[MLA-L] Eric Herz, Harpsichordist Captured Sounds From Past, 82 (fwd)
Rebecca J Littman
-Rebecca
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 17:30:55 -0400
Newsgroups: alt.obituaries
Subject: Eric Herz, Harpsichordist Captured Sounds From Past, 82
.
Eric Herz, who escaped the Nazi Holocaust and became a leader of the
Boston [Massachusetts] school of harpsichord makers, died May 25, 2002,
in Barton, Vermont, after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for many
years, at the age of 82.
Herz built nearly 500 harpsichords, prized as much for their beauty as
their sound. A flutist as well as an instrument maker, he was the former
president of the Boston Early Music Festival, a biennial showcase of
classical music performed on period instruments.
He was working at the Baldwin Piano Factory in Boston in 1953, when he
heard Frank Hubbard and William Dowd were making harpsichords on Tremont
Street. He asked the men if he could use their shop to build a cabinet.
After the cabinet was finished, he joined their shop.
Hubbard and Dowd became pioneers of the ''Boston school'' of harpsichord
making, artisans who rejected the prevalent trend to modernize the
instrument and looked instead to the artisanry of the 17th and 18th
centuries for guidance.
Two years later, Mr. Herz began his own one-man operation in the living
room and garage of his home in Harvard.
"He did magical things with his hands," his son, Michael, said
yesterday. "We lived on the former site of a Shaker Village, a single
street with eight houses on it. The little boy across the street
sprained his ankle and couldn't walk. My father made him crutches and
they were so good other kids in the neighborhood asked for some too. So
he spent a day making crutches until all the kids in the neighborhood,
maybe six or eight of us, were all limping around.
"I still wonder what people must have thought when they drove through
the neighborhood."
Mr. Herz later set up shop on Howard Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where he took on apprentices and remained there until he retired in
1996.
There was always classical music on the radio and often somebody
noodling on a harpsichord while Mr. Herz and about a half-dozen other
members of his shop sawed and chiseled cherry, ebony, mahogany, and
other exotic woods into finely tuned, elegantly engineered keyboard
instruments.
"He liked having his own way, which worked mostly to his benefit,"
Hendrik Broekman, technical director of Hubbard Harpsichords, said
yesterday. "We take care of his instruments and they were wonderfully
made. He was a first-rate craftsman and the instruments he made were
always sought after for their beauty.
"Early in his career he was not as much interested in the authenticity
of his product, per se, as interested in making something that he
considered beautiful," said Broekman, who was an apprentice to Mr. Herz
in the 1960s. "He pursued the concept of reliability first and sound
second. But he was an inveterate tinkerer and toward the end of his
career began to value the lessons that the old instruments had to teach.
He began to take instruments back and fix them. His customers were
always well taken care of."
Mr. Herz was born in Cologne, Germany. As life became increasingly
difficult for Jews in Germany in the mid 1930s, his older brother and
sister left for Palestine.
Mr. Herz joined them in 1939, when he was accepted to study the flute at
the Jerusalem Conservatory. His parents were deported to the Jewish
ghetto in Lodz, Poland, where they died.
During his three years as a student at the conservatory, Mr. Herz
supported himself as an apprentice in a cabinet-making shop, where he
became an accomplished woodworker.
During World War II, he served in the English Army in Cairo, where he
played in a military band and taught himself to tune pianos.
After the war, he became a member of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra,
for whom he played flute and piccolo. In 1951, he left the orchestra and
immigrated to Canada where he worked in the piano department of a
Toronto department store. The following year, he moved to Boston, to
work for the Baldwin Piano Factory. He also served a stint traveling
with pianist Claudio Arrau as his personal concert tuner.
"He had a really remarkable ability to enjoy life, given the amount of
loss and upset in his life, given the fact that his parents died in the
Holocaust," his son Jonathan said yesterday. "He loved music and was a
great sportsman who enjoyed sailing, skiing, backpacking and bicycling.
Even during the past four years, after Alzheimer's disease had
significantly affected his life, he enjoyed cross-country skiing when he
could barely talk, and playing the flute, sight reading the music, when
he couldn't even read."
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