Maria Herzaus modern

Maria Herz (* 19 August 1878 in Cologne; † 22 October 1950 in New York City), also known as Albert Maria Herz or A. Maria Herz, was a German composer and pianist.

Life

Born the youngest of three siblings, Maria (Mariechen) Bing grew up with her older brothers Moritz and Hugo in a well-known Jewish textile merchant family in Cologne. She received her musical training from the pianist Max von Pauer (1866-1945) and Josef Schwartz (1848-1933), violin teacher at the Conservatory of Music in Cologne, composer and conductor of the Cologne Men’s Choral Society. She married Albert Herz in Cologne on 21 March 1901 and the couple settled in England, where Herz had emigrated at the end of the 19th century due to the strong anti-Semitism in Germany. The couple had four children: Herbert, Robert, Nora and Marga.

In the following years, Maria Herz organised numerous concerts in Yorkshire and had lessons in harmony and composition in Bradford with Arthur E. Grimshaw (1864-1913), who composed a string quartet entitled Variations on a theme by Mrs Herz in 1910. She worked as a concert organiser, appeared in numerous concerts as a pianist, introduced composers and their works and gave her first performances of her own compositions.

In 1914, the entire family of six was in Germany attending the wedding of one of Albert Herz’s younger brothers, Julius Herz (1875-1960), when the First World War broke out. This forced the family to stay in Cologne. Albert Herz was called up to the German army and had to serve as a chemist for the entire duration of the war. This massively reduced Maria’s musical activities or even made them impossible. Due to Albert’s early death during the influenza epidemic in 1920, Maria and her adolescent children were very challenged. Nevertheless, she resumed her music studies with August von Othegraven (1864-1946), Hermann Hans Wetzler (1870-1943) and mainly Philipp Jarnach (1892-1982). In honour of her late husband, but probably also for practical reasons (female composers were hardly taken seriously at the time), she henceforth signed her compositions with the pseudonym Albert Maria Herz.

The period from 1920 to 1935 was her most fruitful creative period, during which she produced a considerable oeuvre of compositions. Maria Herz cultivated a lively exchange with many leading musicians of the era. Her circle of acquaintances included the Budapest String Quartet, the Quartetto di Roma, the singer Ilona Durigo, the baritone Hermann Schey, the cellists Gregor Piatigorsky, Emanuel Feuermann and Gaspar Cassadó as well as the conductors Hermann Abendroth, Otto Klemperer, Peter Raabe, Hans Rosbaud and many others.

Her list of works includes numerous songs for voice and piano (some cycles have been orchestrated), chamber music, solo concertos for piano and violoncello as well as choral and orchestral works. These speak their own authentic language, range stylistically between late Romanticism and early modernism and sometimes place high demands on the performers. After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Jewish composers were banned from performing. The Nazis forced the family to leave Germany, and so she and her younger son Robert lived in England for a good ten years. Here she wrote lectures on composers from various countries and periods. After the war, she emigrated with her son Robert to her daughters in the USA, where she died in New York in 1950 after a short, serious illness and was buried in Springfield (New Jersey).

Only five songs (1910, Stainer & Bell) and her arrangement for string quartet of Bach’s Chaconne (1927, Simrock No. 774a, b) were published during her lifetime; her other compositions have been preserved in manuscript.

Since October 2015, Maria Herz’s estate has been part of the music department of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.
Source Wiki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Herz