User:BooseyHawkesNY/Maria Herz

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

Biography
The youngest of three siblings, Maria (Mariechen) Bing grew up with her older brothers Moritz and Hugo in a prominent Jewish family of textile merchants in Cologne. She gained her musical training from the pianist Max von Pauer (1866–1945) and Josef Schwartz (1848–1933), a violin teacher at the then Conservatorium der Musik in Coeln (present-day Cologne University of Music), composer and conductor of the Cologne male choral society. On 21 March 1901 she married Albert Herz in Cologne. The couple then settled in England. Herz had emigrated to Britain in the late 19th century in the wake of virulent antisemitism.

In the years that followed, and despite the birth of her four children Herbert, Robert, Nora and Marga, Maria Herz organised numerous concerts in Yorkshire and took lessons in harmony and composition at Bradford from Arthur E. Grimshaw (1864–1913), who in 1910 composed a string quartet entitled Variations on a theme by Mrs Herz. She worked as a concert impresario, took to the stage herself as a pianist in numerous concerts, showcased composers and their works, and performed the first of her own compositions.

In 1914, the entire family of six happened to be in Germany to attend the wedding of one of Albert Herz’s younger brothers, Julius Herz (1875–1960) when World War I broke out, forcing the family to remain in Cologne. Albert Herz was enlisted in the German army and required to serve as a chemist for the duration of the war. Maria’s musical endeavours were greatly curtailed as a result, not to say rendered impossible. Albert’s premature death during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1920 posed a tremendous challenge for Maria and her adolescent children. Nonetheless, she resumed her musical studies under August von Othegraven (1864–1946), Hermann Hans Wetzler (1870–1943) and, first and foremost, Philipp Jarnach (1892–1982). Thereafter, she signed her compositions with the pseudonym Albert Maria Herz in honour of her late husband, but also no doubt for practical reasons since female composers were barely acknowledged as such at that time.

The period from 1920 to 1935 was her most prolific creatively, giving rise to a sizeable compositional oeuvre. Maria Herz engaged in lively exchanges with many of the leading musicians of her era. Her circle of acquaintances included the Budapest String Quartet, the Quartetto di Roma, the classical contralto Ilona Durigo, the baritone Hermann Schey, the cellists Gregor Piatigorsky, Emanuel Feuermann and Gaspar Cassadó and the conductors Hermann Abendroth, Otto Klemperer, Peter Raabe, Hans Rosbaud and many others.

Her list of works includes numerous Lieder for solo voice and piano (a number of Lieder cycles have been orchestrated), chamber music, solo concertos for piano and cello as well as choral and orchestral works. They are characterised by a distinctive and authentic idiom that ranges stylistically between the late Romantic and early modern periods and are in part rather challenging for performers. After the Nazis seized power in 1933, a ban was imposed on the performance of works by Jewish composers. Due to the Nazi regime, the family was compelled to flee Germany and relocated to England where they lived with the younger son Robert for ten years or so. There Maria Herz authored lectures on composers from different countries and periods. After the war she and her son Robert emigrated to her daughters in the US, where she died in New York in 1950 after a brief but serious illness; she was buried in Springfield (New Jersey).

Only five Lieder (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 form.

Since October 2015 the estate of Maria Herz has been in the safekeeping of the estate collections of the Music Department of the Zurich Central Library.