Yet as a matter of record, Bernstein was born near Boston, and Massachusetts will be laying claim to him from Oct. 12 to 14, during Celebrating Leonard Bernstein, an international conference and performance festival at Harvard University. A scholarly symposium will include subjects like “Boston’s Bernstein: Jewish Identity and Community,” “Bernstein’s Harvard Student Union Productions: In Search of Political Origins” and “Bernstein’s Senior Thesis at Harvard: The Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Musical Identity.” Concerts at Harvard will feature Bernstein’s neglected early music like his Piano Trio (1937) and Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942), as well as works by his childhood mentors like Solomon Braslavsky, who was choir director at Bernstein’s family synagogue in Boston. Will Harvard succeed in co-opting Bernstein as a Bostonian, snatching away New York’s favorite classical-music son?

New CD and DVD releases suggest that neither New York nor Harvard can definitively claim Bernstein; he belongs to the world. Sony Classical has just transferred to CD a 1956 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony augmented by a compelling lecture about Beethoven’s sketchbooks, delivered by Bernstein in four different languages: English, Yiddish-accented German, pinched French and vibrant, garlicky Italian.

Bernstein valiantly struggled against Babel, reaching out to conquer foreign languages that separated people. In a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon of a 1990 concert of Mozart’s music, Bernstein delivers an intense chat in more stately and masterful-sounding German than he could manage in the mid-50’s. He points out that he’s conducting Mozart in a church in Waldsassen, Germany, near the Czech border, a location at “the very heart of Europe.” Contemplating a local war memorial makes Bernstein “realize how totally outmoded wars are, how futile and useless it is for anyone to emerge and claim victory …. Wars only serve as a pretext for satisfying greed, an appetite for power [in the original German, Machthunger], and economic growth at other people’s expense.”

Music can be seen in a visibly international context as part of a slew of new DVD’s of Bernstein concert performances released by Kultur International Films Ltd. They include long-unavailable films of performances in Paris, Vienna, Sydney and Tokyo, among other places. In 1970, Bernstein conducted Verdi’s Requiem in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Before the concert, as the camera pans over the majestic cathedral, Bernstein’s disembodied voice speaks mournfully about the London Blitz, the Holocaust, the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the death in a 1961 plane crash of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

Intertwining music, language and site-specific history was a compulsion for Bernstein from his days at the Boston Latin School (he was class of ’35). It was at Boston Latin, as Jack Gottlieb writes in an editor’s note to Bernstein’s recently reprinted Young People’s Concerts (Amadeus Press), that the young Lenny picked up German, French, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew — in addition to Latin. Most conductors have enough working knowledge of foreign languages to get them through rehearsals overseas. By contrast, Mr. Gottlieb recalls, Bernstein’s New York study was “filled, floor to ceiling, with dictionaries, etymological works, and phrase books of all kinds. His familiarity with literature was almost frightening in its scope; and his passion for unconventional word games, like cutthroat anagrams and convoluted British-magazine crossword puzzles—the harder the better—almost bordered on the religious …. He was intoxicated with words.”

I’ve had firsthand experience of this linguistic intoxication: In 1982, I was invited to dinner, along with a friend who was editing some of the Maestro’s unpublished music, at Bernstein’s Fairfield home. What I remember most vividly about that long dinner—even more than Bernstein’s noisily rapacious way of eating corn on the cob and suddenly leaping to his feet to perform balletic pliés as a digestive aid—were the postprandial, multilingual word games. The assembled guests were suddenly challenged to cite opening sentences of literary works in as many languages as possible. The pressure was real and slightly uncomfortable.

Linguistic achievements were also on the menu in 1984, when Bernstein made a return visit to the Boston Latin School. The New York Times reports that he explained to students how his teachers made learning a “matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else …. A known fact is like a dry, dead thing. But when those connections are made, wham!”

Bernstein’s international connections retain their “wham!” in the Sony/BMG archives, among his few recordings still not transferred to CD. His 1961-62 versions of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals feature narrations in Spanish by his wife, the Chilean pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Two other contemporaneous recordings of the same works exist, with narration in Hebrew.

