Henri Herz was born Heinrich Herz in Vienna. He was Jewish by birth and asked Fétis to leave that out of his musical encyclopaedia, which likely reflects the antisemitism of nineteenth-century French cultural life. He studied first with his father and then at Koblenz with the organist Daniel Hünten, and in 1816 entered the Paris Conservatoire, taking piano with Louis-Barthélémy Pradher, harmony with Victor Dourlen and composition with Anton Reicha; he won the first prize for piano in 1818. His brother Jacques Simon Herz was a fellow pupil who also became a pianist and teacher. He was Austrian by birth and French by nationality and residence, and taught at the Conservatoire for more than thirty years. He died on 5 January 1888.

By his own account his playing was formed on Moscheles. He toured extensively, visiting Germany in 1831 and England in 1834 with the violinist Charles Philippe Lafont, and wrote eight piano concertos, a sonata, rondos, nocturnes, waltzes, marches, fantasias and a great many sets of variations. He entered the piano workshop of Henri Klepfer et cie as a partner in 1825, which went badly, and in 1839 founded his own factory — one of the three leading French makers alongside Érard and Pleyel, all three of which took the médaille d’honneur at the 1855 Paris World’s Fair. His most consequential mechanical work was the multi-layered hammer, two inner layers of leather with fabric and rabbit fur and up to nine outer layers of wool felt of decreasing hardness: less loud than what replaced it, but finely graduated in dynamics and colour, and a large part of the sound of Chopin’s own grand pianos.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Herz
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q572547