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Johanna Müller-Hermann
15.1.1868 – 16.4.1941
Johanna Müller-Hermann came from a respected family of civil servants in Vienna, in which great attention was paid to the musical education of the children, especially by their mother, who was herself a trained singer. As a child, Johanna received piano lessons from Heinrich von Bocklet, and as an adult, she studied composition and music theory with Dr. Guido Adler, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Josef Bohuslav Foerster, whom she succeeded as professor of Music Theory at the New Vienna Conservatory.
Since 1903, Johanna Müller-Hermann has appeared regularly as a composer, many of her works have been positively reviewed and praised for their colourful, modern harmony. Apart from opera there is no relevant musical genre that is not represented in her oeuvre. The musical estate is part of the music collection of the Austrian National Library.
Stefan Mendl’s thoughts on the work
Johanna Müller-Hermann, born in Vienna in 1868, where she died in 1941, was a student of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schmidt. She was also greatly influenced by the Czech composer Josef Bohuslav Foerster, with whom she studied music theory and, as his successor, taught at the New Vienna Conservatory between 1918 and 1932. Her Seven Songs op.1 were published in 1903 and her Sonata for Violin and Piano op.5 was published by Doblinger in 1905. The premiere took place on November 4, 1905, and was very positively reviewed when it was performed again in 1908 in the Ehrbar-Saal in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.
The four-movement sonata was written entirely under the influence of Brahms’ chamber music. Nevertheless, the composer finds completely independent and wonderful solutions, such as in the particularly successful scherzo, which after the trio part features a “fugato” before the “da capo”, or in the wonderful finale, which begins with a small violin cadenza and then harks back to the wonderfully vocal-like main theme, initially introduced by the piano.
This piece is a work that deserves its place even among the masterpiece-rich genre of sonatas for violin and piano.