Karl Wirth (piano maker)

Karl Wirth (* 1800 in Augsburg , † 1882 in Stuttgart ) was a German organ and piano builder who built a large piano factory in Saint Petersburg between 1827 and 1854 .

Live and act

Karl Wirth was the son of Franz Joseph Wirth (1760-1819), an organ and piano builder working in Augsburg. After the death of his father, Karl Wirth took over the business, but relocated to Saint Petersburg because of the better order situation there. Karl Wirth's factory soon had 100 workers. Friedrich Wilhelme Schiller also worked as a journeyman in the factory, who later opened his own factory.

Wirth worked and lived in his own house at 22 Malaâ Morskaâ Street (currently 21). For his "Aeolodikon", a keyboard instrument with freely swinging tongues, a forerunner of the harmonium, he received the Great Silver Medal in 1829 at the First Public Exhibition of Russian Manufactured Goods in Saint Petersburg.

In the 27 years that he was active in Petersburg, he built 2,700 instruments. In Clara Schumann , Wirth found a prominent piano virtuoso who reported good things about his pianos, which he was able to use as advertising material. About her trip to Saint Petersburg she mentioned that around 1850 German was spoken everywhere in the Russian capital, only 10 miles outside the Russian language is said to have predominated. By this she will also have meant the large number of other German instrument makers she met in Saint Petersburg. In 1841 there was a fire in Wirth's factory, in which a large part of the tools and materials were destroyed.

An organ dating back to Wirth from Saint Petersburg (1833) has been in the Finnish community of Myrskylä since 1875

“At the beginning of the thirties, Carl Wirth emerged with one really wonderful grand pianos, which didn’t give in to Tischner’s instruments in terms of solidity, but far surpassed them in terms of elasticity of the playing style and soft, vocal tone. It was a real delight to play on a Wirth grand piano, because the mechanism of the same reproduced every touch of the player with the greatest possible precision, depending on the player's intentions, and at the same time resembled the tone of the human voice. I am firmly convinced that anyone who has ever had the opportunity to play a real Carl Wirth instrument (from the period 1840–55) will agree with me completely. Carl Wirth's grand pianos competed victoriously with the then world-famous Erard's products, and in the end even pushed them out of the palaces of our aristocracy, so devoted to all Parisian chic. "

- Jouryi from Arnold

In research, Friedrich Eschenbach is seen as the successor to Karl Wirth's piano factory, as Eschenbach continued to produce the famous pianos under the same name in the years after Wirth's return home. Eschenbach was probably the son of Wirth's brother-in-law Adam Eschenbach.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's family acquired a Wirth grand piano around 1870. In the three memorials in Simbirsk , Kazan and Samara , extra Wirth wings were procured during the Soviet era in order to make the historically accurate ambience tangible.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sergeev MV "On ostavlyaet po sebe dobruyu pamyat, ne oskorbiv nichego slukha": peterburgskiy fortepiannyy master K. Virt ["He Leaves a Good Memory about Himself, without Offending Anyone's Hearing": St. Petersburg Piano Maker C. Wirth] // Nauchnyy vestnik Moskovskoy konservatorii [Journal of Moscow Conservatory]. 2017. № 1. P. 18-33. (Russian).
2. ↑ Sergeev MV Fortepiannoe delo v Peterburge XIX veka: (Po materialam russkoy periodicheskoy pechati) [Piano making in St. Petersburg of the XIX century: (According to the Russian periodical press)]. Rossiyskaya kultura glazami molodykh uchenykh [Russian culture through the eyes of young scientists]. Vol. 3. St. Petersburg, 1994. P. 74-92. (Russian).
3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Page access on November 27, 2015 
4. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ Quoted from Neue Zeitschrift für Musik : 1896, Volume 92, Part 2 [1]
6. ^ Sabine Katharina Klaus: Studies on the history of the development of stringed keyboard instruments up to around 1830: Sources and studies on technical development. Munich City Museum. Musikinstrumentenmuseum H. Schneider, 1997. p. 398.