There’s also the world-wide impact of conductors he mentored, like the remarkable John Mauceri, whose 1974 recording of Bernstein’s Candide has just appeared on CD from Sony/BMG. Mr. Mauceri (who will be participating in the Harvard events, sharing his memories as an assistant to Bernstein) is the former music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin and of the Scottish Opera; he’s recently been named chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. And Antonio Pappano, possibly the greatest all-round conductor of his generation, got his start as a rehearsal pianist for a 1980’s revival of Candide and is now music director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome.

It’s safe to say that Lenny’s musical legacy has outgrown our local feud.

Yet as a matter of record, Bernstein was born near Boston, and Massachusetts will be laying claim to him from Oct. 12 to 14, during Celebrating Leonard Bernstein, an international conference and performance festival at Harvard University. A scholarly symposium will include subjects like “Boston’s Bernstein: Jewish Identity and Community,” “Bernstein’s Harvard Student Union Productions: In Search of Political Origins” and “Bernstein’s Senior Thesis at Harvard: The Roots of a Lifelong Search to Discover an American Musical Identity.” Concerts at Harvard will feature Bernstein’s neglected early music like his Piano Trio (1937) and Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (1942), as well as works by his childhood mentors like Solomon Braslavsky, who was choir director at Bernstein’s family synagogue in Boston. Will Harvard succeed in co-opting Bernstein as a Bostonian, snatching away New York’s favorite classical-music son?

New CD and DVD releases suggest that neither New York nor Harvard can definitively claim Bernstein; he belongs to the world. Sony Classical has just transferred to CD a 1956 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony augmented by a compelling lecture about Beethoven’s sketchbooks, delivered by Bernstein in four different languages: English, Yiddish-accented German, pinched French and vibrant, garlicky Italian.

Bernstein valiantly struggled against Babel, reaching out to conquer foreign languages that separated people. In a new DVD from Deutsche Grammophon of a 1990 concert of Mozart’s music, Bernstein delivers an intense chat in more stately and masterful-sounding German than he could manage in the mid-50’s. He points out that he’s conducting Mozart in a church in Waldsassen, Germany, near the Czech border, a location at “the very heart of Europe.” Contemplating a local war memorial makes Bernstein “realize how totally outmoded wars are, how futile and useless it is for anyone to emerge and claim victory …. Wars only serve as a pretext for satisfying greed, an appetite for power [in the original German, Machthunger], and economic growth at other people’s expense.”

Music can be seen in a visibly international context as part of a slew of new DVD’s of Bernstein concert performances released by Kultur International Films Ltd. They include long-unavailable films of performances in Paris, Vienna, Sydney and Tokyo, among other places. In 1970, Bernstein conducted Verdi’s Requiem in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Before the concert, as the camera pans over the majestic cathedral, Bernstein’s disembodied voice speaks mournfully about the London Blitz, the Holocaust, the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the death in a 1961 plane crash of U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld.

Intertwining music, language and site-specific history was a compulsion for Bernstein from his days at the Boston Latin School (he was class of ’35). It was at Boston Latin, as Jack Gottlieb writes in an editor’s note to Bernstein’s recently reprinted Young People’s Concerts (Amadeus Press), that the young Lenny picked up German, French, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish and Hebrew — in addition to Latin. Most conductors have enough working knowledge of foreign languages to get them through rehearsals overseas. By contrast, Mr. Gottlieb recalls, Bernstein’s New York study was “filled, floor to ceiling, with dictionaries, etymological works, and phrase books of all kinds. His familiarity with literature was almost frightening in its scope; and his passion for unconventional word games, like cutthroat anagrams and convoluted British-magazine crossword puzzles—the harder the better—almost bordered on the religious …. He was intoxicated with words.”

I’ve had firsthand experience of this linguistic intoxication: In 1982, I was invited to dinner, along with a friend who was editing some of the Maestro’s unpublished music, at Bernstein’s Fairfield home. What I remember most vividly about that long dinner—even more than Bernstein’s noisily rapacious way of eating corn on the cob and suddenly leaping to his feet to perform balletic pliés as a digestive aid—were the postprandial, multilingual word games. The assembled guests were suddenly challenged to cite opening sentences of literary works in as many languages as possible. The pressure was real and slightly uncomfortable.

