Albert Nurnberger

Where it actually starts

You will read that the family goes back to Johann Adam Nürnberger in the middle of the eighteenth century, and that the Nürnbergers have three hundred years of continuous bow making behind them.

I would suggest handling that information carefully. Johann Adam is all over the dealer literature but he does not head the documented Markneukirchen line in the standard reference, Grünke, Schmidt and Zunterer’s Deutsche Bogenmacher. Our own archive places him in Klingenthal, which is a different town, and the German accounts have the early family working across both.

What is documented starts with Christian Gottlob Nürnberger (1792-1868). Grünke names him, alongside Christian Süss, as one of the two important pupils of the C. W. Knopf workshop, and it was Knopf that pioneered the modern bow in Markneukirchen. Between them, the German account has it, those pupils became the pillars of high-quality Neukirchen bow making in the nineteenth century.

He turns up in the town records as a bow maker in either 1823 or 1824, and even that small discrepancy hasn’t been settled against the underlying trade register.

A word about the disputed father

Some sources give F.A.N. I’s father as Christian Gottlob. Others give Karl Gottlieb. The German literature calls him Carl Gottlob, and so, as it happens, does our own archive, where he is filed as Carl Gottlob and dead in 1868.

Four spellings, one man. One source even lists him as “Karl Gottlieb Nürnberger (1793-1868), Christian Gottlob Nürnberger” in a single breath, which rather gives the game away. Nobody has yet produced the parish or civil register that settles which form is correct.

I believe it is a problem of nomenclature, not a genealogical one. Catalogues on all sides of it have been written as though the other lot were wrong.

The same caution applies to his teacher. The German dealer literature has him as a pupil of F. C. Knopf; Grünke has the workshop as C. W. Knopf. We follow Grünke.

F.A.N. I, 1826-1894

The son and pupil of Carl Gottlob, and the man the German sources credit as the founder of the workshop that the world now knows as ALBERT NÜRNBERGER. He first appears in a Markneukirchen address and trade listing in 1853.

His work is usually a Tourte model and thoroughly good. Sound, unshowy, and rarely branded. Most of it went out of the door unstamped, into the hands of the town’s Verleger, the merchant publishers who bought from the makers and sold to the world. Which is why bows you can firmly pin on him are scarce and usually anonymous.

His lasting contribution arguably wasn’t at the bench. He was a founding member of the Markneukirchen bow makers’ guild and for years its Oberinnungsmeister, the senior master of the trade in the town.

That guild has a longer and messier history than the usual one-line version allows. The bow makers first petitioned for their own guild in 1790 and were flatly refused in January 1791, largely because the violin makers objected. A renewed push came in 1886, when the bow makers’ spokesman August Voigt argued that a guild had in practice existed since 1859 and only needed official blessing. The statute was finally approved by the Royal District Authority of Zwickau on 14 January 1888.

Then it fell apart. The guild lasted only to 1899, undone largely by the freedom of trade Saxony had introduced in 1862, which had stripped guilds of most of their power. A compulsory guild replaced it, lasted four years, and was dissolved by the bow makers themselves in 1903. After that Markneukirchen had no bow makers’ guild at all until 1934.

To see why any of it mattered, look at the scale of the thing. The 1872 survey by the Plauen chamber of commerce counted 70 independent bow making workshops in Markneukirchen and another 100 in the surrounding villages, with 42 registered assistants, 44 apprentices and 76 suppliers outside the cooperative altogether. Between them they turned out roughly 36,000 dozen bows a year, about 432,000 of them.

And here is the number that should stop you in your tracks. Only about five and a half per cent of that output was in the better woods, and only a little over four per cent was pernambuco with nickel to gold mounts. Grünke reckons the entire annual production of good bows could have been made by ten to fifteen masters and about fifteen assistants.

That is why, out of hundreds of named Markneukirchen bow makers, comparatively few fine bows of the period survive. The town made an ocean of cheap bows and a puddle of good ones. By 1913 the town alone listed 90 named bow makers.

That is the sea F.A.N. I was trying to build a breakwater in.

F.A.N. II, 1854-1931

Born and died in Markneukirchen. Trained by his father, set up on his own account around 1880 and took the workshop on when F.A.N. I died in 1894. The German account is blunt about what he did with it. He took it to world fame.

