Thürmer was a Saxon piano house for 112 years.

On 1 April 1834, the company’s history records, Ernst Ferdinand Wilhelm Thürmer, from Zittau, opened a workshop in Meissen, the Saxon town better known for porcelain. He made, in the spelling of the day, “Fortepiano’s in Flügel und Tafelform, wie auch Guitarren” — grand and table pianos, and guitars — about a dozen a year, and 365 by his death in 1862.

His son Gustav Adolf Ferdinand, who had spent three years with Julius Blüthner in Leipzig, built the business into a factory: a new building on Martinstraße in the mid-1870s, prizes at a London exhibition in 1884, and a strong trade with Australia. Two more sons joined as partners in the late 1890s; the 25,000th instrument was finished on 15 June 1903; a larger factory opened in Meissen-Zscheila in 1908. By 1914, the company says, it had made almost 50,000 instruments, and by 1946 about 67,000.

That is the year the Saxon story ended. On 30 June 1946, the history says, the factory was expropriated by the Soviet occupation authority and turned into a state-owned enterprise, the “Meißner Piano- und Möbelfabrik.” The owner, Dr. Walther Thürmer, was arrested the same day; he died on 23 February 1947 in the Mühlberg internment camp. Piano making in Meissen, the company writes with deliberate caution, was “vermutlich 1955 endgültig eingestellt” — probably finally ended in 1955. The family left for the West that year.

Revived under licence, then rebuilt around a concert hall.

The name came back before the factory did. In 1971, the company says, Jan Thürmer, the fifth generation, born in 1946, had pianos built under licence by Ferd. Manthey in Berlin, bearing the Thürmer name. From 1975 he worked with the Landshut maker L. u. O. Willis, later as a partner, and from 1977 Thürmer finished semi-finished pianos from Landshut in Herne, in the Ruhr. Willis stopped production in 1993.

That sequence is the guide’s central lesson about piano names. For some years a Thürmer piano was a piano built or partly built elsewhere and sold under a name with a long history — not a deception, but a licence, which is how many old names survive. What made the name a manufacturer again was a building. On 17 June 1988 Thürmer opened a new house in Bochum with a 450-seat chamber hall.

Music became the brand. Jan Thürmer started a “Klaviersommer” in Bochum in 1984, and in 1989 continued it as the Klavier-Festival Ruhr, which opened on 15 June 1989 with Vladimir Ashkenazy and closed on 27 August with Martha Argerich. The logo still reads “Pianofortefabrik seit 1834 • Konzertsekretariat” — a piano factory and a concert office, side by side. Many piano makers sponsor concerts; few can say they started a festival, and the line in the logo is the record of it.

In 2009 the state of North Rhine-Westphalia bought the Bochum building; from 2014 it housed the acting department of the Folkwang University of the Arts. In 2022, the local news site Halloherne reported, the state property agency awarded Jan Thürmer a listed 1929 police building in Herne, with plans for piano workshops, a museum and a chamber hall. The company’s imprint now gives that Herne address. A listed police station is an unlikely home for a piano maker, but it is in keeping with a firm that has survived by finding new buildings for an old name.

On the seal list — with a careful reading of what that says.

Thürmer is one of the brands the German piano makers’ association, the Bundesverband Klavier (BVK), lists as certified. Its certificate page names “Ferd. Thürmer Pianofortefabrik” among the makers, and the BVK says it certifies “nur solche Marken von Herstellern … welche zu 100 % in Deutschland hergestellt werden” — only brands made entirely in Germany. It publishes no certification dates and no audit method, so we report the listing, not more.

The list itself is revealing. Of the six certified piano brands we read in October 2026 — Blüthner, Blüthner Digital, Haessler, Rönisch, Thürmer and Pfeiffer — four belong to one Leipzig group: Haessler is a Blüthner line named after a family member, and Rönisch, a Dresden name of 1845, has been made in Blüthner’s factory since 2009. That leaves Thürmer and Pfeiffer as the only certified piano brands owned by other families. Thürmer, which once trained a son at Blüthner, now sits beside Blüthner on the seal list.

The company’s own pages are modest about production. “Die Anfertigung ist immer Handarbeit,” it says — the making is always handwork. An undated history page gives about 100 instruments a year in the Bochum era, 15 to 20 of them grands. We could not establish today’s output, and the model lists on the company’s site and the BVK’s page do not match. The showroom also sells instruments from other makers, including Kawai. We describe Thürmer as it describes itself: a piano factory and a concert office, certified by its trade association.

Meissen has not forgotten. A Thürmer Pianoforte-Museum opened in the old Martinstraße factory on 1 April 1999, the company’s 165th anniversary; it was hit by the August 2002 flood and reopened in 2008. The town that lost the company kept the building.

A silver script, a founding date, and a concert office in the same line.

Thürmer’s logo is an ornate, copperplate-style script, “Thürmer,” rendered in silver with a bevel, above the line “FERD. THÜRMER Pianofortefabrik seit 1834 • Konzertsekretariat.” The script is the old-fashioned kind once painted in gold on a piano’s fallboard; the silver bevel makes it a modern web graphic. Its website’s title spells the name without the umlaut, “FERD. THUERMER,” a small concession to the way names travel on the internet.

“Seit 1834” carries a lot of history in four characters. It asserts continuity through an expropriation, a licence, a partnership and several cities — and the company tells that story on its own site in more detail than most brands would. For a design guide, that candour is the identity: a name whose value lies in having been kept.

For this guide we use a slate and a silver with a copperplate-flavoured serif. These are an unofficial interpretation, not Thürmer’s colour values, and nothing of its script logo is reproduced.

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