Linguistic achievements were also on the menu in 1984, when Bernstein made a return visit to the Boston Latin School. The New York Times reports that he explained to students how his teachers made learning a “matter of interdisciplinary cognition—that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else …. A known fact is like a dry, dead thing. But when those connections are made, wham!”

Bernstein’s international connections retain their “wham!” in the Sony/BMG archives, among his few recordings still not transferred to CD. His 1961-62 versions of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals feature narrations in Spanish by his wife, the Chilean pianist and actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Two other contemporaneous recordings of the same works exist, with narration in Hebrew.

There’s also the world-wide impact of conductors he mentored, like the remarkable John Mauceri, whose 1974 recording of Bernstein’s Candide has just appeared on CD from Sony/BMG. Mr. Mauceri (who will be participating in the Harvard events, sharing his memories as an assistant to Bernstein) is the former music director of the Teatro Regio in Turin and of the Scottish Opera; he’s recently been named chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts. And Antonio Pappano, possibly the greatest all-round conductor of his generation, got his start as a rehearsal pianist for a 1980’s revival of Candide and is now music director of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome.

It’s safe to say that Lenny’s musical legacy has outgrown our local feud.

The technical demands of virtuoso works like Beethoven’s “Waldstein” and “Sturm” sonatas, included in the Brilliant reissue, do not daunt Mr. Goldsmith, whose fingers, thick as sausages, deftly discover an eerie cosmic resonance in miniature pieces like “Für Elise” and “Allegretto für Piringer.” The pianist plays in a highly personal, self-contained world—like a passenger lost in thought on a subway train—but his playing is deeply informed by the style and substance of Beethoven’s imagination. Mr. Goldsmith has made equally accomplished recordings of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms over the years, which are still awaiting reprint on CD.

Also awaiting reprint are Mr. Goldsmith’s multitudinous articles for such now-defunct music magazines as High Fidelity and Opus, as well as CD-booklet notes for now-hard-to-find releases. His articles are well worth tracking down: Not since the days of Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940), the British pianist, composer and paragon of musicological writing, has a pianist been such a pertinent and useful analytic writer about music.

The legendary Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) once confessed that hearing Mr. Goldsmith play Schubert and Schumann in a 1969 master class was “literally one of the most gratifyingly musical experiences I can remember … listening to him I had tears in my eyes with pleasure and happiness.” Musical luminaries such as the pianists András Schiff and Richard Goode are also longtime fans of Mr. Goldsmith’s acumen. What is the secret of his mastery?

Mr. Goldsmith studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Robert Goldsand (1911-1991), a Viennese-born student of Moriz Rosenthal, who himself studied with Franz Liszt. For decades, Mr. Goldsmith has concentrated an unwavering focus on musical ideals, as embodied by the conducting of Arturo Toscanini, an early hero. Defending Toscanini against persistent accusations of rushed tempos, Mr. Goldsmith points out in the notes to volume six of BMG’s Toscanini edition on CD: “In fact, many of the Maestro’s performances were slower than the norm, but the combination of firm rhythm, clear articulation and a stronger than customary architectural emphasis—in a word, a sometimes overwhelming authority—often created the illusion of implacable speed.”

Although willing to acknowledge flaws in the occasional misjudged Toscanini performance, Mr. Goldsmith uses the Italian conductor as a beacon from which musical enlightenment radiates. In a CD reissue of recordings by the Budapest String Quartet (SONY Classical MH2K 62870), Mr. Goldsmith points out that from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, this stellar ensemble shared with Toscanini “an easily recognizable (and then distinctly modern) technical brilliance, a certain streamlining of architecture, a pervasive rhythmic virility, unfussy phrasing and momentum. One heard, too, an analogous lean transparency and vertical clarity, and beautiful intensity and silkiness of tone.”

Encouraged by his arts-minded parents, Mr. Goldsmith attended scores of Toscanini concerts as a young music student. His father, preoccupied with the persecution of the Jews in prewar Europe, moved his family to Cuba in 1938 for a yearlong project to obtain visas allowing refugees to land in Havana. In 1939, Milton Goldsmith participated in the historic doomed effort to save the passengers of the S.S. St. Louis, sailing from Hamburg, Germany, who were rejected by the U.S. and Cuba and sent back to Nazi Europe. (This tragic episode spawned a number of books and Voyage of the Damned, a 1976 Hollywood film starring Faye Dunaway.) The Goldsmith family, which soon returned to Manhattan, may have emerged with an instinct for adamantly embracing lost causes, an invaluable trait if you’re contemplating a musical career.

