A majestic Knabe square grand piano, built in 1898, was sold recently at Second Chance. Commercial dealers are asking $35,000-$45,000 for comparable instruments.
According to the very generous donor, the piano was made of Brazilian rosewood (now an endangered tree species) and had the original ivory keys (vestiges of a bygone era; ivory can no longer legally be used in musical instruments). It resided in the donor’s living room for 25 years. Purchased by the donor’s great-great-grandfather, it was one of the last square grand pianos that Knabe made. Never restored, it was in excellent condition, except for one key that would not sound. The donor’s father repaired one of its legs after the family dog chewed on it.
Knabe pianos have a distinguished history. A German immigrant founded William Knabe & Co. in Baltimore in the mid-1830s. By the late 1860s it was the third largest piano manufacturer in the United States, after Steinway and Chickering. The company won numerous awards for excellence at trade fairs and expositions.
In the 1890s William Knabe III sponsored concerts in Baltimore by renowned pianists and composers, including Saint-Saens, von Bulow, Tchaikovsky and Rubenstein, who would not have come to the city otherwise. A Knabe concert grand was named official piano of the Metropolitan Opera. Albert Einstein owned a Knabe piano, and Elvis Presley owned a white Knabe grand built in 1912. It was auctioned on Ebay in 2017 for $375,000.
The 300,000 square-foot Knabe factory, which accommodated 765 employees in the early 1900s, stood at Eutaw and West Streets. The company moved to Cincinnati in 1911 and went bankrupt in 1916, but the brand survived.
Over time the Knabe family established branches in New York, Canada and England and merged the company with larger businesses, such as the American Piano Company. The Samick Music Corporation, with headquarters in South Korea and factories in Indonesia, still makes high-quality Knabe pianos.
The long-abandoned Knabe building in Baltimore was razed in the late 1990s to build the M&T football stadium. A sidewalk mosaic of a piano keyboard at the stadium’s southwest corner commemorates the Knabe company’s long association with Baltimore. The building’s cupola resides on the grounds of the Baltimore Museum of Industry.
Knabe’s association with Baltimore continues with the William Knabe International Piano Competition, held every summer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for young people aged six to twenty-six.
Linda Rabben is an author, anthropologist and human rights activist. She has worked for nongovernmental organizations as a writer, researcher and public speaker. Since 2015 she has been an associate research professor of anthropology at the University of Maryland. Linda has published 10 nonfiction books and has given talks about human rights issues to more than 80 groups in the US and other countries. In 2021 Linda and her husband moved to Baltimore, where she enjoys walking in her neighborhood, meeting her neighbors and shopping at Second Chance. She is now doing research on the social history of stained-glass windows in Baltimore homes, churches and institutions…and much more.
