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Henri Herz (6 January 18031806 by his own account, 1803 in the register of the Paris Conservatoire. Source: Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1986), pp. 33940 (vol. 06, p. 293). Note translated from the German Wikipedia page for Henri Herz. The date is given as 2 January 1806 by Christoph Kammertöns here, based on a marriage certificate from 1865. – 5 January 1888) was a virtuoso piano, composer and piano manufacturer, Austrian by birth and France by nationality and domicile. He was a professor in the Paris Conservatoire for more than thirty years. Among his major works are eight , a piano sonata, , , , marches, fantasias, and numerous sets of variations.
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In 1825, Herz joined the piano workshop of Henri Klepfer et cie as a partner, but that connection proved unsuccessful, and in 1839 he founded his own piano factory, which became one of the three most important factories in France, the others being Erard and Pleyel. All three were awarded the "Médaille d`honneur" for "Pianos d'une sonorité très-remarquable" at the Paris World's Fair in 1855. Kammertöns. Among important developments of Herz's early time as a piano maker in the 1820s and 1830s was the change from a single-layered hammer to one that was multi-layered, on the inside two layers of leather, several layers of fabric, and rabbit fur; on the outside wool felt in up to nine layers of decreasing hardness. The characteristic sound of Frédéric Chopin's grand pianos, to which the labor-intensive, hand-made hammers after Herz's patents make a distinctive contribution, disappeared with mid-century developments in the USA (Steinway). The Herz hammer sets have the drawback that pianos cannot be played quite as loud, because the hammers are less densely pressed, but the dynamics and colorfulness – in combination with traditional materials of wrought iron strings (before the invention of Bessemer process) – are very finely graduated and fiery. In the second half of the 19th century, simplification and impoverishment of the piano's sound variety occurred with two-layer, industrially produced Dolge hammers. To Herz's work as a piano maker can also be attributed the implementation of a simplified version of Sebastian Erard's double repetition. Through the "Herz spring" ( Repetierfeder) Kammertöns. the mechanics of the instrument found their modern form.
In 1849, the Academy of San Juan de Letrán launched a convocation, with the object of acquiring a suitable letter for a hymn that represented Mexicans, especially abroad. In this call, three compositions were received, of which two were chosen: that of the American composer Andrew Davis Bradburn, and that of the Mexican poet Félix María Escalante, which was set to music by the Austrian Henry Herz; however, this hymn was not to the taste of the people.
Herz's anthem appears in the 1934 film, Juárez y Maximiliano as Maximilian and Carlota's musical theme. It also appears in Carlota: The Mad Empress.
Among the most important performance venues in Paris were halls built by the instrument manufacturers. In 1838,1842 per the German-language page for Henri Herz. Source unknown. Herz and his brother Jacques Simon Herz followed this model and built the 668-seat Salle Herz on the rue de la Victoire, used for performances by Hector Berlioz and Offenbach. Hector Berlioz Website, accessed 23 February 2011] The Ecole Spéciale de Piano de Paris, which the brothers founded, was housed in the same building. The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, ed. by Don Michael Randel (1996), p. 379. The building was still in use for concerts as late as 1874 but was demolished in that year.
Herz was possibly married to Pauline Thérèse Lachmann (or Esther Lachmann), a French courtesan known as La Païva. It is generally believed that they married in London, but it is not clear that this actually occurred. In any case, such a marriage would have been bigamous, as she was already married."La Paiva", The Fortnightly, December 1922, pp. 480–482. By him she had a daughter. Historia, January 1984, No. 446, page 76 Her extravagant spending nearly ruined Herz's finances, and he traveled to America in 1848 to pursue business opportunities. While he was away, Herz's family turned Thérèse out of the house.Kracauer, Siegfried, Orpheus in Paris: Offenbach and the Paris of His Time (Knopf, 1938), page 120
Herz taught at the Conservatoire between 1842 and 1874. Of his pupils, only Marie-Aimée Roger-Miclos (1860–1950) recorded, in the early 1900s, for Dischi Fonotipia.
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