By Peter Hewitt —
Every day or so there’s a picture in the Arts section of the New York Times of some celebrated pianist, and ninety-nine percent of the time he (or she) is playing a Steinway piano. Never have I known of one manufacturer to dominate an industry so completely.
Now that the makers’ names are appearing on the “audience” sides of the instrument, Steinway is getting a whale of a lot of free advertising.
There are other good pianos – Yamaha comes to mind – but Steinway has become synonymous with the best, from Fats Waller to Horowitz.
They’ve been around a long time. In the early 1900s, Irving Berlin wrote a song entitled “I Love a Piano.” One of the lines was “He knew the fine way to treat a Steinway.”
Peter Hewitt is a former resident of Dublin who retired to RiverMead along with several other Dublin residents.