Two brothers in Eisenberg, 1927.

Ammer was founded in 1927 by the brothers Michael and Alois Ammer in Eisenberg, in Thuringia, as the “AMMER-Spezialwerkstätten für Historische Tasteninstrumente” — specialist workshops for historical keyboard instruments, according to the firm’s own history and the German Wikipedia. The brothers had come from Landshut, in Bavaria, to work in their uncle Josef Ammer’s piano factory, and had played early music through the Wandervogel youth movement.

From the 1930s they built harpsichords, spinets and clavichords in close collaboration with the musical-instrument museum in Leipzig. Both brothers died in 1947. After a manager stood in, Michael’s daughter, Renate Ammer, ran the firm, and Jürgen Ammer (1945–2017) joined the firm in 1965.

The firm describes itself, and the German Wikipedia repeats, that as Ammer KG it was the only maker of historical keyboard instruments in the whole Eastern Bloc. We report that as its description.

Nationalised in 1972, closed in 2017.

In 1972, like all remaining private firms in East Germany, Ammer was forcibly nationalised and merged into the state furniture combine in Eisenberg, the VE Möbelkombinat Eisenberg. One source says it had built about 2,540 instruments before then; we could not confirm that figure.

The family, however, carried on making instruments. In 1974 Renate and Jürgen Ammer founded a new workshop in Leipzig-Wiederitzsch; Jürgen left in 1984, and that firm was dissolved in 1988. Jürgen moved to West Germany in 1988 and opened a workshop at the Domäne Trendelburg, which the firm dates to 1990–2001, and from 2001 worked in Schauenburg-Breitenbach, near Kassel.

The German Wikipedia records the end: “Im Juni 2017 wurde die Firma Jürgen Ammer Historische Tasteninstrumente wegen des Todes von Jürgen Ammer geschlossen” — in June 2017 the firm was closed following Jürgen Ammer’s death. Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: Ammer no longer makes instruments. Its website remains online, but is no longer current.

A revival on both sides of the wall.

The modern harpsichord was reinvented twice. First in Paris: the Cité de la musique says Wanda Landowska’s name “reste indissolublement lié au clavecin Pleyel (16 pieds), modèle conçu à partir de ses suggestions, inauguré en 1912” — remains inseparably linked to the Pleyel 16-foot harpsichord, built to her suggestions and launched in 1912, to which she stayed faithful throughout her career. Instruments in that style are now called “revival” harpsichords.

Then in Boston. Harvard Magazine records that Frank Hubbard and William Dowd “independently pursued apprenticeships with disciples of Dolmetsch, then founded a harpsichord company in 1949,” and that their serial number one was “modeled on a design by the Flemish Ruckers family.” Wikipedia sums up the difference: they built “on historical principles, rather than the 20th-century modern (now known as ‘revival’) style practised by virtually all professional makers.” Ammer’s collaboration with the Leipzig museum from the 1930s put it on the historical side of the argument earlier than most.

A museum now holds one of the trade’s great collections. Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum says that in 1969, with help from the Volkswagen Foundation, it acquired “Die Klavierhistorische Sammlung des Bamberger Klavierherstellers J.C. Neupert,” which “enthält über 300 Objekte, die meisten davon Tasteninstrumente” — more than 300 objects, most of them keyboard instruments.

The Cité de la musique traces Landowska’s influence forward “aux temps des débuts américains dans la facture de clavecin selon des principes historiques” — to the beginnings of American harpsichord making on historical principles.

Germany’s oldest name in the field, J.C. Neupert, founded in 1868, built harpsichords from the 1900s and still works near Bamberg; its historical collection passed, in the late 1960s, to Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

In Germany the scale was different. Kurt Wittmayer’s firm in Bavaria made about 440 instruments a year in the 1960s, according to the German Wikipedia, and some 8,430 modern instruments in all before closing in 1995.

Frank Hubbard set out the historical approach at book length in Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making, published by Harvard University Press in 1965; the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick wrote that Hubbard “unquestionably knows more about the history and construction of harpsichords than anyone alive today.” Wolfgang Zuckermann explained his kit in his 1969 book The Modern Harpsichord: “Realizing that most people approach a harpsichord with caution, the way they do a vicious dog, I decided that the only way they might lose their fear of harpsichord maintenance was to go through the process of building the instrument for themselves.”

Hubbard’s former partner William Dowd, who closed his Massachusetts workshop in 1988, built, according to the Boston Globe, “more than 800 instruments that are now played in 26 countries.” The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History holds the records of both Boston pioneers — the Hubbard Harpsichord Records and the Dowd Harpsichord Collection — so the American revival is documented in a national archive.

Wolfgang Zuckermann explained his kit in his 1969 book The Modern Harpsichord: “Realizing that most people approach a harpsichord with caution, the way they do a vicious dog, I decided that the only way they might lose their fear of harpsichord maintenance was to go through the process of building the instrument for themselves.” Ammer, by contrast, built finished instruments in its own workshops, in close contact with a museum collection in Leipzig.

A family name through two German states.

Ammer’s brand was its family name and its specialism, and its long connection with a museum, written into the company’s title: specialist workshops for historical keyboard instruments. The name crossed from Bavaria to Thuringia, from private firm to state combine, and from East to West Germany.

For a design guide, Ammer shows a family name surviving a political system that took its business away, and a small workshop’s reputation travelling with its makers rather than its building. The workshop was nationalised; the name went with the family. Compare Neupert, in Bavaria, which stayed private throughout, and Wittmayer, another German maker of the period.

Its story is best told in the places it worked: Eisenberg, Leipzig, Trendelburg and the edge of Kassel.

For this guide we use a chestnut and a linen with a serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument or mark is reproduced.

Keep Ammer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.