Fritz Wurlitzer

Fritz Ulrich Wurlitzer (Erlbach, 1888 – Erlbach, 1984) was a German clarinet maker from a family that had long been devoted to the construction of woodwind instruments. His contribution lies within the German clarinet tradition, in which the Oehler system and the Boehm system coexisted, and his work consisted in refining both models.

He initially trained in the workshop of his father, Paul Oskar Wurlitzer, and set up on his own around 1930. During that decade he collaborated with the clarinettist Ernst Schmidt, with whom he introduced improvements to both the Oehler-system and the Boehm-system clarinet. From this collaboration emerged the Schmidt-Kolbe system, which modifies the Oehler with a more uniform venting fingering; Wurlitzer initially developed it together with Louis Kolbe, a maker from Altenburg. Most of these instruments had a very wide bore of 15.2 mm, possibly the largest ever used in instruments of the German type. They enjoyed great acceptance, above all in the Netherlands.

The Schmidt Reform Boehm system retains the standard Boehm fingering but incorporates several additional vent holes that give it a very homogeneous sound, closer to the German timbre than to the French. Wurlitzer also made fine bass clarinets, basset horn bass clarinets and a contrabass clarinet; his low-register instruments remained highly prized up to the end of the twentieth century.

His legacy is carried on above all through his son Herbert Wurlitzer, who worked with him until 1959, the year in which he settled in the Federal Republic of Germany. Fritz Wurlitzer is remembered as one of the architects of the technical solutions that gave identity to the German clarinet of the twentieth century.