Henri Herz

Henri Herz (b Vienna, 6 Jan 1803; d Paris, 5 Jan 1888). Austrian pianist, composer and teacher, active in France.

His earliest music lessons were with his father, and he later studied in Koblenz with the organist Daniel Hünten. He was a prodigy, performing and composing from the age of eight. In April 1816 he gained admission to the Paris Conservatoire, where he studied with Pradher (piano), Dourlen (harmony and composition) and Reicha (counterpoint and fugue); he subsequently became a professor of piano there (1842–74), and with his brother Jacques Simon Herz (b Frankfurt, 31 Dec 1794; d Nice, 27 Jan 1880), founded the Ecole Spéciale de Piano de Paris.

Herz became one of the most famous virtuosos and popular composers in Paris in the 1830s and 40s. He travelled widely, touring the European continent (including Russia), South America and the USA, which he crossed three times (1845–51), and wrote a memoir of his experiences. His compositions consist largely of variations and fantasies on themes by other composers, but they also include eight piano concertos, various dances, salon pieces and exercises, amounting to some 225 works with opus numbers, and the same number again without.

In the early 1830s Schumann used Herz's Piano Concerto no.1 as the model for his own (unfinished) Piano Concerto in F (Macdonald), and took a theme by Herz as the basis of his Phantasie satyrique. However, his later perception was that Herz's compositions exemplified the hollow state of the Parisian virtuosos in the second third of the 19th century, and he levelled sharp criticism at Herz in his reviews in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Many of Herz's works are nevertheless of considerable merit; in particular the first two of the Trois nocturnes caractéristiques (1828) are fine examples of the genre. His variations on ‘Non più mesta’ from Rossini's La Cenerentola (c1831) were particularly popular with his contemporaries; each variation exhibits a different facet of the pianist's technical skill, including glissandos in 3rds, rapid scales and arpeggios and taxing dotted-note passages. Along with Chopin, Czerny, Pixis and Thalberg, Herz was asked by Liszt to contribute to Hexaméron, a set of variations on a theme from Bellini's I puritani, intended for performance at a benefit concert for Italian refugees in 1837. Herz's variation (the fourth) was cast in a legato e grazioso style, in moto perpetuo.

Herz was also involved in piano manufacture, establishing his own factory in 1851. His instruments were regarded by his contemporaries as equal to those of Erard and Pleyel, and one of his pianos won first prize at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. Although he was later accused of pirating another's invention, he also invented and marketed the ‘dactylion’, designed to strengthen pianists' fingers.