Selected Piano Works

Maria Herz – only in recent years has her name begun to be heard in the music world, so thoroughly had her work been forgotten due to a complicated fate in 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 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 in England after the National Socialists seized power 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 are published in two volumes. This second volume brings together all the compositions written during her first period in England at the beginning of the 20th century for "her" instrument, which she had studied with none other than the piano virtuoso Max von Pauer in Cologne before the turn of the century. The Fugues and Préludes are presumably musical exercises in connection with her composition studies with Edmund Grimshaw in Leeds. The enchanting 12 (Valses) Ländler may have been written for a piano recital by the composers on 12th December 1911 at the Arts Club in Bradford, a city in the north of England not far from Leeds, where the young family had settled. Even if neither a year of composition nor traces of performances during the composer's lifetime can be found for the pianistically most important work in the collection, the Variations on Chopin’s C Minor Prélude Op. 28 No 20, its style and English title suggest that it was composed before the Herz family's involuntary return to Cologne in 1914.