Eric Herz

Eric Herz (10 December 1919, Cologne, Germany — 25 May 2002, Barton, Vermont) was a distinguished American harpsichord maker and flutist, former Boston Early Music Festival president, and one of the leaders of the "Boston School of harpsichord building," alongside Frank Hubbard (1920—1976) and William Dowd (1922—2008). Herz made almost 500 instruments between 1955 and 1996, equally prized for their acoustics and impeccable aesthetics. He was a prolific mentor and had numerous apprentices, including Thomas and Barbara Wolf, Hendrik Broekman, Robert A. Murphy, Robert Duffy (2), and Allan Winkler. Born and raised in a Jewish family, Eric served at one of the so-called "training centers" for Jews, predecessors of full-blown concentration camps established across the country as Hilter rapidly accumulated power and political influence. His older brother and sister, Walter Herz (1910—†) and Ruth Schoenfeld, née Herz (1912—2005), immigrated to Israel several years earlier. In 1939, Eric Herz followed his siblings, narrowly escaping Holocaust extermination. (Their parents, Josef (1879—1942?) and Rebecka Herz, née Bucki (1886—1942), unfortunately, couldn't flee Germany on time, deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź, Poland, where they both died.) Herz studied flute at the Jerusalem Conservatory while apprenticing as a cabinet-maker. During the Second World War, Eric joined the British Army in Egypt, where he played in a military band and self-taught as a piano tuner. Between 1945 and 1951, Eric Herz played flute and piccolo in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1953, he relocated to the United States and joined the Baldwin Piano Company in Boston; Herz also served as Claudio Arrau's piano tuner. Eric soon befriended two local Bostonian harpsichord-makers, Frank Hubbard and William Dowd, and began making cabinets at their workshop on Tremont Street. In 1955, Herz launched his private workshop, assembling the first instruments in the living room and a garage at his home in Harvard. Eric followed Hubbard and Dowd's approach, rejecting the predominant trend for modern, "revival"-style harpsichords (with enhanced 16' disposition and contemporary features, like pedal controls) and instead focused on historically informed building techniques and methods, making faithful replicas of the XVII-XVIII-century antique instruments. The new venture soon expanded, and Eric established a proper workshop on Howard Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Herz retired in 1996 at seventy-seven.