He was especially remarkable as a performer of Liszt’s piano works. He also
accompanied his wife Agnes who was a singer. George Bernard Shaw rated him as ‘the
finest, most serious artist of them all’ in the context of comparison with Paderewski and
Sapellnikoff. Stavenhagen composed two piano concertos, solo piano pieces, and
cadenzas to Beethoven’s second and third piano concertos.
Stavenhagen co-edited with Eugen d’Albert ‘The Collected Works of Franz Liszt’. His
pupils included Max Anton, Edvard Fazer, Philip Halstead, Ernest Hutcheson, Nora
Drewett de Kresz, Loris Margaritis, Edouard Risler and Otto Urbach. He died in Geneva
in 1917 and after his death his body was transferred to Weimar where he was buried.
Stavenhagen did not make any Liszt discs but made a number of Liszt rolls of which ‘My
Joys’ (after Chopin), Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12 and ‘St Francis of Paola’ are on CD.
He never recorded the Liszt Sonata.
STEINWAY
Steinway & Sons was founded in 1853 in New York City with a second factory
established in 1880 in the city of Hamburg, Germany. Both Steinway factories still make
Steinway pianos today.
Heinrich Englehard Steinweg, piano maker of the Steinweg brand, emigrated from
Germany to America in 1850 with his family. One son, Christian Friedrich Theodor
Steinweg, remained in Germany and continued making the Steinweg brand of pianos. In
1853 Heinrich founded Steinway & Sons. His first workshop was in a small attic at the
back of 85 Varick Street in Manhattan, New York City. The first piano produced by
Steinway & Sons was given the number 483, as Steinweg had already built 482 pianos.
Only a year later demand was so great that the company was forced to move to larger
premises at 82-88 Walker Street. In 1864 the family anglicised its name to Steinway.
By the 1860s Steinway had built a new factory and lumber yard. Three hundred and fifty
men worked at Steinway & Sons and production increased from 500 to 1800 pianos in a
year. Steinway pianos underwent numerous improvements through innovations made
both at the Steinway factory and elsewhere in the industry, based on emerging
engineering and scientific research, including developments in the science of acoustics.
Almost half of the company’s 115 patented inventions were developed by the first and
second generations of the Steinway family. Soon Steinway’s pianos won several
important prizes at Exhibitions in New York, Paris and London.
In 1864 the son of Henry E. Steinway, William Steinway, built a set of elegant new
showrooms housing over a hundred pianos on East 14th Street. Two years later he
oversaw the construction of Steinway Hall at the back of the showrooms. The first
Steinway Hall was opened in 1886. It seated over two thousand people and quickly
became an important part of New York’s cultural life, housing the New York
Philharmonic for the next twenty-five years, until Carnegie Hall opened in 1891.
Concertgoers had to pass first through the piano showrooms which had a remarkable