Chapter 4
Attendees mobbed the Steinway & Sons exhibit in a melee depicted here at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, after the New York–headquartered piano maker became the first American manufacturer to receive the Grand Gold Medal of Honor at the fair.
From their “Chopsticks” beginnings in 1853, when a German immigrant named Henry Engelhard Steinway started Steinway & Sons in a loft on New York’s Varick Street, the famed piano makers strived for and attained the status of the “Goldberg Variations.” Their success was in part a ricochet off of America’s own achievements: Per capita income had grown as much as 77 percent between 1800 and 1860, resulting in a nascent American middle class whose houses were larger and whose needs for symbols of affluence to fill said houses were greater yet. Just as the middle classes a century later filled the hollow voids of their ranch houses’ game rooms and recreation rooms with televisions set in ornate consoles that looked like Louis Quatorze had impregnated a Magnavox, the middle class in Steinway’s day sought recognition and pursued status in the form of pianos. One contemporary historian, James Parton, professed that pianos held a place in the home that was surpassed only by that of the stove. Indeed, Americans bought 25,000 pianos a year in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and by 1905, pianos and organs outnumbered bathtubs in American homes.
With advertising barely grown past an embryonic stage (the first convention of advertising agents wasn’t held until 1873), Henry Steinway Jr. realized that fairs and exhibitions—and the awards they conferred—would be just the imprimatur the company needed to appeal to its target demographic. In 1855, he entered a Steinway piano at the Metropolitan Mechanics Institute Fair in Washington, D.C., where it collected first prize. The same year, he entered the instrument into the more esteemed American Institute Exhibition at New York’s Crystal Palace (site of the 1853 expo), where judges and the press showered Steinway’s musical mechanism with hosannas and another first prize.
The awards reaped an increased awareness of Steinway pianos, which in turn brought a nearly 300 percent leap in sales in 1855. Flush with success, the company moved to a 175,000-square-foot factory in 1858 where in a few years it would prepare for a kind of Hunger Games with foot pedals: the International Exposition of 1867.
Set in Paris, the expo would be the most extravagant of all world’s fairs yet. It would feature more than 50,000 exhibitors, a palace on the Champ-de-Mars built with the help of Gustave Eiffel, and a common worker’s house Napoleon III himself would stoop to design. It was the first world’s fair to feature restaurants and amusement parks around the main building.
For two months prior to the fair’s April opening, Steinway and his bête noire, Boston-based Chickering & Sons, prepared to do battle at the expo before a potential crowd of millions.
Chickering’s fate over time may have been to play Salieri to Steinway’s Mozart, but he knew how to stoke demand for his product. After P.T. Barnum convinced Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind in 1850 that she should make a concert tour of the country, Barnum commissioned Chickering to custom-build a grand piano for her tour. With the piano accompanying Lind at nearly 100 shows where tens of thousands mobbed to hear the echo from heaven that was her voice, Chickering became the largest piano manufacturer in the United States.
Courtesy of HarpWeek
In the buildup to the expo, Steinway and Chickering spent an estimated $80,000 each plugging their pianos through posters, newspaper ads, and taste-making VIPs. It was money well spent, wedging the companies apart from the other 150 or so piano manufacturers exhibiting and competing for awards at the fair.
Emperor Napoleon III awarded Chickering the Imperial Cross of the Legion of Honor, to go along with a gold medal. Considering the company had solicited the Imperial Cross, however, it was a bit like the company receiving a gold star for participation, then being told to go back to the kids’ table to finish its juice box.
But Steinway, perhaps gleaning a lesson from the Chickering/Lind association, hired the charismatic Belgian concert pianist Desiré Magnus to play on its five pianos at the fair. By the end of the expo, the virtuoso playing of the dashing Magnus helped transform Steinway into the premier piano maker of its time: It became the first American manufacturer to receive the Grand Gold Medal of Honor along with an honorary membership in France’s Société des Beaux Arts. The company even sold all of the pianos it had shipped over to Paris, including one concert grand to Baroness Madame Rothschild.
The expo was only round one, however, with both companies milking their triumphs there like a Holstein cow. Chickering proudly advertised that Franz Liszt had endorsed its product, neglecting to mention that the Hungarian composer and pianist had commended Steinway as well. Chickering hung a massive replica of its Imperial Cross medal on top of their New York factory, but Steinway one-upped Chickering’s endorsements by using testimonials from Queen Victoria and other royals from Russia, Sweden, Spain, and Turkey. Steinway’s sales soon doubled.
Chickering merged with several other companies in 1908 to become American Piano Co., which was later absorbed by the Aeolian Co. Chickering survives today as a brand name of the Baldwin Piano Company, which itself found promotional lucre at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, and the 1914 Anglo-American Exposition in London.
Steinway leveraged its expo exposure even further with a program called “Steinway Artists,” whose ranks came to include Franz Liszt, Vladimir Horowitz, Cole Porter, and others who played solely on Steinway pianos. Now owned by hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, Steinway & Sons recently celebrated building its 600,000th piano, a process that can take eleven months in order to assemble 12,000 separate parts into what has been called “The Instrument of the Immortals.”