He did it with three decisions.

1 – He widened the models. His father worked essentially to Tourte. F.A.N. II added Voirin and Tubbs patterns alongside it, the lighter French model and the English one, while keeping Tourte as the house standard. Suddenly he had something for every player and every dealer.

2 – He built the brand. From about 1890 he stamped ALBERT NÜRNBERGER on his output. He was riding a trend, in fairness, because Markneukirchen makers generally began stamping from the late nineteenth century, which is precisely why bows from that point on can be sorted by maker at all. But in a town of ninety bow makers where nearly everything sold anonymously through middlemen, a legible brand was how you kept the value of your own reputation instead of handing it to somebody else’s label.

3 – He went for export. He supplied August Richard Weichold in Dresden and Wilhelm Hermann Hammig in Leipzig, and then, decisively, got quantities of bows into America through Rembert Wurlitzer, who by about 1912 were selling him to American players as the greatest living bow maker.

Worth pausing on the Weichold and Hammig arrangement, because it makes the whole problem visible in miniature. Neither man was a bow maker. Both ran shops that sold bows under their own names, bought in from firms like Nürnberger. Worse, the German record is explicit that wholesalers routinely re-stamped bought-in bows or sold them under invented model names. The stamp on a Markneukirchen bow was a commercial arrangement long before it was a signature.

The museum record credits F.A.N. II with many international competition awards. Nobody has published the medal list, so we don’t name specific exhibitions until somebody digs out the award catalogues.

The measure of it is this. Either side of the First World War, and right up to his death in 1931, the Nürnberger workshop and W. E. Hill & Sons were talked about in the same breath. Two firms at the top of the tree.

Carl Albert and Philipp Paul

Philipp Paul Nürnberger (1882-1946) and Carl Albert Nürnberger (1885-1971), both sons of F.A.N. II, carried the workshop on together after him. Carl Albert took charge in the 1920s.

The trade’s view, for what it is worth, is that Carl Albert was the finest craftsman the family ever produced. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the best hand and the most famous name aren’t the same person.

Between them the two brothers refined the house Tourte into something that was recognisably theirs rather than a French model copied. Through the twenties the shop hit a level of consistency no other German workshop matched, and arguably nobody anywhere matched at that volume. Consistency was the product.

And this is where the great names attach. The Chimei Museum puts Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Grumiaux and David Oistrakh with Carl Albert’s bows, not with his father’s.

You’ll see Ysaÿe and Kubelík on the list too, but that comes down a weaker chain of sources, and none of it is bow-by-bow provenance. It is reputation rather than documentation, and should be written as such.

Then the state took it

The house didn’t come through the twentieth century as a private firm.

It started well enough. When the Soviet zone makers were putting themselves back together after 1945, Grünke singles out A. Nürnberger, alongside Penzel, Pfretzschner, Rau and Weidhaas, as one of the established workshops that helped the returning and the wounded restart, and did it generously.

Then the machinery closed in. The makers’ own private buying and selling cooperative, MIGMA, had been founded in 1943 and survived the war. In 1961 the state set up PGH Sinfonia Markneukirchen as the socialist counterweight to it, and the larger and better-known bow making firms were, in Grünke’s careful phrase, persuaded to join voluntarily by means of the economic lever. In 1972 it became VEB Sinfonia, which meant the final surrender of any commercial independence at all. By 1974 every remaining private dealer had been absorbed, and export was handled solely by the state agency DEMUSA.

You can watch the quality go. Grünke is direct about it. Difficulty getting materials, combined with state price controls, told on the bows coming out of some workshops. From 1965 a state testing office graded output, and only bows classified as Künstlerbogen, artist bows, escaped price control at all.

The important bit for attribution is that the stamp went with it. Bows carried on being made under the Nürnberger name inside a state combine, by hands with no family connection, to a specification set by an export ministry rather than by a master.

Meanwhile the line itself continued. Karl Albert Nürnberger (1906-1972), son of Carl Albert, is the generation most often dropped out of the story altogether, including by dealers who ought to know better.

