Stein’s daughter Nanette Streicher, a marvelous player and a cultivated woman, upon inheriting her father’s piano business moved to Vienna and for forty years was considered an expert in the piano world. Thayer, in his life of Beethoven says: “In May, Beethoven, on the advice of medical men, went to Baden, whither he was followed by his friend Mrs. Streicher ... who took charge of his lodgings and his clothes, which appear to have been in a deplorable state.” Thayer says that Beethoven always preferred the piano of Stein to any others. Beethoven wrote to Nanette: “Perhaps you do not know, though I have not always had one of your pianos, that since 1809 I have invariably preferred yours.”
So, you see a woman could keep house and be a manufacturer as well, even in the early 19th century!
Then came Sebastien Erard (1752–1831) who made the first French piano in 1777. Erard invented many new things for the piano and formed a company in England. This firm was advertised on the hand bill announcing Liszt’s concert in Paris when he was twelve years old.
Added to these names is Ignaz Josef Pleyel (1757–1831), who also made a piano with a very sympathetic tone which Chopin made famous from 1831. The Pleyel and the Erard are still the leading pianos of France.
For some years the pianoforte went through many changes. As you are not learning to make a piano, you will have to take it for granted that there were many many steps taken from this time on to make the modern piano. However, the thing that held it back was the all-wood frame which could not stand the strain of the tightly drawn strings and it was a long time before the makers gave up the beautiful wood for the sturdier metal. About the time of Beethoven, playing the piano became a more complicated thing than it had been, and a grown up instrument was needed, so musical instrument makers had to “step lively” to keep pace with the music. At every concert, and often in the middle of a piece, the player would have to stop to retune the instrument on which he was playing. Therefore, all energy was bent to making the frame of the piano rigid, the strings more elastic and the pins firmer, and the metal frame was used.
All these special things were accomplished in later years. Some of the inventors were John Isaac Hawkins, an Englishman, who patented the upright pianoforte in 1800 in the United States, William Allen, a Scotchman, who introduced metal braces in 1820 and Alpheus Babcock, who patented the iron frame in a single cast, in Boston, in 1825. It was an American, Jonas Chickering, of Boston, who invented the complete iron frame for the concert grand, and at present, after many years, the instrument which seventy-five years ago bent under the pull of the strings, can now stand the strain of thirty tons! Chickering made pianos as early as 1823.
After this there was much experimentation in pianos, culminating here, in the pianos made by Steinway and Sons the ancestor of which was the firm of Heinrich Englehard Steinweg, of Brunswick, Germany, starting as organ makers. In 1848 Heinrich’s sons went to New York City and changed their name to Steinway, where Theodore, the eldest, continued the firm as Steinway and Sons.
Of course, the methods of stringing and tuning a piano have taken years to develop—all of which we cannot go into in this book. Now, instead of twenty strings, as we saw them in the clavichord, we have 243 strings to produce 88 tones.
So now we have the harpsichord with hammers “grown up” into the pianoforte, with its myriad parts, no longer made by hand, but carefully manufactured by machinery and the finest of them are American.