Piano Maker’s Diary Details Gilded Age

The entry for Saturday, April 15, 1865, reads: “Terrible News that at 9.30 p.m. President Lincoln has been assassinated at Fords Theatre in Washington, Secretary Seward and his sons dangerously injured & stabbed. Great excitement and grief throughout the City. Closing of the stores.”

The city was New York, as seen through the eyes of William Steinway, a son in the piano-making Steinway & Sons.

Nine volumes of his diaries that provide a fascinating look at New York society life and the cutthroat competition of the piano trade during the last four decades of the 19th century have been presented to the Smithsonian Institution.

The journals start with his marriage in the spring of 1861 to Regina Roos of Buffalo, N.Y., and include almost daily entries until just three weeks before his death in 1896.

Most of the entries are terse and matter-of-fact, but the 2,400 pages provide valuable insight into New York’s Gilded Age as seen through the eyes of one of the era’s foremost protagonists.

“He started when he was married to keep his sexual record,” said Henry Steinway, William Steinway’s grandson and the heir of the neatly penned journals.

“It starts off saying, ‘Diary of William Steinway and Wife,’ but within a week it’s really his diary,” Steinway said.

Steinway and the Smithsonian researchers who have spent years studying and indexing the diaries say William touched his feelings most deeply and revealed the mores of his era most candidly when he wrote of the end of his marriage to Regina in 1875 when Steinway learned he was not the father of his wife’s third child.

“He went through a very painful divorce and all of the details are in there,” said Edwin Good, who is transcribing and editing the diaries. “That was a really poignant story. He didn’t want to divorce her, but felt he had to.”

Those intimate details of William Steinway’s life initially made the family reluctant to allow the diaries to become public, Henry Steinway said. But after time, everyone agreed that the historical significance of the journals far outweighed any privacy concerns, he said.

“He gives a vivid account of the draft riots in New York” during the Civil War, Good said. The journals tell how the Steinways, with the help of an Irish priest, paid off the leader of an Irish mob intent on ransacking the Steinway piano factory.

Steinway’s journals also provide “a view of the German community in New York City--which was terribly active and very lively--the likes of which you will get nowhere else. He was one of the leading figures and knew everybody in the German community,” Good said.

Steinway’s entries illustrate the competitive, male-dominated, business-oriented society of the late 1800s and even foreshadow from the opening pages the marital problems that will later haunt the fabulously wealthy piano maker.

“His wife was named Regina, but as soon as he got married, for a long time she was just called ‘wife.’ Women almost lose their identity in his diary,” noted Smithsonian curator Cynthia Adams Hoover, a scholar of American music who has studied the journals since the 1960s.

Steinway is credited with being the commercial and financial genius of the family. Journal entries for June 1876 speak of piano judging at a Philadelphia trade fair and suggest that he paid off the jurors to look kindly at his instruments.