Christian Albert Nürnberger, born 1947 and the great-grandson of F.A.N. II, trained with his grandfather Carl Albert in the mid 1960s and came through the VEB years. After reunification he re-established the family workshop in Markneukirchen, where it trades today from Erlbacher Straße 12 as A. Nürnberger Bogenbau, making artist bows for violin, viola and cello.

The proprietor is listed, by both the town and the German Music Council, simply as Albert Nürnberger. Which is either the neatest possible proof of everything above, or a very old joke still running.

The family counts eight generations. Six of them are documented. Either way there has been a lot of world history in between, and the bench is still occupied.

Reading the stamp

1 – From about 1890, ALBERT NÜRNBERGER with no stars, used by F.A.N. II. The date is supported. The exact year isn’t.

2 – At some point stars appear flanking the name. One source says 1920 and credits F.A.N. II’s son. Another has a starred stamp in use around 1918 to 1925 and running on to about 1960. A third says 1915. None of them can be squared with the others, and the museum record, which is the best source we have, declines to date the stars at all or to say who introduced them.

3 – So treat the stars as a rough indicator of the twentieth century workshop, and nothing sharper than that. Anyone dating a bow to a five year window on the strength of two stars is guessing.

4 – Export stamps often drop the umlaut, NURNBERGER, and that tells you nothing whatever about date or quality.

5 – Made in GDR is the one hard date you get. That stamp was made compulsory on all export bows in 1972. If it’s there, the bow left East Germany in or after 1972, and it left a state enterprise rather than a family workshop.

The trade also holds that one or two stars marked out the better grades. Treat that as workshop lore rather than a system anyone has demonstrated. It gets repeated far more often than it deserves, in much the same way that the brand on a W. E. Hill & Sons bow is only one consideration among several.

The only rule you can lean on is a negative one. The stamp identifies the workshop and never the hand.

Bows from the pre 1931 workshop are much rarer, much better, and priced to match. Everything after that has to be judged on the stick and the frog in front of you. The model, the quality of the head, the cut of the chamfers, how the mounts are fitted. Certification by a recognised bow expert is the practical route to a firm date, and Hans-Karl Schmidt’s certificates turn up regularly on the best examples.

The family in this archive

Because the name covers so many hands, we keep a separate record for each documented member of the family, with their own auction history. This page is the account of the workshop; those are the people in it.

Carl Gottlob Nürnberger (1792-1868), the first documented bow maker of the line. Franz Albert (I) (1826-1894), founder of the workshop and Oberinnungsmeister. Franz Albert (II) (1854-1931), who made the name international. Philipp Paul (1882-1946) and Carl Albert (1885-1971), the brothers who took it to its peak. Karl Albert (1906-1972), the generation everyone forgets. And Johann Adam in Klingenthal and Johann Christoph among the wider family.

The archive holds nineteen Nürnberger records in all. See every Nürnberger in the archive.

What we call them

On a practical note, and given all of the above, our preference is to catalogue this material as the work of the Albert Nürnberger workshops, and to name the individual maker only where the evidence actually supports it.

It’s the honest formulation. It credits the house that made the bow, it keeps F.A.N. I and F.A.N. II properly apart, it puts Karl Albert back into a story he keeps getting written out of, and it stops us handing one man the credit for three generations and seventy years of other people’s work.

Sources

Klaus Grünke, C. Hans-Karl Schmidt and Wolfgang Zunterer, Deutsche Bogenmacher / German Bowmakers 1783-2000 (Bubenreuth, 2000). Extracts published by the Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung. The source for the guild chronology, the 1872 and 1913 trade figures, the Knopf pupils, the post-war and GDR history and the Made in GDR stamp.

Stadt Markneukirchen, municipal register of stringed instrument businesses, for the present workshop.

Deutsches Musikinformationszentrum (German Music Council), institutional record for Albert Nürnberger, Bogenmachermeister.

Chimei Museum, Tainan, maker records for Franz Albert Nürnberger II, Carl Albert, Philipp Paul and Karl Albert.

Amati Makers’ Archive, for the family records.

Also consulted: Henley, Universal Dictionary of Violin & Bow Makers (Amati, 1969); Vannes, Dictionnaire Universel des Luthiers; Roda, Bows for Musical Instruments (1959); Lütgendorff (1922).