Heinrich , Freiherr von Herzogenberg

Heinrich von Herzogenberg (Graz, 1843 – Wiesbaden, 1900) was an Austrian composer with a humanities and legal education who ultimately devoted himself to music in the academic Berlin of the second half of the nineteenth century. He is regarded as one of the most prominent composers of the conservative Berlin circle, an environment in which the Germanic tradition still carried decisive weight against new currents.

He studied the humanities at several gymnasiums in Feldkirch, Dresden and Graz. Between 1862 and 1865 he read law at the University of Vienna and, at the same time, studied composition at the conservatory with Felix Otto Dessoff, a teacher who introduced him to Brahms, with whom he formed a friendship that would last his whole life. After settling in Graz as an independent composer in 1868, he moved to Leipzig in 1872. There, in 1874, he founded the Bach-Verein together with Philipp Spitta and Alfred Volkland, and he directed it from 1875.

In 1885 he succeeded Friedrich Kiel as professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he also taught a masterclass in composition. Health problems forced him to withdraw from teaching, and in 1889 he lost his post in favour of Woldemar Bargiel. He gave up the masterclass in 1891, was appointed a member of the Senate in 1892 and, after Bargiel's death in 1897, took over his work at the Hochschule and at the Akademie der Künste. A further illness forced him to retire in the spring of 1900.

His early works, such as the dramatic cantata Columbus op. 11, reflect his confrontation with Wagner, while his piano music and songs were at first inspired by Schumann and, increasingly, by Brahms, whose chamber works served him as a model. His interest in early music, especially that of Bach, was encouraged by Spitta and crystallised in a body of Protestant sacred music that came to the fore from 1893, when he came into contact with the theologian Friedrich Spitta, brother of Philipp. Despite his Catholic upbringing, his religious oratorios—Die Geburt Christi, Die Passion and Erntefeier—form the core of that period. In 1868 he had married Elisabeth von Stockhausen, a pianist and former pupil and close friend of Brahms.

Today he is remembered above all as a representative figure of late nineteenth-century Berlin musical life and as the author of a broad body of vocal and sacred music, whose influence was somewhat overshadowed by that of Brahms.