William Steinway, who became the driving force behind the Steinway & Sons piano manufacturing company from the 1860s until his death in 1896, was an active member of the New York Liederkranz, a men's singing society in the tradition of the German Männerchor, throughout the same period. The importance of the Liederkranz in Steinway's daily life cannot be overestimated. Chart 7.1 shows that Steinway recorded increasingly frequent evenings at the Liederkranz in his diary throughout the 1860s. He participated as a singer in the chorus and as a longtime member of the board of trustees and an officer of the organization. Steinway biographer D. W. Fostle noted that 22 percent of Steinway's diary entries from the period 1867–1870 mentioned the Liederkranz, compared to 12 percent of entries mentioning the family business and only 6 percent mentioning outings with his wife, Regina—a total of 62 out of 1,095 entries.

The impact of the Liederkranz on William Steinway's daily life made me curious to discover more about the organization and what it might have meant to its members, most of whom, like Steinway, were German immigrants. While Steinway's experience in the New York Liederkranz is the primary focus of this investigation, I also consider the complexity of the German immigrant experience in New York and the impact of the German musical tradition on mid-nineteenth-century New York. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the German Romantic aesthetic had supplanted the previously dominant Anglo-American musical tradition, and the German presence increasingly influenced musical life in America. By the 1860s, the finest musicians in New York City typically were Germans. German names, for example, dominated the roster of the New York Philharmonic Society (see chapter 6), which was also conducted by a German, Carl Bergmann. Contemporary accounts in the New York press suggest that German listeners were among the most attentive in the city's concert halls, and the music of German composers—such as Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and, increasingly, Wagner—filled concert programs. Germans also proved to be among the finest craftsmen in the domain of piano building at a time when no civilized American home was without one.