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 US, where most of her music lay forgotten in drawers, until Albert Herz, a grandson living in Zurich, brought it to Switzerland in 1995 and donated it to Zurich Central Library in 2015. At this point, Maria Herz’s name and biography, as well as her music, were completely unknown. However, a promising turn of events unfolded—a rarity often denied to many anonymous figures in music history: musicians gradually began to take notice of Maria Herz and incorporate her music into their programmes.

Biography courtesy of Boosey & Hawkes
Photo: Zurich Central Library