Johann Andreas Stein

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Johann Andreas Stein was born on the 16th of May 1728 in Heidelsheim, and by the time he died in Augsburg on the 29th of February 1792, he had changed the sound of Western music forever. His name rarely appears in concert programmes or on the covers of recordings. Yet the piano you hear today traces a direct line back to a small workshop in Augsburg, where Stein devised a mechanism so precise and so responsive that Mozart wrote home to his father about it in astonishment.

  How does a journeyman organ builder become the central figure in the history of the piano? What was so different about his instruments that one of the greatest composers of the age preferred them above all others? And what happened to his legacy after his death, when his daughter carried the family's craft from Augsburg to Vienna and built it into something even more remarkable than her father had imagined?

• 2. From Organs to Pianos

  ›

  Stein learned to build organs from his own father in Heidelsheim, and that foundation shaped everything that followed. From August 1748 to January 1749, he worked as a journeyman at two of the most important instrument workshops in German-speaking Europe: that of Johann Andreas Silbermann in Strasbourg and of Franz Jakob Späth in Regensburg. Johann Andreas Silbermann was the eldest son of Andreas Silbermann, making him a nephew of the celebrated Gottfried Silbermann, whose pianos had already drawn Frederick the Great's attention.

  Stein settled in Augsburg, probably around 1750, and became a citizen there by 1756 or 1757. That latter year was also when he completed a magnificent organ for the Barfüßerkirche in Augsburg and became the church's organist. Yet something about the organ was beginning to frustrate him. In a letter, he recorded his decision in the 1760s to give up organ building entirely in order to devote himself to stringed keyboard instruments.

  His first contact with piano making most likely happened not at the famous Silbermann workshop but at Späth's in Regensburg. That detail matters, because it places the true seed of Stein's later invention in a workshop that history has largely overlooked. As a maker of stringed keyboard instruments, he built clavichords, harpsichords, and pianos, but he also pushed into stranger territory that pointed toward the future.

• 3. Extraordinary Machines

  ›

  In 1769, the Augsburg Intelligenzblatt carried a description of something Stein called the Poli-Toni-Clavichordium: a large harpsichord fitted with four choirs of strings, at registrations of 8', 8', 8', and 16', combined with a piano in a single case. Three years later, in 1772, he built the Melodica, a small organ in which the player's touch could alter volume. It could be used alongside a harpsichord or a piano, on a separate manual of a larger organ, or as a solo instrument on its own.

  In his own 1772 published description of the Melodica, Stein expressed his dissatisfaction with keyboard instruments as a class. They did not allow expressivity in the manner of the human voice, the violin, and the trombone. That frustration was not idle complaint; it was the intellectual engine driving his experiments.

  He also built vis-a-vis instruments, placing a piano and a harpsichord facing one another inside a single case. Two of these survive. The Verona example dates from 1777 and the Naples example from 1783. In Verona, the harpsichord section carries registrations of 8', 8', 8', and 16', with hand stops for engaging and disengaging them in the manner of a German harpsichord or organ. In Naples, the registrations are 8' quill, 8' leather, and 4' quill, and knee levers replace the hand stops in the manner of French harpsichords. In both instruments, the harpsichord player can also couple the piano action at the opposite end onto one of the harpsichord keyboards. These were not curiosities; they were laboratories.

• 4. The Prellzungenmechanik

  ›

  Around 1780, Stein perfected the invention that made his name: a hammer action known as the Prellzungenmechanik, or German action. What distinguished it from every mechanism that came before was an escapement.

  In Stein's arrangement, each hammer was mounted on top of its corresponding key, with the hammer head positioned at the end closer to the player, a traditional layout in German pianos of the period. Each hammer was a small, asymmetrical lever. The head sat far from the fulcrum. On the other side, much closer to the fulcrum, was a small upward-facing hook called the beak. When a player pressed a key down, the entire hammer assembly rose. The beak engaged an escapement hopper attached to the keyframe. As the beak rose, the hopper pulled down on it, causing the far end of the lever, the hammer head, to fly upward and strike the string. The hopper was hinged and sprung; this allowed the beak to push past it as the key returned to its rest position.

  The result was described, in the Grove reference cited by Latcham, as "a breakthrough in the piano's history," one that "offered the player a remarkable control of the hammers, especially when playing softly, and was astonishingly responsive to the player's touch." Pianos built with this action, or the more developed Viennese action that grew from it, became the natural instruments for the piano music of Haydn, Mozart, and the early works of Beethoven and Schubert.

  Stein may also have been the first to provide a knee lever for the dampers, the device that is the forerunner of the modern damper pedal. Gottfried Silbermann had devised a damper-disengaging mechanism in the 1740s, but it required two hand levers operated during pauses in the music. Stein's version worked from the knee, freeing the player's hands entirely. His later pianos, beginning with the one Mozart described in 1777, had a knee lever that disengaged all the dampers at once, permitting the equivalent of modern pedaling.

• 5. Mozart's Letter

  ›

  Mozart visited Stein in Augsburg in 1777, during an unsuccessful job-hunting tour that also took him to Mannheim and Paris. What he found in Stein's workshop changed his thinking about what a piano could be, and he recorded the experience in a letter to his father Leopold that has been widely quoted ever since.