Soon after the Second World War, Mr. Goldsmith discovered a young conducting prodigy, Guido Cantelli (1920-1956), who possessed all of the virtues and almost none of the flaws of his mentor, Toscanini. Mr. Goldsmith became an impassioned Cantelli fan and was thunderstruck when the young podium giant died in 1956 in an air crash near Orly airport in France on his way to conduct the New York Philharmonic. About this loss, Mr. Goldsmith admits: “The heartbreak remained forever for this admirer.” This statement of unique ardor appears in a moving—and mightily impressive—expression of posthumous devotion, The Art of Guido Cantelli: New York Concerts and Broadcasts, 1949-1952 (Music & Arts), a recent 12-CD box set presented and annotated by Mr. Goldsmith. (This beautiful and revelatory set, as well as two further CD’s from Music & Arts of live Cantelli concerts from 1953 introduced by Mr. Goldsmith, are not available in the U.S. for copyright reasons, but are essential purchases for any music fan traveling abroad.)

Mr. Goldsmith’s own performing career eventually faded, but he carries on with his teaching and writing. As a valued coach for generations of young pianists, including such talents as Cécile Licad, Jenny Lin and Klára Würtz, Mr. Goldsmith has relished the opportunity to encourage young talent with a self-abnegating didactic instinct that places the music itself first and foremost. Meanwhile, he’s produced unsurpassed descriptions of many great performing personalities. In notes to volume six of SONY/BMG’s Arthur Rubinstein Edition, Mr. Goldsmith relishes Rubinstein’s evolution from “impulsive firebrand” to “expansive, debonair sage,” while forgiving his “reckless fistfuls of wrong notes.”

With other famed performers of the past, Mr. Goldsmith is unforgiving—noted pianist Josef Hofmann (1876-1957), for example. Although he’s still treasured by some record collectors for his glitzy virtuosity, Hofmann’s 1938 concert recording of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata is dismissed by Mr. Goldsmith as “bizarre … alternately trivialized and pulverized” (a comment which appears in his notes to Artur Schnabel: The Complete Schubert Recordings 1932-1950). Unlike most critics, Harris Goldsmith has actually been able to preserve for posterity a praiseworthy version of how the “Waldstein” Sonata and other works should be played. His new Beethoven CD set is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the distinctive musical abilities of a fine appreciator of music.

The technical demands of virtuoso works like Beethoven’s “Waldstein” and “Sturm” sonatas, included in the Brilliant reissue, do not daunt Mr. Goldsmith, whose fingers, thick as sausages, deftly discover an eerie cosmic resonance in miniature pieces like “Für Elise” and “Allegretto für Piringer.” The pianist plays in a highly personal, self-contained world—like a passenger lost in thought on a subway train—but his playing is deeply informed by the style and substance of Beethoven’s imagination. Mr. Goldsmith has made equally accomplished recordings of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms over the years, which are still awaiting reprint on CD.

Also awaiting reprint are Mr. Goldsmith’s multitudinous articles for such now-defunct music magazines as High Fidelity and Opus, as well as CD-booklet notes for now-hard-to-find releases. His articles are well worth tracking down: Not since the days of Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940), the British pianist, composer and paragon of musicological writing, has a pianist been such a pertinent and useful analytic writer about music.

The legendary Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (1903-1991) once confessed that hearing Mr. Goldsmith play Schubert and Schumann in a 1969 master class was “literally one of the most gratifyingly musical experiences I can remember … listening to him I had tears in my eyes with pleasure and happiness.” Musical luminaries such as the pianists András Schiff and Richard Goode are also longtime fans of Mr. Goldsmith’s acumen. What is the secret of his mastery?

Mr. Goldsmith studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Robert Goldsand (1911-1991), a Viennese-born student of Moriz Rosenthal, who himself studied with Franz Liszt. For decades, Mr. Goldsmith has concentrated an unwavering focus on musical ideals, as embodied by the conducting of Arturo Toscanini, an early hero. Defending Toscanini against persistent accusations of rushed tempos, Mr. Goldsmith points out in the notes to volume six of BMG’s Toscanini edition on CD: “In fact, many of the Maestro’s performances were slower than the norm, but the combination of firm rhythm, clear articulation and a stronger than customary architectural emphasis—in a word, a sometimes overwhelming authority—often created the illusion of implacable speed.”

