A 104-Year-Old Grotrian-Steinweg — With a Steinway Family Connection

Every once in a while, I open up a piano for a routine service appointment and discover that I've been invited to work on a particularly interesting piece of piano history.

This week, it was a Grotrian-Steinweg Model 120 upright, serial number 41798, built in Braunschweig, Germany.

According to Grotrian-Steinweg's own historical serial-number records, the company finished 1921 at serial number 39,802 and 1922 at 42,075. That dates this piano to 1922—making it about 104 years old.

And Grotrian-Steinweg isn't just another obscure German piano name. Its history is directly intertwined with the family that created Steinway & Sons.

From Steinweg to Steinway—and Grotrian-Steinweg

Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg began building pianos in Germany before emigrating with most of his family to New York in 1850. There the family adopted the Americanized name Steinway and established Steinway & Sons in 1853.

One son, however, remained in Germany: C. F. Theodor Steinweg. He continued the family's German piano-building operation and eventually formed a business relationship with the Grotrian family.

When Theodor later left Germany to join his family at Steinway & Sons in New York, his German operation passed into the hands of the Grotrians and their partners. That business developed into Grotrian-Steinweg of Braunschweig.

So Grotrian-Steinweg and Steinway & Sons aren't simply two companies with confusingly similar names. They actually grew from interconnected branches of the same 19th-century piano-making story.

A Serious German Upright

By the time this particular piano was made in 1922, Grotrian-Steinweg had long since developed into an important high-end German manufacturer in its own right.

The designation cast directly into this piano's plate reads:

GROTRIAN-STEINWEG NACHF. — Mod. 120 — BRAUNSCHWEIG

The "120" refers to this model's approximate height of 120 centimeters, or about 47 inches. Surviving examples of the Model 120 from this same era measure approximately 120 cm high and 147 cm wide.

That's a substantial upright piano, and you can see the quality even before hearing it. I particularly love the beautifully ornamented cast-iron plate. Even components that would normally be purely functional were given considerable attention.

And tucked into the plate is the little number that tells us when all of this was made:

41798.

[PHOTO: Serial number 41798]

Built in the Golden Age of the German Piano Industry

This piano came from an extraordinary period of German piano manufacturing. In fact, I found a surviving German piano catalog from 1921—just one year before this instrument was built—that included Grotrian-Steinweg among the premium makes being offered at the time. The catalog was published by Karl Lang, which described itself as Germany's largest piano retailer, and included Grotrian-Steinweg alongside several other prominent German manufacturers.

A 1927 Grotrian-Steinweg price list shows the Model 120—the same model as this 1922 piano—selling for £120 in black finish. Adjusted for inflation, that's roughly £9,800 today, or about $13,200 in current U.S. dollars.

That little piece of historical context is one of my favorite things about working on old instruments. In 1922, this wasn't an "antique piano." It was a new, modern German instrument being sold into a thriving international piano culture.

More Than Just an Antique

Age alone doesn't make a piano good.

I've worked on plenty of century-old pianos whose historical interest is considerably greater than their musical potential. After enough decades, deterioration of the soundboard, bridges, strings, pinblock and action can leave an instrument with relatively little to offer a serious player.

But occasionally an old upright reminds you why certain manufacturers earned the reputations they did.

This Grotrian-Steinweg is one of those pianos.

At more than a century old, its condition naturally has to be judged as an individual instrument rather than simply by the name on the fallboard. But it was clearly built as a serious musical instrument, and much of that original quality is still apparent today.

That's one of the pleasures of my work: sometimes a tuning appointment also turns into a small encounter with history.

And in this case, that history stretches from Braunschweig, Germany, to the Steinweg family, to Steinway & Sons—and finally, 104 years later, to a farmhouse outside Rochester, Washington!