  In the translation by Emily Anderson, taken from Broder 1941, Mozart wrote: "Before I had seen any of his make, Späth's claviers had always been my favourites. But now I much prefer Stein's, for they damp ever so much better than the Regensburg instruments.... In whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It never jars, it is never stronger or weaker or entirely absent; in a word, it is always even."

  Mozart noted that Stein did not sell a piano of this kind for less than three hundred gulden, and he acknowledged the labour behind that price. He described Stein deliberately exposing his finished soundboards to rain, snow, and heat until they cracked, then inserting wedges, gluing them firm, sometimes cutting into them himself before gluing them back together. "He is delighted when it cracks," Mozart wrote, "for he can then be sure that nothing more can happen to it."

  The knee lever also drew praise. Mozart wrote that he had only to touch it and it worked, and that shifting his knee the slightest bit produced no reverberation at all. The piano Mozart described in that letter predates the oldest known surviving Stein piano with the German action, which dates from 1780. The only Stein piano from before that year is the one in the 1777 Vis-a-vis in Verona, and it carries a different but still escapement-based hammer action. It may have been that earlier design that so impressed Mozart in Augsburg.

  After Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, he bought his next piano not from Stein but from Anton Walter, a Viennese builder who followed Stein's design principles. Mozart probably bought the Walter instrument in 1782. It still exists, though with a hammer action that Walter almost certainly replaced after Mozart's death, perhaps around 1805.

• 6. The Stein Dynasty

  ›

  Around 1790, when Stein had become too ill to continue working, his daughter Nannette took on the leadership of the firm. Nannette was born in Augsburg in 1769, and she would outlive her father by more than four decades, dying in Vienna in 1833.

  In 1794, Nannette, together with her newly married husband Andreas Streicher (1761-1833) and her brother Matthäus Stein (1776-1842), moved the family firm from Augsburg to Vienna, continuing under the Streicher name. In the autumn of 1802, the siblings separated their operations. The instruments Matthäus made thereafter bore the inscription Frère et Soeur Stein in Wien; after the split, Nannette inscribed hers Nannette Streicher née Stein in Wien.

  By 1807, Nannette had transformed her father's compact five-octave piano, shaped like a harpsichord, into a grand piano spanning six-and-a-half octaves. Further refinements arrived by 1811, after which her design remained largely stable until her son Johann Baptist Streicher (1796-1871) became joint owner of the firm with her in 1823. The firm continued after Nannette's death under Johann Baptist, and after his death in 1871 under his own son Emil. Emil's son, the composer Theodor Streicher, owned a Hammerflügel of 1808 made by Nannette, now in the collection of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. In 1896, the firm ceased production, just over one hundred years after the move to Vienna.

  Meanwhile, Nannette's brother, known as André Stein, continued building pianos in Vienna and obtained his Viennese citizenship and became a master piano maker there in 1803. André flourished especially in the 1820s, and some observers judged his individual style to exceed even his sister's work. From Beethoven's conversation books it is clear that André helped Beethoven not only by tuning and maintaining instruments but by constructing a large horn to amplify the sound of the piano. André Stein married Maria Theresia Dischler in 1796, an occasion noted in a letter from Beethoven that also mentioned a Nannette Streicher piano on loan for an Accademie, and Beethoven's feeling that its sound was too weak for his needs.

  In 1828, Friedrich Wieck (1785-1873) acquired a Hammerflügel by André Stein for his daughter Clara (1819-1896). Clara later married Robert Schumann. Her piano by André Stein is preserved today in the Robert Schumann House in Zwickau, and it appeared on the German DM 100 banknote issued in 1989.

• 7. What Survives

  ›

  About fifteen Hammerflügel bearing Stein's own label survive, ranging in date from 1780 to 1794. Two of those fifteen are privately owned, one from 1782 and one from 1783. The instruments made after around 1790 would have been made under Nannette's supervision, given her father's declining health. A note of caution applies to the surviving record: many instruments built after Stein, some carrying fake labels, exist in the world, and careful scholars have had to distinguish these from the genuine articles.

  Two clavichords by Stein also survive. One of them, now in the Budapest National Museum, was bought by Leopold Mozart for practising while travelling. One instrument that combines a piano with a single rank of organ pipes survives in the Gothenburg Historical Museum. Numerous instruments by André Stein survive as well: more than twenty Hammerflügel dating from about 1803 to at least 1838, at least twenty-six square pianos (probably all after 1815), and two upright Hammerflügel, most of them held in public collections.

  For listeners who want to hear what Stein's instruments actually sounded like, recordings exist on replicas. Ronald Brautigam recorded Beethoven's complete works for solo piano on a replica of a Stein piano made by Paul McNulty, released on the BIS label. Alexei Lubimov and colleagues recorded Beethoven's complete piano sonatas on copies of Stein, Walter, Graf, and Buchholtz instruments, also made by McNulty, for Moscow Conservatory Records. The Hammerflügel that Clara Schumann played as a child, that image printed on the DM 100 note, represents one endpoint of a chain that began when a young organ builder from Heidelsheim sat down at a workbench in Augsburg and decided the keyboard had not yet said everything it could say.