Although willing to acknowledge flaws in the occasional misjudged Toscanini performance, Mr. Goldsmith uses the Italian conductor as a beacon from which musical enlightenment radiates. In a CD reissue of recordings by the Budapest String Quartet (SONY Classical MH2K 62870), Mr. Goldsmith points out that from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, this stellar ensemble shared with Toscanini “an easily recognizable (and then distinctly modern) technical brilliance, a certain streamlining of architecture, a pervasive rhythmic virility, unfussy phrasing and momentum. One heard, too, an analogous lean transparency and vertical clarity, and beautiful intensity and silkiness of tone.”

Encouraged by his arts-minded parents, Mr. Goldsmith attended scores of Toscanini concerts as a young music student. His father, preoccupied with the persecution of the Jews in prewar Europe, moved his family to Cuba in 1938 for a yearlong project to obtain visas allowing refugees to land in Havana. In 1939, Milton Goldsmith participated in the historic doomed effort to save the passengers of the S.S. St. Louis, sailing from Hamburg, Germany, who were rejected by the U.S. and Cuba and sent back to Nazi Europe. (This tragic episode spawned a number of books and Voyage of the Damned, a 1976 Hollywood film starring Faye Dunaway.) The Goldsmith family, which soon returned to Manhattan, may have emerged with an instinct for adamantly embracing lost causes, an invaluable trait if you’re contemplating a musical career.

Soon after the Second World War, Mr. Goldsmith discovered a young conducting prodigy, Guido Cantelli (1920-1956), who possessed all of the virtues and almost none of the flaws of his mentor, Toscanini. Mr. Goldsmith became an impassioned Cantelli fan and was thunderstruck when the young podium giant died in 1956 in an air crash near Orly airport in France on his way to conduct the New York Philharmonic. About this loss, Mr. Goldsmith admits: “The heartbreak remained forever for this admirer.” This statement of unique ardor appears in a moving—and mightily impressive—expression of posthumous devotion, The Art of Guido Cantelli: New York Concerts and Broadcasts, 1949-1952 (Music & Arts), a recent 12-CD box set presented and annotated by Mr. Goldsmith. (This beautiful and revelatory set, as well as two further CD’s from Music & Arts of live Cantelli concerts from 1953 introduced by Mr. Goldsmith, are not available in the U.S. for copyright reasons, but are essential purchases for any music fan traveling abroad.)

Mr. Goldsmith’s own performing career eventually faded, but he carries on with his teaching and writing. As a valued coach for generations of young pianists, including such talents as Cécile Licad, Jenny Lin and Klára Würtz, Mr. Goldsmith has relished the opportunity to encourage young talent with a self-abnegating didactic instinct that places the music itself first and foremost. Meanwhile, he’s produced unsurpassed descriptions of many great performing personalities. In notes to volume six of SONY/BMG’s Arthur Rubinstein Edition, Mr. Goldsmith relishes Rubinstein’s evolution from “impulsive firebrand” to “expansive, debonair sage,” while forgiving his “reckless fistfuls of wrong notes.”

With other famed performers of the past, Mr. Goldsmith is unforgiving—noted pianist Josef Hofmann (1876-1957), for example. Although he’s still treasured by some record collectors for his glitzy virtuosity, Hofmann’s 1938 concert recording of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata is dismissed by Mr. Goldsmith as “bizarre … alternately trivialized and pulverized” (a comment which appears in his notes to Artur Schnabel: The Complete Schubert Recordings 1932-1950). Unlike most critics, Harris Goldsmith has actually been able to preserve for posterity a praiseworthy version of how the “Waldstein” Sonata and other works should be played. His new Beethoven CD set is a welcome opportunity to appreciate the distinctive musical abilities of a fine appreciator of music.

