Feurich lost its factory to bombing and its country to partition, and kept going on the strength of a name.

Feurich tells its beginning with a nice detail: Julius Gustav Feurich founded the firm in Leipzig in 1851, it says, “at the cost of 1 gold mark.” A second plant opened in Leipzig-Leutzsch in 1911. In 1943 bombing destroyed the factory and the company’s archives — which is worth remembering whenever anyone quotes a precise early Feurich figure.

After the war Leipzig was in the Soviet zone. In 1959 the family left the German Democratic Republic and re-founded the firm in the West as Julius Feurich Pianofortefabrik GmbH, building its pianos with the maker Euterpe in Langlau, in Franconia. The 1990s brought a brief entanglement with Bechstein through the Euterpe connection, after which, by Feurich’s account, the family bought back its shares and production moved to Gunzenhausen in 1994.

That is already three homes — Leipzig, Langlau, Gunzenhausen — and the brand had not yet left Germany. The next moves would take it to two other countries at once.

The name went to Vienna. Most of the pianos went to China.

From 2003, Feurich says, it produced pianos in a partnership with Hailun Piano Co. in Ningbo, China — “FEURICH started producing pianos in Ningbo, China, in 2003,” in the words of its own production page, which does not name Hailun; its history page does. The company says its Model 122 Universal won a Diapason d’or in 2007.

Then the name itself moved. Between 2010 and 2012 a Vienna company headed by Ernest Bittner acquired the worldwide brand rights. The Austrian register tells the story through one company’s names: it was registered in 1998 as Ernest Bittner GmbH, became Wendl & Lung in 2003, took the name “FEURICH PIANOFORTE, Wendl&Lung” in 2016, and has been FEURICH PIANOFORTE GmbH since 2021. A Viennese piano-building and sales company grew, over twenty years, into the owner of a German name.

There is an old echo in that. According to English Wikipedia, Hermann Feurich held a court warrant from the Austro-Hungarian monarchy — the firm was once a supplier to the Viennese court. Today its name is registered at a Vienna address. It is a pleasing coincidence of geography, and we claim no more for it than that.

The buyer’s guide PianoBuyer states plainly that the “Feurich (Ningbo)” pianos “are built at the Hailun factory in Ningbo, China,” and a member of the Feurich family told the same publication in 2016 that instruments carrying the name had been made in China, by Hailun, since 2012. Feurich also opened a factory in Vienna on 21 June 2016, which made, it says, the first “Made in Austria” Feurich; the 123 – Vienna upright is built there, with a German Renner action. So a Leipzig name now carries two origin labels that the company states itself, Chinese and Austrian.

For a buyer, the practical consequence is simple: with Feurich, the model matters more than the name. A Vienna-built upright and a Ningbo-built grand carry the same nameplate and the same founding year, and the company is open about which is which on its production pages. The nameplate tells you about a family in Leipzig in 1851; the model number tells you about the factory.

Feurich’s website names a couple in Vienna. A report of Bechstein’s shareholder meeting names Feurich as part of Bechstein.

Feurich’s own site presents “Bailin & Ernest Bittner” as “the couple behind the new FEURICH organisation.” We searched its home page and its About page for the word “Bechstein” and found it on neither, while “Bittner,” “Ningbo” and “Vienna” all appeared — so the search worked.

Yet an independent report of Bechstein’s annual meeting of 27 August 2021, published by the research firm GSC, records: “Im vergangenen Jahr wurde Feurich neu konsolidiert, was einen zusätzlichen Absatz von 2.000 Instrumenten brachte” — last year Feurich was newly consolidated, adding sales of 2,000 instruments. Consolidation means Bechstein was treating Feurich as part of its group. Company-register data aggregated by North Data also lists Bechstein as Feurich’s main shareholder and Bechstein’s chief, Stefan Freymuth, as a Feurich managing director since 2021; we have not checked that against the Austrian register itself, so we give it as North Data’s reading. The same data shows a separate Feurich–Hailun production company, founded in 2016, being merged into the Vienna company in May 2021 — the year the Vienna company took its present name.

We do not resolve the two pictures, because the documents do not. What we can say is that a buyer reading Feurich’s home and About pages would not learn what Bechstein’s shareholders were told in 2021. It is a striking example of this round’s theme: the name on the fallboard, the company on the website and the group in the accounts can be three different things.

There is one more thread. Bechstein’s own second line, Zimmermann, is reported to have been made by Hailun in Ningbo since about 2013. If both reports are right, the same Chinese maker builds pianos for two German names that now sit in the same German group.

The founding year is a registered mark; the innovation is sold to rivals.

Among the marks recorded for the company are “FEURICH” and “SEIT 1851” — “since 1851.” Like Seiler’s “1849” and Bechstein’s “1853,” the founding year is doing the work of continuity for a brand whose ownership and factories have changed many times.

The most modern thing Feurich sells is not a piano. Its High Speed KAMM Action, developed with Udo Kamm, is a repetition add-on for upright pianos that Feurich says can be fitted to any brand’s upright “for as little as €599.” A piano brand selling an upgrade for its competitors’ instruments is unusual, and it fits a company that has always lived between other people’s factories. The current grands are the 162 Dynamic I, 179 Dynamic II and 218 Concert I. And the upright the company still cites for its prize, the Model 122 Universal — which it says won a Diapason d’or in 2007 — dates from the years of the Ningbo partnership; the company does not say, on the pages we read, where that particular model was built, and so neither do we.

For this guide we use a deep Feurich claret and a pale rose with a Viennese-geometric sans. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Feurich’s own colour values, and nothing of its mark is reproduced.

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