1933

  • Steinway & Sons’ loss is $570,000. The company’s trustees calculate that if Steinway & Sons fonds continue to be depleted at a current rate, in 2 years the company will go out of business.
  • Steinway & Sons makes less than $23,699 in piano rentals.
  • To decrease Steinway & Sons losses, Theodore Steinway reduces the amount of money the company spends on Steinway Artists to $85,779 (compared to $153,223 in 1929). Steinway & Sons can no longer afford to ship grand pianos to concerts, to pay wages and travel expenses to personal tuners, and to pay concert subsidy to the pianists. Temporary exceptions are made for a few pianists: Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Josef Hofmann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Ignaz Friedman, Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Alfred Cortot. Eventually Steinway & Sons will only supply the piano, and the artists will pay all the other costs. Theodore Steinway personally visits Paderewski, Hofmann and Rachmaninoff, to explain to them the new terms to the “immortals”. Remarkably, not a single artist has left Steinway & Sons because of the new policy – proving that their main attraction has been, and remains, the unique beauty of tone and responsiveness of action of Steinway & Sons pianos.
  • Theodore Steinway also cuts the company’s advertising budget to $55,905 (from roughly $500,000 in the previous years).
  • Steinway & Sons assets are estimated at $9,588,742, of which $2,408,981 is in inventory.
  • Roman de Majewski becomes Steinway & Sons’ new head of sales.
  • The player piano market has disappeared: 2/3 of American households have radios. Aeolian Company fails to sell over 240 player pianos. Theodore Steinway offers Aeolian to take back all the Steinway & Sons player pianos in exchange of closing the contract with Aeolian. Steinway & Sons workers disassemble the player pianos, rebuild them as regular instruments, and add them to 2,000 pianos already in Steinway & Sons inventory.
  • Steinway & Sons trustees consider either merging the German branch with Bechstein or Blüthner, or closing it.
  • By this year, hundreds of piano manufacturing firms have failed in the United States since the beginning of the Great Depression.