Abstract
<jats:p>Henri Herz was born in Vienna in 1806. As a child, he was taught the piano by his father and by the organist Hünten, and, at the age of eleven, came to Paris to study at the conservatory. Thereafter he was a Parisian. He had a successful concert career and also acquired a reputation as composer in the semiserious style of the boulevards. His tour of the United States, in 1846, was immensely profitable, for he never permitted artistic scruples to constrict his own or his manager’s sense of what would appeal at the box office. Twenty years later he wrote down a witty description of his adventures in the New World, and it was published as Mes Voyages en Amérique (1866). As befitted a man who consistently made a good thing of life, he lived until the ripe age of eighty-two.</jats:p>