House of Steinway;

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Artur Rubinstein once phoned New
York from Buenos Aires to have a Stein-way
piano flown down. The Steinway
he had brought with him was tied up in
the harbor by a shipping strike. The
substitute Steinway would have to be
flown 6,000 miles, but no other piano
would do.
That was just after World War II.
Today Rubinstein would find a Stein­way
on hand almost anywhere he had
an engagement, but before that time it
was customary for concert pianists of
major rank to travel not only with a
Steinway but also with a "piano man."
William Hupfer is a piano man ex­traordinary
employed for fifty years by
Steinway & Sons, an H&S client served
by our New York Office. He traveled
with Sergei Rachmaninoff for thirteen
years, regulating the piano's tone before
each concert for variations so subtle the
pianist himself claimed he couldn't de­tect
them. Then he stationed himself in
the wings during the performance.
"I was always standing there ready,
for all those years," he once said, "and
I never had a thing to do except listen.
But my client could say to himself,
'Now, if there's one thing I don't have
to worry about, it's the piano.' "
Today, aged 70, Mr. Hupfer does
most of his regulating—or "voicing," as
they say—in the basement of Steinway
Hall on 57th Street in New York, sur­rounded
by dozens of concert grands
from which artists may choose for their
New York appearance. They prefer to
pay around $150 cartage and service
charge for a Steinway, although other
manufacturers will let them use their
pianos free in an effort to break their
loyalty to Steinway pianos. Some pian­ists
run up annual charges of $5,000 or
$6,000 for Steinway service of one sort
or another. "It's fascinating to come
across signatures of the Van Cliburns
and Horowitzes on our confirmations,"
says Jim Begley, senior accountant in
charge on the engagement.
Karl A. Herrhammer, supervising
partner, remembers that back in the
Depression days many of the great pi­anists
were being carried on the books
as Steinway tided them over hard times.
He had first taken the engagement in
1936 as a New York staff accountant
while riding in the ring at the Squadron
A Armory with his commanding officer,
Major Frederick A. Vietor, whose
mother was a Steinway.
Steinway accounts for only four per
cent of the pianos sold in this country,
but its $12 million annual sales repre­sent
12 per cent of the industry's total.
In fact, however, the company doesn't
consider itself in the same business with
other piano manufacturers.
"They are just volume people who
know how to buy lumber and shave
costs," says Henry Steinway, the presi­dent,
whose great grandfather began
his musical career as a bugler at Water­loo
and made the first Steinway in the
kitchen of his house in Seesen, a village
in Germany's Harz mountains.
The immense Steinway prestige is
best understood when one realizes that
almost all pianos used in concerts and
recitals in this country are Stein ways.
But that is not all. This American prod­uct,
which has its roots in European
culture, has completely captured the
Bushings for piano-key actions are assembled by hand at the H&S client's factory.
4 Steinway's William Hupfer lends sharp ear to concert-grand test by pianist Gary Graffman.