JOHANNA MÜLLER-HERMANN - AUSTRIA
BORN 15 JANUARY
Johanna Müller-Hermann was an Austrian composer and pedagogue. Originally a primary school teacher, she gave up this career after marriage and retrained in musical composition. She became especially known for her orchestral music, chamber music and songs, and her use of subtle chromatic harmonies.
Müller-Hermann studied composition under Alexander Zemlinsky and Josef Foerster, and took over as a theory and composition tutor at the New Vienna Conservatory in 1918 after Foerster left the post. Yet despite teaching there for more than 20 years, she is relatively unknown today and there are only a handful of recordings of her work.
Dr Carola Darwin, who has been researching Müller-Hermann's life and music, puts the composer's achievements in the context of Vienna's wider pre-war cultural life. "The contribution of women to Vienna’s creative life at this period has been largely forgotten as the result of Nazi ideology, as well as the general destruction of the Second World War," she says.
"Johanna Müller-Hermann’s works deserve a much wider hearing, not only because of their intrinsic quality, but also because they were an integral part of the Vienna’s extraordinary creative flowering."
"Johanna Müller-Hermann’s works deserve a much wider hearing, not only because of their intrinsic quality, but also because they were an integral part of the Vienna’s extraordinary creative flowering."
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MIRIAM HYDE - AUSTRALIA
BORN 15 JANUARY
Composer, concert pianist and poet, Miriam Hyde was a trailblazer of Australian 20th century music. After graduating from the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide in 1931 she won an Elder Scholarship to the Royal College of Music, London, where she attended until 1935; studying composition with R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob, and piano with Howard Hadley and Arthur Benjamin. During the 1930s Hyde would go on to win the Cobbett Prize and perform her piano concertos with both the London Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestras.
Hyde returned to Adelaide in 1936 and married in 1939. During World War Two, her husband Marcus Edwards was captured on Crete and interned as a German prisoner of war. Throughout these difficult years Hyde composed the substantial Sonata in G minor for piano (1941-1944). Upon her husband’s return to Australia following the war, Hyde would settle with him in Sydney, raise a family, then go on to work for decades as a composer, recitalist, teacher, examiner and lecturer.
Hyde was awarded an honorary doctorate by Macquarie University in 1993, and in 2004 she received an award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music at the Australasian Performing Right Association and Australian Music Centre Classical Music Awards.
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Villa Fair by Miriam Hyde
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