Kurt Wittmayer taught himself the trade.

Wittmayer’s founder, Kurt Wittmayer, was born on 22 November 1917 in Hermannstadt, now Sibiu, in Romania, and studied the organ before teaching himself harpsichord building from 1945, according to the German Wikipedia. In February 1949 he opened a workshop in Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria, with the engineer Rudolf Schüler (1911–1995); the business moved to Königsdorf in 1950, and the partnership split in 1951.

On his own, Wittmayer then built a substantial manufacturer, in the countryside south of Munich. From 1952 he worked in Geretsried-Gartenberg with two staff, and by 1955 had 22. In 1950 he had applied for a patent on a new design of harpsichord jack, the small part that plucks the string. In 1967 the firm moved to Wolfratshausen.

The German Wikipedia counts its output in thousands. In the 1960s, it says, the firm made about 440 instruments a year with nearly 50 staff, and in all built about 8,430 instruments of modern construction. From 1964 to 1992 it also restored 38 historical instruments and built 265 “in historischer Bauweise” — in historical style. Wikipedia ranks it among the world’s leading harpsichord makers of its time, with Sperrhake of Passau and Neupert.

Closed in 1995.

The German Wikipedia dates the firm’s closure to 1995. Kurt Wittmayer died in Bad Tölz on 4 September 1997. Under our rule for defunct businesses we say it plainly: Wittmayer no longer makes harpsichords, and we found no company continuing the name.

Its instruments remain in use and in collections. The Deutsches Museum in Munich holds a Wittmayer Klein-Cembalo — a small harpsichord — and a private collection documents an early Schüler and Wittmayer instrument from 1949. One collection record gives sales of about 3,868 for the Klein-Cembalo and Corelli models between 1951 and 1985; we could not confirm it, so we give it only as reported.

Wittmayer’s scale sets it apart from the workshop makers in this round. Where Dowd built about twenty instruments a year, Wittmayer, in the 1960s, built hundreds.

Revival instruments at scale.

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. Most of Wittmayer’s output was in that modern style; its historical-style work came later and in smaller numbers.

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.”

And then came the kit. The New York Times, in its 2018 obituary of Wolfgang Zuckermann, described his “Z-Box” as “a 35-pound box containing a keyboard, strings, plectrums (or pluckers), jacks (plectrum-holders) and tuning pins, but not the wood for the cabinet,” and said “Thousands of people around the world” bought one.

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 to Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum in the late 1960s. Across the inner German border, the Ammer workshops in Eisenberg, founded in 1927, built harpsichords with the Leipzig instrument museum from the 1930s, were nationalised in 1972, and continued in family hands, later in the West, until 2017.

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.” 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.”

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.” 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.

Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum, which also holds Neupert’s collection, had acquired the Rück collection, of about 1,500 pieces, in 1962, making Nuremberg one of the great places to study historical keyboards.

Meanwhile 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. Wittmayer’s small historical-style output, 265 instruments in nearly three decades, was its share of that movement.

A maker’s name on a production line.

Wittmayer’s brand was its founder’s surname on a large output of modern instruments, including small models such as the Klein-Cembalo, now in the collection of the Deutsches Museum.

For a design guide, Wittmayer shows a craft name scaled up into a product line, at a time when the field was moving toward historical copies. Compare Neupert, which still trades as a maker of historical keyboard instruments, and Ammer, which closed in 2017.

Its places — Bad Reichenhall, Königsdorf, Geretsried, Wolfratshausen — trace a firm that grew from a two-man workshop into a factory.

For this guide we use an Alpine blue and a mist with a sans serif, an unofficial interpretation. No instrument or mark is reproduced.

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