Life
He learned his trade in part at the Silberman workshop in Strasbourg (1748–9), working for Johann Andreas Silbermann, nephew and pupil of the great instrument maker Gottfried Silbermann. He settled in Augsburg, where he also served as an organist.
He built not just pianos, but other keyboard instruments, some of them of novel invention. One extraordinary instrument, called the "Poli-Toni-Clavichordium" (1796), combined a large harpsichord having four choirs of strings (registration 8', 8', 8', 16') with a piano. He also built (1772) the "Melodika," a small organ in which the player's touch could alter volume; thus it stood to regular organs much as pianos do to the harpsichord. He also built "vis-à-vis" instruments, with a piano and a harpsichord facing one another in a single case.
Toward the end of his life, Stein's business was largely taken over by his daughter Nannette (see below). Pianos with his name after 1790 are held to be Nannette's work, as Stein was himself too ill to build instruments by this date.
Read more about this topic: Johann Andreas Stein
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet come to me in dreams that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)