Maria Herz: rediscovery continues with Cello Concerto in Manchester
Unknown until recent years, Maria Herz’s music written between the two World Wars continues to be rediscovered. Her Cello Concerto, composed close to a century ago under the pseudonym of her deceased husband, has received its first recording on the Capriccio label and the work’s UK premiere is presented by the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester on 27 February.
Maria Herz’s music returns to the United Kingdom on 27 February with the UK premiere of her Cello Concerto, composed around 1930 but unknown until the resurgence of interest in her works over the past decade. The concert is presented by the Hallé Orchestra with cello soloist Raphaela Gromes, who has done much to champion neglected music by women composers, and Han-Na Chang – herself a prestigious cellist – on the rostrum at the Bridgewater Hall. Maria Herz (1878-1950) lived near Manchester between 1902 and 1910, continuing her music studies there in her mid-20s, and gave concerts in the city with commentary, in which she appeared as a pianist, composer and speaker.
> Visit the Hallé Orchestra website
Herz’s 20-minute Cello Concerto was written in Cologne around 1930 under the pseudonym of the composer’s late husband Albert Maria Herz, to avoid likely dismissal of her music because of her gender. It dates from a period in the 1920s and early 1930s when her composing career was at its most successful, with some 30 works created and performances by leading musicians and orchestras in the Cologne area. Her style moved on from late Romanticism to fuse elements of Expressionism with the New Objectivity and Neo-Classicism. Her burgeoning career was to end with the rise of National Socialism from 1933, progressively silencing her work as a composer for the rest of her life. With the expropriation of her family property including her home in Cologne, and the denial of her cultural and musical identity, she settled back in the UK in 1938, scraping a meagre existence with her family in Birmingham and after the war in New York, where she died in 1950.
After more than half a century following her death, her music began to be heard again when her grandson Albert Herz donated her estate to the Zürich Central Library in 2015. This led to a renewed interest in her compositions, a publishing agreement with Boosey & Hawkes, and the release in 2024 of the first recording devoted to Herz’s music. The works on this recent Capriccio recording include the Cello Concerto performed by Konstanze von Gutzeit with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christiane Silber, together with the Piano Concerto, Four Short Orchestral Pieces and the Suite for Orchestra (Capriccio C5510).
Bavarian Radio Classical selected the Capriccio recording as its Album of the Week, praising the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra for “making a strong plea for Maria Herz’s highly expressive music. A distinctive personal voice is audible, carried with great seriousness and an irrepressible will to express that is unstoppable.” The review notes how the composer in the Cello Concerto “switches after a sombre lament to a dance-like tone. As with Shostakovich, Maria Herz has taken up Jewish folk music here… She composed her pain into her music.”
About Maria Herz
Born as Maria Bing on 19 August 1878, Maria Herz was the youngest child of a Jewish textile dynasty in Cologne. From an early age she received piano instruction from Max von Pauer, a renowned professor at the Cologne Conservatory. After her marriage to chemist Albert Herz in 1901, she moved with him to the United Kingdom, had four children by 1910, and began to compose in the Romantic style. She also organised lecture concerts, in which she appeared as pianist, composer, and speaker. Her composition teacher was none other than Arthur Edmund Grimshaw, first-ever choir master and organist of Leeds Cathedral. He even dedicated one of his own compositions to her, a string quartet entitled Variations on a Theme by Mrs Herz.
Blindsided by the outbreak of war during a stay in Germany in the summer of 1914, the Herz family couldn’t return to England and therefore remained in Cologne. Albert Herz survived military service during World War I but later died of the Spanish flu in 1920. Newly widowed, Maria Herz began composing again, now orienting herself on modern trends and adopting the pseudonym Albert Maria Herz. Writing under her husband’s name enabled greater recognition of her work. The premiere of her Four Short Orchestral Pieces, op. 8, in 1929 at Cologne’s Gürzenich Hall under Hermann Abendroth marked the apex of her oeuvre.
Threatened as a Jewish woman by the emerging Nazi dictatorship, Herz fled Germany and for some time moved restless through England, Switzerland, and France, until she settled in Birmingham in 1935. At this time, she ceased composing; her last piece of music is a Baroque inspired Concerto for Harpsichord (or Piano) and String Orchestra with Flute. After the war she and her son Robert emigrated to join her daughters in the United States. She died in New York in 1950 after a brief but serious illness.
Her estate remained with her descendants in the USA, where most of her music lay forgotten in drawers, until Albert Herz, a grandson brought it to Switzerland in 1995 and donated it to Zürich Central Library in 2015. At this point, Maria Herz’s name and biography, as well as her music, were completely unknown. The past 10 years have seen a resurgence of interest, with performances, recordings and the publishing of her music by Boosey & Hawkes.
Resources and documentary
Maria Herz is included in the new Turning Points brochure and web resource from Boosey & Hawkes, exploring music by persecuted and ostracised composers before and after 1945. The German version of the brochure is now printed and the English version is in preparation for release this spring. Turning Points includes an essay by Michael Haas describing the lives and music of those composers who emigrated to the UK during the 20th century with Maria Herz alongside Berthold Goldschmidt, Hans Gál, Egon Wellesz, Franz Reizenstein, Roberto Gerhard and Andrzej Panufnik.
The recent 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1945 has seen a number of documentaries honouring those who died there and those who miraculously survived, including musicians and composers. The experiences of Simon Laks (1901-1983), a Polish musician working in Paris before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942, are vividly and movingly retold within the BBC documentary ‘The Last Musician of Auschwitz’, featuring testimonies including that of the 99-year-old cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. Laks survived the camp as a member and, later on, arranger and conductor of the camp orchestra. The documentary includes a haunting performance, filmed in the shadow of Auschwitz today, of music from Laks’s String Quartet No.3, based on Polish folk tunes.
> View The Last Musician of Auschwitz on BBC iPlayer (available in UK)
> Further information on Work: Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester
Photo: Zürich Central Library