Adin Marshall Wright

Biography

Adin Marshall Wright, said to descend from Mayflower passenger Peregrine White, was born at Grafton, Vermont, on October 3, 1859. After high school and three years at Ward's School in Bellows Falls, he studied music and violin, then spent a year as an organ tuner for the Esteys of Brattleboro before four years learning piano building with the Emerson Piano Company and Vose and Sons of Boston. He became president of the Manufacturers' Piano Company of Chicago (representing the Weber piano) in 1887, and in 1894 manager of the Everett piano warerooms in New York, where he engaged a leading scale designer and arranged Ossip Gabrilowitsch's US tour, traveling to St. Petersburg to secure him. Dissatisfied with the result, he hired John Anderson as factory superintendent to build a better grand piano, which virtuoso Alfred Reisenauer pronounced flawless ("tadellos"); Wright then persuaded the initially unwilling Reisenauer, a Leipzig Conservatory professor, to tour America. A devoted patron of art and music who traveled widely and counted many concert artists as friends, Wright belonged to the Boston Chamber of Commerce, Boston Art Club, Boston Athletic Association, and Oakley Country Club. In 1906 he became general manager, then vice-president and general manager, of the Mason and Hamlin Company, greatly expanding that piano's market in America and Europe.

Highlights

• Personally traveled to Ossip Gabrilowitsch's home in St. Petersburg to arrange the virtuoso's American concert tour on a specially built grand piano
• Persuaded the reluctant European virtuoso Alfred Reisenauer, over dinners in Leipzig, to sign a contract for a US tour
• Rose to vice-president and general manager of the Mason and Hamlin Company in 1906

Source

Alfred Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers, Vol. II (1913), pp. 150, 151, 152, 153.

Public domain.