Piano industry loses a legend, Henry Steinway, 93

NEW YORK — Henry Steinway, the last Steinway to run the piano-making company his family started in 1853, died Thursday at home in Manhattan. He was 93.

Mr. Steinway once said he had taken countless piano lessons but never knew "which is Beethoven's this or Beethoven's that."

Henry Ziegler Steinway was the great-grandson of Heinrich Engelhard Steinway, the illiterate German immigrant before the ampersand in Steinway & Sons.

By the time Henry was a boy, "Steinway" had become almost synonymous with pianos, famous on concert stages and in Tin Pan Alley. Irving Berlin paid homage in "I Love a Piano" with the lyric "I know a fine way to treat a Steinway."

The handcrafted pianos were the instruments of choice for such greats as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz and Artur Rubinstein.

Mr. Steinway joined the company after graduating from Harvard in 1937 and began his career by building pianos, just as his father, Theodore, and uncles had.

"I learned a respect for work that is actually done," he said years later.

He also discovered that making instruments that have thousands of tiny parts under the lid is not easy. He said it took him a day and a half to do what the workers at the factory did in four hours.

In the 1940s, Mr. Steinway began overseeing operations at the company's three factories in Queens. He became company president in 1955.

By then the piano business was struggling against changing technologies and tastes. Phonographs and radios had displaced pianos as home entertainment, and television was on the rise. As Mr. Steinway recalled in 2003: "People would say: 'You're in the piano business? That doesn't exist anymore.' "

So he downsized the company, closing two plants. He decided concert artists to whom the company had lent pianos would have to return them, unless they bought them.

He also sold Steinway Hall to Manhattan Life Insurance. He moved most of the company's offices, including his own, to Queens. But the showroom remained.

In 1972, he sold the company to CBS for $20.1 million in stock.

"It was the hippie time," he recalled in 2003. "Nobody in the next generation ... " He left the rest of the sentence unsaid.

CBS replaced him as president in 1977, naming him chairman. He gave up that title when he retired at 65 but never really left. Until a few months ago, he went to Steinway Hall most days. He also went to the factory to autograph just-finished pianos, signing the cast-iron plates with felt-tip pens.

CBS sold Steinway in 1985 to what was then a band-instrument manufacturer. That company went public in 1998 and is known as Steinway Musical Instruments.

Last year, President Bush presented Mr. Steinway with the National Medal of Arts, the government's highest award in the arts.

Mr. Steinway is survived by his wife, two daughters, three sons and seven grandchildren.

Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.