Anthony Philip Heinrich

• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)
• Country: USA
• Born: March 11, 1781 in Schönbüchel, Bohemia
• Died: May 03, 1861 in New York City
• Genres: Orchestral Music, Vocal Music

Biography

Anthony Philip Heinrich was an emblematic success story of the early United States. Aside from some childhood piano and violin lessons, he was largely a self-taught immigrant musician who rose to prominence as America's first recognized professional composer, grandly hailed as "the Beethoven of America."

Heinrich was adopted into an affluent branch of his German-Bohemian family, and inherited a successful business. Unfortunately, he lost his inheritance in the course of the 1811 Austrian financial crash. He tried twice to reestablish his business in the United States, without success; by 1820 he had resolved to give it all up and turn to a career in music. Before writing his own first composition (in 1818), Heinrich undertook two major treks: a 300-mile wilderness journey on foot from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and a 400-mile trip down the Ohio River to Kentucky. Heinrich would recount his personal experiences in America's wild places in his music. Among his earliest works are found such titles as The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature (a collection of songs and violin and piano pieces) and The Sylviad, or Minstrelsy of Nature in the Wilds of N. America. He presented himself as a log-cabin, frontier composer (he wrote his first pieces under Walden-like conditions in Kentucky), and his works are preponderantly programmatic pieces inspired by America's nature, history, and peoples (he sympathetically evoked Native Americans, for example, in his first orchestral piece, Pushmataha).

Although his orchestral music was too complex for the limited abilities of the period's home-grown ensembles, the orchestras of America's principal cities frequently made valiant efforts on Heinrich's behalf. He helped organize the New York Philharmonic Society in 1842, he played his own music for President Tyler, and he made several extended trips to Europe, where the music of this unschooled American savage made a tremendous impression (the fact that he was born and bred in Europe no doubt improved his reception). Despite such acclaim on two continents, Heinrich ended his long life in poverty.

Heinrich's compositions are rough, perhaps needlessly complex in texture yet formally undeveloped, oddly chromatic, and beholden to Haydn, Italian opera (even though he wrote little vocal music), and classical dance forms. He also quoted popular tunes liberally. His music is eccentric but striking, and in different ways Heinrich may be seen as a forerunner to both Gottschalk and Ives. ~ James Reel, All Music Guide

(b Krásný Búk, 11 March 1781; d New York, 3 May 1861). American composer of German-Bohemian birth. Considered America's first ‘professional’ composer, he worked in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Kentucky, Boston and New York, where he settled in 1837. As a violinist he led the first known performance of a Beethoven symphony in the USA (Lexington, ky 1817) and in 1842 he helped organize the New York Philharmonic Society. His large output of orchestral, vocal, instrumental and keyboard works, 1818-58, includes many expressive or descriptive pieces (e.g. The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or The Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature, 1820; Pushmataha, a Venerable Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians, 1831); some are eccentric and unusually complex.

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The giant orchestral works of Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), an American of Bohemian extraction, won him the sobriquet "Beethoven of America." He was the first American composer to use Indian themes in his work.

Anthony Philip (originally Anton Philipp) Heinrich was born in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) on March 11, 1781. As a boy, he learned to play the violin. In 1816, following the failure of a business he had inherited, he emigrated to the United States and decided to make music his career.

After a few years in Philadelphia directing music in the Southwark Theater, Heinrich moved to Pittsburgh, where he conducted the earliest known American performance of a Beethoven symphony. Later he moved to Kentucky. While convalescing from a serious illness, he taught himself how to compose, and in 1820 his Opus 1 was published. This was "a collection of original, moral, patriotic and sentimental songs for the voice and pianoforte interspersed with airs, waltzes, etc." entitled The Dawning of Music in Kentucky, or the Pleasures of Harmony in the Solitudes of Nature.

The cordial reception of this work induced Heinrich to move to Boston in 1823. Although held in high esteem by his colleagues and the public, he had difficulty earning a living. By 1826 he had resettled in London, where he played the fiddle in the orchestra at the Drury Lane Theatre and tried, with minimal success, to advance his reputation as a composer. He returned to Boston in 1831, but by 1833 he was back at Drury Lane. The Continent beckoned, and in 1835 he went to Germany and Austria, enjoying a small degree of public favor. Performances of his orchestral music are recorded in Dresden, Prague, Budapest, Graz, and elsewhere.

In 1837 Heinrich settled in New York City. He threw himself into composing and teaching with unflagging energy, and within a short time he had gained considerable renown and notoriety as "Father Heinrich," eccentric genius. Enthusiasm for him culminated in monster "Heinrich Musical Festivals" in New York in 1842, 1846, and 1853, and in Boston in 1846.

Heinrich returned to Europe in 1857, receiving an especially warm welcome, climaxed by an all-Heinrich concert in Prague. His reception in Germany was less enthusiastic, and in late 1859 he was in New York again, where he died in abject poverty on May 3, 1861.

None of Heinrich's music outlived him. Some characteristic titles of large works are The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons; Pocahontas, the Royal Indian Maid and the Heroine of Virginia, the Pride of the Wilderness; The Wildwood Troubadour; and The Wild Wood Spirit's Chant.

Further Reading

William T. Upton, Anthony Philip Heinrich: A Nineteenth-Century Composer in America (1939), is a definitive biography. The Boston musical festival of 1846 is examined at some length in Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (1964).

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