Neither musicians nor audiences seem likely to tire of Steinway pianos anytime soon. Just as connoisseurs of wine and spirits argue over the merits of top-ranking champagnes or whiskeys, there are legitimate reasons for preferring other pianos, whether Germany’s C. Bechstein or Boston’s Mason & Hamlin. Yet Steinway dominates the market for concert grand pianos to an amazing extent; recent statistics put their market share at no less than 98 percent. Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz were Steinway artists: Rubinstein could make the instrument sound as hearty as a steak dinner, while Horowitz’s fleet, flat-fingered renditions sounded mercurial and diabolical. Other musicians who were loyal to the Steinway brand include George Gershwin, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky.

A piano is an artistic vehicle, and if it’s recalcitrant or unwieldy, it will frustrate and anger anyone who tries to play it seriously. Steinway pianos can be joyfully obedient, adding to sonic artistry rather than making concerts even more difficult than they are. Part of the company strategy to ensure that future generations of pianists will feel this way about Steinways is to make top music conservatories like Juilliard and Oberlin so-called “all-Steinway schools.” If you want to study the piano there, you must play a Steinway.

Since much of the brand’s prestige depends on its continued manufacturing skill in a field that still demands much craftsmanship by hand, it’s natural to wonder precisely how this quality is achieved. Others have written in detail about the Steinway manufacturing process, but James Barron’s Piano marks the first time that a skilled, experienced reporter has offered a full-length study of this industrial phenomenon.

Mr. Barron’s byline has recently appeared under such New York Times headlines as “Husband Aided Wife’s Suicide in Cliff Plunge, Police Say” and “Jet Crashes in L.I. Sound, but 3 of 5 Aboard Survive, Largely Unhurt.” He also hosts The Times’ weekday podcast summarizing top stories on iTunes. Who would begrudge this diligent reporter a more artsy subject, especially as his book’s blurb identifies him as an “accomplished amateur pianist”?

Piano originated as a series of Times articles in 2003-4, but only rarely has Mr. Barron had the chance to write on music. One exception is his obituary of Liberace in 1987 (“With his megawatt smile, his furry, feathery costumes, rhinestones as big as the Ritz … and a unique blend of Beethoven and the ‘Beer Barrel Polka,’ Liberace charmed millions with a flashiness that was almost too much to be believed”); another was Mr. Barron’s own wedding in 1995. (The organist played the melody known as Bach’s Air on the G String, which Mr. Barron dismisses as the “musical equivalent of Hamburger Helper.” Oops!)

Inside the Steinway factory in Astoria, Mr. Barron displays a great love for memorable detail and an endless interest in New York lives. He traces the progress of the new concert Steinway K0862, informing us that one workman has posted a photo of Frank Zappa above his workbench and uses a plastic bucket which his creatively dyslexic young son labeled as “Dad’s paino tools.” Mr. Barron alludes not just to the “paino,” but also to the instrument’s erotic attraction, telling us about “pianists who kiss their pianos every day, who touch the case as tenderly as they would touch a lover’s cheek.” This theme extends to the Steinway technicians, one of whom confesses, “This company kind of sucks you in. I’ve had a dream where my wife turned into a piano.” Readers learn that a visceral response to the piano is inherent in the manufacturing process: Some Steinway workers are called “bellymen” because the “only way to do their work is to climb inside a piano on their stomachs.”

Such intimate contact does not preclude workplace strife. Mr. Barron doesn’t stint on details about difficult labor conditions, including workrooms reeking of “glue-caustic, stinging glue that is all the more unpleasant for the lack of ventilation.” He mentions Steinway employees who are obliged to work at two jobs—or struggle with strenuous overtime hours—in order to make ends meet. These descriptions take away some of the “romance” of the craftsmanship, which still includes the manual labor of bending a maple rim to form the piano’s body and fitting the spruce soundboard to the rest of the construction.

On the management side, the company’s proud possessors are depicted admiringly, starting with the founder Heinrich Steinweg, born in Wolfshagen, Lower Saxony, who anglicized his company’s name to Steinway & Sons in the 1850’s. One of Heinrich’s sons, born Wilhelm, changed his name to William but retained Teutonic precision as a way of life. William Steinway, who died in 1896, recorded in his diary each time he and his wife “had sex and when his wife Regina’s menstrual periods had occurred.” Regina eventually took a lover, with whom she had a child; William’s reaction was to banish the immoral woman and her illegitimate son to the predestined place for depraved Victorians—Paris, France. Beyond such intriguing details, the Steinways have indubitably marked the face of New York, as anyone who is familiar with the Steinway Street subway stop in Long Island City (once the site of worker housing) will readily acknowledge.

