The Steinway Collection

In this historic volume, beautiful color paintings by prominent American artists and eloquent prose portraits by the renowned performing arts critic James Huneker celebrate the lives and work of some of the greatest composers who ever lived. Chopin, Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Handel are among the composers featured in The Steinway Collection, which was originally printed in 1919 as an in-house publication of Steinway & Sons and has never before been released to the public. To pay tribute to the great composers, Steinway & Sons commissioned esteemed American artists to create paintings that, in Huneker's words, "would evoke musical visions; for music is visionary, notwithstanding its primal appeal to the ear." Huneker's intriguing biographical commentary on the composers puts the paintings in perspective with telling details of how life influenced art. A critical moment of Chopin's close relationship with the novelist George Sand is depicted in A.I. Keller's painting The Raindrop Prelude. We learn how Franz Liszt befriended, and aided the career of, the political exile and revolutionist Richard Wagner, giving him musical ideas and producing his Tann