Making a grand piano is part physics, part carpentry and part devotion.
At the Steinway & Sons factory in Hamburg, where each instrument takes close to a year to complete, you see how vibration becomes melody and a craftsman’s touch turns raw material into sound.
Each hammer strike in the warren of workshops sends waves through soundboards of varnished spruce, turning air pressure into tone.
It is a daily process refined on both sides of the Atlantic for nearly 170 years – a choreography unchanged since founder Heinrich “Henry” Engelhard Steinwey opened his New York workshop in a Manhattan loft in 1853.
Opened in 1880, the Hamburg site is one of only two Steinway factories in the world. Its sister workshop in New York, established earlier by Henry's son William Steinway primarily to serve the North American market, continues to operate independently. From this corner of northern Germany, the instruments that take shape find their way to concert halls in London, Vienna and Dubai.
The emirate's connection to Steinway stretches back nearly a decade. Since Dubai Opera’s inauguration in 2016, it has relied on Hamburg-made concert grands for its performances, supplied through the UAE distributor House of Pianos.
head of product management EMEA, Steinway & Sons
The relationship deepened with the Dubai Opera Limited Edition – a limited set of 14 handcrafted pianos unveiled last year and featured at the Downtown Dubai venue since, including the Steinway Prizewinner Concert Series running from Sunday until March 29.
Chinese-American classical musician Yuja Wang is also slated to sit behind the keys in her Middle East debut at Dubai Opera on March 26.
As the first newspaper from Mena to tour the factory, The National’s visit begins not in a showroom but in a nearby lumber yard. Rows of maple, beech and mahogany woods rest on steel racks, some marked with chalk dates showing how long they have been drying.
“We keep them here for up to two years,” says Camilo Daza Tapia, head of Steinway & Sons's product management for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “Only when the wood has released its moisture naturally can it hold the tension that produces our tone.”
He explains that only a small number of guests are ever allowed through the gates.
“These visits aren’t open to the public,” he says. “They are for concert halls or private buyers who have ordered a piano and want to see how it comes to life. When they see what a year of work looks like, they become patient. They stop thinking about the instrument as an object and start thinking of it as an heirloom.”
Inside the main hall, the air hums with machinery: the steady thud of hammers shaping the rim of an unbuilt piano, the searing whine of saws cutting spruce for soundboards, the brushing of lacquer. Between stations, workers tune out the din through earbuds.
“Eighty per cent of what we do is still manual,” Daza Tapia says. “Technology assists us for safety and precision, but our tone depends on touch – on experience that can’t be programmed.”
A group of craftsmen move a long ribbon of laminated maple into a heavy steel press, bending it into the familiar curve of a grand piano. It will rest for 100 days to hold its shape.
“We always start from the outside in,” Daza Tapia explains. “The rim is our foundation. It holds the vibration that defines everything else.”
Nearby, another team works on the soundboard – the thin wooden panel beneath the strings that acts as a natural amplifier – assembled from strips of Sitka spruce with the precision of a violin maker.
“Only about 20 per cent of the wood we source meets our standards,” he says. “It has to be light enough to respond but strong enough to last a century.”
The soundboard is what Steinway engineers call the instrument’s soul. Its crown, a subtle arch in the wood, gives the piano its ability to project.
Later, in a quieter room, a technician threads copper-wound bass strings across the heavy cast-iron frame inside the piano – the component that absorbs the tension of the strings and supports the whole structure. Each string is tightened and struck, its pitch tested with a tuning hammer. From a distance, the process appears ritualistic: signatures and pencil marks track accountability and progress across the frame, a technician’s name input at each step.
Steinway’s Hamburg workshop produces about 1,200 pianos a year. Many will go to institutions, some to individual artists. Increasingly, a few are commissioned as works of art in themselves. Each concert grand represents an investment that can exceed $200,000, and Daza Tapia says the UAE is part of a growing Middle East market, with institutions and private collectors driving demand.
The Dubai Opera Limited Edition, for example, was created in tribute to both the venue and the seven emirates. Each of its 14 models is finished in white or black lacquer with gold fittings, arabesque patterns on the inner lid and a music desk shaped like a dhow sail.
“Some clients are musicians, others are interior designers or collectors,” Daza Tapia says. “Either way, they come to us because they want something functional and aesthetic. It has to look right in a room, but also respond to the lightest touch.”
The bridge between workshop and stage becomes clear when the piano undergoes voicing – the step where hammer felts, the compressed wool covering the piano hammers that strike the strings, are pricked by hand to refine their tone. The technician, a young woman oblivious to us standing nearby, plays the same note repeatedly, soft then louder, listening for what Daza Tapia describes as the “colour” of the note.
“This is the moment it finds its voice,” he murmurs. “Every piano ends up with its own personality. Even I can’t predict exactly how each one will sound.”
Many of the artisans who reach this stage began here as apprentices. Daza Tapia notes that Steinway runs a three-and-a-half-year in-house training programme certified by Germany’s Chamber of Crafts, teaching every aspect of piano construction. It is not unusual for an employee to spend an entire career perfecting one task, passing the technique to the next generation as their mentors once did. A board inside the headquarters lists long-serving employees – of the roughly 500 working in the Hamburg factory, more than a dozen have between 25 and 50 years of service.
Down a long corridor, the noise falls away. Daza Tapia opens a set of double doors and the atmosphere transforms. The selection room feels like a different world: bright, silent, still. The air smells faintly of polish and new lacquer – the scent of instruments freshly finished, their lids glinting under the soft light.
“This is where clients come to choose,” he says, his voice low out of respect for the quiet.
In this room, the factory’s work ends and the piano’s life begins. Rows of gleaming grands stand like newborns, each with a tag noting its serial number and destination. Those looking to buy – not a ready-made piano – arrive to play scales, others only a few chords before they know. Most prefer to be left alone until the solemn decision is made, which sometimes takes minutes, sometimes hours.
“At this stage, nothing I say matters,” Daza Tapia notes. “It’s between them and the piano.”
And almost simultaneously, while the chosen instrument is shipped for delivery – where it is assembled and fine-tuned on-site by certified technicians – another piano will begin assembly on the other side of the plant: wood stacked, rims bent, strings tightened and hammers voiced.
“Every piano ends up with its own personality,” Daza Tapia says. “You can have the same materials, the same process, but it still surprises you. That’s what keeps us here; you never really finish learning. Each one teaches you something new – about sound, or about yourself.”