Mr. Barron clearly conveys the rather tangled destiny of the family company, which was sold to CBS in 1972. In 1985, CBS sold it to an investment group, Steinway Musical Properties Inc., which in turn dealt it to Selmer—the noted instrument manufacturer—in 1995. Steinway stock is currently listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LVB (for Ludwig van Beethoven).

A seasoned news reporter is an apt narrator for the corporate aspect of Steinway lore, yet a full-time arts writer might have done a bit better with certain cultural details. The great pianist, editor, lecturer and teacher Arthur Loesser (1894-1969) is described reductively here as “the historian”; Loesser did indeed write some wonderful music history, but that’s not the whole story. Similarly, the American crafts prophet and philosopher Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) is described here as merely “the writer.”

Seemingly hesitant to judge for himself the quality of concert Steinway K0862 when it’s finally finished, Mr. Barron relies on word of mouth, which tends to be somewhat anticlimactic, if not banal. Emanuel Ax calls the resulting piano “nice” and Katia Labéque finds it “not terribly brilliant—yet.” Perhaps the worst letdown is when the reader is informed without a trace of irony that the first recording for the new piano is a CD by “The 5 Browns,” a gaggle of teenage brothers and sisters from Utah who hammer away relentlessly at the keyboard like so many Howdy Doody puppets in a horror flick.

The bibliography at the end of Piano lists only English-language sources and omits a number of obviously pertinent books, such as Susan Goldenberg’s Steinway: From Glory to Controversy: The Family, the Business, the Piano (1996). But that shouldn’t detract from Mr. Barron’s accomplishment. His modest professionalism—he’s an objective recorder of facts who doesn’t elbow egoistically to the forefront—is a rarity on the New York publishing scene. His book is a refreshing treat to read, just as it must have been for this doughty reporter to write.

Benjamin Ivry is the author of biographies of Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc.

Neither musicians nor audiences seem likely to tire of Steinway pianos anytime soon. Just as connoisseurs of wine and spirits argue over the merits of top-ranking champagnes or whiskeys, there are legitimate reasons for preferring other pianos, whether Germany’s C. Bechstein or Boston’s Mason & Hamlin. Yet Steinway dominates the market for concert grand pianos to an amazing extent; recent statistics put their market share at no less than 98 percent. Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz were Steinway artists: Rubinstein could make the instrument sound as hearty as a steak dinner, while Horowitz’s fleet, flat-fingered renditions sounded mercurial and diabolical. Other musicians who were loyal to the Steinway brand include George Gershwin, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky.

A piano is an artistic vehicle, and if it’s recalcitrant or unwieldy, it will frustrate and anger anyone who tries to play it seriously. Steinway pianos can be joyfully obedient, adding to sonic artistry rather than making concerts even more difficult than they are. Part of the company strategy to ensure that future generations of pianists will feel this way about Steinways is to make top music conservatories like Juilliard and Oberlin so-called “all-Steinway schools.” If you want to study the piano there, you must play a Steinway.

Since much of the brand’s prestige depends on its continued manufacturing skill in a field that still demands much craftsmanship by hand, it’s natural to wonder precisely how this quality is achieved. Others have written in detail about the Steinway manufacturing process, but James Barron’s Piano marks the first time that a skilled, experienced reporter has offered a full-length study of this industrial phenomenon.

Mr. Barron’s byline has recently appeared under such New York Times headlines as “Husband Aided Wife’s Suicide in Cliff Plunge, Police Say” and “Jet Crashes in L.I. Sound, but 3 of 5 Aboard Survive, Largely Unhurt.” He also hosts The Times’ weekday podcast summarizing top stories on iTunes. Who would begrudge this diligent reporter a more artsy subject, especially as his book’s blurb identifies him as an “accomplished amateur pianist”?

Piano originated as a series of Times articles in 2003-4, but only rarely has Mr. Barron had the chance to write on music. One exception is his obituary of Liberace in 1987 (“With his megawatt smile, his furry, feathery costumes, rhinestones as big as the Ritz … and a unique blend of Beethoven and the ‘Beer Barrel Polka,’ Liberace charmed millions with a flashiness that was almost too much to be believed”); another was Mr. Barron’s own wedding in 1995. (The organist played the melody known as Bach’s Air on the G String, which Mr. Barron dismisses as the “musical equivalent of Hamburger Helper.” Oops!)

