Piano Sonata in F minor

Maria Herz – it is only in recent years that her name has begun to get around in the music world, so thoroughly had her work been forgotten due to multiple exile. Born in Cologne in 1878 and raised there as the child of an important Jewish textile merchant family, she was one of the few female composers who succeeded in carving out a place for herself in the male-dominated new music scene in Germany. At the beginning of the 20th century, she had followed her husband, Albert Herz, to England to escape the anti-Semitic climate in Germany. In August 1914, the outbreak of the First World War prevented her return to England following a family visit to Cologne. She began a second career as a composer after further studies with Hermann Hans Wetzler and Philipp Jarnach. At the end of the 1920s, she entered the public eye with successful performances of orchestral works and songs - but the time until her forced second exile to England in 1933 was not enough for her to establish herself internationally. She fell silent as a composer and died in 1950 in New York, her third and last place of exile. The first edition of her works is being published by Boosey & Hawkes - Bote & Bock in cooperation with the composer's descendants and the Central Library in Zürich, where her estate is kept. 
Maria Herz’ piano works appear in two volumes. The first is dedicated to her only piano sonata, written in Cologne in 1922, a pianistically demanding work in which a sprawling romanticism meets neoclassical esprit and elegance. The composer was very attached to this sonata, which she probably only performed once in public herself – she used thematic material from it again in her piano concerto, which was also published by Boosey & Hawkes - Bote & Bock.