Henri Herz - Nocturne,

This is from 3 Nocturnes caractéristiques, , first published in the year 1828. My first thought while playing this was, I was ashamed, that I didn’t play more Herz so far, and I only know him because of his Hexameron contribution. What a gorgeous piece this is! I’m speechless... The best way to know if a composer is “something“, is to just play the works and see ! Herz(1803-1888) was a virtuoso pianist, composer and piano manufacturer, Austrian by birth and French by nationality and domicile. He was a professor in the Paris Conservatoire for more than thirty years. Among his major works are eight piano concertos, a piano sonata, rondos, nocturnes, waltzes, marches, fantasias, and numerous sets of variations. In 1816 Herz entered the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied piano with Louis-Barthélémy Pradher, harmony with Victor Dourlen and composition with Anton Reicha. He won first prize in piano in 1818. Herz’s style of playing was, by his own admission, strongly influenced by Ignaz Moscheles. 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. 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 steel) – 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) the mechanics of the instrument found their modern form. Herz composed many pieces, the opus numbers of his published works reaching 224.