Inside the Steinway factory in Astoria, Mr. Barron displays a great love for memorable detail and an endless interest in New York lives. He traces the progress of the new concert Steinway K0862, informing us that one workman has posted a photo of Frank Zappa above his workbench and uses a plastic bucket which his creatively dyslexic young son labeled as “Dad’s paino tools.” Mr. Barron alludes not just to the “paino,” but also to the instrument’s erotic attraction, telling us about “pianists who kiss their pianos every day, who touch the case as tenderly as they would touch a lover’s cheek.” This theme extends to the Steinway technicians, one of whom confesses, “This company kind of sucks you in. I’ve had a dream where my wife turned into a piano.” Readers learn that a visceral response to the piano is inherent in the manufacturing process: Some Steinway workers are called “bellymen” because the “only way to do their work is to climb inside a piano on their stomachs.”

Such intimate contact does not preclude workplace strife. Mr. Barron doesn’t stint on details about difficult labor conditions, including workrooms reeking of “glue-caustic, stinging glue that is all the more unpleasant for the lack of ventilation.” He mentions Steinway employees who are obliged to work at two jobs—or struggle with strenuous overtime hours—in order to make ends meet. These descriptions take away some of the “romance” of the craftsmanship, which still includes the manual labor of bending a maple rim to form the piano’s body and fitting the spruce soundboard to the rest of the construction.

On the management side, the company’s proud possessors are depicted admiringly, starting with the founder Heinrich Steinweg, born in Wolfshagen, Lower Saxony, who anglicized his company’s name to Steinway & Sons in the 1850’s. One of Heinrich’s sons, born Wilhelm, changed his name to William but retained Teutonic precision as a way of life. William Steinway, who died in 1896, recorded in his diary each time he and his wife “had sex and when his wife Regina’s menstrual periods had occurred.” Regina eventually took a lover, with whom she had a child; William’s reaction was to banish the immoral woman and her illegitimate son to the predestined place for depraved Victorians—Paris, France. Beyond such intriguing details, the Steinways have indubitably marked the face of New York, as anyone who is familiar with the Steinway Street subway stop in Long Island City (once the site of worker housing) will readily acknowledge.

Mr. Barron clearly conveys the rather tangled destiny of the family company, which was sold to CBS in 1972. In 1985, CBS sold it to an investment group, Steinway Musical Properties Inc., which in turn dealt it to Selmer—the noted instrument manufacturer—in 1995. Steinway stock is currently listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LVB (for Ludwig van Beethoven).

A seasoned news reporter is an apt narrator for the corporate aspect of Steinway lore, yet a full-time arts writer might have done a bit better with certain cultural details. The great pianist, editor, lecturer and teacher Arthur Loesser (1894-1969) is described reductively here as “the historian”; Loesser did indeed write some wonderful music history, but that’s not the whole story. Similarly, the American crafts prophet and philosopher Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) is described here as merely “the writer.”

Seemingly hesitant to judge for himself the quality of concert Steinway K0862 when it’s finally finished, Mr. Barron relies on word of mouth, which tends to be somewhat anticlimactic, if not banal. Emanuel Ax calls the resulting piano “nice” and Katia Labéque finds it “not terribly brilliant—yet.” Perhaps the worst letdown is when the reader is informed without a trace of irony that the first recording for the new piano is a CD by “The 5 Browns,” a gaggle of teenage brothers and sisters from Utah who hammer away relentlessly at the keyboard like so many Howdy Doody puppets in a horror flick.

The bibliography at the end of Piano lists only English-language sources and omits a number of obviously pertinent books, such as Susan Goldenberg’s Steinway: From Glory to Controversy: The Family, the Business, the Piano (1996). But that shouldn’t detract from Mr. Barron’s accomplishment. His modest professionalism—he’s an objective recorder of facts who doesn’t elbow egoistically to the forefront—is a rarity on the New York publishing scene. His book is a refreshing treat to read, just as it must have been for this doughty reporter to write.

Benjamin Ivry is the author of biographies of Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc.